As a youngster, Jeff Jensen dreamed of being an astronaut or a police officer. In his 20s, he considered becoming a teacher or a pastor. Those are all noble professions, but thank God Jensen stuck with the writing thing. After all, he plays a critical role in helping the masses digest and decipher the best show on television, Lost, through his work for Entertainment Weekly and EW.com. (Note: If you’re a Lost devotee but you’re unfamiliar with Jensen’s work, make it a point to visit EW.com each Wednesday and Thursday during the show’s final season.)
As a senior in high school, Jensen was persuaded by a teacher at his small Lutheran school in Seattle to compete for a free ride to the School of Visual Arts in New York City as a writing major. He won the contest. When he graduated in 1992, he parlayed his contacts, his pop culture acumen, and his journalistic talents into a job at Advertising Age on the sports & entertainment marketing beat. When he decided in 1998 that he wanted to go to work for his favorite magazine, EW (so he could focus more on writing about entertainment) he got that job, too.
Even though Jensen wasn’t immediately assigned to Lost coverage at EW, the show had his attention from the beginning. Professionally, he had already developed a reputation for his reporting on and analysis of sci-fi and cult shows such as Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and Alias. Personally, he was known for trading emails with coworkers in which he would offer theories and predictions on where mystery-driven shows like Alias were headed after the previous evening’s episode. Eventually, Jensen was given some Lost-focused magazine pieces to write, and then he was charged with recapping each Lost episode for EW.com. In the midst of Lost’s second season, an editor suggested to Jensen that he make an online column out of the Lost theories he was emailing to coworkers. Thus, the immensely popular “Doc Jensen” column was born. (How popular is Jensen’s work? His columns inspire a few hundred comments each, and his recaps tip the scales at a few thousand comments each. Enough said.) Jensen was kind enough to let me ask him a couple questions about Lost and spirituality in pop culture—two subjects on which he has a lot to say.
COLLIDE : What makes Lost such a great show?
JEFF JENSEN: That question, I have found, is very difficult to answer because I think that (more than any other show I’ve ever encountered) early on in the show’s life there were so many different points of entry or reasons to be interested in the show and that’s kind of how it snared such a large audience. You know, there are people who by their nature are interested in mysteries and mystery-based storytelling, and Lost presented a bunch of very irresistible mysteries like What is the monster? What are the numbers? I think the mysteries they created add some kind of deep appeal.
There was something about these mysteries beyond their relevancy to the plot or back-story of Lost and the history of the island and the history of these people. There was something about these mysteries that tapped fundamental issues of how we experience the world. Whether we live in a naturalistic world or a supernatural world, whether faith or reason is the proper way to engage the world.
I think the metaphor of the hatch, before it was ever opened up, spoke to all of that or contained all of that. What is in the hatch? Our imagination could dream about that and wonder about that. Is it nefarious? Is it hopeful? Is it magical? Is it a letdown? [The show is] fascinating and provocative and challenging in its own way, and it captured your imagination over and over again, and I think that’s great. There are some other appeals to the show that mean more to other people, too.
I think the characters began as generic archetypes but very quickly they evolved into people that were complicated and troubled, and we cared about them. They made us care about their improvement and their redemption, and the show has never really articulated exactly how redemption is gonna come about. I think that’s going to be the main focus of the sixth season, but we fell for these characters. And the show enticed us with this concept of their redemption, and we bought into that. We want it.
It’s really wonderful if you think about it—the defining tension of these characters is our desire to see them flourish as human beings. We want to see Jack get over his stuff, his issues, and find some measure of grace and an ability to live comfortably in his skin and in the world with other people. You want to see Sawyer overcome the darkness of his childhood that has turned him into a dark person and you want to see him atone for his mistakes, make peace with his past, and then find some way to live his life at peace. John Locke—you’re rooting for him to have genuine spirituality without being dogmatic or polemical or zealous about it. You want to see him stop trying to latch on to any old thing without thinking about it for the sake of giving his life meaning and coming to peace with himself. Then if he could find something that’s real and true and trust it with discernment, you want that for him.
COLLIDE : What’s your reaction when you see pop culture expressions such as Lost tackle spiritual themes, or even in the case of Lost, overt biblical and messianic themes?
JENSEN: I am very interested when I hear that there are big pop culture stories that are tackling those kinds of issues and those kinds of themes. I relate to those themes, you know? I’m a Christian, I believe in a metaphysical view of the world. I believe that there is a Creator God. But I also believe that the defining tension of humanity is the experience of God or the lack thereof. I am drawn to spiritual stories about redemption. I am drawn to stories that involve spirituality and redemption, but I’m more interested in stories in which people are frank and honest and raw and provocative about their experience of life on earth as fallen people who are separated from truth and separated from God. How, then, do we live our lives?
And I love Lost for this. I love Lost because I am Jack. I am the doubter. I am the skeptic. But I am also John. I am the believer who wants to believe, and I recognize these tensions within myself. We are all these people at once. Even though I have a faith and I profess this, I honestly feel these tensions that all of these other people embody. That’s one of the things I’m very drawn to by Lost, and I’ve been very invested because I’ve had a suspicion or been curious. I’m not counting on the show to follow this through. I’m not exactly sure if it’s about anything else but just establishing that we live in a world defined by these tensions. But I have wondered if we’re getting a story that is exploring these tensions or establishing these tensions and then coming to some kind of opinion or resolution about them. I’m not expecting it to, but I’m curious. I definitely want to know, Where is the end of John and where is the end of Jack? And are they compatible? Are they going to be forever at odds? Can these tensions be resolved in some interesting way? So I’m very interested. What I reject are polemical religious stories.
I think that any story is inherently spiritual if it aspires to being honest about how the storyteller experiences life and reality. What I’ve always found when storytellers seriously pursue the themes of our existence is that I notice, Hey, that really hooks up with a lot of biblical principles. That really hooks up with a lot of things that the Bible tells about the nature of our world and our relationship with God. That’s what I recognize in Lost and that’s what I want from stories.
Scott McClellan is the editor of COLLIDE.