Who's your daddy? Lost's sad obsession

I've been an intermittent watcher of Lost for the past couple of seasons. It looked like things were getting better last year, and I started watching again regularly, only to have my hopes dashed this year. 

I've already written about how I don't expect Lost will ever make any goddamn sense at all. Today I'm going to rant about something even worse than the show's total lack of narrative coherence. Today we're going to talk about Daddy Issues.

Here's a brief list of all the characters I can think of who have serious issues with at least one parental unit.

Jack (dad)

Hurley (dad)

Sawyer (dad, plus Locke's dad)

Sayyid (dad)

Kate (dad and mom)

Sun (dad)

Jin (dad and father in law - bonus points!)

Ben (dad)

Walt (dad)

Claire (dad abandoned her, was also Jack's dad)

Miles (time travel dad)

Penny (dad)

Locke (dad - possibly the worst dad in the history of bad dads)

This list is by no means comprehensive. I'm sure we'll later find out that the smoke monster's creator never tucked it in at night, and also that the flight attendant who died on impact had a troubled relationship with her step father, and that the guy who gassed up the plane has always wondered who his sperm-donor father really was (it was probably Christian).

Last week we got the big reveal that Miles' dad had abandoned him, he never knew the guy, blah blah whatever. If I rolled my eyes any harder I'd detach a retina. It's just not interesting. It's not a surprise any longer, not after five seasons of bad dad whining.

John Locke is the standard bearer for this. While Jack's relationship has been given a massive amount of back story, Locke is the only character to lose not one, but two major organs to his father. 

I remember when my girlfriend and I watched the Locke loses a kidney episode. After a while, as his father kept screwing up his life, I started making a joke about it. "If his dad stole his spine too, you owe me a Coke," I said. Damned if I didn't get a Coke a season later. 

I don't hate this contrivance just because it's overused to a truly ludicrous degree. There are two reasons why I think this is more than simple bad writing.

First, I worry about what this says about the writers. Why is the only plot that ever recurs on Lost with any frequency, the only thread never dropped, the plot that suggests you've never really gotten over the time daddy didn't come to your little league game? To me, it says that Lost's writing staff doesn't actually know how to write an adult relationship. They don't have a lot of characters who are parents, or even in stable marriages. The bad-dad trope indicates a show by, and about, immature man-children who refuse to stand on their own. You know what? Some of us liked our fathers. Some of us are actually happy with how we were raised. If we had issues as kids, we've gotten over them. As audience members, we're just fucking baffled.

Second, I think it actually says something about American society at large that this is the sort of plot that not only gets trotted out on Lost constantly, but on a lot of other so-called serious dramas. (Battlestar Galactica was not averse to using it.)

I have a hypothesis that Americans no longer have any ideology. Sure, they think they believe in political causes. But America is one of the most politically homogeneous democracies in the world. In continental Europe, almost every country has far right parties and far left parties, and by right I mean "they have SS uniforms in their closets" and by far left I mean hard line communist. The middle of the spectrum is generally broader, with labour and social democrat parties competing with liberals, neo-liberals and conservatives who'd be more recognizable in the States. This means that there is a larger philosophical spectrum – people may have actually thought once or twice in their lives about the ethics of private property vs. public, about political economy, about nationalism.

Even in Canada, where I live, there is still a shadow of a social democrat movement. Britain also has a wider spectrum of political opinion.

Despite the fact that Americans generally only disagree with each other on a handful of issues, they take sides as though it was Nazis vs. Soviets. The divide is pretty wide. Weirdly so, to an outsider. 

What that means, in practice, is that TV writers don't have very strong opinions on a lot of issues, because on average, Americans don't either. And where they do have strong opinions – usually only on Culture War hot buttons – they don't dare risk slipping them into their stories. So they can't write stories about big ethical and political issues that are invisible to most Americans, and they won't write about the few issues Americans actually care about, because it would alienate too much of their audience.

So you wind up with a strange phenomenon on American TV: no character thinks about ethics. Characters seldom take sides over well-defined moral or religious positions. What are the differences between Locke and Jack, the differences that the writers yammer on and on about in interviews? Faith vs. Reason? Bullshit! 

