Lost: A good story that will fall short of the Good Story?

Jeff Jensen is seein’ what I’m seein’ in Lost’s Jacob-unLocke storyline—an unfolding Yin/Yang view of the Island:

Jacob isn't ''good,'' per se — he's just capable of giving life. Put another way: Jacob is the god of beginnings. He is The Alpha. The Man in Black? Not evil — he's the god of endings. He is the Omega. The beginning and the end. Polar, warring opposites, but absolutely necessary for life to bloom (Alpha) and to have form (Omega). Both are necessary for anything to have meaning. Jacob unchecked leads to chaos; Man In Black unchecked leads to annihilation. Both need to exist in balance; both need to be equally weighted rocks on the scale.

Jensen may be premature on his assessment. After all, we’ve only seen the Man in Black unchecked and how that leads to annihilation; we haven’t seen Jacob “unchecked” yet so we don’t know if such a state would lead to chaos.

I tend to think Jensen is getting this right, though (with the caveat that the writers are famous for misdirection). And if he’s right, then Lost will end up being at best a good story but not the Good Story. In the Good Story of Christianity, good and evil are not in balance as warring-but-equal opposites. Satan is not God’s dark counterpart in an unending cycle of existence. Instead, evil is an aberrant intrusion into God’s world, and will be destroyed in the final act of the Bible’s linear drama.

(By the way, stories that track with the Good Story celebrate this truth. There is no “balance of powers" in Narnia: Jadis the White Witch loses to Aslan. There are no eternally-existent polar opposites in Middle Earth: Sauron is snuffed out when the Ring of Power is destroyed.)

It will be interesting to see if Lost tracks with the Good Story or simply ends as nothing more than a good story.