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J. J., It's Not Just About Blowing Up Vulcan
As the elders among you know, J. J. Abrams was the co-creator and director of
Lost
, a television
series that ran from 2004 to 2010. Many viewers compared the show to crack in its addictive
qualities and the special sort of ambiguity it engendered—
God, I'd love to get off the stuff, but it
feels so
good. Although the show had fantastic viewership and many awards to its credit, it was
actually crack.
Long ago I worked in summer stock for several years with one of the cast members of
Lost
,
Sam Anderson (who played Bernard Nadler). I therefore demanded that Rob watch the entire
series with me, mostly to get a glimpse of Sam on the tube. Despite the material he was given,
Sam is an amazing actor.
At the beginning of Season 3, we knew it was crack, but I forced Rob to persevere. Each
episode was a cliffhanger. The labyrinthine plot meandered in tighter and tighter coils around
a particular mystery, then suddenly fl ew off with the introduction of some
deus ex machina
—a
baby, a submarine, a nuclear weapon. But it was also like Viagra for your dramatic soul, utterly
absorbing in the small, as it were, but unable to please over duration. The fi nal episode had many
millions of fans tied up in knots. It was the greatest
deus ex machina
of all, literally, and there was
no dramatic satisfaction for enduring that six-year arc.
I saw J. J. speak at the Game Developers' Conference several years ago and again in 2007 at
TED. Both times he told the story of his “mystery box.” It was a gift from his grandfather that he
has refused to open over all the years. It has become an inspiration to him. Thousands of critiques
and blogs and comments about J. J.'s box have appeared over the years. He talks about the mys-
tery box again in relation to his
Star Wars
adventure with Disney.
J. J. pulls things out of his mystery box, like the lame ending of
Lost
or the wanton destruc-
tion of Vulcan—a major component of the
Star Trek
bible—in his
Star Trek
reboot fi lm of 2010.
When things get boring for little J. J., he just pulls some vir-
tual crap out of his mystery box.
J. J., this might be cool if you were ten years old.
When a playwright lets a plot meander and meander
with no sense of what's in its mystery box, that's bad news.
It's even worse news when the stuff that J. J. pulls out of
his mystery box is some lame dirty trick. But friends, J. J.
has a lesson for us. When things are lagging, as Rob and I
often tell each other, you just need a baby, a submarine, or
a nuclear weapon.
Open the box, J. J. Maybe your imagination is inside.