Whenever possible, the writers use the flashbacks to show us that Character A took Action X on the island because Event Y happened to him in the flashback. Most often, this event was something involving a bad dad. So the characters aren't acting based on ethics or beliefs. They're automatons, mechanistically reacting to what has come before. It's like the whole thing is a giant trick pool shot, with one ball bouncing off another until the plot is resolved. It robs the main characters of agency, choice, and free will.

Do other popular SF shows employ this trope? I've mentioned that BSG does it from time to time, but not nearly as often. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is notable because the main character actually has a deadbeat dad – whom we almost never hear about. Buffy barely mentions him. She's over that crap. Fox Mulder famously had issues with his father, but they were a tiny fraction of his overall fucked up personality, and we didn't get episode after episode in which Scully and Skinner and Cancer Man and Krycek trotted out their daddy issues. The Star Trek franchise barely touches the issue. Deanna Troi's mom is mostly used for comic relief. If the other characters have issues, they're often resolved in the space of one episode. 

Which leads me back to J.J. Abrams again, and the upcoming Star Trek movie.

I swear to god, if Kirk becomes captain of the Enterprise because he's mad at his father, I'm going to burn down a movie theatre.

ETA: It would be unfair of me to not mention Charlie, the only character who we know had a good relationship with his father. In his final episode with flashbacks, one of his favourite memories is being taught to swim by his father. This was also one of the best uses of the flashback structure since we learned that Locke was paraplegic, way back in season one.

Writing your way out of your own mythology

This week, my girlfriend (she who is both wise and beautiful) and I are going to sit down and watch about four or five episodes of Battlestar Galactica back to back. We have the bare minimum cable package, and here in western Canada, that does not include anybody broadcasting BSG.

We've had the tapes for a week now, and we haven't exactly been in a rush to finish them off, despite being in the middle of the Gaeta Mutiny. (I like Alessandro Juliani better in live theatre. We referred to him as Romeo for the first season, because we've seen him do plenty of Shakespeare in Vancouver over the years.) 

My love for BSG, in full flower after the mini series and the first season, has now withered and could blow away in a strong wind. I just don't have any confidence that there's a mythology there that's going to make sense.

The whole term mythology or mytharc started showing up a lot when The X-Files was ramping up. I watched that series from the get go. Then, around season seven, I just stopped. I've never seen the finale. I don't care. There was no way to fix what was wrong, not in two hours, not in two years worth of episodes.

The field of science fiction and fantasy TV is littered with series that showed early promise and then crashed and burned under the weight of their own myth building, and their creators total inability to untie the knotted plot threads.

The X-Files is the template for all these shows, for good and ill. It was fairly innovative in its day for attempting to create a serialized show out of a cop/supernatural format. Almost every other cop show of the day relied on one-off episodes, as did most SF shows of the 1980s and early '90s, such as Star Trek: The Next Generation and the remake of The Twilight Zone. Continuity was for soaps and teen dramas.

When The X-Files hit it big, almost every copycat show attempted to follow its paradigm of mixing one-offs with mytharc elements. Just from Fox in the 1990s, I remember Strange Luck and VR.5, the latter a show so terrible I would saw open my own skull and pour in lye rather than watch it again. Anthony Stewart Head notwithstanding.

The serialization started to become more and more prevalent, not just on SF shows, but on a lot of the programs on HBO. Check out Deadwood, The Wire, or The Sopranos. A new generation of SF shows dove even further into serialization. The later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer don't make sense at all if you haven't been paying close attention for about five or six years. 

The problem isn't the serialized format; I love a good ongoing story. It's that too many SF showrunners learned how to do it from Chris Carter, and not enough from J. Michael Straczynski or Joss Whedon. (Say what you will about his dialogue, Stracznyski knew how to plan.)

