“So much for fate”:
Free Will and Narrative Closure in Lost
Introduction
Season one: The Numbers
Season two: "Pushing the button"
Season three: Charlie's fate
From its inaugural episode, when the character Charlie wrote the word “fate” on his fingers, the spiraling narrative of Lost has turned on the issue of free will vs. fate. During the course of season 1, Locke and Michael profess a belief in destiny, while other characters debate whether fate or happenstance led them to the island. Desmond, Anna-Lucia, Eko and Ben Linus join this discussion in season 2. In season three Juliet and Ben address the question of free will, while the mysterious Mrs. Hawking appears as if an agent of fate personified, sent to ensure that Desmond remain on his pre-determined path.
This ongoing debate is signified by a symbol or action that – although woven into the larger narrative – holds particular significance for each of three seasons to date. These iconic signs or events appear time and again, their constant repetition at odds with the forward movement of plot and character development. In season 1 tragedy and doom attach to “the numbers,” (as the sequence 4-8-15-16-23-42 is known to the Lost community), a series devoid of explicit origin or meaning but which permeates the Lost universe. In the second season several characters confront “pushing the button,” the abstract, law-like requirement that they input this number sequence into the Swan hatch computer every 108 minutes to avoid certain catastrophe. These events are clearly distinguished from other narrative conflicts. For instance, discrete flashbacks relate actions taken in the past to those occurring in the island’s present. Didactic morality tales of community life follow individual narrative arcs that move the larger plot forward. But each time the characters encounter the numbers or push the button, they reach an impasse, and are returned – figuratively and often literally – to the place from which they began.
In season 3 the ethical dimension of free will vs. fate becomes explicit when Desmond reveals a precognitive insight to upcoming events: flashes of a future that include Charlie’s death. Desmond’s flashes complete a trifecta that began in season 1 with the numbers and continued in season 2 with the button. As part of an escalating series of events that pit individual characters against fate, (the ultimate big Other), repeated glimpses of Charlie’s demise assert the traumatic collision between fate and free will in its literal fullness. No matter how many times Desmond saves Charlie in Lost’s reality, Charlie’s death will return like clockwork in the form of visions that predict the character’s every move and moral choice. I will first analyze the numbers, the button, and Desmond’s visions as they embody the conflict of predestination vs. free will through Lost’s first three seasons. I close with a discussion of Charlie’s death as a summation of this theme, with implications for the new format of Lost in seasons 4-6.
Season one: The Numbers
The sequence 4-8-15-16-23-42 was officially introduced to us as a series in episode 18 of season 1, “Numbers,” but each separate number – as well as 108, the series’ sum - appeared as so-called “Easter eggs” throughout the season, as catalogued exhaustively, and assigned portents from the mundane to the cosmic, on fan sites such as “The Lost Numbers” and “Sledgeweb’s Lost stuff.”1
Numbers in themselves, of course, resist semantic reinterpretation. But the ubiquity of individual numbers confounds our understanding of them as simple icons that order or quantify. The appearance of the entire series in diegetic locations that range from a radio broadcast to the shirts of a girls’ soccer team further resists interpretation on the conventional level, and encourages us to invest them with an extra-nominal significance.
The Lost numbers refer to a long-standing narrative tradition in sci-fi and fantasy literature cited earlier by executive producer J.J. Abrams, when he incorporated the number 47 as a recurring symbol in the fantasy spy series Alias.2 Here specific numbers serve a dual function, as icons of conspiracy that link disparate events by association. But Lost’s numbers serve a different rhetorical function; more than mere signs, their connection to pivotal events suggests a veiled agency. In series they seem to advance or thwart not only the plans of individual characters, but – as revealed in the 2006 online game The Lost Experience – to control the fate of the world as we know it.3
Like a virus passed on from one plot thread to another, the numbers move from background to foreground, from Hurley’s flashback in “The Numbers” to other characters and situations, traversing decades and continents.4 They penetrate the realm of the public and private without distinction, as abstract entities located nowhere in particular, yet embodied everywhere in hatch inscriptions, connect four games, and lottery tickets. Until the producers assign a definitive interpretation within the textual frame of the show, the numbers remain opaque, with each viewer free to assign them provisional and contradictory meanings.
