I am Jack's cultural progression.
The year is 2010, and two long-running television shows, Lost and 24, air their last episodes, one day after the other. They seem diametric opposites. Or are they?
>>FLASH, DIAGONAL-WISE!<<
The year is 1993, and a fantastic, two-part story has begun. A cataclysm – a rift in time and space itself, a clash of new dimensions – catapults a man from the world he once knew into not one, but two different strange and alien landscapes. To some, that man will be a nameless stranger. To others, he will be known as “Jack.”
One version of the stranger lands on a mysterious island, where time moves in unpredictable ways. Wandering a beautiful, dangerous, eternally puzzling place drenched in remembrance of things past and unknown, his journey of discovery brings him, in the end, to two long-estranged brothers playing with human beings like game pieces, vying for release from their prisons.
The other lands in a high-tech government facility, where time marches ever inexorably forward – where life is cheap, and speed matters. He is a soldier, always alone, always enraged, accomplishing one task of immense brutality and cunning only to be slammed by another and another without rest, doing the only thing he knows how to do – stopping the infiltration of his home, his unit, the very hearts and minds of his brothers of arms, by a heinous, foreign evil.
But, wait, why 1993? Lost only ran for six seasons. 24 only ran for eight. A long run, but not 17 years.
Because this story didn’t begin with the shows – it began with a cultural divide begun somewhere else – in two different visions for a new, more complicated, more observable, more technologically dense world.
In 1993, the nameless stranger’s island, which became Jack’s island, was called MYST.
And in 1993, the nameless stranger’s battle against infiltration wasn’t against terrorists, it was against monsters in a computer game called DOOM.
It's like a McDLT - hot on one side, cool on the other.
It Was a Very Good Year
Jack’s fantastic 17-year voyage came to a close this week, as the television juggernauts Lost and 24 aired their series finales on back-to-back nights. On Sunday, we left the island forever. On Monday, the waves upon waves of demons/terrorists/friends-turned-bad finally relented.
But it all began with a sea-changing moment – the expansion of computer gaming into the third dimension. The proliferation of the CD-ROM and the surging popularity of first-person gaming in immersive worlds with movement along three axes – three years before Super Mario 64 – reinvented in a fundamental way the frame of reference human beings have for the complexity of their lives, introducing new anxieties and new ways of thinking about time and space.
Well, to an extent, it reinvented them – and to an extent it was a signpost of a larger trend that informed the change – a trend of emerging access to more immersive and more sophisticated simulations of reality, available cheaply and widely, that brought the question of how we choose to bridge the gap between what we are capable of seeing and our minds can internalize and live with constructively.
The narrative parallels are fascinating. The way these stories flow from franchise to franchise – essential stories of our time, where the names and faces of the heroes often change, and often remain ambiguous.
It began the original “this island makes no goddamned sense, why is there this odd machinery here and these numbers, this is really frustrating, but if I allow myself to get into it I am sucked in forever,” a little game called MYST, – and the original “THERE’S NO TIME FOR THIS RIGHT NOW! I HAVE THE WEAPON! TAKE THE SHOT! DAMMIT!” — well, that’s DOOM.
In a way, yesterday was the final Mortal Monday.
This is interesting, because 24 was originally slated to debut in 1994.
This article is awesome and I love reading it and others like it on your site. For the podcast could you just have the author read the article first? That way I could skip over the part where you all giggle and hem and haw about yourselves for half an hour before getting to any content.
Wow, did we just get neg hit?
Was there ever an episode of 24 where Jack entered a cheat code and became immortal and had every weapon available to him including a big gun that shot out a pulsing blue light and also he could walk through walls? Because that would really tie that connection together.
@Chris
Yes. Jack Bauer seems to use that code about three times a season. This time around it involved Michael Madsen.
Really interesting; the exploring mysterious island & linearly fighting demons paradigms both seem quite accurate. But I’m not sure I buy that “24 and Lost are ending therefore we’ve figured something out as a culture.” Might it not just be a fortuitous coincidence?
from what i’ve seen of Lost they always are moving and running and fighting but not getting anywhere… trying to impose linear time on a non-linear narrative?
and Hurley, who seems to just wait in the background, comes out on top
But do you shoot *polar bears* in DOOM? Therein would lie the ultimate connection, sir Fenzel.
;p
When I was halfway your article I couldn’t help but think of Doom and 24 as taking place in an ‘island in time’: the now. One thing you don’t mention about Myst is that you could only move through it screen by screen – no fluid 3d animation, but more like Colossal Cave with pictures. So the spatial constraint was double (no getting of the island, no free movement). So you could say that Myst/Lost requires spatial constraints to explore temporal questions and that Doom/24 has temporal constraints to freely explore space/spatiality. So now I finally understand how Jack Bauer can travel across LA in 15 minutes. Thanks for clearing that up!
OK, I’ve been waiting to do this for a while:
WELL ACTUALLY the Highlander series fills the 1 am (EST) low budget action hour.
Still, I would like to see more on the progression of Jack in our media.
A bit late commenting on this article, but I wanted to add more relevant cultural context to this pre-gamergate article…
MYST holds a special place of nostalgia for those of us who craved accessible content in the ’90s, but that does not mean the franchise gets a “free pass” from criticism or exemption from censorship. The games still employed sexist tropes and game mechanics that enforced/internalized misogynistic ideology (granted, to a lesser degree than other games at the time) in the individual minds that were participating in this male-created adventure. The supplemental books and comics that were released were a little better in their depiction/treatment of female characters, but not by much, and managed to gain a cult-like following amongst the less developed minds of that generation. It would have been better for all if MYST was sequestered to the nostalgic past, but in the last two decades, there have been attempts to resurrect the franchise onto the “big screen” in the form of a movie or series. These attempts have mostly self-destructed under poor management, but the project keeps getting passed to larger studios, and I would be lying if I said I was not worried about the continued proliferation of ’90s era game misogyny to modern media. We are/were too late to stop another Mortal Kombat, but we can stop this. If you consider yourself to be a feminist, please consider signing this petition to “cease any-and-all progress on creating a movie or TV series based on the misogynistic video game franchise of Myst”
[ https://www.change.org/p/stop-movie-based-on-sexist-myst-video-game-series ]
Even if they modernize the content for the movie or series, people will possibly want to explore the source material and ingest the inherent sexism therein. It must end. As my favorite line in the new Star Wars movies suggests, we must “let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.”
Please note, I am not the author of the petition, but I do believe in it.