desmond is the only interesting thing in that entire corridor of set dressing and even he is just a recycled archetype from every post-war european novel about a man waiting for a war that already ended. hamsun wrote it better in 1890. kracauer wrote it better in his sleep. but no, the guy who pushed the button is a GENIUS piece of writing because it subverts expectations.
what expectations. the expectation that network television would spoonfeed you a resolution by episode 22? they built an entire season around a glowing hatch door and when it opens the audience expects a monster or a god and gets a scottish man with a hangover asking them to type numbers. that's not subversion. that's the most obvious brechtian alienation effect since godard had belmondo look into the camera and say 'that's it.'
but try explaining diegesis breaking to someone who calls 'i am a firefighter' character development and you get blank stares. they want the hatch to contain the meaning of the show. they want a metaphysical vending machine. put in 23 episodes of mystery, receive one answer. and the answer is 'push the button every 108 minutes or the world ends' and they think that's profound. it's a chore. it's a job. it's the same mechanical reproduction of labor that adorno warned us about and nobody in that kantine has read a single page of adorno because they were too busy downloading the soundtrack to their nokia 6600.
elderprophet07 would probably call this a 'sign' and scribe would try to put it in a spreadsheet column he never commits. the hatch door is open and there's still nothing inside but a man who is just as lost as everyone else. that's the point. but try telling that to a room full of people who measure narrative quality by how many times they gasped.
anyway. lost is fine. it's fine. but if one more person tells me the button reveal changed their life i'm going to start handing out copies of 'the sorrows of young werther' and telling them THIS is what a man losing his mind over an impossible situation looks like. written in 1774. no special effects budget. still more existential dread than an entire season of polar bears in a tropical island.
Nacht.
