stevenberlinjohnson.com: Lost Does Dickens

What did everyone end up thinking about this season of Lost? My wife and I have been bouncing around on TiVo time with the show for most of the year, which meant we were usually an episode or so behind the rest of the world, and thus I spent most of the year studiously avoiding any conversations about the show, for fear of spoilers. (Of which, more to come in this post, so consider yourself warned.) I thought the season started brilliantly, sagged in the middle (weighed down in part by the sheer number of characters) and then was quite brilliant at the end. The whole "I think I crashed your plane" bit with Desmond in the final episode was right up there with my two other favorite Lost moments: the decoding of the French woman's looping help message; and Locke's expression and line after watching the first Dharma film -- "We're going to have to watch that again!" (Which, by the way, might as well have been the title for the second half of Everything Bad Is Good For You.)

I've been joking about the lack of apparent connection between Everything Bad and The Ghost Map, my new book about cholera in 19th-century London. But Lost neatly supplied the missing link with the season finale: the copy of Dickens' Our Mutual Friend that plays such a crucial role in the episode. Our Mutual Friend is the first book quoted in The Ghost Map -- on the very first page, as it happens. Dickens' narrative interweaves with the themes of my cholera book in a number of ways: for starters, they're both obsessed with London's epic waste removal problem in the middle of the nineteenth century. The novel was also going to be central to the dissertation I never got around to writing at Columbia, in my English Lit grad school days. When it flashed on the screen during Lost this week, I thought: "Hey, I'm an expert on that book! Someone should get me to a Lost fan forum pronto."

It'll be interesting to see if they actually try to build some kind of extended meaningful connection to the book's plot next season. Beyond the trash theme, the most striking thing about the plot is (VIctorian spoiler alert!) the assumed identity of the protagonist, who, after his long-estranged father dies, fakes his own death in order to spy on 1) the people who ended up inheriting his father's fortune, and 2) the woman his father intended him to marry. (At least, I think that's right -- those Dickens plots are complicated.) I could imagine the narrative of Lost somehow mimicking that structure in season three, though I'm not exactly sure how. They certainly have the estranged dead fathers, the sudden fortunes, the spying, the arranged marriages. Maybe I'll have to watch that last episode again....

stevenberlinjohnson.com

Lost Does Dickens

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