Lost's Ending: the Junction of Time and Timeless Discourse

Abstract

The mere mention of Lost's ending usually suffices to grab listeners' attention. We began watching Lost ourselves at age sixteen. We can vividly recall the first episodes aired on TF1 in summer 2005. We thought "Oh boy! They'd better know where they're going with this. If it were up to us, we'd have had the series end with the first season, so that we could find out if the survivors from Oceanic flight 815 would make it off the island. We longed for an answer to Charlie's question at the end of the TV series' pilot: "Guys, where are we?". As our patience was tested, we began to watch Lost with greater detachment. We began to settle into the idea that the show could run for several more years-until the decision to wrap up the series in its sixth season gave our expectations a deadline. From that point on, we could revert back to being patiently impatient knowing that our wait would pay off. As we researched and prepared this work, memories of all these feelings flooded back into our minds. Each of us has our own stories with Lost, having formed what one might call a "way of watching" the series. One's personal history is necessarily embedded in a time period. Whether you followed Lost while it was being aired (by following the American web broadcast, or on French television) or whether you enjoyed the show on DVD, download or video on demand, no matter when you watched or tuned in, we all experienced its story in our own way. This is what we could call "spectatorial time", that is, the memory of the time shared with the fiction and what we got out of it. The series' greatest specificity seems to me to be its highly peculiar structuring of time. A time of remembrance, of anticipation, of alternation, a time for constructing identity and affect, a time for sharing and discussion. 2 From a more pragmatic standpoint, each season of Lost revolves around two different time trajectories. We'll come back to this point later on. By focusing on this temporal specificity, we see that Lost's ending is intended to create an impossible junction between two of the narrative's temporalities and form a discourse aimed at pushing the