Re: Lost: Season 5
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Originally Posted by Joseph DeMartino
When the audience knows things that the characters don't, it is called "dramatic irony". It can actually add to the tension (and the connection to the characters), since you know a Bad Thing is about to happen when the characters don't. Every horror film in the world has used this when someone approaches the door to a supposedly safe room, while we know the killer is lurking behind it.
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In the case of LOST, the realization (in "The Variable") that people might act as variables to change the course of events, was treated like a revelation and contained, as far as I can tell, no sense of dramatic irony. If anything, on a basic level, the writers want the audience to ask themselves, 'could this really work?' but one thing the writer's AREN'T saying is whether the plan is bunk or not. We simply don't know that for sure. In that sense, we have no more information than the characters do.
The genesis of Jack's plan was handled, from a dramatic sense, like a potentially game changing revelation that raises some uncertain possibilities, given all the information we had before. All it took was a a brief, dramatic speech/reversal by post Ann Arbor Faraday. The character deeply opposed to Jack's plan (Kate) is open to the possibility that preventing the Oceanic crash places her in L.A. in custody of an Air Marshall. The character working with Jack to detonate the bomb (Sayid) has a very alive Nadya waiting for him in L.A., if the Oceanic flight doesn't crash. This tells me that characters other than Jack have seriously considered the possibility that his plan might work.
So yeah, I'm not necessarily seeing irony, just a lot of misdirection and uncertainty. Nothing new for LOST.
