This presentation will be putting theorizations of retroactive continuity and serialization into conversation with adaptation theory through an examination of the demigod “Jacob” on the show Lost (ABC, 2004-2010), a program which is receiving a wave of renewed interest this year coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the airing of its pilot and the return of the series to Netflix on July 1st. Retroactive continuity is “the process whereby creators and/or producers in some way alter the events of the origin, backstory, and/or history of a particular character or story world,” and is “most often utilized to rewrite some aspect of a character’s past” (Freidenthal 10). It is an activity that “fills in past information … while also causing an audience to reinterpret and discard some previous impression” (Galaver and Goldberg 8). It is, in other words, a process by which a serialized text adapts itself, and as a result leans into the “Modernist energy” inherent to all seriality, which depends on “a willingness to make narrative pieces work against one another” (O’Sullivan 62).
In examining the development of “Jacob,” I will explore how, for a network show with an expansive mythology such as Lost, retconning was a practical inevitability even more than a deliberate aesthetic choice. Though the mystical island at the show’s center was conceived by co-creators J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof and their initial team of writers as “the nexus of a conflict between good and evil,” any underlying logics by which the supernatural phenomena on the island were subject to heavy revision throughout the show’s run, partly due to the fact that “network television was … extremely genre-averse” during the show’s run (Grillo-Marxuach).
For a character who was not even introduced until the third of six seasons, Jacob played an outsized role in Lost’s mythology. The tension between his initial introduction – as an amorphous and largely invisible being who can move furniture – to his reintroduction at the end of the fifth season to a largely de-powered, immortal, and entirely-visible human, speaks to how the show “eventually shifted away from the idea of Jacob” and his nemesis “the Man in Black” being “literal constructs” of God and the Devil, in favor of having them “serve ‘as mere fiduciaries’ of those entities” (Howell 136). I will argue that this is particular retcon, and the irresolvable contradictions it creates between Jacob’s appearances throughout the series, are a case study in how the serial presentation of the supernatural can, through the use of retroactive continuity, deepen viewers’ sense of the numinous through the very lack of artistic unity that is seen as a hallmark of bourgeois realism.
Works Cited
Friedenthal, Andrew J. Retroactive Continuity and the Hyperlinking of America. UP of
Mississippi, 2017.
Galaver, Chris and Nat Goldberg. Revising Reality: How Sequels, Remakes, Retcons, and Rejects
Explain the World. Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.
Grillo-Marxuach, Javier. “The Lost Will and Testament of Javier Grillo-Marxuach,” 24 Mar.
2015, https://okbjgm.weebly.com/uploads/3/1/5/0/31506003/2._lost.pdf. Accessed 24 July
2024.
Howell, Charlotte. Divine Programming: Oxford UP, 2020.
O’Sullivan, Sean. “Six Elements of Serial Narrative.” Narrative, vol. 27, no. 1, p. 49-64. Project
MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2019.0003. Accessed 24 July 2024.