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I'm going to try to put down some complicated rumination on the finales of SUPERNATURAL and LOST here--with spoilers for both. Watching the The End finale last night it reminded me of Swan Song. In the end I feel like Swan Song was more successful as a narrative in delivering what it promised.
I apologize for how long this is. It was probably a bad idea to try to talk about two such important finales in one post, but they seemed really ripe for comparison.
Both were series finales--okay, SPN is coming back next season but SS was clearly written as a series finale and felt like one. Both had Mark Pellegrino playing a supernatural guy causing a lot of trouble. Both featured brothers arguing over whether to follow a parent's orders or challenge them. And both contain characters who are on some level aware of living in someone else's narrative.
That last makes me wonder if people will watch these shows in the future and see them as trendy for the time we're in now. On SPN Sam and Dean first dealt with prophecies that told them what they would or must do. They discovered a series of books written by a prophet that indicated their actions were predetermined. Sam and Dean decided "Screw destiny. Screw it right in the face" and in a refreshing change, this seemed to actually be possible. But then SS introduced God as a more active player** which in turn suggested that while the boys may have rejected what others told them was God's plan, that didn't mean they weren't still characters playing out the story God was writing.
On LOST, by contrast, doing what you are "supposed to do," having a purpose in the universe, brings a sense of peace and fulfillment. Which implies the question never really answered on the show: "supposed to" according to whom? Jacob? The Island? Some general force in the universe? The dharma?
Personally, I find this sort of meta-pov a little off-putting. In both finales there were times where I felt "fate" or "destiny" was code for "good narrative technique." You do things because it's correct narratively speaking. I don't mean that in the sense of bad writing, where the character does things so that the author can get them where s/he needs them to be even though the character has no reason to do them. These episodes were more like meditation on a good narrative instinct with God or The Island or Jacob personifying that instinct.
Which is why the characters in both shows often discuss their roles as characters. On SPN Lucifer and Michael discuss the possibility of not playing out the roles they think God has assigned, and seem to flunk the test Sam and Dean pass by giving God responsibility for their actions. (Lucifer blames God for making him who he is; Michael vows to fight Lucifer because God wants him to fight Lucifer.) Chuck complains about endings being hard and audience dissatisfaction. He talks about tying up loose ends as the narrative seems to do just that, bringing Castiel and Bobby back to life and rewarding them based on their good service before escorting them out of Dean's life so he can be alone in his final scene.
On LOST Smokey!Locke responds to Jack's identifying himself as Jacob's replacement by saying, "Isn't that a little obvious?" It's a meta comment: it's been obvious to the audience all along that it will be Jack because he's Matthew Fox and he's the protagonist. (Though that turns out to be a fake-out; Jack's role is not, truly, to be Jacob's replacement.) But there's no real reason for Smokey!Locke to feel that way. In "Across the Sea," essentially LOST's origin story, Jacob and his brother (I'll call him Esau even though he has no name) grow up with an unreliable narrator for a mother. Jacob accepts her narrative as truth; Esau searches for objective truth.
Esau says that since he found the board game the boys play on the beach, he makes the rules. When Jacob has his own game, he can make the rules. That sentiment is echoed in "The End" when Ben advises Hurley that just because people couldn't leave the island under Jacob, doesn't mean they can't leave now. "Those were Jacob's rules," Ben says. "You make your own rules."
Both series, therefore, highlight the arbitrariness of their own narratives. Characters may be forced to follow rules, but the author (God, Jacob or his replacement, or a the next level the actual writers of SPN or LOST) has the power to make or change the rules--and those changes will always be based on what's best for the narrative. Since both shows are putting that out there so obviously, how well does the narrative pull match up with their choices? For me personally, SPN succeeds more at this.
Both shows have complicated fantasy plots alongside character development. SPN has never doubted where its priorities lay: if there's a question of which one drives the show, it's the relationship. This is not to say the fantasy plots aren't important or are merely metaphors. But the relationship between Dean and Sam and the way that relationship shaped them as people is the real through line of SPN.
SS does an excellent job coming up with an appropriate scenario to play that out. Dean, the brother who since childhood has been all too willing to be a good soldier and someone else's blunt instrument must guard his own autonomy even when the hosts of heaven are telling him God wants him to hand it over. Over the years Sam has often been frustrated by Dean's pattern of self-sacrifice. At his lowest moments that frustration turns into contempt. But in the last few eps Sam learned to use his role as little brother to manipulate Dean in a way that was both clever and kind, first in "Point of No Return" and then in SS. In PoNR Sam tells Dean he has faith that Dean won't give into Michael and although Dean has every intention of giving in, he can't bear to let his little brother down. Sam's love for Dean gives Dean power to do the thing he can't do on his own.
