Lost: "There's No Place Like Home," Part 1

Tonight's "Lost" was merely part one of a three hour event, and so it's hard to talk about it the way that we usually talk about "Lost." The secret genius in the show's basic structure is that it's simultaneously a serial drama - the events in one episode build on the previous and look toward the next - and a series of standalone stories. It takes the twin DNAs of its cult-pop predecessor, "The X-Files" - the mythology episodes and the monster-of-the-weeks - and combines them together. This means you can track the show in terms of characters' movements throughout the season (movements over geography, shifting power status), while at the same time separating each chapter into a distinctive, glorious whole: a Jack episode, a Locke episode, a Jin/Sun double flash, a Desmond time spin, a Tailie chronicle. People never used to review individual episodes of television. "Lost," I would argue, practically invented (or at least popularized) the notion that every episode could be radically different (in style, in tone, in perspective) without sacrificing the through line of an overarching story.

You could argue, I think, that "Lost" is little more than "The Twilight Zone" with continuity. Rod Serling's opening narration for that show explicitly described a specific place, a destination - "a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge." In later seasons he would expand on his description - "A dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind," he added in season 2. By season 4, he'd decided that the zone was also "a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas."

For Serling, the "Zone" was more a state of storytelling mind, filled with pseudo-scientific twists and apocalyptic turns. But imagine if he had actually made the Twilight Zone a place - a tiny snowglobe world, wherein beautiful women were ugly in a world of pigmen, and the monsters were due on Maple Street, and a sane man flying in an airplane could see an awkwardly costumed Gremlin. Where else could he set such a world, but an island on the edge of forever?

Continuity might be the great new artistic pursuit of our popular narrative age. Whole magnificent works of comic book art have been constructed out of archaeological endeavors to create an infrastructure between existing works of literature. Alan Moore turned "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" into less of a story saga than a graphic narrative mash-up of every work of literature in the Western World from Beowulf to Frankenstein; a wax museum with a pulse, to quote Vincent Vega. (His latest volume, "Black Dossier," threw in dystopic literature, 50s spy movies, 60s spy shows, Kerouac novels, and nearly every pre-Norman mythology you can think of.) In Moore's world, Nemo hangs with Dr. Jekyll, who turns into Mr. Hyde, who kills the Invisible Man, who was making a Faustian bargain with the aliens from "The War of the Worlds."

Elsewhere in the comics world, Don Rosa wrote "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck," the great undiscovered American novel of the 1990s. Stitching together a thousand throwaway backstories from the canon of Carl Barks, who wrote dozens of Uncle Scrooge stories (without credit) in the middle of the 20th century, Rosa created a work of narrative art that was unimpeachably impeccable, yet with a truly singular structure - two thirds rising action, one third plateau. You can't quite call "Life and Times" original, since it used characters and ideas created before Rosa was born, yet the very nature of the piece - watching characters growing older (this is the one and only time in a Disney comic that you will see a dying Duck), seeing dreams turn into reality turn into nightmares - added an unimaginable weight, a narrative oomph, to what were really just childrens' tales, written for the third-tier medium in a global empire.

(Just to make this not gigantic, I want to establish that I'm talking about narrative continuity - although there is an entire thesis to be written about visual continuity, or discontinuity, in major motion pictures that film in multiple worldwide locations. [Which is why the Gotham of "Batman Begins" can feel simultaneously like art-deco Chicago and post-modern London, or why Orson Welles in "Othello" can start a scene walking through a doorway in Venice and end a scene walking through a room in Morocco.] No, I'm talking specifically about the world within the screen, or behind the words - the world which we believe in, even if we don't quite believe the writers' sentences or the cinematographers' camera angles.)

What's funny about continuity, when you mean it as consistency between constituent parts, is that it essentially only applies to works of serial artistry - comic books, TV shows, internet cartoons. Unlike novels or movies, these media thrive on story cycles that are conceived in advance and then produced in spurts - one episode or one issue at a time. It has always been difficult, and certainly always been somewhat wrongheaded, to attempt to review a comic book saga in the same way you'd review a novel, just as it doesn't quite make sense to review a season of a TV show the way that you'd review a movie. For one thing, they tend to be much longer. For another thing, whereas, say, "No Country For Old Men" was written all at once, directed all at once, and edited all at once (by essentially the same people), season 3 of "The Sopranos" was written by at least 12 people, directed by 7 people, and edited by many more people, in fits and starts, by committee and by individuals and by individuals arguing before a committee.

That's why it's so wonderful that there are so many TV shows now that are essentially built, from the ground up, off of continuity. This is most literally true in "24," which made one basic promise seven years ago - "events occur in real time." The time bomb used to be a storyteller's crutch - do you think a real bomb was ever actually attached to a gigantic ticking clock? "24" turned it into a defining aesthetic. "Lost" also made the passage of time its central aesthetic - we're with the castaways every day, in every way, and so there's never really any sense of off-camera comfort. On older TV shows, the six days between episodes were a resting period for both the viewer AND the viewed. Not so on "Lost," where on occasion three episodes have gone by with nary a day forward on the island.

But continuity doesn't need to be so blatant. At its core, I think that narrative continuity simply comes down to an acknowledgment, within the narrative, that was has gone before did happen, and that the characters are as aware of it as we are. So, when Adriana, in a throwaway line in season 4 or 5 of Sopranos, mentions that Tony had some ducks in his pool once, we who have watched from the beginning can remember those ducks - and recall how, in their strange way, they were the catalyst for the whole series. "The Sopranos" is still years ahead of the competition - watch the closing episodes again, and notice how both Tony and AJ mutter "Poor You!" and remember old Livia Soprano yelling that phrase in season 1, sending her mobster son off to therapy.

Continuity, at its core, manifests itself in the simplest of terms: the characters take a break from talking about the plot, and instead talk about their shared past. The best, and most blissfully perfect, example that I can think of comes from the end of the first season of "Deadwood." Al Swearengen (the tavern owner) and Seth Bullock (the new Sheriff) stand up on Al's deck. Both men hate each other - Al has been working most of the season to gain control of the claim of a rich Widow in town (he killed her husband), and Seth has been working most of the season to protect that claim (along with accidentally falling in love with the widow.) The two men stare out over their town, and notice the Widow in the window, right across the street. Swearengen notes, apropos of nothing, that he has never actually met the widow. In "Deadwood," this is almost unthinkable - the town is barely bigger than two streets, so everyone meets everyone. But it's true - somehow, for an entire season, David Milch has managed to juggle any number of characters, without every letting the two oppositional forces so much as meet.

Continuity largely manifests itself in the serial arts. Movies are one-offs, and rightfully so. Too much reference backward can seem awkward - see the second and third "Pirates of the Caribbean," which piled on nobody's old favorites from the first movie (the evil Commodore! the funny pirate with one eye!), when we would have all been completely happy with just Jack Sparrow doing his crazy thing. Yet continuity is the essential pleasure of the third "Bourne" movie, which stitches itself between the penultimate and final scenes of "Supremacy," digs backward into the hidden depths of "Identity," and ends up being a deeper and fuller experience than either one. When Julia Stiles says "It was difficult for me, with you," with tears in her eyes, we all finally realize why Julia Stiles is still in this trilogy after two movies' worth of uselessness, and when she gives herself a Franka Potente haircut, the romance is so right, and so twisted.

To be continued, natch.