As portents of indeterminate value that may bode good or ill, their mimetic reproduction throughout the series pulsates with a sense of the uncanny. As symptoms of a repressed trauma more shocking than the plane crash itself, the numbers function as proxies for the mysterious workings of fate. Their irruption into the narrative is a subtle reminder that Lost’s central trauma is not the plane crash that began the series; of more importance is each character’s confrontation with that fate, as well as Fate with a capital F. The juxtaposition of flashbacks with island narratives in seasons 1-3 underlines this theme, in a complex dance between each characters as they once were and as they exist in the show’s present.
Despite their mystery, the diegetic introduction of the numbers follows a progressive pattern: first broadcast over the air, the numbers drew Danielle Rousseau's crew to a disasterous fate, and "infected" Sam Toomey and his friend Lenny with their suggestive power. Lenny was institutionalized and spends his days vocalizing the numbers, which "spread" to Hurley, who serendipitously plays them to win the lottery.
The utter contingency of the numbers indirectly expresses the trauma of blind fate. Yet as a symptom they are addressed to the “other supposed to know.” Hence Hurley’s vigorous pursuit of Sam Toomey and Danielle, when he discovers that the very numbers that brought him both immense wealth and untold disaster led them to similar fates. But no one in Lost can interpret the numbers for Hurley, leaving the viewer to assume the position of analyst. We might note that, left alone, the number are but inert symbols, whose a semblance of order tempts the unwary. The numbers have agency only when performed, broadcast over the air, used to win contests, or typed into a computer every 108 minutes. Thrown into the world like dice at a craps table, they return the user’s message in an inverted form: to call lady luck invites good as well as bed. Sam, Hurley and Danielle don’t yet know who programmed the numbers into the radio beacon, or who inscribed them on the hatch. But each made a choice to heed the numbers, and each became obsessed with their link to unforeseen catastrophe.
Season two: "Pushing the button"
In the premier episode of season 2 we meet Desmond, who is all too acquainted with the numbers.5 Desmond does not hear them, say them, or write them, but types 4-8-15-16-23-42 13.3 times a day, every day, for nigh on four years. Like the sweepstakes winners, Desmond performs the numbers, towards an explicit if mysterious, end. And just as the numbers brought both good fortune and calumny to Sam and Hurley, so their import is paradoxical: the Swan station numbers both count down to disaster and simultaneously prevent it. Desmond’s success at pushing the button is signified only by the ghostly replication of the numbers in yet another form, as a countdown timer that resets with their sum, 108.
But unlike Hurley and Sam, Desmond does not encounter the numbers by chance; his performance represents Kant’s classic ethical dilemma of the forced choice. Desmond appears to have little free will in the matter; not performing the numbers would result not only in suicide but mass murder. During the course of season 2 many fans wondered, why not build a completely mechanical fail-safe? Why must any character make the decision day in and day out whether or not to push the button?
When Lost began, the debate between free will and determinism grew naturally out of the characters’ reactions to the plane crash; later we find that the characters felt connected to fate before they arrived. Season two brought this theme to a sharp focus in the Swan station when the “hatch monkeys,” a chosen few who represent the community as a whole, pushed the button every 108 minutes. In the classic paradox of the forced choice, one of the alternatives is always choice itself, for life and the world create the very condition of freedom. The button paradox leaves no room for free will, a choice through which Desmond, Locke, Eko or Jack could assert his subjectivity. John’s fateful choice at the end of season 2 to not push the button, and to prevent anyone else from doing so was less an act of freedom than an hysterical outburst directed towards the force he feared was really in control, pulling the strings behind the castaway’s fate. In contrast to Desmond, Locke’s fantasy projects the island as big Other, a master constantly testing his servants with inscrutable demands which it is their burden to decipher.
