The tricky business of juggling secrets
Lost is one of my favorite new shows this season. It’s not perfect, but it’s been quite good. This week’s episode, though, definitely showed signs of weakness. Much of what makes Lost a compelling watch is that the information is doled out bit by bit so we are not left completely stymied week after week.
Good secret management is what makes for a compelling thriller. Make the secret too obvious, and it’s no fun when it is officially revealed. But make it too obscure, and it doesn’t pay off either. Good secret management keeps the viewers engaged, drawing them along to a conclusion that will, they hope, have good closure.
This week’s episode was a long backstory on Kate, which served to show that she’s a good liar. I could sustain my disbelief to believe that she’d lie to another thief in order to break into a bank to access a safe-deposit box containing only a personal memento. I could not, though, believe that she’d lie to both Sawyer and Jack to retrieve it out of a salvaged case. Neither of them, when the case was opened, would have prevented her from taking a personal memento, or questioned her on it. The conflict among them was artificially heightened in order to call Kate’s honesty into question. I’m left with a bad taste in my mouth. Perhaps the writers will give more context to make her behavior more credible. Right now, though, it feels like they clumsily wrote an episode simply to highlight that she can’t be trusted, which probably means that she can be.
Here’s my take on a few other of the show’s secrets. I think that Rousseau’s child Alex is a girl. She never used a gender pronoun, and it was only Sayeed who referred to Alex as him. Also, my guess is that the man Kate referred to when she said “I killed the man I loved” is her father, not a former lover. We’ve been given hints about these, over a few episodes. These secrets are being well-managed, then.
A great example of secret-management gone bad is the X-Files. It was also built around secrets, but over time the explanations grew so unwieldy and complex that it broke down. Some viewers stayed till the end; I wasn’t one of them.
Sometimes a good secret can elevate a merely OK work. I thought Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, was pretty good. The secret, though, was so cool that I still remember it fondly.
Other times, a bad secret can drag a good book down. I loved the book Smilla’s Sense of Snow right up till the end and the revelation of its lame secret (which was the same secret as an arctic episode of the X-Files). Wondering if revealing the lame secret in advance would lessen the disappointment, I revealed it to my husband–with his permission–before he read Smilla. He still thought it was a lame ending. Smilla’s lame secret is also why I no longer recommend a book until I have finished reading it. Endings are hard, no matter what medium or genre one works in. One of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson, does annoyingly short-shrifted endings.
I too, both in my fiction writing and in these weblog entries, often struggle with endings. While I can empathize with the writers on Lost, they’re paid way more than I am to do what they’re doing, so I hold them more accountable. I’m expecting those secrets to be well-managed, and I’m going to be mighty peeved if they are not.
January 7th, 2005 at 2:01 pm
I’ve heard a lot about Lost and I kind of wish I’d watched it from the beginning. I don’t watch a lot of TV and therefore don’t seek out many new programs each season.
Are you a novel writer?
January 8th, 2005 at 9:12 am
Technically, yes, I am a novel writer. I have written one novel that has a beginning, middle and end, though then last part of it still needs some work. I also was a winner during National Novel Writing Month, which means I spewed out 50 thousand words of raw material that I hope to shape into novel #2.
Novel #1 has not yet been sent out in its entirety. But excerpts were sent to apply for a grant and another competition, and were met with deafening silence. I try to stay both humble and yet hopeful enough to keep at them.
January 9th, 2005 at 2:37 pm
Hey, there was an article about the NaNosotans in today’s Star Tribune. I don’t think you were among those interviewed or mentioned, but maybe you’re in the picture of the celebration at Pizza Luce. You’re famous!
January 11th, 2005 at 8:13 am
I agree about last week’s Lost episode. It had way too many “nobody would really do that” moments for my taste. Let’s hope they’re back on their game by this week’s episode.