Guys, Where Are We?
They named Jack's dad “Christian Shepherd”? Really? Was “Jesus H. Allegory” taken?
Every Catholic publication has to run an occasional pop-culture piece to keep the lights on, I get it. Some very recent examples: First Things wrote about Taylor Swift. America wrote about Avatar: The Last Airbender. Word on Fire has a piece about The Giver, fully and unacceptably squatting on my territory. People read it and share it and it keeps people coming back to the respective sites. And hey, I do stuff like this all the time, even without “lights” to “keep” “on”, because it's fun to write stuff like this, it's fun to pick up someone else's way of looking at the world and seeing if it helps you better understand your own way of looking at the world, it's fun to write about stuff you enjoy experiencing. As soon as I can find the smallest possible Catholic angle on it and shoehorn it into this newsletter, you will all be subjected to my thoughts on Conner O'Malley's new standup special, which is the funniest thing I've seen in any medium in at least five years.
So: National Catholic Reporter ran one of those pieces last week, from John Dougherty, titled “Netflix reintroduces 'Lost' to a new generation, and the timing couldn't be better”. LOST, of course, ran on ABC for six seasons, it was one of the most expensive shows in the history of network television up to that point, and it was an enormous commercial and critical success. J.J. Abrams, who co-created the series, spun its success into his personal branding as a master of sci-fi storytelling, and went on to head big-budget reboots of Star Trek (which went okay) and Star Wars (which did not). The Obama White House literally re-scheduled the State of the Union so as not to bump the 2010 season premiere. LOST was probably the most successful foray by a network into “golden age of television” turf dominated by HBO and basic cable channels; since we are about to hit the twentieth anniversary of the series premiere, and since the show just went up on Netflix, there's an easy opportunity to write about the themes and personal impact of the show. Hell, there's even a natural affinity for Catholic viewers beyond the show's philosophical themes: Dominic Monaghan is in it, and he's most famous for playing a hobbit, and Catholics love hobbits1. Dougherty's essay touches on the show's repeated questions on faith and community:
“... a story about meaning, community and how we navigate life's great mysteries. Watching "Lost" was like having a spiritual director on my TV once a week…Life is mysterious and frightening. We don't have all the answers, and we never will. It seems reasonable to hold ourselves apart, every person for themselves. But if we want to make it through this life at all, the only way is together. We need to risk trusting others, risk believing that we can grow beyond the sins that shaped our pasts. And when we open ourselves up to connection, we find grace and healing — and discover our true purpose.”
Normally, this is the part where I’d weigh in and revisit and re-watch some of LOST and think about What It All Means For Catholicism In This Era. But I'm NOT DOING THAT. I'M NOT FALLING FOR THAT SHIT AGAIN, LOST. I LEARNED MY LESSON THE FIRST TIME.
I loved LOST, guys. Loved it. I had other members of the trombone section come over to my dorm room and sit on my futon to watch new episodes. Watch them, as they aired! I was like “oh shit, Wednesday night2, I'm going to stop whatever I'm doing and watch exactly sixty minutes of television including commercials at a time I did not choose.” While the heyday of LOST pre-dated the idea of live-tweeting television as it aired, it landed smack in the middle of “episode-by-episode recaps on television blogs where everyone gets to weigh in with their theories every week in the comments”, all of which I read. And look, there's a lot about the series that is wonderful, mainly the great characters (Hurley, Sawyer, Ben, Sayid, all created by outstanding performances3), and some of the best episodes of television of its decade (“Numbers”, “Tricia Tanaka is Dead”, “Through the Looking Glass”, “The Constant”4).
BUT. The conceit of LOST, the main attraction, what Abrams and company sold to the network, was that this bonkers sci-fi concept - plane crash on a desert island but the island is not what it seems! - was a perfectly calibrated suspense machine humming towards a brilliant conclusion that would tie together dozens of complex storylines against a backdrop of a search for faith and meaning and community. But that didn't happen, and the most glaring omission from Dougherty's piece, the most famous part of LOST which is not mentioned in his piece about LOST, is that the ending of the series is famously bad5. And the reasons that it's bad are closely related to the boring realities of making a marquee television show.
Season one of LOST actually was a perfectly calibrated suspense machine, and it really did seem like it was humming towards a brilliant conclusion. But from there, the show kept hitting bumps in the road, and it was very clear that the bumps were not the result of any sort of master plan from the writers. Michelle Rodriguez was hired in season 2 to play a new character, and then abruptly written out of the show after she got a DUI arrest (or, possibly, because the writers room was racist). Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje was also hired in season 2 to play a new character, and then also abruptly written out of the show because he didn't want to live in Hawai'i, where LOST was shot. Child actor Malcolm David Kelley played Walt, a ten-year-old castaway with mysterious powers that were probably meant to play into later episodes of the show, but the character got abruptly written out because the actor was visibly going through puberty and couldn't credibly exist in the timeline of the show anymore. By season 3, the writers had to awkwardly mark time because they didn't know how long they were supposed to stretch out the mysteries, leading to the infamous “we put Sawyer in a cage and yelled at him for several episodes” arc.
