So what happens if the characters’ free will affects ka or fate so heavily that events are unable to be corrected before the narrative reaches the point where it should end but can’t?

Things start over again, of course!

In both LOST and The Dark Tower, events unfold for one main purpose: salvation. Both are redemption stories; every character has some kind of regret in his or her past that must be atoned for. The purpose of finding the Island in LOST is for each of the castaways to work toward redeeming themselves in their eyes or others. The same goes for Roland and his companions. Their trek to the Dark Tower is one where they learn to overcome the limitations of their past.

Because such an emphasis is placed on character growth, for the narrative to be complete, every character must be saved, must evolve past whatever he or she was prior to the quest’s beginning. Because fate or ka has a finite area in which to work, sometimes salvation cannot be found, thus the sentient (or seemingly) forces at work in both series cannot get what they want, effectively negating the destined order of events. This causes this force is (read: the Tower or the Temple, depending on which series we’re talking about) to effectively reboot circumstance in order for each character to reach the desired goal. If fate goes awry because of free will, just give it another shot!

Each character is different, in that some might realize what the flaw that must be overcome is, while others (Roland and Jack Shephard, as my examples here employ) mistakenly consider themselves all but perfect, festering in their own character flaws.

A reboot happens at the end of The Dark Tower. Roland has apparently been questing to save the Dark Tower for eons, and he has never gotten it right. He’s never learned the lessons that ka wishes him to learn. So each time that he climbs the Tower, he gets put back into a place where he can hopefully do things the right way and reach his ultimate goal. He has to progress as a person to where ka wants him to be in order for this to happen. Otherwise, it’s a do-over.

Throughout the novels, Stephen King never writes about Roland really succeeding at his quest. Until the very end, readers never understand that Roland has travelled this same path multiple times. There are vague references to it, such as Roland seeing Susannah and Eddie grasping the concepts of being a Gunslinger faster than he thought possible, but never is the cyclical nature of ka pronounced as blatantly as when Roland finally climbs the Tower and is sent back to the desert where Book 1 begins. Only then does the reader get a look at ka’s effect on events.

Each repetition of his quest for the Tower, Roland has learns something about the mistakes he made in the past, so ka rewards him by giving him another chance to make things right. In the quest documented in the novels, one of his mistakes revolved around losing the Horn of Eld at the Battle of Jericho, where he is the only survivor of his original ka-tet. When he regains consciousness at the beginning of his rebooted quest, the Horn of Eld is with him, letting him know that he has taken a step in the right direction. But it might be just a step. Roland has no sure idea of where ka wants him until he gets there.

Roland might have been moving toward salvation, but without ka’s intervention, he might have never obtained redemption and the narrative would have never been completed as it was meant to. And as far as the readers know, he still hasn’t. The arc contained within the novels does not explicitly show Roland being redeemed, only that he is finally moving toward it after eons of apparent stagnation. This is a limitation of the series’ narrative because readers only get vague ideas of hope that Roland will one day fulfill ka’s wishes.

Roland’s flaw is that he always sees people as objects to be used for his own purposes; he has never really had a reason to see the good in people or that maybe ka has a purpose for them as well. Roland has no concept of balance or that there are greater forces at work than him. Ka is working on teaching him differently. While Roland has repeatedly met Jake and Eddie and Oy and Susannah on each other quest, he uses them until he has to continue to the Dark Tower alone, thus failing his quest because the others have not completed their own destinies because of his misplaced leadership.

Roland must indeed reach the Dark Tower alone, but the journey there is filled with other people. He has a problem realizing that the other people are not objects to be used as he sees fit, but as ka does. Roland must learn not to be entirely self-absorbed. By saving Jake from his initial death because of his own guilt, Roland altered what ka wanted, and so events were thrown off course. He perpetuated what ka already knew about him, directly leading into another repetition of the course. Roland’s dedication to ka is mere lip-service, and he will never be able to relax until he learns that he is not in control of his own destiny. Until he learns to quell his self-importance, ka will never allow him to rest because he is always looping back in on himself, but never entirely cognizant it is happening.

The same kind of cycles appear in LOST. Jeff Jensen has been saying for a while now that LOST is not only cycling through its narrative again, but it has been effectively mirroring itself from the halfway point. Meaning that the series finale will parallel the original pilot, at least thematically.

