Now, everything between “Once upon a time” and “the end,” between the tips of our accordion, the meat within our sandwich, is what we use to color our narrative. The true “middle” in terms of plotting is made up of tiny narratives nested within the larger one, like those Russian Nesting Dolls. Inside “Jack dies on a magical Island” is the myth of Jacob and the Man In Black, inside that myth is the origin of The Others, inside the origin of The Others is the struggle between Ben and Charles Widmore–a struggle that began when the survivors Time Travelled, which is something they did when they tried to escape on the freighter, which is what they did after trying to escape on the submarine, after Jack fixed Ben’s cancer, after Ben abducted Jack, after Jack held Ben hostage in The Hatch, after Locke blew open The Hatch, after they were shipwrecked on an Island.
In season one’s “Exodus”, Jack and Locke have a discussion about fate and their opposition, which could have been inserted directly to the final battle in “The End” in order to provide the proper context as to why Jack and (someone who looks like) Locke would be fighting each other. Everything else that existed to deepen our understanding of the character or the history of the plot exists in a tinier version of that story.
The next step was to apply what I’d learned about TV storytelling to a methodology for stripping away some of the repetition inherent in the medium. If the “Pilot” has the characters and “The End” has the answers then the space between needs to keep its own momentum with ongoing plot and character arcs. On the Island, this leads to mystery and a lot of hiking around.
Cutting just the Flashes was a good place to start but we’ve also learned that, because of the network broadcast, there was a lot of recapping of previous events and, because of Lost‘s setting, a lot of traveling through the jungle that often gets relegated to non-essential story motion because of the production constraints of a live-action series.
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