-

Warning: If you are avoiding spoilers for Lost, stop reading now?

Lost is my favorite show on TV and is fast becoming my favorite show ever. If you have not been watching it, go rent the DVDs.

The season 2 finale was on last night and it was awesome. This whole season there has been an underlying theme about faith. To make a very long story way too short, there is a guy on the island named John Locke. Before the plane crash (the show is about these people that crash landed on an island) Locke was paralyzed, we don?t know why we just know that he couldn?t walk. After the plane crash he could walk, he experienced a miracle (we are lead to believe it is because of the island.) Through a series of events over the course of both seasons, he develops a faith in ?the island? (I know it sounds weird but it makes sense in the context of the show.)

So, in season two we find out that there is this computer in this hatch that has to have a certain sequence of numbers entered in every 108 minutes or the world will end. Locke believes it whole heartedly, it is part of his faith in the island. Others question the reasoning and suggest that it may all be a game and that the world really will not end. Locke is undeterred and is faithful in pushing the button. That is until a series of events cause him to question the reason for pushing the button and his faith in the island.

Someone lies to him and tells him that they didn?t hit the button and nothing happened when, in fact, they did hit the button (which we don?t find out until the finale.) That lie put a crack in his faith which was split wide open when he finds another hatch with an instructional video instructing the residents of that hatch to monitor the button pushing hatch and record their actions, as a behavioral experiment. Once Locke finds this out he has a crisis of belief and rejects his faith, thinking he has all the facts, thinking that he can see the big picture, thinking the button did nothing and that it was nothing more than a psychological experiment. Then he acts on that unbelief and the error of his ways almost destroys the world.

In the finale we find out that the button actually does something. It discharges some sort of electromagnetic field that builds up every 108 minutes. Locke doesn?t believe it and is determined to keep the button from being pressed in order to free himself and everyone else from the ?oppression? of having to press the button. He destroys the computer so the button cannot be pressed, the counter reaches 0, alarms go off, and the whole hatch starts to shake, metal starts flying towards the center of the hatch and Locke begins to see the error of his ways. His faith is restored when he sees that his assumption (arrogance) that he knew the whole picture begins to literally blow up in his face. And not only that, the consequence of his actions threatened him and everyone around him.

As I watched that I thought, ?what a great allegory!? I don't think I've seen matters of faith treated so well and so intelligently as they are on this show. Its just not so obvious at first glance.

If you want to know what happened next, you?ll have to watch the show.

]]>