What I find interesting about LOST’s cyclical narrative is that multiple repetitions are contained entirely within the confines of the series, where The Dark Tower is only a single run-through o f one reiteration. Also, characters in LOST appear to be aware they are looping and cycling within a single narrative, whereas Roland is ignorant of his repetition. Viewers get to see the characters’ entire road to redemption rather than a single section of the journey. Jack Shephard is a perfect example of this.

He wakes up on the Island like all of the other 815 survivors, and we immediately find out that what Jack has to work on mending. He starts ordering people around, giving directions, and going completely hands-on in saving people. Eventually, viewers find out that Jack Shephard has a problem—he has to fix things and be in control. Like Roland Deschain, Jack is the center of his own universe; he must be the one in the spotlight making things better.

This character flaw ruined Jack’s pre-Island life, leading him to need the Island for salvation. A couple of examples of this: his wife left him because he was controlling and he had daddy issues (like every other character on LOST, actually) that stemmed from feeling he had to consistently one-up his father since they worked together as premier spinal surgeons in Los Angeles (don’t we all wish our lives could be that awful?). Jack would consistently have to be the one to make things better, and in the end, his self-absorption would drive people away from him.

Viewers see this on the Island from the very beginning, as well as pre-Island via flashbacks, giving the viewers even more information about the cycles the character is going through. As he and John Locke interact more, Jack’s “man of science” rationale begins to grate on everyone on the Island. He is given the leadership role on the Island despite his saying he doesn’t want it (though for such a spotlight seeker, I think that was all lip service). And what does Jack want to do instead of help stabilize the community he is set to lead? He wants to help them get off the Island, no matter what. And he succeeds. At the end of Season 3, the castaways are rescued (at least 6 of them are), and Jack is the hero of the day.

But when he gets back home, he realizes he made a mistake. He sees that they never should have left because life is just as miserable as it was initially. So what does Jack do? He tries to fix things again, only this time by gathering the people he helped leave the Island and trying to bring them back there.

And he succeeds. And the cycle begins again. Because Jack could not learn the simple lesson of “take a step back and stop trying to fix things.”

Since Jack wasn’t able to reach salvation on his first stint on the Island, fate brought him back for a second shot at it. He was too wound up in himself and his overwhelming desire to fix things that he never realized the Island for what it really is—a place to reinvent oneself. Because of him attempting to control his own fate, he has been given a second shot. In Season 5, the viewers don’t see the “I’ve got to fix this!” Jack; we see a Jack who lets others do the work while he lets things happen as they should.

At one point, Kate mentions that he’s changed and that she liked the old Jack better, to which he responds along the lines of “No, you didn’t; you didn’t like the old me.” Jack, like Roland at the end of The Dark Tower, finally confronted his character flaw and began to deal with it like an adult.

At least for a while.

By the end of the finale, Jack is back to his old ways. He thinks that it is his job to set things right once again and basically reboot history so that their plane never crashes on the Island to begin with, proving that not only is Jack Shephard stubborn, but that he also doesn’t learn from his mistakes. The Island (or the Temple, rather) will not be pleased with Jack in Season Six. Talk about delusions of grandeur. The man has some serious self-importance issues.

So the LOST cycle is in limbo due to the hiatus, but looks like there will be the narrative’s third cycle in the final season. Jack (and I am using him as a stand-in for the rest of the cast) has now gotten to the Island once, failed to learn his lesson, left the Island, realized his mistake, went through a ridiculous amount of trouble to get back to the Island a second time, went through some deep philosophical growth, only to come back to the point where he wants to leave the Island again under his own power, effectively negating every bit of personal growth he had achieved. Season Six will represent Jack’s (and any other castaways who have yet to learn their lessons) final opportunity to fulfill their destiny and move past the…well…past, provided that the narrative is set to actually end (and I think it is) with the final episode instead of starting over yet again. I do not think the series will end with Jack’s eye opening on the beach as in the pilot because the creators have already recycled this image in the episode “316.”

