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We Don't Know JackThe clever narrative trick that has made this season of Lost the best one yet.

By Juliet LapidosPosted Wednesday, May 28, 2008, at 3:05 PM ET

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Dana Stevens reviewed the pilot episode of Lost and requested a moment of silence for Leslie Arzt, who's blown up by a stick of dynamite in the Season 1 finale. Matthew Gilbert bemoaned the plague of cast overpopulation on shows like Heroes and Lost.

In the flash-forwards, the camera acts like an unreliable narrator. Not in the Wayne Booth sense, in which a first-person narrator deceives his audience by relaying false information. Lost isn't The Usual Suspects. It's more like Muriel Spark's novella The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which uses an irregular time sequence to disorient the reader: We're told in a prolepsis that the title character has been dismissed from her job as a teacher; only much later do we learn the circumstances of her firing. In Lost, the viewer doesn't know how many years have elapsed since the Oceanic Six left the island, or what happened in the meantime. Did the other crash survivors die? Are they stuck as they were before? Or have they managed to escape off-camera? Without these vital plot points, viewers don't know whether to think of the Oceanic Six as heroes or as Judases who have somehow betrayed their comrades.

Throughout the first three seasons, Lost viewers knew more about the characters than the characters knew about one another. We knew that Jack and Claire were half-siblings; we knew that Kate was a fugitive, having torched her father's house. This season, the Lost writers have changed the game: It's unclear how much the characters have learned by the time depicted in the flash-forwards. We no longer have a leg up on the characters, or at least we're no longer sure that we do.

Take, for example, the episode "Something Nice Back Home," in which we see Jack and Kate raising Claire's baby, Aaron, together. During a fight, Jack snaps, "you're not even related to him!" In the past, Jack has treated the boy with relative indifference, not realizing that he is, in fact, a blood relation. Has Jack learned, at some point during the ellipsis, that he is Aaron's uncle? If so, he seems to be asserting his natural rights to the child and calling Kate's into question. If he hasn't, then it's a classic example of dramatic irony, in which the audience can find more meaning in a character's words than the character knows are there. (Only in a later episode, after weeks of uncertainty, do we learn that Jack had indeed discovered his connection to Claire and that his comment was a slight.)

Uncertainty has, of course, always been a part of Lost. From the beginning, the show's writers have masterfully deployed two conventional techniques for getting the viewer's heart rate up: surprise and suspense. A polar bear jumps out of the forest. Surprise! If Locke doesn't enter the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 into a computer every 108 minutes, the whole island might blow up. Suspense! Alfred Hitchcock thought suspense was the more effective technique, because it lasts longer. But what Lost has accomplished through its flash-forwards is even more nerve-racking. Instead of waiting for a bomb to go off or not go off, it's as if the viewers have been transported to a time after the bomb has or has not exploded—only we don't know which. Without a frame of reference, the viewers experience epistemological anxiety, doubting even their most basic assumptions about the world the characters live in.

There's a debate currently raging among Losties over whether the show's writers are making things up as they go along, like ordinary TV scribes, or have always had a master plan—a rarer, more impressive feat. Perhaps the most cunning result of the flash-forwards is that they seem to support the latter argument: If the writers are showing us the future, they must have a damn good idea of how to get us there. But that's just an illusion. The flash-forwards work like a zoom lens, revealing a detail that doesn't make a whole lot of sense without the big picture. The writers can still fill in that big picture as they wish. Previews indicate that Thursday's finale will take a step toward connecting the present and the future. Here's hoping the writers don't get their soldering irons out too quickly—they'd be abandoning their most impressive trick yet.