Sam plays a similar trick in SS when he makes Dean promise to try to build a happy life for himself without Sam. Since the show had already established that Dean, unlike Sam, would feel completely bound by a deathbed promise to his brother, we know Dean's got to do it. Sam took Dean's habitual behavior and turned it back on him. If Dean is desperate to do something for Sam, Sam will request Dean make himself happy.
Sam, meanwhile, has always struggled with the idea of being evil, worried that he isn't strong enough to resist the evil within him, and seen himself as isolated from his family because of it. Dean's watchful eye often looked judgmental, as if he were watching Sam for signs of his turning into a monster Dean would have to hunt. But in SS this too is turned around. When Sam isn't strong enough to control the evil inside him in the person of Lucifer, Dean's stubborn refusal to run for cover--his insistence at putting himself at Sam's mercy--gives Sam the strength to overcome. It demonstrates that Sam's always been wrong to think his personal strength was an issue and reverses the mistakes he made in S4 by relying on personal strength instead of Dean. Dean's love for Sam gives Sam power to do the thing he can't do on his own.
This scenario hits right in the sweet spot of all the conflicts on the show: the personalities of the brothers, and the way they draw strength from their relationship when others try to exploit it as a weakness. The technicalities of how they trap Lucifer are just an excuse to play this out.
LOST is more problematic. On LOST, the emphasis between plot and character is switched, with individual episodes devoted to character plots that become building blocks to the central mystery of what exactly is going on. On SPN, an ep about a Christmas chimney killer becomes another piece of the puzzle of how Sam and Dean relate to each other. On LOST an ep revealing that John Locke is in a wheelchair or telling us how he got that way is another piece of the Island puzzle: Why did the Island choose Locke?
It's not that we can't see an emotional pattern in the characters on LOST. They are lonely. Characters long to connect to others but feel a deep sense of inadequacy or shame that makes them unworthy of connection. Existing relationships were nearly always destructive or soured: Shannon and Boone manipulated and undermined each other; Sun and Jin were isolated by secrets and lies; Michael and Walt were wary strangers who resented each other. Back stories revealed even more betrayal, rejection and broken trust. Only Rose and Bernard had something like a peaceful connection--one that set them apart.
But it’s important to end the story you start and begin the story you intend to end. However nice it is that some of these characters found connections on the island, an ending where they meet in a waiting room so they can move onto the next life together doesn't resolve any central questions raised in the narrative. Where I can easily understand how the events of SS resolved and changed things for Sam and Dean, and see how much worse things would have been without that resolution, the whole plot of the sideways world (which from now on I'll call Purgatory) in LOST could be cut out without changing anything.
For six years trying to get all these characters in one place was like herding cats so it's a bit odd for the resolution to be them coming together. Sure Sawyer and Juliet would be overjoyed to find each other, but Sawyer and Jack only ever achieved something more like a grudging affection and respect. Kate's official tie to Aaron was established the minute she claimed him, but the Jack/Kate relationship ended as ambiguously as it began. It was nice that poor Claire wasn't left on the beach too afraid to go to her son, but for the past 6 years it wasn't Claire's fears that kept her apart from her son, but the strange mystery plots and it's still unclear why. (Ultimately it really didn't seem to matter who raised Aaron.) It's not that I think the Lostaways didn't care at all for each other, but they're not even really as close as your average sitcom bunch in a series finale.
In fact, Purgatory went out of its way to privilege romance and children over anything most of the Losties felt for each other. Hurley was awoken to his reality by Libby, a girl he almost had a date with once. Jin and Sun remembered reality upon seeing Ji Yeon, the little girl they failed to factor into their decision to die together.
Emotional bonding always took place in downtime from the mystery plots and left some characters more emotionally resolved than others. Jack started off a control freak with a compulsion to save people. In the final seasons Jack mastered his control issues and learned to be passive until it was time to act, but he still died saving everyone. And his moments of greatest affection imo were with Hurley in their final days. No wonder Jack was the last to wake up to his true situation in Purgatory—he resolved personal issues there he never did on the Island.
Of all the characters, I felt Ben Linus was the one who resonated most emotionally. When Hurley asked Ben for help, when Ilana offered to take him into her group, or when Locke forgave him for his own murder I felt how much it meant to Ben and saw him progress from a man afraid and isolated to a man connected to others. Part of that is Michael Emerson's performance, but the other part is that Ben sublimated his emotional needs to his desire to run the Island. Sam and Dean resolved their emotional issues and as a side benefit stopped the apocalypse. Ben was finally honestly asked for help in running the island and as a side benefit began to resolve his emotional issues.
