During an email discussion with some friends about the most recent episode of Lost, someone brought up Rose, Bernard, and the rest of the surviving castaways, and how they’ve disappeared, and what happened to them. Some of my friends basically just said “jimmy crack corn and I don’t care.” Others said that their disappearance matters to them, because it ought to matter to the main characters. My pal Kiel Phegley put it like this:

…if Lindelof, Cuse and the rest want me to think that Jack and company are doing something of worth and are worth my support and investment, then I can’t just accept that the only people it’s important for them to save are the ones they’ve either slept with or who have mind powers.

This is really interesting to me.

Back in Season One, as it became apparent that of the 48 castaways we’d only ever be focusing on about a dozen or so, and as it became apparent that there was something really weird about the Island, and as certain characters like Locke argued that they were “meant to be here,” the question of why it was the above-the-credits cast that mattered and not the extras, aka redshirts, first popped into my head. Obviously, the real answer here is “because that’s how TV works,” but what diegetic explanation would the show concoct? The first time this was addressed in-show was with Dr. Arzt, who complained to Hurley or Charlie or whoever it was about the main characters’ “adventure club” or whatever he called it. I was fascinated that characters within the show’s world had realized that some of them were more important than others. At that point, though, we still didn’t really know why this was, or even IF it was actually true.

As the seasons progressed, the show began to reinforce the notion that these characters we’re following were in fact the most important ones, using various plot points to make this argument. They were the characters who had to press the button. They were the character’s on the list given to Michael. They were the characters giving birth to babies, or who had children with special powers. They were the characters on “Jacob’s list.” And so on and so forth. The reason we were following them rather than Scott, Steve, Frogurt and the other randies really WAS because they were more important, or at least seen as being more important by the Others and/or the Island itself.

By the time we’ve reached where we are now, that’s been taken even further. These are the characters who comprise the Oceanic Six. They’re the characters that Ben, Christian, and by extension Jacob INSIST must return to the Island in order to save it. They’re the only characters even CAPABLE of returning to the Island. They’re the characters that traveled through time and are therefore having double the impact on the Island’s history. By comparison, the redshirts mean less and less.

But here’s the thing. As we learn that they really don’t mean anything to the Island, they mean less and less within the world of the show; that is to say they mean less and less to the plot, they mean less and less as plot drivers. And therefore, the creators of the show seem to believe they mean less and less in terms of the audience’s emotional investment in them versus our emotional investment in the main characters, simply given the amount of relative screentime and story importance each group has been given.

However, main characters, and the audience, are NOT the Island. Whatever the redshirts’ lack of importance may be in terms of the Island and what its powers mean for those who try to harness them and for the world at large, we the audience understand on some level that they’re supposed to be actual, full human beings. We may not have seen Kate go swimming with them or Sawyer play golf with them or Jack treat their headaches and splinters and so on, but presumably that happened. Presumably they had campfire singalongs with Charlie, presumably they traded some notes with Hurley about who the hell Desmond and Juliet were, presumably they wondered whether Boone and Shannon were doing it and asked other characters if they thought they had a shot, and so on and so forth. And most importantly, presumably the recent actions of Locke, Jack, and Sawyer were intended to save these anonymous souls along with the main characters–heck, it seems like Sawyer spent three years organizing grid-pattern searches of the Island just to track them down.

Here’s my point: The Island is a harsh mistress and doesn’t care about any of that. It seems as though the show is training us not to care about it all that much either. But sometimes we can’t help but do so, and when that happens, it becomes weird to realize that the main characters apparently don’t. They’re supposed to be full human beings too.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.