I have a feeling that Season Six will be Point Z of the narrative (instead of a loop back to the beginning like The Dark Tower) because of the cycles viewers have seen in the series so far. Were LOST documenting a single leg of the 815 survivors’ journey to redemption, I think that it be much more drawn out and continuous, and there would be fewer cycles within the show itself. The show’s structure is intentionally segmented into different arcs despite its serialization, whereas The Dark Tower is a single narrative across seven volumes. The show itself would be a single cycle like The Dark Tower if the end of the series were to perfectly parallel the beginning. But because there is a definitive beginning and ending set, viewers get to see the whole arc rather than simply one section of it and being told there is something larger at work. While that aspect works very well for The Dark Tower because of the scope of the narrative itself (even though it is based around redemption, the story primarily deals with the ending/protecting of all existence), I feel that LOST is far more character-driven. The story and mythology only exist to facilitate the characters’ redemption.

Where in The Dark Tower, the Tower utilizes Roland’s salvation to save itself, LOST’s arc makes Jack and Jin and Kate and all of the castaways’ personal salvation more important than the Island itself. The quest is not to get to the place where salvation will occur, but to actually perpetrate that salvation once there. While there is the narrative arc where Ben and Jack try to protect the Island from people like Charles Widmore like The Dark Tower told about Roland protecting the Tower from the Crimson King, that narrative cold not exist if not for the characters’ story of reaching salvation.

Both series utilize the same mechanics to different ends, but there is enough shared between them that makes me realize that it cannot be mere coincidence. While The Dark Tower has yet to be added to the ABC.com official library for LOST, the creators use the phrase “our hero” when referring to Stephen King. And given that LOST is something of a television phenomenon, I can think of no better way to honor one’s hero than to have striking parallels to his opus. While the characters are entirely different, the scope of both shows works in much the same way, utilizing the same devices and mechanisms to deliver the impressive narrative. The genius in the way these series parallel one another is not necessarily in the specific ways of how they do it, but in that they are so imperceptively linked that it takes a deeper look at them to see the similarities.

So that’s my look at The Dark Tower through the lens of LOST. Or is that the other way around? I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this series as much as I have writing it. Approaching this topic really made me appreciate the breadth and scope that really make both of these epics tick. And I hope that Season Six doesn’t throw every idea I’ve had here out of the water, allowing me to expand some of the ideas presented here into a paper or two. But if it does, then oh well. Half the fun of theorizing about LOST is being proven completely wrong when the developers (or other, more observant fans) completely pull the rug out from under you.

In both LOST and Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, there are higher powers at play than simply the characters themselves. Jack Shephard and Ben Linus are nowhere near as important as they each think themselves to be, nor is Roland Deschain able to decide whether or not he continues his quest toward the Dark Tower. In all cases, all decisions come down to the discretion of a higher power. LOST fans are very much aware of the Island’s penchant for “course correction,” and The Dark Tower universe hinges entirely on the concept of ka. At its most elementary, this higher power could be termed fate or destiny, but that really doesn’t even hint at the true complexity of the phenomena.

Ka is defined loosely as a destiny-like power in The Dark Tower. It’s not quite destiny in that it seems to be a semi-sentient force with a will of its own. Destiny is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the power or agency by which, according to various systems of philosophy and popular belief, all events, or certain particular events, are unalterably predetermined.” Ka differs from traditional thoughts on destiny because it is not “unalterable.” While ka might wish something to happen, it is not simply set to occur. If Roland (or anyone, for that matter) goes against what ka wishes to happen, then ka will alter how events play out until things go the way it wills, but there are no predetermined roles for people to play or how events will unfold. On the otehr hand, destiny (according to the OED) is a linear, unyielding progression of fate.

LOST, too, has a non-linear representation of fate. This universe simply refers to things that went fatedly awry as “course correction.” The interesting thing about LOST’s course correction is that neither viewers nor characters are sure of where the correction is coming from, where in The Dark Tower, Roland (and really all people) are aware of ka’s thumb in every pie. Its source will likely be explained in Season 6 (my theory: the Temple), but for now, it is one of the great mysteries of the Island. And again, one that directly parallels Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.

LOST’s most prominent focus for course correction is Desmond Hume. We learn that he is the only Islander special enough to be Daniel Faraday’s constant, though we never fully understand the ramifications of the revelation. We learn that he (for reasons we have not yet been told) possesses a unique affinity to space-time. But more importantly, we learn that despite this affinity, Desmond Hume is still a slave to the Island’s course correction, making him a direct parallel to Roland Deschain and showing that despite any character’s proximity to the Island’s source of power, there is still something greater at work.