But not everybody is Ben Linus. Other characters' journeys were more scattered or cut short or just overwhelmed by the many mysteries. Hurley became the new Jacob because of the guy he'd been all along, not because he'd evolved into the role. It was a straight answer to a mystery: who's the one? Hurley. I said that I felt Jack's closest connection seemed to eventually be with Hurley, and that too was because their final relationship happened around their shared search for understanding of the mystery plot.
So in the end, I felt like LOST’s Purgatory ending leaned heavy on a sentiment that wasn't earned by the narrative. It was sad because we as viewers associate these characters with each other and now we're saying good-bye. Within the narrative it was barely a reunion because they'd all just seen each other. Going from Jack dying in the jungle and Hurley allowing the remaining characters to leave (however he did that—he makes the rules now) felt a bit like skipping from Frodo and Sam on the erupting Mount Doom to Frodo and Sam meeting across the sea. It's nice as a hint of epilogue because the Frodo/Sam relationship became so important in the course of the plot to destroy the Ring. But "will Frodo and Sam be together in the afterlife?" isn't a question raised by Gandalf that day in Bag End.
While the characters and relationships were always important in LOST, the narrative wasn't driven by relationship questions. (Shipping in general was mostly an annoyance.) It was driven by the question: WTF is going on? I've never been one who needed all the answers on that score, but I can't help but notice the show literally created an entirely separate story in a separate universe in the final act just so they could resolve that instead. We know WTF was going on in the sideways world now. That mystery is about all these people being dead and apparently happy to see each other. The folks in the actual LOSTverse get no such resolution.
In fact for me, Ben and Hurley seem like the two characters who got full resolutions, because they referenced their relationship as Number One and Number Two in their real lives while they were in Purgatory and those titles indicate a knowledge of WTF was going on in the original story. Ben and Hurley are fulfilled because they know the answers to at least some of the questions the characters and the audience starting asking back in the pilot.
But like every character whose every known something about the Island on LOST, they're not telling the rest of us.
**On the Chuck as God question, there are 3 possibilities: a) He was God the whole time and we just didn't know it; b) God took him over during this ep alone; c) He was a prophet speaking for God and taken into heaven at the end. Personally, I can go with b) or c). a) makes the character too much of a lie to me, and also I think "A writer is like God" is a very different proposition than "God is like a writer."
I apologize for how long this is. It was probably a bad idea to try to talk about two such important finales in one post, but they seemed really ripe for comparison.
Both were series finales--okay, SPN is coming back next season but SS was clearly written as a series finale and felt like one. Both had Mark Pellegrino playing a supernatural guy causing a lot of trouble. Both featured brothers arguing over whether to follow a parent's orders or challenge them. And both contain characters who are on some level aware of living in someone else's narrative.
That last makes me wonder if people will watch these shows in the future and see them as trendy for the time we're in now. On SPN Sam and Dean first dealt with prophecies that told them what they would or must do. They discovered a series of books written by a prophet that indicated their actions were predetermined. Sam and Dean decided "Screw destiny. Screw it right in the face" and in a refreshing change, this seemed to actually be possible. But then SS introduced God as a more active player** which in turn suggested that while the boys may have rejected what others told them was God's plan, that didn't mean they weren't still characters playing out the story God was writing.
On LOST, by contrast, doing what you are "supposed to do," having a purpose in the universe, brings a sense of peace and fulfillment. Which implies the question never really answered on the show: "supposed to" according to whom? Jacob? The Island? Some general force in the universe? The dharma?
Personally, I find this sort of meta-pov a little off-putting. In both finales there were times where I felt "fate" or "destiny" was code for "good narrative technique." You do things because it's correct narratively speaking. I don't mean that in the sense of bad writing, where the character does things so that the author can get them where s/he needs them to be even though the character has no reason to do them. These episodes were more like meditation on a good narrative instinct with God or The Island or Jacob personifying that instinct.
Which is why the characters in both shows often discuss their roles as characters. On SPN Lucifer and Michael discuss the possibility of not playing out the roles they think God has assigned, and seem to flunk the test Sam and Dean pass by giving God responsibility for their actions. (Lucifer blames God for making him who he is; Michael vows to fight Lucifer because God wants him to fight Lucifer.) Chuck complains about endings being hard and audience dissatisfaction. He talks about tying up loose ends as the narrative seems to do just that, bringing Castiel and Bobby back to life and rewarding them based on their good service before escorting them out of Dean's life so he can be alone in his final scene.
