Middle of season 5 of Lost: for some reason the survivors spending three years in the Dharma initiative in the 1970s feels like going into the core of the world of the island, even though the further back origins of the oldest things on the island are revealed in season 6 (the further back origins on the island are what Owen Barfield would call "original participation," whereas the specific story of Lost is the myth of modernity, the interaction between the original participation of the Others and the science of the Dharma initiative, what Barfiled would call alpha thinking). I think there is this layering thing in Lost: The regular world seen in all the flashes, then the island that somehow mystically exists somewhere in that as it's mythos, as the land of smoke monsters and polar bears and mysterious remains in caves and desperate escapes and armed standoffs and temples, but yet inside that, there is this history of a "modern Western" world 70s-style, and now into THAT you get injected the present-day survivors who landed on the island in the crash, including Faraday crossing the line between the 50s others and the bomb and the 70s Dharma folk about to be taken over by Ben crossing from Dharma to Other, kind of the jungle's Barfieldian "original participation" taking back over again.
There's the obvious sci-fi draw of the time play (I love Faraday's line that either the island is moving through time or the people are, and the second is just as likely, that interplay of people and place and which is stable and which is dislodged and can you tell objectively when the people from the same time stick together in where they land, although I think that makes it that the people move, since the other people like Richard don't move with them), but my interest is beyond that. Season 5 in the 1970s is like all the layers coalescing in preparation for shooting out (after Jack "drops the bomb" literally, that key device of real-world horror coming into the 1950s) into season 6's core-triple-myth-connection: the side flashes that are "real life" (despite being the "purgatory" in the world in which the island is the real world, they represent "real [mundane] life" in the context of the island being the mythical dimension of real life; the episode that made the mythic reading coalesce for me the first time I watched the series was "Dr Linus" in season 6, with the same core decision going on for Ben in both worlds), then the present island as mythic battle ground, and then the mythic history of the island itself with the origin stories of Jacob and the Man in Black and Richard Alpert revealed and the most ancient mythical place of the island (the temple) in play (if you want to look at it another way, taking the material aspect of the sci-fi element, time play, and taking it to the thematic level: the history related in season 6 is no longer the flashbacks of the flight survivors, but rather the history of the mythic place; the present on the island is the battle ground, and the flash "sideways" are really the future aspect, the waiting room of the eschatological, not in the Marxist sense, but in the Jewish and Christian sense, the preparing to move on ... see below on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying).
And of course, the finale where it began; with Jack laying in the high grass in the jungle; to quote a source maybe disparate but with common theme, but also hopefully with a more optimistic tone; Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, a title borrowed from the lines of Agamemnon to Odysseus (but, and again hopefully the tone is more hopeful, but Aggie's statement to Odie does have to do with a recurring visual in lost, and the one that is right there at the end because it was there at the beginning, the open eyes). And maybe Southern Gothic was a little on their minds, as they did have Jacob reading Flannery Oconnor's Everything that Rises Must Converge as he sits on the park bench in the final episode of season 5 as Locke has his 8-story fall behind him... I will have to keep an eye out for any Faulkner, in the rest of seasons 5 and 6. I know from the general hearsay etc that they didn't have a clear plot path going in, but I think in the end, they skillfully rode the wave and pulled it together into a cohesive plotline, albeit perhaps a bit like chaos theory, but I think they would like that idea (it is one that I use to discuss structure in Terry Pratchett's writing, who would hate the thought because of his attachment to the rambling feel, but I think he would allow a discussino of structure if phrased as chaos theory; I think his brain just worked certain ways such that he came out with a structure while having fun rambling, and I think the same thing is probably true of those who crafted Lost), Also playing on that last shot as "As I Lay Dying," there are definitely similarities: Faulkner's novel is stream of consciousness told by 15 different narrators and involves the quest to bury somebody in a certain place, like Christian Shepherd's and then John Locke's coffins being on the planes ostensibly on the way to burial in a homeplace, LA for Christian and the island for Locke ... and the island is the place Locke's body returns and the place where Jack passes after returning..
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