Two television shows, one quite successful, the other a week from being cancelled, have tried to make headway with a similar ongoing question:

How much of our lives is fate? That is, random happenstance out of our control.

How much of our lives is about choices, decisions, that we make?

And I came back to these themes today, while editing a batch of stories we ran on a plane crash in Mangalore, India, in which 158 people died … but eight did not.

From what I can make of the stories, the survival of eight people from a plane carrying 166 people was about where they happened to be sitting.

If, while during a plunge off the end of the runway and into a ravine you somehow were not killed or knocked out or too seriously injured … you had a chance to walk away from a plane that was torn open in several places.

If you were conscious and could move, you could escape. Eight people did, somehow or other. Four of them were not badly hurt at all. One was described as having no significant injuries.

The rest? If they were not already dead by the time the plane came to a halt, they either were unconscious or trapped … and died in the fire that broke out.

So, the survivors: Pure, dumb luck?

It gets a bit more complicated. In addition to the eight who were alive, the last we heard (one was in critical condition) … were nine people who held tickets to Air India Express Flight 812 … but who did not get on the plane.

As our story on four of those people makes clear, the reasons they didn’t get on the plane, in Dubai (up the road from me in Abu Dhabi) varied. One guy forgot. Just forgot. He thought maybe he was flying the next day. One woman thought the plane left at 1:15 p.m. instead of 1:15 a.m. Another was told by his employer that he had to stay in town to deal with a workplace crisis. The fourth simply “changed his mind” and booked a later flight on another airline.

Several of these people mentioned divine intervention.  That would seem to place them directly into the “fate” camp — with God controlling every aspect of their lives. Which also puts them in line with the basic teachings of both Islam and Christianity. A fourth mentioned “luck” … which at root is more of a pagan concept, with an undertow of “perhaps something I did” (free will) was influenced by the gods (lower-case “g”) or the universe. Or something.

We find these concepts fascinating, in the abstract. Once we step back from the horror of a crash that killed 158 people.

The free will vs. fate debate is what has fueled two current U.S. television shows. “Lost,” which is a highly successful property that began with, yes, a plane crash … and “Flash Forward,”  which showed the future to everyone on Earth and has investigated how characters react to “knowing” what will happen — and whether the future can be changed even if we know what it is “supposed” to be.

The final episode for both TV shows is in the next few days. For “Lost,” on Sunday night, it is a grand finale. The climax to seven seasons, and event that all TV-ophiles await with great expectation. For “Flash Forward,” its final episode next week is just … the end. It was cancelled, sadly (well, most of the time) and it apparently will just flicker into nothingness with the last episode the producers made. No wrap-up episode here.

In both TV shows, the ideas of “do we choose … or do forces greater than us choose for us” are constant. Should we struggle to control our destinies, if that is even possible (and a sort of Western notion, I believe)? Or do we try to sit back and accept that we are just spectators in our own lives?

Here, we had a plane crash that brought the debate into sharp focus.

Did some divine being spare those eight people on the plane by giving them seat assignments that allowed them to escape before the jet caught fire? Or did some of them perhaps say, “No, I want a seat in Row 20” or “I prefer the one in Row 7 to the one in Row 25.” Making it about choice?

And the people who didn’t get on the plane at all. At least two were about choices — an employer who said “can’t go” and a man who decided “later flight.” One seems pure,  dumb luck — forgot what day I was flying. And the fourth is more complicated still — with the husband of a woman convincing her to wait a day and fly this morning (on the doomed flight) … but with her thinking it was an afternoon flight and not a morning flight. In this case, then, a choice to go from a safe plane to a doomed one, followed by dumb luck — mistaking 1:15 a.m. for 1:15 p.m.

Fascinating stuff.

I suppose most of us like to think we control our lives to some degree. For some of us, we like the idea of near-complete control. That even what seem to be non-choices are, in fact, choices. (We choose to let our spouse talk us into a later date; we choose not to check the reservation; we choose to accept our employer’s demand that we fly on another date.)

I prefer to think we have some control. “Empowering” and all (a word I generally edit out of copy). But upon further review … “not deciding” usually is not really a choice. We don’t have the time or energy to make a rational decision on the zillion actions we take every day.

Sometimes God says it isn’t your time. Or the universe decides your number isn’t up. Or you’re just lucky.

“Lost” and “Flash Forward” examine this in as entertainment.  For those on Air India Express Flight 812, however, the answers to the questions were a matter of life and death.