On LOST Smokey!Locke responds to Jack's identifying himself as Jacob's replacement by saying, "Isn't that a little obvious?" It's a meta comment: it's been obvious to the audience all along that it will be Jack because he's Matthew Fox and he's the protagonist. (Though that turns out to be a fake-out; Jack's role is not, truly, to be Jacob's replacement.) But there's no real reason for Smokey!Locke to feel that way. In "Across the Sea," essentially LOST's origin story, Jacob and his brother (I'll call him Esau even though he has no name) grow up with an unreliable narrator for a mother. Jacob accepts her narrative as truth; Esau searches for objective truth.
Esau says that since he found the board game the boys play on the beach, he makes the rules. When Jacob has his own game, he can make the rules. That sentiment is echoed in "The End" when Ben advises Hurley that just because people couldn't leave the island under Jacob, doesn't mean they can't leave now. "Those were Jacob's rules," Ben says. "You make your own rules."
Both series, therefore, highlight the arbitrariness of their own narratives. Characters may be forced to follow rules, but the author (God, Jacob or his replacement, or a the next level the actual writers of SPN or LOST) has the power to make or change the rules--and those changes will always be based on what's best for the narrative. Since both shows are putting that out there so obviously, how well does the narrative pull match up with their choices? For me personally, SPN succeeds more at this.
Both shows have complicated fantasy plots alongside character development. SPN has never doubted where its priorities lay: if there's a question of which one drives the show, it's the relationship. This is not to say the fantasy plots aren't important or are merely metaphors. But the relationship between Dean and Sam and the way that relationship shaped them as people is the real through line of SPN.
SS does an excellent job coming up with an appropriate scenario to play that out. Dean, the brother who since childhood has been all too willing to be a good soldier and someone else's blunt instrument must guard his own autonomy even when the hosts of heaven are telling him God wants him to hand it over. Over the years Sam has often been frustrated by Dean's pattern of self-sacrifice. At his lowest moments that frustration turns into contempt. But in the last few eps Sam learned to use his role as little brother to manipulate Dean in a way that was both clever and kind, first in "Point of No Return" and then in SS. In PoNR Sam tells Dean he has faith that Dean won't give into Michael and although Dean has every intention of giving in, he can't bear to let his little brother down. Sam's love for Dean gives Dean power to do the thing he can't do on his own.
Sam plays a similar trick in SS when he makes Dean promise to try to build a happy life for himself without Sam. Since the show had already established that Dean, unlike Sam, would feel completely bound by a deathbed promise to his brother, we know Dean's got to do it. Sam took Dean's habitual behavior and turned it back on him. If Dean is desperate to do something for Sam, Sam will request Dean make himself happy.
Sam, meanwhile, has always struggled with the idea of being evil, worried that he isn't strong enough to resist the evil within him, and seen himself as isolated from his family because of it. Dean's watchful eye often looked judgmental, as if he were watching Sam for signs of his turning into a monster Dean would have to hunt. But in SS this too is turned around. When Sam isn't strong enough to control the evil inside him in the person of Lucifer, Dean's stubborn refusal to run for cover--his insistence at putting himself at Sam's mercy--gives Sam the strength to overcome. It demonstrates that Sam's always been wrong to think his personal strength was an issue and reverses the mistakes he made in S4 by relying on personal strength instead of Dean. Dean's love for Sam gives Sam power to do the thing he can't do on his own.
This scenario hits right in the sweet spot of all the conflicts on the show: the personalities of the brothers, and the way they draw strength from their relationship when others try to exploit it as a weakness. The technicalities of how they trap Lucifer are just an excuse to play this out.
LOST is more problematic. On LOST, the emphasis between plot and character is switched, with individual episodes devoted to character plots that become building blocks to the central mystery of what exactly is going on. On SPN, an ep about a Christmas chimney killer becomes another piece of the puzzle of how Sam and Dean relate to each other. On LOST an ep revealing that John Locke is in a wheelchair or telling us how he got that way is another piece of the Island puzzle: Why did the Island choose Locke?
It's not that we can't see an emotional pattern in the characters on LOST. They are lonely. Characters long to connect to others but feel a deep sense of inadequacy or shame that makes them unworthy of connection. Existing relationships were nearly always destructive or soured: Shannon and Boone manipulated and undermined each other; Sun and Jin were isolated by secrets and lies; Michael and Walt were wary strangers who resented each other. Back stories revealed even more betrayal, rejection and broken trust. Only Rose and Bernard had something like a peaceful connection--one that set them apart.