This led to the writers developing a three-season plan to finally conclude the series, which was almost immediately derailed by the 2007 WGA strike. By the time we got to the actual 2010 series finale, dozens of questions that had been set up as major plot points throughout the series were left unanswered, including major questions about the dualistic godlike characters at the center of the series mythology, “Jacob” and “Titus Welliver”. Most appallingly, Sayid - whose character’s primary motivation was his search for his lost childhood love Nadia - inexplicably and very suddenly ends the series with FUCKING SHANNON, the skinny bitch from season one who was cast according to the beauty standards of 2004 and thus has no ass at all:
That LOST was able to hit as many highs as it did throughout its run was a miracle. The finale actually hit some emotional notes very well, but the fact remains that this was a series that started by promising “answers” but, over the course of six years, had to pivot to delivering “vibes” instead. Creatively, it accomplished some very cool stuff at various points throughout its run. Narratively, and by the standards of the narrative objectives it had set for itself at the beginning of the show, it was an abject failure, albeit a very interesting and instructive one6.
This is all to say that I agree with Dougherty: there couldn’t be a better time for a new generation of Catholics to get into LOST. Because we’re rapidly approaching the series finale of the Synod, and it sure looks like we’re rapidly approaching another disappointment after years of waiting.
Now, when the second big meeting of the giant global Synod on Synodality happens in October, I’m sure we’ll get plenty of terrible metaphors from John L. Allen Jr., but we should start thinking long and hard about whether anything else is actually going to come out of the final Synod session, or if this whole thing has kind of been a waste of time.
I don’t want to sound overly cynical here, but this feeling isn’t coming out of nowhere. To use a very easy example: one of the issues that has been discussed at every stage of the Synod so far has been the role of women in the church, and what ministries they should be allowed to perform, and whether they should be allowed to take on larger, more important roles in the church, even possible ordination to the diaconate. Pope Francis had even set up two commissions to study the issue prior to the big Synod meeting, and both of them wrote reports, although neither of those reports have been published yet, anywhere. Coming out of the first large Synod session last October, the Synod assembly called for the release of those two reports - which still hasn’t happened - and Pope Francis set up yet another commission to write yet another report on the issue. Then, as you probably remember, Pope Francis sat down with Norah O’Donnell in May and said “oh yeah we’re definitely not doing women deacons ever”. So, I guess the third and current commission that was set up to study the issue has got to feel relieved that they can cancel all of their remaining Zoom meetings.
RNS’s Phyllis Zagano wrote in November 2023 that “without doubt, the best line to emanate from the synod on synodality is ‘Excuse me, Your Eminence, she has not finished speaking,’” referring to the jarring new reality that, in October 2023, bishops sat at round tables with lay people, including women, and were required to listen to them talk and share their experiences, as part of this new synodal method, as part of this new listening church. When Zagano wrote that, she didn’t know that the formal response of the church was apparently going to be “wow I had to wait for that bitch to stop talking, we'd better make sure that never happens again.” So the people who currently run the church have started communicating to us, very clearly, that they will work very hard to make sure that women will not be invited to help them run the church, will not control the finances or the buildings or the personnel, or be anything other than an interesting novelty at two month-long meetings.
And that’s tough to think about. What if you’re not in a church that can realize any meaningful change from a big Synod? What if you’re not in a listening church at all, you’re in a church where a bishop can just suddenly and unilaterally gut his archdiocese’s Hispanic ministry because he’s not really interested in Hispanic ministry? What if you’re in a church where the bishops can just suddenly gut their own human development department after head-faking during their annual meeting? What if you’re in a church where your bishop’s response to the high-profile suicide of a queer high schooler is to put out a podcast decrying the evils of ‘gender theory’? What if the Vatican also can’t stop and won’t stop talking about ‘gender theory’, even when it doesn’t make any sense in the context of other teachings in the same document? What if the church’s response to overwhelming evidence in a high-profile sexual abuse case is “yeah okay but he’s pretty good at mosaics so maybe let this one slide”? What if you’re in a church where a pastor assigned to a reservation mission can have such open contempt for his congregation that he steals their icons and tells them it’s impossible to be Apache and Catholic at the same time? What if you’re in a church where the Pope can say “ugh these seminarians are getting too faggy” and I’m quoting him almost verbatim? What if every single one of those things has happened after the first big Synod session, after years of gathering reports and hearing from people on the margins, after big public statements on how the church was going to listen differently this time around, after “excuse me, Your Eminence, she has not finished speaking”? What if this is the “listening church” that we have and nothing is going to change that? “Tony you shouldn’t expect the Synod to change everything overnight” yeah okay, but the Synod was also preceded by several decades of not-change, of ignoring cries for change, so at this point I'm left wondering what actually is going to lead to any sort of change to the way power is held in the church.