Desmond’s arc during Season 3 predominantly dealt with his being unable to save Charlie Pace from death. Desmond would see Charlie die in a clairvoyant flash, and he could take steps to prevent his vision from coming true. Unfortunately for Charlie, each time Desmond saved his life, fate (or rather, the entity that controls fate) would course correct and invariably put Charlie in equal or greater danger further down the road. Desmond continues to get flashes of Charlie’s eventual death with increasing frequency, and eventually comes to the realization that, in the end, he cannot not save Charlie. Charlie’s path always led to death. When Desmond realized this and stopped trying to fight the unavoidable, LOST’s narrative was able to once again move toward its resolution, but through events that were not intended to be part of the main course of history.

You see, the narrative arc in LOST must go from Point A to Point Z. There are a finite number of episodes in the series as determined by the execs at ABC and the creators. As of this writing, there are 18 more hours until Point Z airs and the series ends with either a bang or a whimper (or a “well, huh” like Battlestar Galactica did). Now, the Pilot episode is Point A. The series finale is Point Z. However, as the show progresses and the story evolves, there does not there have to exist a mere 24 points within the range of A to Z. And that’s where course correction comes in.

Since Charlie Pace’s death was integral to the narrative being completed as evidenced by the amount of course correction used to finally culminate it, then the event would exist as a static point in the series. For the sake of this example, let’s call it Point M. When Desmond prevented Charlie from dying to the electrical strike, Point M could no longer progress into Point N. The course correction, then, created a new narrative point that did not and could not have existed before: Point M1. The interesting part of this line of thought is that Point M1 cannot lead directly into Point N like the original plot would have. Events changed. And Desmond tried multiple times to prevent Charlie’s death, never allowing the narrative to reach Point N as was originally intended, so he repeatedly created various other Point M’s. Eventually, Point M4 (just as an example) was fulfilled and Charlie died. The narrative, however, still cannot go into Point N or even Point N1 because other “fated” events were changed, thus destroying the original narrative entirely.

Still following me? Okay.

So even though the original event never occurred, the intended outcome of the event eventually did—Charlie died. This led to even more course correction. Point M4 needed to get back on the original track because the fated outcome of the series is not the analogous Z4. It was simply Point Z. So Charlie’s death was not only impacted by the successive events, they were created by it, making the characters in LOST have experiences they were never intended to have, yet had to have in order to get linear time back on course. Point M4 would work toward getting back to Point Z through Point N4 then O3 then P2 and finally back to the original timeline of events with Point Q, but all of these corrected points diverge from the original timeline and exist only because fate and destiny on LOST are not unalterable.

This same narrative structure exists as a major component of The Dark Tower, only it takes Roland much longer to accept than it does Desmond. In the first novel of The Dark Tower series, Roland finds Jake Chambers alone at a way-station in the desert and takes the child under his protection; he eventually finds out that the boy arrived there through being murdered in another world. By the end of the book, Roland has to make a choice: he can either save Jake from falling to his death, or he can let Jake die and finally catch up to the man he has been chasing since the first line of the novel and get closer to his goal of reaching The Dark Tower itself. He chooses to let Jake die, and he catches his enemy, and progresses his quest to the Dark Tower.

Roland never forgives himself for making the decision to let Jake die, so when he is given the opportunity to prevent it from happening in Book 2, he travels to Jake’s home world and stops him from ever being murdered in the first place. Because of this, Jake will never end up at the way-station. This creates a paradox wherein both Jake and Roland experience their minds being split between two separate realities. This is where ka comes in, course correction. Roland and his companions had to complete a ritual to draw Jake entirely into the one world in which he is supposed to exist to set their minds correct, but the side effect of doing so is that Roland inadvertently and unknowingly fathers a bastard child ka never intended for him to have and nullifies Jake’s intended death in Book 1. Ka must then not only find a place for Roland’s son Mordred to exist, but also a way for fate to turn out the way it should.