But it’s important to end the story you start and begin the story you intend to end. However nice it is that some of these characters found connections on the island, an ending where they meet in a waiting room so they can move onto the next life together doesn't resolve any central questions raised in the narrative. Where I can easily understand how the events of SS resolved and changed things for Sam and Dean, and see how much worse things would have been without that resolution, the whole plot of the sideways world (which from now on I'll call Purgatory) in LOST could be cut out without changing anything.
For six years trying to get all these characters in one place was like herding cats so it's a bit odd for the resolution to be them coming together. Sure Sawyer and Juliet would be overjoyed to find each other, but Sawyer and Jack only ever achieved something more like a grudging affection and respect. Kate's official tie to Aaron was established the minute she claimed him, but the Jack/Kate relationship ended as ambiguously as it began. It was nice that poor Claire wasn't left on the beach too afraid to go to her son, but for the past 6 years it wasn't Claire's fears that kept her apart from her son, but the strange mystery plots and it's still unclear why. (Ultimately it really didn't seem to matter who raised Aaron.) It's not that I think the Lostaways didn't care at all for each other, but they're not even really as close as your average sitcom bunch in a series finale.
In fact, Purgatory went out of its way to privilege romance and children over anything most of the Losties felt for each other. Hurley was awoken to his reality by Libby, a girl he almost had a date with once. Jin and Sun remembered reality upon seeing Ji Yeon, the little girl they failed to factor into their decision to die together.
Emotional bonding always took place in downtime from the mystery plots and left some characters more emotionally resolved than others. Jack started off a control freak with a compulsion to save people. In the final seasons Jack mastered his control issues and learned to be passive until it was time to act, but he still died saving everyone. And his moments of greatest affection imo were with Hurley in their final days. No wonder Jack was the last to wake up to his true situation in Purgatory—he resolved personal issues there he never did on the Island.
Of all the characters, I felt Ben Linus was the one who resonated most emotionally. When Hurley asked Ben for help, when Ilana offered to take him into her group, or when Locke forgave him for his own murder I felt how much it meant to Ben and saw him progress from a man afraid and isolated to a man connected to others. Part of that is Michael Emerson's performance, but the other part is that Ben sublimated his emotional needs to his desire to run the Island. Sam and Dean resolved their emotional issues and as a side benefit stopped the apocalypse. Ben was finally honestly asked for help in running the island and as a side benefit began to resolve his emotional issues.
But not everybody is Ben Linus. Other characters' journeys were more scattered or cut short or just overwhelmed by the many mysteries. Hurley became the new Jacob because of the guy he'd been all along, not because he'd evolved into the role. It was a straight answer to a mystery: who's the one? Hurley. I said that I felt Jack's closest connection seemed to eventually be with Hurley, and that too was because their final relationship happened around their shared search for understanding of the mystery plot.
So in the end, I felt like LOST’s Purgatory ending leaned heavy on a sentiment that wasn't earned by the narrative. It was sad because we as viewers associate these characters with each other and now we're saying good-bye. Within the narrative it was barely a reunion because they'd all just seen each other. Going from Jack dying in the jungle and Hurley allowing the remaining characters to leave (however he did that—he makes the rules now) felt a bit like skipping from Frodo and Sam on the erupting Mount Doom to Frodo and Sam meeting across the sea. It's nice as a hint of epilogue because the Frodo/Sam relationship became so important in the course of the plot to destroy the Ring. But "will Frodo and Sam be together in the afterlife?" isn't a question raised by Gandalf that day in Bag End.
While the characters and relationships were always important in LOST, the narrative wasn't driven by relationship questions. (Shipping in general was mostly an annoyance.) It was driven by the question: WTF is going on? I've never been one who needed all the answers on that score, but I can't help but notice the show literally created an entirely separate story in a separate universe in the final act just so they could resolve that instead. We know WTF was going on in the sideways world now. That mystery is about all these people being dead and apparently happy to see each other. The folks in the actual LOSTverse get no such resolution.
In fact for me, Ben and Hurley seem like the two characters who got full resolutions, because they referenced their relationship as Number One and Number Two in their real lives while they were in Purgatory and those titles indicate a knowledge of WTF was going on in the original story. Ben and Hurley are fulfilled because they know the answers to at least some of the questions the characters and the audience starting asking back in the pilot.
But like every character whose every known something about the Island on LOST, they're not telling the rest of us.
**On the Chuck as God question, there are 3 possibilities: a) He was God the whole time and we just didn't know it; b) God took him over during this ep alone; c) He was a prophet speaking for God and taken into heaven at the end. Personally, I can go with b) or c). a) makes the character too much of a lie to me, and also I think "A writer is like God" is a very different proposition than "God is like a writer."
Tags:
- lost,
- meta,
- supernatural,
- tv,
- writing