The New Man in Charge

I'm interrupting the flow of my recent "Lost re-reviews" to talk about about the last chapter of series. Not the actual last episode, but rather, the special 11-minute mini-movie included on the final season's DVD: The New Man in Charge.

This "extra act" of Lost came about when the creators were asked if some sort of "extended cut" of the final episode might be possible for the DVD. Their answer: no, we don't think so. Their compromise: how about a little mini-episode that ties up a couple of loose ends we can't really address in the finale without interrupting the narrative? So here you have it.

If you're still reading this post and haven't yet watched Lost all the way to its conclusion, you'd better turn back right now!

No one still here to ruin anything for? Good. Alright then...

The New Man in Charge is set in the period of time where Hurley is guardian of the Island, and Ben his lieutenant. Word leaked out ahead of time that this was to be the subject of this mini-episode, and I was frankly skeptical of it. Whatever questions I may have felt were unresolved by the end of the series, they most certainly weren't about Hurley and Ben's Island Adventures.

For one, we didn't even know about this until the finale itself, so it wasn't a long-standing issue that demanded attention. But more importantly, I liked that the finale had left this tantalizing hint of... well, hell, think of it as in entire spin-off series of Lost! And completely up to our own imaginations! How cool is that? Or rather, how potentially uncool might it be to have any of my imaginings intruded upon by the contents of this 11 minutes?

But I think the creators themselves had some trepidation, if not outright distaste, for this "epilogue" as well. You can see it if you just read between the lines of a lot of the dialogue in it: "We're closing this place down." I'm here to "tie up a few loose ends." "You guys have a DVD player?"

Someone complains "you can't just walk out of here; we deserve answers!" To which Ben snidely replies that you can get the answer to one question. "Just one, so make it count." The subtext isn't really "sub" at all here. They're talking directly to the fans, about Lost itself.

So perhaps I have only my fellow fans to blame for the issues that are addressed here in this mini-episode. Because frankly, I found them pretty stupid. The people asking their "one question" in this movie don't make it count.

The first half of the episode revolves around explaining a handful of leftover details about the Dharma Initiative, primarily in the form of another Station orientation video. And very little real information is actually revealed. If you've been paying attention to the show at all, you should have been able to intuit the answers to nearly all of the questions addressed here.

For example, we learn that the polar bears were the subjects of genetic experimentation at the Hydra station. But we were basically told this point blank way back in season three.

We're told that the weird "torture room" was used to brainwash abducted "hostiles" so that they wouldn't remember their interrogations (thus not violating the treaty between Dharma and the hostiles). Again, it didn't take a genius to know what the room was for in a general sense -- the revelation that it was used on the Island's native inhabitants (or that Dharma was interested in Jacob) is hardly important.

We get Dr. Pierre Chang voicing the concern that he might have to switch to an alias. Did anybody out there really wonder why he used different names in different orientation videos? After all, the video for the Pearl station was proven to be an outright lie -- it said that pushing the button in the Swan station wouldn't do anything, when we saw firsthand that it did. So if the mysterious Doctor lied about his name too, so what?

The only real answers we get in the first half of this episode are that "food drops" kept happening on the Island because these two guys in this warehouse never got instructions to stop sending them (I specifically mentioned this in my write-up of the finale as an issue that I didn't care about) and that "electro-magnetic effects at the Orchid" are harmful to early-term pregnancies, and presumably are thus responsible for the all the pregnancy problems on the Island.

Well, okay, that last tidbit is worth a little bit, I suppose. But seeing as how people were having babies on the Islands for thousands of years before the Dharma Initiative came along, and then suddenly there were complications? Here again, I didn't need to know anything specific; I had enough information to intuit that something the Dharma gang did messed it up for everyone.

So, sorry, but my only real entertainment from the first half of this mini-episode came from recognizing a version of one of Michael Giacchino's recurring Lost themes used as background music for the orientation video.

That takes us to the back half of the mini-episode, which sees Ben go to the mental hospital where Hurley (and Libby) used to be patients. And now it seems that Walt one is too. Ben recruits Walt to leave and come back to the Island. Hurley has a job for him to do. The Island is where Walt has always belonged.

This speaks to exactly the concern I was talking about earlier. By penciling in any details of "Lost's lost period," my own imagination about what that might have been like has been tampered with. In fact, I found this actively frustrating.

First of all, we don't actually get any answers as far as Walt is concerned. Ben reminds us "Walt is special," which was thrown at us for a long time during the series without proper resolution. Why open up that old wound just to throw salt in?

Now that we know Walt's destiny really was the Island (and not to be free of it), it sort of begs the question, why didn't Walt appear in the church at the end of the finale along with the rest of the Oceanic gang? We know Michael wasn't there because his actions got him condemned to eternity as a whispering spirit, instead of passing on to the afterlife. So what, did something like that happen to Walt too? Man, sucks for him! And sucks for me, not being able to imagine a "happily ever after" for Walt anymore.

Or perhaps we're supposed to infer that Walt's "specialness" is an ability to talk to the dead Whisper Ghosts and free them to pass over into the true afterlife? But I think you'd have to read a lot into it to get that, especially when Hurley has already demonstrated the ability to talk to dead people. What would he need Walt for?

Again, I felt like the only good takeaway from this half of the episode was not in the content itself, but was something on a "meta" level -- I believe that prior to this scene, Malcolm David Kelley and Michael Emerson had never shared a scene together on Lost. Kind of interesting.

So in the end, while it's fun to watch Michael Emerson act in almost anything, and therefore enjoyable to see him play Ben one last time, I have to say I felt about this mini-episode much the same as I felt about the "So It Begins" mobisode that was retroactively grafted to the beginning of the pilot. It provides no vital new information we didn't know (or weren't having fun speculating about) already, and the fact that it doesn't actually fit into the perfect bookend narrative of the pilot and the finale actually detracts from the impact they make.

I love Lost, but I will always think of "The End" as the final chapter, not The New Man in Charge.