Another Lost Theory

Ooh, just had another theory epiphany. We have two parallel tracks running on the show now (if that's the right metaphor). We have the present and the future. Each are progressing in their own time. The flash forwards are not flash backs - they are going to happen, but have they happened yet? Well, yes and no. If we think the stuff on the island is the present, then no they haven't happened yet. But if we think of the flash forwards as the present, then they're currently happening now. But then that means there are basically two presents. There's the present time period on the island and the present time period in the future. Two presents.

So, my theory is that the writers are going to close the "island present" down right and make the "future present" the new present. That is, the stories on the island are going to end with the Oceanic Six ending. We will learn why they left, who died, who is left, and ultimately what this organization is after. When the writers finally leave that time period, the current time period will be this new flash forward time period that they've been developing. And around that time, the story will have progressed enough that Jack and the others have some plan to get back on the island, and we'll then begin the path back to the island. The actual amount of screen time spent off the island (in terms of episodes) will therefore be small. There will be either no "off-the-island" gap, or it will be very small, because the writers will basically use this novel narrative technique of telling present and future simultaneously to close the present off, and thus automatically making the future story the present.

When you stop and think about it - assuming this is right - what other medium could you have done half the things that they have been doing on Lost? I mean, can you even tell a story like this in a book or a movie? There are things that you can do on serialized television dramas that you cannot do anywhere else. I present Lost as evidence #1 against Neal Postmman's theory that we are amusing ourselves to death. This is a level of sophistication in story telling never seen before. I think what is either happening is either that writers are learning that there are techniques available to them that they did not know, maybe because network executives were so risk averse. Or there has been some change in the population itself and they now suddenly crave more complicated stories. I strongly suspect we haven't changed (the Flynn Effect stuff notwithstanding) and instead suspect something is changing on the supply-side. I'm just not sure why and what and why now. It's not the technology, because for a sci-fi story, there's startlingly no CGI anywhere. So it can't be technology. And if it was just Lost, I'd chalk it up to, well, just Lost. But it's not just Lost. Everywhere you look on television, stories are growing in complexity and texture. Characters are deeply layered and interesting in a way that weren't 10 years ago, let alone 40 years ago. Stories run long, through multiple episodes, or in Lost's case, multiple season without dropping the ball. The question isn't how do they do it. They question is why is it changing, and why now and not 10 years ago?