FIRST THINGS: Lost and Saved on Television - by Ross Douthat (May 2007):
via prvs-VllgV derisive survey of RDouthat writings: Douthat reasons that even sex&swears-soaked TV shows like The Sopranos are conservative not fair sum ~ his argument more that conerned w 'First Things' ("Lost shares w Battlestar Galactica a cosmic optimism"). //
The counterculture has largely won, & our society is in many ways the worse for it. Is chance to see story of Christ’s Passion as Mel Gibson reimagined it—blood-drenched,harrowing,brilliant—worth giving same R-rated carte blanche to Quentin Tarantino? ..But there are opportunities in defeat as well as victory. Now the incentives to be uncontroversial are far weaker. Along w the dreck & smut & mediocrity, also more room for idiosyncrasy, controversy, political incorrectness. These can be materials of blasphemy, but also of art ~that goes deep into issues—theology, human destiny, sin &redemption—that the old mass media ~wary of. The new profane culture arguably takes religious issues & debates more seriously than used to in era more decent & less decadent. //longish re BSG, Lost, Sopranos. cool. >dlww.


BSG
The best sci-fi show on television today is Battlestar Galactica, a “reimagining” of a short-lived late-1970s series about the last remnants of humanity fleeing a genocide perpetrated by their own creations—a race of humanoid robots called Cylons—and searching for our species’ last refuge, a mythical planet called Earth. The brainchild of a frustrated Star Trek scribe named Ronald Moore, Galactica is deliberately designed to be the anti-Trek: Instead of a bloodless, hygienic future in which the human race seemed to have outgrown every recognizable human aspiration on its way to outer space, the show depicts a star-faring humanity driven by familiar motivations—religious faith chief among them.
The original series borrowed from Mormon cosmology, but the newer, better incarnation pits the Greco-Roman polytheism practiced by the humans (they worship the ancient Mediterranean pantheon, and each of their “Twelve Colonies” is named for a sign of the Zodiac) against the crusading monotheism of the Cylons, who are convinced that their human progenitors worship idols and that they themselves are God’s latter-born, perfected children, destined to inherit the universe from a flawed and sinful humanity. This may sound like an allegory designed for know-nothing liberals: crazy fanatical monotheists (think Osama Bin Laden or Jerry Falwell) pitted against tolerant pagans (think Berkeley, California, or maybe Burlington, Vermont). But Moore’s show is far too clever to slide into that trap. The human polytheists, in practice, have a great deal in common with the Abrahamic monotheists of Planet Earth: They’re a people of the book, divided between fundamentalists who take the sacred scrolls literally and more latitudinarian believers who don’t, and divided, as well, on all the culture-war questions—notably abortion—that divide our own semi-Christian West. And the Cylon monotheism, too, appears riven by theological factionalism, with tenets that are open to quasi-Buddhist as well as Mosaic interpretations.
More interesting still, the fundamentalists in both faiths have a tendency to be proved right huh, and the skeptics wrong. Prophecies are fulfilled and ancient scrolls prove accurate, and the religious choice, in any given situation, is likely to be the right one. The Old Testament overtones of the show’s conceit—twelve tribes looking for a promised land—aren’t accidental, and as Galactica’s quest narrative proceeds, so does the audience’s awareness that the story is unfolding according to some larger design. Whether this design belongs to the Colonists’ pantheon or the Cylons’ single deity remains uncertain. Both sides, despite their theological differences, seem bound to a common destiny in ways that neither understand; like Jews and Christians after Christ, they’re joined in brotherhood and enmity, till the end of their quest or perhaps the end of time. But however their relation turns out, it’s likely to dovetail with the show’s overarching premise—the idea, at once old-fashioned and subversive, that human history has an Author.