The Scottish sailor faces his a forced choice of a different kind when, following Locke’s rash action, he employs the mysterious fail-safe key left for extreme emergencies. With only the barest hint of what might result, Desmond – to paraphrase his late partner Kelvin – takes his finger out of the dam and blows the whole thing up. 6 To save the island – perhaps the world - from destruction he must, theoretically at least, destroy the island, with no idea if the cure is worse than the disease. Desmond faces terror at its most pure: the only way to prevent unthinkable destruction is to cause unthinkable destruction, to show fealty to his cause and sacrifice the island to the island.
The violent implosion of the hatch was the outward sign of a narrative turn away from the Dharma station toward a greater mystery. But it also indicated a character shift for Desmond, the perennial outsider. In the terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Desmond’s choice to turn the key was an act, a truly free choice devoid of Kant’s pathological necessity. Lacan called suicide the only successful act, but here suicide represents the death of the subject as a symbolic entity: that is, the death of the subject represents everything that defined his or her place in the symbolic order. Although saved from literal death, Desmond’s internal change – and his new role in the Lost community – is externalized as he both travels back in time and experiences flashes of the future. The course of season three played out the full implications of that choice by forcing Desmond to continually repeat it, in a more intimate and ambiguous form.
Season three: Charlie's Choice
Desmond and Charlie’s parallel trajectories in season three played out the two logics of suicide, the two paths to the act as the Kantian definition of free will. In the third and fourth episodes of season three we suspect that Desmond might have precognitive abilities. These abilities and more are revealed in episode 8, “Flashes Before Your Eyes,” where Desmond’s ethical quandary is laid out in full. Fate – the big Other if every there was one – has apparently set him on a preordained path, yet cruelly reversed that path for the sole purpose of offering the classic forced choice.
Desmond’s quandary is straight out of the Critique of Practical Reason, where Kant suggested that no reasonable man would forfeit his life for a night with the woman of his dreams.7 The stakes are even higher in “Flashes,” where Desmond is asked to give up a life with his beloved Penny in 1996 order to save the world 8 years hence; the story’s nods to the Odyssey along with the presence of the eerily omniscient Mrs. Hawking put Desmond in the role of a tragic Greek hero.8 As a truly ethical subject Desmond would not cede his desire: he would marry Penny, and to hell with fate. But to choose his fiancée over the world would be monstrous, a betrayal of his humanity, and so Desmond sacrifices the girl for the world.
Desmond’s sacrifice follows the first logic of suicide, the sacrifice of one’s life, or something of great value, (here Penny’s love), so that another may live or thrive. But Mrs. Hawking’s proposal is only the first (in one temporal stream) of a series of choices forced on Desmond by his horrific foreknowledge. As always with the logic of sacrifice, fate is a sadistic master, and will always come out the victor. Desmond’s flashes compel him to choose between the girl or his comrade’s life more than once: repeated visions imply that he may either save Charlie or reunite with Penny. Thus Desmond sacrifices love for honor over and over again, each time losing Penny to give Charlie a few more days of life. The only way to escape the sadism of fate is to choose the second logic of suicide: to deny fate its formal victory by commiting an act with no purpose in the eyes of the big Other. This brings us to Charlie’s choice, the defining act that closed season three and set Lost on an entirely new narrative course.9
Charlie’s act followed yet another of Desmond’s visions of his demise, but one with a rider attached: that his newfound family Aaron and Claire will be rescued by helicopter. With this development the logic of sacrifice shifts agents from Desmond to Charlie, who immediately rises to the challenge, even as Desmond attempts once again to intervene. In Through the Looking Glass, Charlie follows Desmond’s vision to the letter. He finds that – as a musician who knows the melody of an old Beach Boys song – fate seems to have chosen him alone to break the code that will alert the outside world to their predicamant, theoretically rescuing not only Claire and Aaron, but saving the castaways from death or incarceration at the hand of the others. Everything that happens, in fact, is as Desmond predicted until he flicks the switch that would allow contact with the outside world.
