Every Series Should Have An Exit Plan

I've been meaning to write this since last Thursday. Honestly, I've been meaning to write it for several months, but until late last week I kept holding off because I feared they were going to screw it up. Even if I'd told you, there'd be no way you could have gotten up to speed to catch it while it was on the air.

Season 5 of Lost freakin' rocked like nothing else I've ever watched.
The four seasons before it were awesome, too, but the fifth was something special. I love the way the show reinvents itself every season. Spoilers in white text.

• 1st Season is about being a castaway on a haunted, monster-infested island full of psychopaths and con men, spiced with flashbacks about how everyone's life sucked before they crashed on the island.
• 2nd Season is about mad science experiments on the haunted island.
• 3rd Season is about the mysterious and creepy fanatics who run the island.
  
• 4th Season is about a war and rescue, and the flash-backs become flash-forwards.
  
• 5th Season is about time-traveling to the freakin' garden of Eden so you can murder God.
  

I kid you not about that 5th Season plotline. It just blew me away. It's a show known for it's bizarre mythology and surprise twists*, yet the 5th Season went way above and beyond even that reputation.

Plus we're getting answers. Every season of Lost raises about 100 questions, so at this point, 500 questions have been asked. Even sharing the questions here would be a spoiler. What's the Monster? Where'd the Polar Bear come from? Are they all dead? What's in The Hatch? What do The Numbers mean? How'd that Pirate Ship end up on the mountain? What happened to the Dharma Initiative? How come food keeps being dropped? What's with the giant foot? Who or what is Jacob? Charles Widmore? Why doesn't Richard age? What did Kate do with Aaron? Are Bernard and Rose going to be Adam and Eve? Are they the two corpses in the cave way back in Season 1? etc., etc., etc. The list goes on.

In season one, we got like 2 answers. In season two, we got about 6 new answers. season three about 18 answers, and I was starting to dispair that they'd never resolve anything, because I hadn't noticed the math of what was happening. Season four gave about 54 answers, which is when I noticed it trippled every season. And yes, season five answered more questions than any single season had asked, about 162 questions answered this season.

My faith has been resored. By my math, season six will answer 486 questions, for a grand total of 728 questions answered, but only 600 asked. The Age of Aquarius is upon us, my friends, and the path to true enlightenment lies with Lost. Watch the show all the way through, and 128 questions about your life and the nature of the universe will be made transparent to you. This is not some silly joke. It makes sense, because they fucking time traveled to the garden of eden and killed God! It's my new religion. In fact, I'm going to speak what once was blasphemy - I predict that by the end of the sixth season, I'll even prefer Lost to Twin Peaks.**

What makes all this possible is that a couple seasons ago, they got the network to sign a contract, giving them a guaranteed run of six seasons. Prior to that, the writers kept building up the mysteries, dragging their feet, and avoiding giving any answers. They didn't want the wind to escape their sales, or to jump the shark. Once they had that contract, they were able to work out an exit plan, and fine tune the rate of plot revelation. They were even free to resolve the entangled love triangles, and ditch the usual network-mandated-tropes. Season five could have just been more regurgitated Sawyer-Kate-Jack-Juliette angst, with everyone cheating on everyone else, because some jerk in a suit thinks that's what put butts on couches week after week. Instead, this season just made a nod in passing to the complicated back story between them, and then said loudly "they've grown past that". Thank you, JJ Abrams and company.***

Of course, one can only imagine what Twin Peaks would have been like if the network had signed a 6-season contract with David Lynch and Mark Frost and just left them to work their magic. Every serious series drama should be allowed to follow this model.

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*: In Zack And Miri Make A Porno, there's a scene where the cast is distracted. They should be watching sex, but instead they say something to the affect of: "I missed it this week. What happened?" "They're off the island. Then they're on the island again. I don't know what the fuck's going on." "I think they're in Hell." They're discussing Lost, and that's a pretty good summary of the 4th season, which was airing while Zack and Miri was being filmed. The first several seasons you spend a lot of time just wondering what the heck you're watching. Eventually it all comes together.

**: Unless they drop the ball. Time-travel is generally problematic in film and television, full of plot-holes and fridge-logic, so there's some tiny fear that some glaring flaw in the sixth season could still marr all that went before it. But if they keep it on the course that Miles (one of the characters) thinks it's on (namely, that the A-Bomb fulfils destiny and creates the time loop), they'll dodge that bullet. And even if they screw that up, they can still save it by just showing us a Richard flashback episode (that reveals his origin story to be Captain of the Black Rock ) and explicitly revealing that Jacob and that guy who played Adams in Deadwood are the smoke-monsters, or God and Lucifer, or Anubis and Set, or some combination of the three. And if they get all of this right, then, with tears in my eyes, I'll say that yes, it's better even than Twin Peaks.


***: Which means now I'll probably have to go catch his version of Star Trek on the big screen. Which, by the way, everyone tells me is much better than they expected.