Lost Q&A: Chris Seay of The Gospel According to Lost
Chris Seay, author of “The Gospel According to Lost,” answered some questions for Nerdage about the themes of “Lost” as the finale nears.
Nerdage: Why has the Lost show been so appealing to people?
Chris Seay: There’s a lot of good reasons; there’s the surface level that they picked some really remarkably beautiful people who have become really good actors as kind of the key in the cast. I think anything that you set on an island in Hawaii is nice.
But ultimately it’s the fact that this show is so much bigger than what we thought the original plot was. We thought this was just people stranded on an island and how do they get off. But we come to find that it’s a deeply and profoundly spiritual subplot. Very opposite from say Gilligan’s Island, where you take these characters that are kind of likeable and everybody easily identifies with. You know, you’re more like a Mary Ann or a Ginger. They take an Iraqi soldier at a time that we’re at war in Iraq; a woman who’s murdered her father; a con man; a great surgeon — he just happens to be an alcoholic, so he might come into surgery drunk. These are people that you don’t naturally like, on the surface, and yet as we’ve come to know them, we’ve really grown to love them because they’re flawed, and they’re willing to face that struggle.
This is a retelling of the Biblical narrative; it’s a show that gets people talking, and there aren’t many shows like that anymore.
Nerdage: What Biblical references may show up in the finale?
Chris Seay: Well, there’s no telling with “Lost” what may pop up. You’re almost guaranteed to get some direct passages of Scripture. A … reporter told me, “I went to Sunday School a few times when I was a kid, but I’ve never owned a Bible. I’ve had to borrow one from the religion editor because they keep bringing up Scripture on ‘Lost.’ I’m reading the Bible all the time now.”
As a pastor, those are things you like to hear from people. My guess is we’ll get some direct spiritual, kind of Biblical references in that vein. I think it’s very likely that the birth of Aaron will play out in this finale. It’s not a mistake that this baby is named after the brother of Moses. It’s not a mistake, clearly, that Jacob, also known in the Bible as Israel, plays a prominent role in this narrative. And ultimately I think the finale and the journey still very much echoes the narrative of the Exodus. We’ve got one of people moving from slavery to freedom and to abundance. The themes of the pharaohs, there’s thousands of images that point to the Biblical narrative of slavery in Egypt on this show, so it’s going to be interesting to see. One of the things they let us know about the finale in the dialogue last night is that faith would play a very prominent role.
Nerdage: Is this something that has made churchgoers think about different allusions in the Bible? Does it let people interface in a different way?
Chris Seay: Yeah, I think so. Mainly what it does is it gives you an opportunity to talk with co-workers, and neighbors, and people that you might not typically talk about faith with, if ever at all. This show brings it up. There are very few shows that get you talking about real issues. You don’t watch an episode of CSI and then show up the next day and talk with all your friends about it. But this show, they’ll reference a book by Soren Kierkegaard, and you go on Amazon 30 minutes later and thousands of people have ordered Kierkegaard’s book and they’re ready to read it because Lost references it and they want to be able to talk about it, and know what it means, and why it’s being addressed on this show. And that’s pretty remarkable. So that’s the thing I think I enjoy most about the show.
Nerdage: Are there redemptive elements to the show that people can apply?
Chris Seay: Yeah, I think no doubt. We look at the way that each of these characters has really struggled in their life and in their journey, trying to figure out who they are. As Jacob referenced in this last episode, all of them, their lives were a mess essentially before they came to the island. And what they’ve learned on this island, one, is to face their sins and their failures, and two, the primary lesson that comes up over and over again on Lost, Jack Shephard said it in season one, is this lesson that we can live together or we can die alone. And ultimately that’s been the biggest part of their redemption. That they’re willing to seek out faith, but they knew they had to do it in the context of community. They’ve learned to rely on one another and depend on one another. So even characters like Sayid, who was an Iraqi soldier, worked under Saddam Hussein as an intelligence officer, is guilty of torture and countless murders, ultimately ends his life in a redemptive act to save his friends. We can see that if redemption is possible for Sayid, that it’s possible for any of us.
- Matt Price
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