Lost

Anything by Ross Douthat is worth reading. In the current issue of First Things , he examines the role of religion in several TV programs – Battlestar Gallactic a, Lost , and The Sopranos .

He notes that the island in Lost is 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.” Scattered on the island are the remains of failed experiments and “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.”

Yet, Douthat argues that Lost is ultimately shaped by “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 a safe bet that the gates of hell won’t prevail against the heroes. This is the nature of fantasy and epic, at least in the context of a Christian culture – by raising the stakes, the genre gives away the ending.”