You can almost always tell whether there's a plan within the first half dozen episodes of a program. Any one problem won't kill a show, but if you pile them one on top of the other, things get problematic fast. Bad signs include:

• Deliberate withholding of information from the audience and characters. My girlfriend pointed out that in The X-Files, Mulder and Scully usually knew exactly as much as the audience. At best, audiences saw a tiny glimpse behind the curtain – they'd see Cancer Man popping some evidence away in a vault, or conferring with some other suits. Compare to Lost, in which we are constantly confronted with A) characters seeing something and reacting with shock, while the audience is in the dark or B) the audience sees something that's supposedly significant, but none of the nine hundred or so main characters knows about it. (I know, they're trying to create tension, but the technique only works if used sparingly.) The tendency to withhold information is linked to

• Deeply incurious protagonists. At least Mulder and Scully were always trying to figure things out. I watched the first season of Carnivale in open disgust of the protagonist, who was constantly being approached by people who wanted to explain his powers and the quasi-Biblical weirdness that surrounded him. And he'd run away, fingers in his ears shouting "La la la la, I can't hear you!" As a viewer I feel like I've been slapped in the face when a character openly refuses information. At that point, the writers are just being dicks. Compare this to BSG (both were headed by Ron Moore) in which it seems like no one is asking the Cylons a lot of pertient questions. How did they know about the Final Five? Who created their religion? How are they different from normal humans, anyway? (These may have been answered by now, I'll know when I check the tapes. But I doubt it, and the questions should have been asked much, much earlier in any case.)

• Dropped plot threads. This is Lost's favourite trick. Go on, start to count up all the plots and hints that have just fallen by the wayside. Smoke monsters, slave ships, four-toed statues, a second island, immortal guys, baby-killing diseases, voices in the forest. And where did all the wild boars go, anyway? If there isn't a coherent plan, dropped plot threads will strangle a show, like they did the X-Files. I'm sure somewhere there's a fan with a giant wall chart that explains all the conspiracies and aliens in Chris Carter's first show, but it's all fanwanking. You cannot reconcile all the alien species, from greys to black goo to clones to baseball players to transgendered Amish sex vampires.

• Constantly revolving cast. How many main characters does Lost have? Outside of the fairly large core of Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Sayid, Hurley, Jin and Sun, and Locke, there have been at least two dozen significant characters, all with their own backstories and motivations. Most of them are dead, while others have been pushed to the side. Some show creators eventually get bored with their core cast and their stories, so they add new people. Lots and lots and lots of them. Often they replace the main characters, or some of them, expecting fans to go along with it. It almost never works. Ask poor Robert Patrick.

• Expanding universe. This afflicted The X-Files to a certain extent, but also Lost and even Buffy and Angel. The show starts out with a simple concept: girl kills vampires; FBI agents investigate a hidden world of conspiracies and aliens; plane crashes on mysterious island. Then more and more and more elements are added, until the original plot thread is in danger of being forgotten. Which leads us to

• No ending. How was The X-Files supposed to end? With Mulder and Scully blowing the lid off all the conspiracies and revealing aliens to the world? And Lost? Half the main cast has already escaped from the island. What's the central premise of the show now? Where's it going? I don't believe that The X-Files was ever meant to have an ending, a finale that would wrap it all up. But the fans were certainly expecting one. Everyone expects an ending to a narrative, a wrap up linked to the central premise, and being left hanging leaves the viewers feeling cheated. Again, look to Straczynski, who introduced the Vorlons and Shadows in the first season of Babylon 5. A more obscure example may be the werewolf/murder mystery show Wolf Lake. It was cancelled pretty quickly (not without cause, the writing was wildly uneven, from great to dreadful) but you got the sense that at the end of the first season, we'd at least know who had killed the town patriarch. There was an end goal in sight. Buffy's last episode wrapped up the central concept that was first mentioned in the opening of the first episode: that there was a chosen one. Joss Whedon wrapped up the show by changing the rules.

So it's possible that BSG has an ending planned, and it may even answer many of my questions. It's far from the worst offender when it comes to meandering plots (I'm looking at you, Lost). But I've seen far, far too many shows crushed under their own mythology, and I wouldn't be surprised if the next decade produces a few more.