The Lost Founder of Tomorrowland

May 22, 2015

The following discusses spoilers for both Lost and Tomorrowland

In a manner befitting of both titles, unknown forces have conspired to see Tomorrowland, Disney’s latest original live-action blockbuster, release one day before the fifth anniversary of the final episode of Lost. Common sense tells you to chalk up the coincidence to corporate chaos theory -though both the film and the TV series seek to find a hand or principle guiding our seemingly random existence, it’s putting too much stock in Disney’s appreciation for metatextual Easter eggs to assume a $190 million film was programmed as a nod to a years-old ABC show. (Granted, the network is a Disney subsidiary).

But there is one man in particular behind both curtains: Damon Lindelof. In 2003, Lindelof, and then-Alias creator, now-Star Wars director J. J. Abrams were responsible for turning a soon-to-be-ousted ABC chairman’s ambitious pitch (Survivor meets Castaway) into a series. When Abrams left early in the first season to film his debut feature, it fell to Lindelof to provide creative direction for the series going forward. Though generous with their credit to the writers room that turned ideas into scripts, Lindelof, and replacement co-showrunner Carlton Cuse (Darlton, as their Internet amalgam identity came to be known) were the public creative face of Lost through its six season run.

It was well before the finale that the phrase “they’re making it up as they go along” became the adopted mantra of frustrated and ex-Lostfans. The story of plane crash survivors investigating the mysterious island on which they were marooned always bred more questions than answers, though the investigation proved a fertile spawning ground for some of TV’s biggest strengths: long-form character stories, bite-sized plays of drama and comedy, and Big Questions getting discussed in primetime. When Lost ended on May 23, 2010, closing the book on its characters while leaving dozens of plot riddles ignored or shoddily answered, it was Darlton, and especially the more social media-savvy Lindelof, who bore the brunt of viewer outcry.

Javier Grillo-Marxuach, a writer with the show through the first two seasons, recently published a tell-all/rebuttal to fans still jilted by Lost’s infamous conclusion nearly five years later. In the piece, Grillo-Marxuach testifies that Lindelof knew the truth behind Lost’s biggest mystery from the very beginning:

“On the first day alone, Damon downloaded on us the notion that the island was a nexus of conflict between good and evil: an uncharted and unchartable place with a mysterious force at its core that called humanity to it to play out a primal contest between light and dark.”

This moral dualism would play out in character and narrative choices throughout the series. But its most direct representation came from two specific characters: the saintly, sanctified Jacob (Mark Pellegrino), and his misanthropic brother, known as The Man in Black (Titus Welliver). Though only given proper introductions late in the series, the supernatural rivals had lived on the island for centuries, using their influence to summon citizens of the outside world as surrogates for their battle against one another. Jacob looked to keep The Man in Black, and whatever evil he carried with him quarantined to the island, while The Man in Black sought a way of vacating the mystical rock.

Where Lindelof could afford years of mythology and setup to lay outLost’s Manichean conflict in near-literal terms, he has only 2 hours to address a similar subject in Tomorrowland. Borrowing not just Lost’s existential struggle, but its explorer spirit and fondness for space-time sci-fi hokum, Tomorrowland boils its message down to a simple fable. Heroine Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), an eternal optimist, gives a pep talk to her father early in the film:

“There are two wolves locked in an endless battle: one representing light and hope, the other darkness and despair. Which wolf wins?”

It takes Tomorrowland just four words to answer its thesis (“The one you feed”). Lost spent 121 hours approaching a similar inquiry from dozens of different angles and perspectives before deciding, “folks can be good sometimes, bad sometimes, but we’re all pretty okay in the end.” Lindelof signed on to write Tomorrowland just over a year after Lost ended, but even after the film’s lengthy development process, there’s plenty of evidence in Tomorrowland that suggests Lindelof wasn’t ready to put the island behind him just yet.

Lost’s first season ends with some of the survivors blowing open a hatch buried in the middle of their tropical prison. Abrams, whose creative resume includes patenting and promulgating the phrase “mystery box,” pushed hard for the hatch’s introduction from the very first episode. As a literal example of the mystery box trope, the contents of the hatch mattered far less to Abrams than the suspense that came with wondering what would be inside. Lindelof was able to successfully defer the device’s inclusion until episode 11, when the writers had a good grasp of the gift that would be underneath the stainless steel wrapping paper. Grillo-Marxuach explains the breakthrough that led to the teasing final image of the first season:

“As we trudged through the first half of season one, Damon rushed into the writers room one day with an uncharacteristic bounce in his step and declared that “inside the hatch there’s a room with a guy in it and if he doesn’t press a button every 108 minutes, the world will end.”“

Among the first images in Tomorrowland is a similar narrative and fictional device: a computer rigged to anticipate global collapse that outputs its predication as a cathode-tube doomsday clock. Where the hatch’s timer would eventually be revealed to have a more elaborate, but not apocalyptic purpose, the ticking clock in Tomorrowland 100%, money-back guarantees humanity's destruction within the next 60 days.

