Chronicles of Deaths Forestalled

Televisual and serialized storytelling has long been haunted by a Scheherazadean sense of the relation between storytelling and death. Like that famous narrator’s death-defying fabrications in Arabian Nights, the longer a television show goes on, the more it reminds us that an inevitable end is coming, every new episode only forestalling this death-like cessation of its characters and fictional world. Damon Lindelof, he of the generation of television writers that became “showrunners,” leans into this connection more than most. In the finale of his and Carlton Cuse’s influential Lost (2004-2010), still famously (and only semi-fairly) hated many years after the fact, the pair outraged viewers by directly confronting the link between death and the end of a story: the episode organized itself around the “revelation” that, eventually, all of these characters will die (no doubt reminding audience members that, hey, you’re going to die one day, too).

In retrospect, Lindelof’s evident fascination with the link between death and storytelling carries over from to his and Tom Perrotta’s (2014-2017), which recently concluded its stellar three-season run. Adapted from Perrotta’s 2011 book, is set in a contemporary world that is recognizably our own, but for one major difference: on October 14, 2011, two percent of the world’s population (140 million