Welcome back to Overthinking Lost, fifth season edition.

"Oh, hey, Destiny! How's it going? Exactly how you expected? Oh. That's... that's cool."

Last week, we had an excellent conversation in the comments section about the never-ending battle between science and faith in Lost.  While we didn’t come to any consensus about whether Jack was truly a man of science, a man of faith, or a mix of the two, last week’s conversation proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the words “faith” and “science” are far more semantically complex than we once thought.  Cool, guys.  Keep up the good work.

This week, I want to tackle two more complex—or shall we say vague?—concepts: the concepts of fate and free will.  Weeks and weeks and weeks ago, back when I was still watching season two, I made the possibly erroneous claim that “fate” and “destiny” are, by definition, religious terms.  In the fifth season of Lost, however, “fate” has taken on numerous definitions, both religious and [psuedo?] scientific.  I mentioned in last week’s post that the first half of season five disappointed me, and I think that’s in part because of the vague nature of these terms.  What is fate, Lost?  What is free will?  And can a television show whose characters lack free will be entertaining?

The answers to these questions and more after the jump.

These have been difficult days for me. As a die-hard Terminator fan, I went into a screening of Terminator: Salvation knowing that the movie was getting bad reviews, but still holding onto a sliver of hope that this latest installment to my beloved franchise would remain true to the “real” Terminator and right the many wrongs of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

As we all know now, the movie was a sloppy, shoddy disappointment (you can listen to me rant about its shortcomings in this podcast episode; I won’t retread that territory here). That disappointment was bad enough, but in the ensuing weeks after seeing Terminator: Salvation, an even worse thing happened: I came to the sad conclusion that a huge part of the Terminator ethos, the franchise’s mantra and guiding light, is one big fat lie:

“No fate but what we make.”

For years, I fooled myself into holding onto this phrase like some sort of holy writ, but now, at this nadir moment, I must recognize the truth: “no fate but what we make” is demonstrated poorly at best by the movies/TV shows–even in the greatness that is Terminator 2–and flat out contradicted by the meta-narrative of the franchise.

“No fate but what we make?” My ass.