Puzzle Box Stories

This week my critique group talked about puzzle box stories.  Puzzle box stories have a mystery--or puzzle--at their heart, but the reader is okay with the mystery remaining unexplained in the end because the journey was what was important.  When you have a puzzle box, just looking at the beautiful way it's carved is more important than solving it.  Now, my analytical mind immediatly rejects this analogy, because there's no way I'd buy a puzzle box I couldn't solve just so I could look at it.  However, I can think of examples where this happened, so I understand the idea.

My friend, Eric, brought up two examples, both of which are TV shows that I'm going to spoil by telling you they're puzzle box stories: The OA and Lost.  At this point in the conversation, I got all squinty eyed and skeptical, because while the ending of The OA left me fulfilled and was so beautiful that I cried, and while I have the first season of Lost on DVD because it's great, the ending of Lost was a disappointment and a half.  I think telling you that The OA is a puzzle box story is okay because it really is the journey that matters there and telling you that the mystery doesn't get solved is not going to affect your enjoyment (plus, if you're familiar with Brit Marling's other work, you already know the end will be ambiguous).  Telling you that the mysteries on Lost don't get solved feels more like a warning to not get your hopes up and to pretend the show got canceled when the world building falls apart.

So this got me thinking about what the two shows did differently that makes one fulfilling for me and one not.  It may be an example of "your milage may vary," but there has to be something more.

First, although the mystery drove the story of both examples, it did so in different ways.  In The OA, solving the mystery brought the characters together.  I wanted to watch them figure out the mystery and see how the process of learning changed their lives.  I kept watching because I wanted to know what happened to the characters.  On Lost, however, I kept watching because I wanted answers to the mysteries.  I wanted the characters to solve those mysteries not so they could know but so I could know. I wasn't watching to see what any of the characters would get up to unless it was hoping they'd open the hatch and show me what's in there.  Looking back, the weirdness of the island affected the characters' actions (run away from the smoke monster), but didn't affect their characterizations.  The supernatural elements were a hook and they were an obstacle, but not something that informed on a character arc.  Their interactions and growth came mostly from the non-supernatural hazards of getting along and surviving on a deserted island with limited supplies.  (So-and-so is sick.  How do we get water?  Did you steal my stuff?  How can we send a message to get help?)

I was watching these shows for different reasons, and if my reason for watching is curiosity about mysteries, I'm going to feel betrayed when those mysteries don't get solved.  This is exacerbated by the fact that the Lost show runners regularly gave interviews saying that all would be explained and everything was connected and it was going to be mind blowing.  There were promises made that were not fulfilled.

Second, I believe that in the early seasons of the show, Lost fully intended to tie everything together and explain it all.  They just hadn't sat down and planned it all out yet because they didn't know how long it would run and didn't want to solve everything and then have to do another season.  However, I believe the building mass of mysteries that they accumulated, ones that contradicted each other, ones that were forgotten, ones that lost their horror over time, developed so much weight and built so much suspense that the writers had backed themselves into a corner.  There was no way they could write something satisfying enough.  There was no way they could answer everything in the limited time they had.  So they didn't answer things.  This ending was not because the writers knew better and gave the viewers what they needed rather than what they wanted.  This ending was not for the viewers who needed to not get the answers, but for the writers who needed to not give the answers.