It is only later in the series that Roland learns that he made the wrong decision by attempting to protect Jake from his death. Jake Chambers, like Charlie Pace, was doomed to die, and Roland, like Desmond, had to stop protecting him and let it happen. Because ka willed it. When he was killed in his own world and ended up meeting Roland, everything was hunky-dory, going as planned. When Roland had the opportunity to let him drop, he was supposed to. It was Jake’s fate to be killed to further Roland’s quest to the Dark Tower. That was the only way that Point A would get to Point Z. When Roland saved him from his initial death, ka had to begin correcting its course, leading to The Dark Tower’s unintended transgression away from Point Z. The only way to get everything back in the right direction was to have Roland father Mordred, confront him at the end of the series, and perpetuate events which leads to Jake’s true and intended death in Maine. Roland not letting Jake die altered the plans that ka held for him and caused ka to have to devise an all new set of events to get Roland prepared to reach the Dark Tower. Had Jake died in Book 1, the novels would have been entirely different. Roland and his companions would have had entirely different experiences had ka not had to compensate.

Ka manufactured Jake’s true death in place of the fictionalized character of Stephen King, allowing Roland to finally reach the Dark Tower because the fictional author was not injured or killed as would have happened if Jake had not been there, and thus King was able to write the end of the series. This would have been a point similar to my example of LOST’s Point M4 in that it would have never existed on a linear narrative arc, but course correction insisted that it was the best way to get to the end originally designated. By not Jake not dying when he was intended, Roland, like Desmond, altered destiny’s course, but not its destination. Never its destination.

The Dark Tower’s narrative structure runs as a cycle (or, as Patrick McAleer noted at this year’s Popular Culture Association conference, a spiral), with the end of the series looping back directly to where the first one began. Unlike LOST (which will presumably complete its narrative arc at the end of Season Six), The Dark Tower could not reach Point Z by the time events lead there. It is made clear to the reader when The Dark Tower finishes that its course correction has yet to be completed, and it has been unable to be completed countless times. Ka places Roland Deschain back at a point where his decisions will (hopefully) lead him where ka wants everything to end. It is implied that the cycle the novels cover teaches Roland a lesson which he has been unable to learn in repetitions past.

In my next (and final) installment of LOST and The Dark Tower parallels, I intend to look at the occurrence of cyclical narrative and how it seems to appear in both series as a mechanism to further characters’ salvation.

Last time, I said that the Dark Tower was “in the most essential terms, [. . .] the center of all possible realities, a hub where parallel dimensions exist as levels of the Tower itself. As one climbs the Tower, the different floors contain doors leading to different worlds. It has been held standing for eons by focused energy called Beams which Roland Deschain eventually follows to reach the Dark Tower itself and complete that leg of his quest for redemption.”

In LOST, there is a structure that is possible will equate to this—the Others’ Temple. Even though the series has not yet shown what the Temple actually is, characters have mentioned it as being a sanctuary that must be protected from outsiders. This leads me to assume that there is something inherently special about the Temple itself; there is something it has that the rest of the Island does not. There are aspects of the Island and The Dark Tower that I believe equates it with being LOST’s analogue of the Dark Tower itself.

First, the name. Being called the Temple automatically denotes sacredness and a level of exclusivity among those who are allowed access. In The Dark Tower, only those chosen by the Tower (or by ka, a destiny-like force which regulates the universe) are able to reach its base, and even fewer are allowed access inside. Most who hear about the Dark Tower consider it a myth or superstition, relegating its true nature to only those who are willing to believe. So in a way, the two structures represent the most sanctified location in their respective universes.

Secondly, and more importantly, both the Temple and the Dark Tower are centrally located in a circle of what can best be described as focal points. In The Dark Tower, these focal points are portals leading to separate worlds, other levels of the Tower, or parallel dimensions. Roland and his companions find one and fight its guardian, Shardik, a giant mechanical bear. In the opposite direction from the portal, a Beam leads directly to the Dark Tower itself. There are Twelve of these portals along six Beams, with the Dark Tower dead center between them. Only those who are attuned to the Beams can see them, but once they are seen, a person cannot unsee them. That person will always have a direct route to the Tower outlined for them.

Stephen King.com has a chart with a visual representation of each Beam as well as its respective portal and guardian. Take a look at what I’m talking about.