Two events happen at this point that reveal cracks in the big Other, that show fate to be nothing but a bit player on the Lost stage. The first is the flipping of the switch, whereupon Charlie is supposed to drown. He is delighted instead to receive an incoming video transmission from none other than Penelope herself. The second event occurs when Charlie asks Penelope about Naomi, the parachutist who claimed to represent Penny’s rescue operation. Here Charlie surmises that the castaways have been duped: Naomi’s party has no affiliation with Penny, and may prove more dangerous than either the island or the Ben Linus-led others. Desmond’s vision of Charlie’s death, and Claire’s rescue seems to have no more predictive power: both Charlie and Desmond have been absolved of their duty to fate. Yet when Charlie finally dies it is not because he has succumbed to fate, but because he has embraced it. He consciously decides to warn Desmond about Naomi and to peacefully accept death by drowning, an end that – as many fans pointed out – he could have escaped. At the moment of death Charlie realizes the Other – his predetermined fate – doesn’t exist. His choice is thus an ethical act of pure freedom, done not for but despite the Other. Charlie’s role in the prewritten drama complete, he improvises a final act, choosing death not because he must but as a gift to his colleagues and friends; in accepting physical death he achieves “spiritual” rebirth, one of the few characters in Lost to achieve full subjectivity.
Charlie’s act reveals the purpose behind the mantra “free will vs. fate” that ran throughout seasons 1-3 of Lost: only at the moment when a character accedes to the demands of fate does he realize his true freedom. Charlie’s sacrifice was the culmination of three seasons in which characters were forced to confront a series of forced choices or tempt fate. It thus marks the tipping point when Lost’s narrative turned upside down, and began flashing forward to an ominous, uncertain future, instead of a static, preordained past. Charlie’s “fate” strongly suggests that only when the remaining characters accept the contingency of the plane crash as destiny, will Lost resolve its founding trauma and achieve emotional, ethical and narrative closure.
Amy Bauer
Notes
This paper was originally presented at the 2007 MidAtlantic Conference on Popular Culture in Philadelphia as part of the panel Lost: Poststructural Metanarrative or Postmodern Bildungsroman?
1 Sledgeweb's Lost...Stuff: The Numbers (lost.cubit.net), The Lost numbers (thelostnumbers.blogspot.com). back
2 Alias inspired a cottage industry of fan speculation regarding its underlying conspiracies and mysterious backstory, although network interference and the decreasing involvement of creator Abrams muted fan interest in the mythological aspects of the show; see http://alias-tv.com for more information. back
3 The Lost Experience was charted in detail by Truffula in Lost 1.2 and 1.3; a summary is available at lostpedia.com. back
4 “Numbers.” Written by Brent Fletcher and David Fury. Directed by Daniel Attias. ABC, March 2, 2005. back
5 “Man of Science, Man of Faith .” Written by Damon Lindelof. Directed by Jack Bender. ABC, September 21, 2005. back
6 “Live Together, Die Alone .” Written by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. Directed by Jack Bender. ABC, May 24, 2006. back
7 Kant, 30. back
8 “Flashes Before Your Eyes .” Written by Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard. Directed by Jack Bender. ABC, February 14, 2007. back
9 “Through the Looking Glass .” Written by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. Directed by Jack Bender. ABC, May 23, 2007. back
References
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. (New York: Macmillan, 1993).
Lacan, Jacques. "Kant with Sade," (1962), from Écrits,transl. by J.B. Swenson Jr., October 51, Winter 1989, 55-75.
Zizek, Slavoj. Tarrying With The Negative: Kant, Hegel And The Critique Of Ideology. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.)
_______. The Plague of Fantasies (Wo Es War). (London, NY: Verso, 1997.)
Zupancic, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. (London, NY: Verso, 2000.)