The machine, assembled by George Clooney’s world-weary, cynical Frank Walker, is relaying a signal from the titular Tomorrowland, a trans-dimensional metropolis founded decades ago by jetpack-setting scientists and artists. Frank’s optimism and inventor’s curiosity earned him an invite to the secret place at a young age, before he was banished for helping create the machine that predicts Earth’s statistically assured demise. It’s Casey’s can-do attitude that causes a fluctuation in The Monitor’s predictions, and it’s Frank’s robotic, child-modeled recruiter, Athena (Raffey Cassidy), that convinces the world-weary man to get Casey to Tomorrowland as a last-ditch effort to prevent the inevitable.

Though Lost and Tomorrowland appear to approach the same goal from opposite directions (“We need to leave here!” vs. “We need to get there!”), both stories eventually complicate their feelings toward the destination of choice. Skeptic Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) viewed escaping the island as a problem to be solved, while John Locke (Terry Quinn), a paraplegic miraculously put back on his feet after the plane crash, developed a deep spiritual attachment to the place. Shown a virtual reality “commercial” for what Tomorrowland is meant to be, Casey is driven to visit the dream world that embodies her futurist ideals, while Frank, having seen the reality of what Tomorrowland would become, has given up on the would-be utopia.

How the characters relate to the impossible world they’ve become a part of changes as new information presents itself in both the series and film, and in both cases, the search is often more fun than any of the discoveries. Lost’s characters shined brightest through the interactions and individual conflicts that appeared on the way to the next big puzzle piece, or through flashbacks to their pre-island days. Similarly, Casey’s cross-country trek with Athena, and later Frank, is where director Brad Bird injects many human touches to characters that could otherwise be defined by their plot, or in-fiction programming.

When it comes time to finally address the Big Questions Lost andTomorrowland are launched off of, the results are less easy to embrace. By its conclusion, many of Lost’s smaller mysteries were left up to the imagination, or answered in oft-hand fashion. The ultimate reveal of the island’s purpose wasn’t half so confounding to fans as the final season’s use of a side narrative showing the survivors living different lives, only for this thread to be revealed as a posthumous spiritual weigh station for the characters. For many fans, the finale, “The End,” was and remains a cop-out: the penultimate scene, which gathers the cast in a church before they “move on” to what’s next, seemed too overtly religious for a show that often approached matters of science and the supernatural as two halves of a greater whole.

Tomorrowland is more purely philosophical in its themes, approaching light and dark as not sides in a greater conflict, but a choice amongst individuals and groups. It’s humanity’s pessimistic outlook that makes The Monitor’s prediction a self-fulfilling prophecy, though some technical mumbo-jumbo from Casey gives the Earth a fighting chance (The Monitor itself is helping induce mankind’s sense of impending doom). Getting to that point means rushing through exposition and explanations that aren’t terribly key to understanding Tomorrowland’s message, but hurt your appreciation for its construction as a film or a narrative. “Can’t you just be in awe without me having to explain everything?” Frank tells Casey, and pretty much every Lindelof critic at one point.

Those still sore about how Lost wrapped up won’t have six years worth of baggage to deal with, yet may begrudge Lindelof for not only leading them on another goose chase, but one that’s overly familiar to boot. Tomorrowland’s action climax has two men, one good, one bad, fighting on a beach for the fate of the world. In the end, the reclaimed paradise is given a new generation of caretakers, similarly to how a pair of Lost’s survivors takes over stewardship of Jacob’s island. LikeLost, Tomorrowland can’t sufficiently answer all the questions it has for itself, let alone humanity. At best, it can pass those questions on to the audience with a smile on its face, and hope the journey justified the destination.

We’ll have to wait and see if Tomorrowland accomplishes its own self-fulfilling prophecy of inspiring others by being, itself, a film about the value of inspiration and positivity. History may be on it its side, though; some of the best writing associated with Lost came from Jeff “Doc” Jensen, EW’s TV critic, the Internet's premiere Lost commentator/conspiracy theorist, and credited story co-conceiver on Tomorrowland. As Lindelof told Grantland, Jensen’s rise from online author to executive producer on one of the year’s biggest films owed entirely to his support of Lost:

“I brought Jeff Jensen in, who had come up with all these amazing theories about Lost while it was on, some of which were just so much better than what we were coming up with in the room. I said, “Come in and look at this stuff and talk to me about it,” and then we started coming up with the germs of a really cool story.”

It’s hard not to see such a partnership reflected in the ethos of Tomorrowland itself. Jensen devoted himself to Lost not because he was (well) paid, but because that creation was something that made him feel inspired to create something of his own. In doing so, Jensen, and his readers came to understand Lost in ways even the show’s mastermind didn’t. The heroes of Lost and Tomorrowland, like their creators, are always such tinkerers, people fascinated by how things work, and tireless in their attempts to solve problems people say they can’t.

“Does it have to work? Can’t it just inspire people?,” The younger Frank asks early in the film in reference to his homemade jetpack, an invention that’s been tied to our vision of the future for nearly a century. We’re not much closer to a consumer jetpack now than whenLost first started, and Tomorrowland proves we’re not much closer to the perfect version of Lindelof’s story five years after the show ended. Then again, we already invented something smarter than a jetpack more than fifty years ago. It's called an airplane: they’re practical, reliable, and get you exactly where you want to go. If that’s all you need from transportation and storytelling, you’ll find no shortage of people lining up to meet your expectation. But only by defying those expectation, and optimistically, disastrously overreaching can something like Lost or Tomorrowland hope to make you see something truly, inexplicably awe-inspiring.