I do like exploring what didn’t work in a piece of storytelling, but I get a lot more enjoyment out of analyzing a story that got it right, so I want to do a bit of a follow-up to my post about Archive 81 and its issues making character motivations feel organic and believable. In that post, I express disappointment that the characters continue to act in ways I felt were inauthentic. One of the things I am enjoying so much about watching Lost for the first time is that it is absolutely obsessed with making you understand every single character’s motivations for everything they do (perhaps you’re sitting at home, shaking your head in sorrow over the many seasons in front of me in which the writers throw this out the window and instead have the characters all just do random shit that doesn’t make sense, but as of this moment in time, season 3 episode 7, I say this with confidence. Believe me, when I finish the series I’ll be back to analyze some more).
I don’t feel like I need to introduce Lost that much to my readers, as it is pretty cemented in our shared cultural consciousness, but just to set the scene, Lost is about a plane that crashes on a mysterious island somewhere. Many people survive the plane crash and try to survive the island while becoming increasingly aware that it is full of mysteries. Lost is one of the great examples of a puzzle box show. These shows rely heavily on keeping information away from the audience and the characters while doling out just enough clues to allow people at home to speculate on what could possibly be going on. A more recent example of this would be Westworld, which actually had to change plot points throughout filming because people would gather online to try to figure out its mysteries and then undercut later reveals. Vox critic Emily VanDerWerff has argued that a lot of current television is moving away from this model, focusing instead on the emotional impact of the events in the story rather than on trying to trick or play keep-away with their audience in order to hold their attention. I think she’s right when she asserts that this is a good thing; too many lesser puzzle box shows like Archive 81 rely on pure curiosity as enough character motivation to drive the plot forward in a believable way, but I don’t think Lost does that. Instead, we the audience may be driven to try and figure out the puzzles the island presents, but the characters themselves are driven by their own internal motivations and rarely if ever do something because they want to just figure out a mystery. Even Locke, who is the character most obsessed with the island’s puzzles, has underlying reasons for wanting to understand them that go far beyond mere curiosity.
Lost is famous for its heavy use of flashbacks. Each episode focuses on a period in one character’s life before they crashed on the island. The flashback always explains why they are doing something in the present. As the series progresses and we get multiple episodes about our main characters, we are able to build upon the information we have received about them both in other flashbacks and through observing their actions on the island. The first season does this very well. By the end of the first five or so episodes, I could tell you exactly what each main character’s driving motivation was. This allows the viewer to predict with high levels of accuracy how they will react in most situations. By the end of the season, I could tell you exactly what the main and minor characters’ driving motivations and secondary motivations were and how those motivations changed as they experienced the extreme shocks of surviving the crash. Flashbacks are often derided as a lazy method of storytelling, dumping background information on the audience in the same way a voiceover might. Lost is not immune to this; there were definitely episodes where I was so interested in what was happening in the present that I wanted to just fast-forward through the flashbacks, but that would be a mistake. They’re always telling you something you need to know about a character that will make it clear why they make the decisions they do.
The episode I just watched, “I Do,” is a good example of this overall concept. For various reasons, doctor and camp leader Jack, conman with a bleeding heart Sawyer, and traumatized, capable fugitive Kate are being held captive by the Others (mysterious baddies). Kate and Sawyer have been held in two cages facing each other and Jack has been held inside a windowless room. Jack recently learned that the leader of the Others has a tumor pressing on his spine and, as Jack is a spinal surgeon, the Others want him to operate. Jack has long been in love with Kate, who has always been uncertain of her own feelings. Sawyer has also long been in love with Kate, who has realized during their captivity that she is in love with him too. The flashback in this episode is about Kate, who marries a sweet cop (Nathan Fillion!!) and tries to stop running from her past, settle down, and play house. A pregnancy scare shows her she isn’t emotionally ready to stop running and she leaves him. In the present day, Kate has figured out that she can escape from her cage and run, but in this episode she chooses instead to stay, climbing into Sawyer’s cage, confessing her love, and consummating their relationship. The flashback teaches us that Kate’s previous trauma (being sexually propositioned by her drunk father, then blowing up their house with him in it to save her mother from his physical abuse) has made it impossible for her to commit to a relationship, even when she is relatively safe from the U.S. Marshalls pursuing her. But now, she has grown through her experiences on the island and chooses to continue risking her life and stay with Sawyer instead of running. Her principal drive was to escape; it has changed to a drive to commit and remain. We have to see her fail at commitment in the flashback to understand how momentous it is for her to choose commitment in the present.
The second half of the episode concerns Jack’s decision on whether to operate. Jack’s driving motivation throughout the series has been to fix everything and save everyone. His flashbacks revolve around how this drive has hurt the people in his life and his time on the island is largely about him struggling with the consequences of this drive. Because we’ve seen him grapple with his drive and watched him overcome it (letting an islander die, for instance, instead of allowing them to continue suffering), the writers are able to construct an ethical dilemma for him and then have it play out exactly as they have taught us it will.
Kate is told they will kill Sawyer unless she convinces Jack to do the surgery; she begs Jack to do so, revealing to him unconsciously how much she loves Sawyer. Jack at first berates her for asking him that, making her think that by learning the woman he loves has chosen another, he will seek revenge by letting Sawyer die. This convinces the Others, who offer him a different deal: they will let him off the island entirely if he saves their leader. He agrees to this deal, leading the audience to think that Jack has acted expressly against his character, as he is the most selfless character we know. He has also seen Kate and Sawyer naked together in the cage when the Others allow him to wander into a surveillance room, and that scene is directed in a way that framed Jack’s reaction as one of jealous rage. In the operating room, Jack bides his time, then cuts into the leader’s kidney, informing the Others that he won’t sew it back up unless Kate and Sawyer are allowed to go free together, unharmed. His previous actions were a ruse for the cameras (both inside the show and out), luring the Others into believing that he would betray Kate and Sawyer out of revenge and selfishness when we should know that he never would.
Although the show sets up its puzzles to be convoluted and often ultimately meaningless, it never does that to its characters. Even as this episode is written and directed to lead us to wonder at the end if Jack is going to betray Kate and Sawyer, if we’ve been paying attention at all, we should know that he never would. If he had, he would have been behaving in a way that was inauthentic to his character as we know it, and it would have been truly bad writing. It might have been more interesting, as throwing a character generally coded as good into a jealous rage in which he betrays the woman he loves is very dramatic and might have made for an interesting plot twist, but the writers couldn’t have done that because they haven’t written that possibility into his character.
The most infamous recent example of bad character motivation is the end of Game of Thrones, which I would argue actually has been ruined as a whole by its terrible last seasons (but will probably rewatch in a few years hoping to be proven wrong). In the series finale, Daenerys chooses to slaughter an entire city out of grief and vengeance, a character beat that was in no way set up by previous writing of her character on the show. It’s one of the great betrayals of a character by her writers, and it still makes me seethe with rage.
Character motivation is the foundation of a good show. It’s what makes it possible to trust a show. When characters do things that are wildly out of character it can make for a thrilling moment, but it also makes the audience feel as if there is no solid ground on which to stand. If you never know how a character is going to react in a given situation, then their actions are all ultimately meaningless; they’re just puppets for the writers to pose and jerk around for plot purposes. I don’t know if the smoke monster has any meaning in this story outside of being a scary baddie, but I do know why Kate loves Sawyer and why Jack had to bury his father and why Sun stays with Jin. What Lost knows is that people are the only real puzzles that matter and figuring them out is what stories are for.