Finding Connections - LOST and Chris Claremont
This post contains spoilers for both Lost seasons 1-5, and Uncanny X-Men #94-279.
Earlier this week I was on twitter, seeing my tweetstream fill up with two basic groups of tweets: people excited about the premiere of Lost on Tuesday night, and people saying they couldn't get into Lost due to the Byzantine nature of the show. As I was in the former group, myself, I started feeling briefly, irrationally defensive about the latter, and was going to tweet about such - it's not that the show's overly complex, it's just that you need to pay attention to the whole thing in order to be able to follow it. As I was in the process of thinking that, though, I realized that I'd said that kind of thing before with Chris Claremont's run on X-Men from 1976-1990. Getting a synopsis of those stories makes it sound like a complete and utter mess, but having read the stories myself, it's not nearly as bad when you're in the middle of it.
The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that there were more connections than that. Both stories feature large, multi-ethnic casts. Both feature several characters with dark, mysterious pasts who are attempting to make amends for those pasts. A lot of characters also have strained parental relationships. There are liberal amounts of time travel in each story. Both feature characters who desperately want to get out of their situation, and even leave for a while, but only to get dragged back in later on.
There are also, arguably, some character connections:
So there it is. I'm not attempting to say that the writers of Lost are ripping off Claremont, or anything, or even that they're aware on his X-Men run, but if you're someone who's a fan of both, they are some interesting parallels.
Earlier this week I was on twitter, seeing my tweetstream fill up with two basic groups of tweets: people excited about the premiere of Lost on Tuesday night, and people saying they couldn't get into Lost due to the Byzantine nature of the show. As I was in the former group, myself, I started feeling briefly, irrationally defensive about the latter, and was going to tweet about such - it's not that the show's overly complex, it's just that you need to pay attention to the whole thing in order to be able to follow it. As I was in the process of thinking that, though, I realized that I'd said that kind of thing before with Chris Claremont's run on X-Men from 1976-1990. Getting a synopsis of those stories makes it sound like a complete and utter mess, but having read the stories myself, it's not nearly as bad when you're in the middle of it.
The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that there were more connections than that. Both stories feature large, multi-ethnic casts. Both feature several characters with dark, mysterious pasts who are attempting to make amends for those pasts. A lot of characters also have strained parental relationships. There are liberal amounts of time travel in each story. Both feature characters who desperately want to get out of their situation, and even leave for a while, but only to get dragged back in later on.
There are also, arguably, some character connections:
- The first character connection is John Locke and Professor Charles Xavier. Both are strong, imposing characters, and both are bald men who suffer spinal injuries and spend years in wheelchairs before being 'cured' under extra-normal circumstances (alien intervention in Xavier's case and the island in John's), only later to become parapelegics once again.
- Xavier's alternate, Magneto, is also present on the island, in the form of Benjamin Linus. In both cases, the two sets of men (Xavier/Magneto and Jonn/Ben) have the same goal, and differ primarily in the means that they consider acceptable towards reaching that goal. Also, both Magneto and Ben start as enemies of our protagonists, but become allies later on.
- Next there's the reluctant leader with parental abandonment issues - Scott Summers, or as they call him on the island, Jack Sheppard.
- Also, for every reluctant leader you have to have the incredibly popular, charismatic anti-hero: Wolverine in the X-Men, and Sawyer on Lost. In both cases, as well, they find themselves able to become the noble figure they secretly always wanted to become when placed in a different environment (Wolverine's journey to Japan to rescue Mariko and Sawyer's travel to 1974)
- One of the more interesting villains we've seen on Lost is Charles Widmore, a billionaire industrialist who, we learn, is secretly an Other, even though his actions work against the interests of the leader of the Others, which is a little like Sebastian Shaw, if you can accept the Others as a metaphor for mutancy.
- Richard Halpert gives me a Mr. Sinister vibe - he's incredibly old but seemingly ageless, he steps back and allows others to act in order to advances his goal (which we are completely unaware of).
- Lastly, there's the enigmatic Jacob. This one was a little tricky, because there's not much we know about him other than he's seemingly ageless, incredibly powerful, and has a connection to Egyptian mythology. Which, arguably, to an extent, is Apocalypse, although I'm not quite sure we can classify Jacob as a villain.
So there it is. I'm not attempting to say that the writers of Lost are ripping off Claremont, or anything, or even that they're aware on his X-Men run, but if you're someone who's a fan of both, they are some interesting parallels.