During LOST Season 2, John Locke finds a similar image inscribed onto the Swan Station’s blast door. This image maps each Dharma Initiative science station surrounding an unknown location in the center. This map was able to be seen only during power outages in the hatch, paralleling the difficulty in discovering the Beams.

This unknown station is likely the Others’ Temple, and the Dharma Initiative built their science stations at specific places around it to tap into whatever special properties the Temple possesses. These properties are most visible through the electromagnetic anomalies at The Swan and The Orchid, and they have functioned similarly to The Dark Tower’s portals at the end of Beams. Where Shardik’s portal was able to function as a gateway Roland and his companions could take to another level of the Dark Tower, The Swan gives Desmond Hume the ability to see the future and inadvertently re-experience his past, and The Orchid works through harnessing latent electromagnetism to open a portal through space-time which has resulted in John Locke and Ben

Linus (and at least one polar bear) traveling to Tunisia.

If I extrapolate this out, then the analogy becomes more pronounced. In The Dark Tower, the portals at the ends of Beams possessed a fraction of the Tower’s actual power and could transport someone to a single alternate world, while the Dark Tower at the center of the Beam could transport them to any alternate world, and in fact, was the scaffolding on which all of the alternate worlds were built. From this perspective, the LOST stations, then, possess only a partial amount of the power inside the Temple itself. If The Orchid can transport someone to Tunisia a year into the future, and The Swan can grant flashes of future events, then the Temple can be assumed to have properties along those same lines, only more pronounced. It might possess the ability for sustained clairvoyance, controlled time-travel, or even the ability to alter reality itself.

The lattermost of these abilities is shown in the finale of LOST Season 4 when Ben moves the Island by harnessing The Orchid’s electromagnetic properties. When he does so, he proves that the Island is not bound by the same laws of physics as the rest of the world. In the fifth season, viewers find that not only is the Island able to be forcibly moved in space-time, but its location is naturally in a state of flux. Eloise Hawking introduces Jack Shephard and his companions to the Lamp Post station in Los Angeles that the Dharma Initiative used to find the location of the Island at any given point in time, taking into account its constant movement. The procedure involved a swinging pendulum which left unique marks used for triangulation on a map on the floor of the laboratory.

The marks on the floor are very much in the same pattern as the Beams which lead to the Dark Tower or the Dharma Stations to the Temple. If the Swan map is accurate, then it can be assumed that the Temple is roughly the center of the Island, which would also make it the central spot in the Lamp Post’s calculations, therefore leading me to conclude that it is the largest locus of power on the Island, much like the Dark Tower is in its world. It is not just the Island’s unique scientific properties that the drew the Dharma Initiative’s attention, but the Temple itself because that is where such properties emanate, and access to it has consistently been denied to them by the Others.

The Temple, like the Dark Tower, must be protected from those who wish to do it harm. Ben mentions in Season 5 that an outer wall has been built a half-mile around the Temple in order to keep people from coming anywhere close to it. The Dark Tower, too, is protected from a distance, but instead of a wall, by a field of roses called Can’-Ka No Rey. The price of having a location of such phenomenal capability is that it must be constantly watched by dedicated guardians, and both the Dark Tower and the Temple possess these. Parallels can be drawn between Roland’s ka-tet and the Others, Shardik and the Monster both serving as security systems, and structures such as the outer wall and Can’-Ka No Rey.

While the Temple has not been shown to audiences, enough is known about the Island itself and the mythology behind it to extrapolate what it could be. This is what I think it could be. I have no idea what it could physically look like, though I do wonder if it will be as aged as the rest of the ruins on the Island. With the series’ penchant for time-travel and blending architectural styles (Dharma + Jungle + Suburbia, for example), I truly wonder if the Temple could be a modern or otherwise out-of-place structure built initially to harness the Island’s power and focus it into a workable form. I am curious if the Egyptian-inspired décor of the Island’s ruins is but a façade for something much more unique and out-there than the rest of the series so far.

With the Temple being the Dark Tower’s analogue in this theory, it leads me to conclude that LOST’s penchant for course correction and The Dark Tower’s notion of ka run the same course. Since ka is known to emanate from the Tower itself, does that mean the Island’s will is served through the Temple itself? I’ll cover that in Part 3 of this series.

Next up: The Island, Destiny, and Ka.