Powell's Books Lost blog: Through the Looking Glass

This is it – this year's final Powell's Books Lost blog post for this season. The episode was a mindbender, pulling together threads from previous episodes and previous seasons, knotting them up, and leaving new ends of narrative trails to follow. And the mirror-twinning aspect was in full effect.

There was also something I've been holding on to for a while; since “Not in Portland” and the Clockwork-Orangish overstimulation chamber, I've been looking for nods to Kubrick. The finale sealed it. The Looking Glass hatch doesn't have a will of its own like HAL, but both seal off human communication, and many of the shots in the Looking Glass recall shots from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” There's also a bit in there about the strange symbols seen throughout the season, again with a nod to Kubrick.

And since the Minkowski thing was pretty much verified (the guy on the freighter answered “Minkowski”), I tried to work out a good way to explain how this works – because it's not all that difficult once it's understood. It works like hacking a CSS file. So here it is:

DES HACKING FATE'S CSS FILE

Any web site has two basic elements, content and presentation. All presentation is controlled by a single file (or sometimes a few different ones, for flexibility). Think of the Powell's Books site; there are thousands upon thousands of pages, and they all have a consistent look to them. That look is controlled by four CSS files if you look at the source code).

Change one element in one of those CSS files -- like the color of the banner -- and the banners on all of those thousands of pages change.

If we're dealing with Minkowski space (and I think we are), the past/present/future are all existing simultaneously, just like all the pages in the Powell's web site are existing simultaneously. We just don't experience them all at once. So when Des alters the outcome of one of his flashes, it's like he's hacking fate's CSS file. He makes one change, and the entire site changes, every page, past/present/future.

But something to consider is if a site isn't well-designed, you can break some pages when you change the CSS file. I've done it plenty of times. And that raises the question: Are we dealing with a poorly-designed site/world? In a poorly-designed world, one CSS change could break the logic of some of the other pages in the site – like the dead having never died in the first place (like Christian).

If we go back to all the various theosophical/gnostic elements alluded to throughout the season, we can look at how those traditions view our world. And they're not kind. In fact, in the gnostic tradition, god didn't create this world, because god is perfect and this world is far from it. That tradition, laid out most clearly in the Nag Hammadi library, suggests that this is a poorly-designed world made by a demiurge that exists between us and the perfect god. Their line of thinking is that the way to get around this is through accessing wisdom, as opposed to faith. Think of this demiurge as a programmer.

Taken all together, we have a poorly-designed (i.e. poorly-coded, poorly-programmed) world having its CSS file hacked by someone who isn't sure what he's doing, Desmond. And he's breaking some of the pages.