LOST
The same set of issues—meaning and purpose, common destinies and divine interventions—dominates the action on Lost, ABC’s addictive serial about the survivors of a plane crash who find themselves marooned on a South Pacific island, cut off from any hope of rescue. Most of the castaways carry secret sorrows or hidden sins: There are murderers and adulterers, drug addicts and former mental patients, an African warlord and an ex-torturer from the Iraqi Republican Guard. And the island is attuned to all of them in some mysterious fashion, speaking to the survivors in dreams and visions, pushing them into strange obsessions and dangerous quests, delivering healing to some and sudden death to others.
The creators of Lost have repeatedly denied that their characters are literally in purgatory, which was a popular theory among early viewers of the series, and most of the evidence from later episodes suggests that they’re telling the truth. Still, the show’s island is at the least a purgatorial landscape—it’s no coincidence that several of the characters are Catholic, lapsed and otherwise—where the things that the castaways carry from their previous lives provide the raw material for suffering, struggle, and growth.
But the show has larger ambitions as well. The island isn’t just a supernatural catalyst for individual redemption; it’s a microcosm of Western modernity (many of the characters, not coincidentally, share names with modern political philosophers—there’s a Rousseau and a John Locke, a Hume and even a Mikhail Bakunin), and a place where the two most powerful forces in recent human history, utopian hubris and scientific arrogance, have worked themselves out with what appear to be disastrous consequences.
At some point long before the plane crash, the island was the site of an overlapping series of experiments on everything from genetic engineering and radical life extension to parapsychology and magnetism, which apparently involved cooperation between a sinister multinational corporation Hanso~Widmore and a Walden II-style commune Dharma (the DeGroots) of idealistic scientists. The landscape is littered with the detritus of these efforts—abandoned hatches with cryptic instructional videos, empty zoos and laboratories, mysterious processes that may still be working themselves out—and populated by what appear to be the experiments’ surviving custodians no the natives who killed the experimenters (but this is being written during S3 so maybe not yet seen ~ Man Behind the Curtain), a group of people known only as the Others, whose purposes remain inscrutable even as they emerge as the castaways’ antagonists.
The shadow of a larger apocalypse hangs over the narrative as well since, whatever the experiments were meant to do, they seem to have created the possibility of a world-ending cataclysm. hmm. the Swan, the button pushing. but that threat is over at end of S2 right? and yes now S4-5 there's the they've got go back Kate dire warnings from Mrs. Hawking "or heaven help us all" but in S3 was there any sense of world-ending threat?
Meanwhile, the castaways are divided among themselves both personally and philosophically, constantly arguing over whether their lives on the island are governed by purpose or blind chance, and whether faith or reason is a surer guide in their strange circumstances. and divided within selves, 'Man of Science, Man of Faith' not supposed to be Jack v Locke but Jack v Jack. Some of the characters are Christian Rose I guess oh and Eko, others embrace a kind of New Age island-worship Locke &? well Richard & the Others (y y band name), others cling to a stringent materialism Sawyer? I guess. At its best, the show seems capable of synthesizing all these elements and building to a metaphysical battle royale, in which the various forces at work in our own civilization struggle with one another for mastery, and nothing less than the fate of the world hangs in the balance. At it worst—well, Lost is in its third season now, and there are disturbing signs that the show is running out of steam, and that the creators may have thrown too many mysteries into the air without a plan to catch them. (This is known among television doctors as the X-Files Syndrome.)
However the saga of the castaways manages to finish up, though, it’s clear that Lost ultimately shares with Battlestar Galactica a certain degree of cosmic optimism. With God (in some form) taking an active role in the narrative and nothing less than the fate of humanity hanging in the balance, it seems like a safe bet that the gates of hell won’t prevail against the heroes. This is the nature of fantasy and epic not in the nature of story, generally? ~ well no I guess sometimes all the heroes die ~ Hamlet. hmm the difference does seem to be the realism v fantasy, can have a tragedy that is fantastical? well I hear BSG is dark (is there still an apparent Author as Douthat thinks?) but BSG has a kind of realism anyway at least in the context of a Christian culture—by raising the stakes, the genre gives away the ending. Aslan will always defeat the White Witch; Frodo will always destroy the ring; Harry Potter will always put an end to Voldemort. A price will be exacted along the way Chesterton (?) ~ have to give up sth (no wh I am thinking of in GKC is re cause & effect you blow the horn or drink the potion and sth happens, but no one thinks it is not MAGIC to have this effect follow this cause, no one thinks it is understandable) but, however dark the story gets, the logic of eucatastrophe still holds, and with it the knowledge that the light will overcome the darkness. well that does sound specifically Christian. I mean you could have a big final battle where the bad guys win, right? or everyone dies? but George MacDonald, GKC, CSLewis. Tolkien too I guess. christians telling fairy tales, well I guess the reason-meaning-appropriateness of that is Chesterton's subject in Orthodoxy, how the worldview of fairytales always seemed true to him and then he found it in the Gospels.

Eucatastrophe - Wkp: a term coined by J. R. R. Tolkien which refers to the sudden turn of events at the end of a story which result in the protagonist's well-being. He formed the word by affixing the Greek prefix eu, meaning good, to catastrophe, the word traditionally used in classically-inspired literary criticism to refer to the 'unraveling' or conclusion of a drama's plot. For Tolkien, the term appears to have had a thematic meaning that went beyond its implied meaning in terms of form. In his definition as outlined in his 1947 essay On Fairy-Stories, eucatastrophe is a fundamental part of his conception of mythopoeia. Though Tolkien's interest is in myth, it is also connected to the gospels; Tolkien calls the Incarnation the eucatastrophe of 'human history' and the Resurrection the eucatastrophe of the Incarnation.

...THE SOPRANOS
This eschatological optimism contrasts sharply with the pessimism of the best realistic show on television today: The Sopranos, which is ending its six-season run on HBO this spring. Where Galactica and Lost are shows about getting through purgatory to heaven, or at least a promised land, The Sopranos is a show about what it means to go to hell. Like The Wire, another HBO production (and the leading candidate for The Best Show on Television title once the Soprano family enters the afterlife of reruns ok so in the Deadwood v Wire v Sopranos contest*, you're voting Sopranos), The Sopranos offers a devastating critique of American life. Unlike the kind of social commentary that Hollywood still churns out—in which everything would turn out better if only conservatives weren’t so busy oppressing homosexuals or women or maybe unionized employees hm what Hollywood movies does this describe? —it isn’t interested in easy sociological answers or cheap political point-scoring. And while even the best episodes of Galactica and Lost are ultimately pop-culture ephemera hey well maybe. really cool, imagination-provoking ephemera, HBO’s mob show is closer to real art: Dostoevsky crossed with Emile Zola, a novelistic right meditation on the nature of societal corruption and personal sin. ... ... ...

*epic poem _vs_ ?first-rate nonfiction critical sociological historical narrative? _vs_ old-school novel
I'm voting for the poem.