Amid thoughts and worries about finals and looming paper deadlines, students who are fans of the television show “Lost” are passionately meditating theories of Egyptian mysteries, biblical illusions and the conflict between science and faith.
The finale of “Lost” that will air this Sunday will signify the end of a six-year-long, perplexing and highly debated era on television. To those who aren’t dedicated fans, “Lost” may seem to pose mentally exhausting questions that are ultimately pointless. Yet “Lost” is indebted to a variety of historical and literary influences, implying that this is a show that is not just another meaningless form of entertainment.
Kara Cooney, an Egyptologist and assistant professor of Egyptian art and architecture, has helped the producers of “Lost” create some of the recurrent historical motifs on the show, including the hieroglyphs inscribed on the monuments on the island.
Cooney said that as soon as avid “Lost” fans began to research the hieroglyphs themselves, the producers decided that they needed the help of a cultured Egyptologist to depict inscriptions that were harder to crack.
“I got in touch with the producers and they would ask me for an Egyptian word for foreboding or threat or solace, weird words, but it usually had a threat connotation or emotion attached to them,” Cooney said. “And then I suggested that they write the words cryptographically. When you read a hieroglyph, you read towards the face of the animals. But if you write them cryptographically, you have to read it in a certain direction which is a little hard to do.”
Fans eventually solved the puzzle and were able to figure out how to understand hieroglyphs in this new way. Cooney said that hieroglyphs lend intrigue to the show by prompting viewers to wrap their minds around the mystique of ancient civilizations.
“People like stories, they like serials, they like dramas and they love mystery,” Cooney said. “They love the idea that something is unsolvable, that there’s some sort of a conspiracy, that there’s something they have to crack. And if you can throw Egypt into that and temples and ancient mysteries with the mysteries of these people and why they’re on this island, well, I think it was very successful.”
Jeff Jensen of Entertainment Weekly, nicknamed Doc Jensen because of his expertise on all things “Lost”-related, recently dedicated several months of work to help produce a special “Lost” issue of the magazine. The articles and interviews he conducted afforded him the opportunity to visit the set in Hawaii during one of the final days of shooting for the series.
“I have seen a scene that will fall within the final 10 minutes of the final episode,” Jensen said. “It is a very big scene that, having watched it, has a lot of implications for how to understand what has been happening this season. It certainly was a big whopper of a thing, but at the same time, there are huge portions of the show that remain unspoiled for me. And I really have no idea how the show is going to get from its most recent episode to the point that I saw.”
Bryan Tomlinson, a second-year history student, said he finds the absorbing questions raised in “Lost” to be the reason he has continued to tune in each season.
“It’s the only show that I really watch that’s building up to something new every episode or to this final mystery, which is cool,” Tomlinson said. “It’s got a lot more intrigue and drama than shows I’ve usually watched.”
While blogs and message boards are inundated with theories, ideas and possible conclusions to the show, many people don’t know what is to come.
Tomlinson said he has certainly invested the mental effort to try to understand how the writers of the show will solve everything by the finale.
“Now that the series is winding down, I spend a lot of time thinking about how it’s going to end,” Tomlinson said. “I still have no idea.”
Despite ambiguity about how the show will ultimately conclude, the finale on Sunday will bring an end to a show that incorporated so many difficult intellectual concepts within such a unique story line.
“This is a show that captured all of our imaginations at the very beginning,” Jensen said. “There was some skepticism and weariness at the beginning of, “˜Okay, is this just going to lead us on and jerk us around and not really add up to anything, or does this show have something to say?’ It’s not a perfectly told story by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s an extremely imaginative story that contains a lot of meaning.”