I would encourage you to check out this lecture by the wonderful Manhattan College feminist theologian Natalia Imperatori-Lee, delivered at Saint Mary’s College in April of this year. Imperatori-Lee is brilliant and furious and throwing some heat at the church’s treatment of feminist theology, of women, of everyone that’s not in the clerical class. I’m not going to do the whole lecture justice - there’s a lot of good stuff in there on “epistemic injustice” and who we believe and trust in positions of authority in the church and why we believe and trust them and not others - but take a look at what Imperatori-Lee is saying about the Synod:
“Much has been made, in the pontificate of Francis, in becoming what he calls ‘a listening church’. We can look to the ongoing Synod as a prime example of an attempt at becoming such a church. A church that listens to those on the margins, a church that listens to the poor and disenfranchised, a church that sits in ROUND TABLES. That was so exciting! Remember how excited we were when we saw the ROUND TABLES7?...As promising as all of this sounds, it cannot help but fall short, and I have to confess that I’m doubtful. I mean, help my unbelief, but I am doubtful that the Synod’s various sessions will come to any significant change. Time and again, women have been forced to learn the harsh reality that listening is not enough…For theology to include the voices of marginalized racial and ethnic communities, these communities must be allowed to drive and set priorities, to be presented in the beginnings of courses, and not at the end, after all of the ‘real theology’ has been done, as some enhancement. I’m afraid that the concept of a ‘listening church’ suffers a bit from this ‘[add] and stir’ optimism that is ultimately insufficient. Because as a church, we have to go beyond listening to women. We have to believe them. Believe them to be narrators of their own experience. Believe them to be dialogue partners with God. Believe them to be capable theologians and scripture scholars, and interpreters of God’s activity in their lives and in the wider world.”
Maybe I was just very naive for thinking that anything new would happen to the church after this Synod, that at the very least the church would try and appear to give more of a shit about the people they had treated poorly and shut out in the past, that the church would set up all of these big important questions with an actual plan in place to try and answer them instead of just shrugging. But if this isn’t going to change anything, what is? Did we really just move from “church that refuses to meaningfully share power with anyone who's not ordained” to “church that refuses to meaningfully share power with anyone that's not ordained and also has a meeting?” It’s not like women and queer people and indigenous people and abuse victims and basically every marginalized group you can imagine waited until October 2023 to say “sorry to bring this up, but you’ve been treating us kind of horribly and maybe you should stop?” People have been asking for change long before the Synod, and change didn't come, and it sure doesn't look like it's going to come from the Synod, either. This was supposed to be something that was at least different. And instead of a church that even pretends to listen, we are left with this picture from Imperatori-Lee:
“We are way past the point where these insights should be epiphanies…The church is hopelessly handicapped, less than what it needs to be, as long as it continues to ignore theology done by women, as long as women suffer from the epistemic injustice perpetrated by clericalism, and from the deficient dogmatic understandings of women’s nature. As long as women are shut out of the conversation, out of seminaries, and out of ordained ministry, the church fails to witness to the fullness of the reality of God.”
Help my unbelief, I guess. At the end of October, I’m going to feel something, although I don’t know what it is yet. It might be anger, or despondency, or frustration. I haven’t been to Mass in a couple of months, and I don’t know what it’s going to take to get me back, but it's not going to be this. I can at least promise you one thing: I will not be surprised. A four-year Synod that adds up to nothing is not going to surprise me. I spent longer than that watching LOST.
He was also in the music video for Eminem's 2010 smash hit single “Love the Way You Lie,” which I'm delighted to bring up for the second time in seven months.
Starting with season 4, this obviously would have been replaced with ‘oh shit, Thursday night’.
I’m sure the female characters were great as well.
While these are all outstanding episodes of television, the greatest television episode of the 2000s overall is the episode of Angel where Angel gets turned into a Muppet. The greatest television episode of the 2010s is the episode of The Americans where Paige walks in on her parents full on doing 69 to each other.
I know there are a few apologists for the finale, so maybe I should have used the world “polarizing”, but in the context of the series, I'm going to stand by that. Whatever, art is subjective, different people can like different things. I think Eminem's Relapse album mostly works and Eminem doesn't even like it. To be fair it doesn't have any singles on the same level as the smash hit “Love the Way You Lie”.
"Wait, Tony, did I see Lord Toranaga in that video?” yes you did.
I’m adding a little emphasis here, but I’m not adding a lot of emphasis.