Lost – “The End”

There is no time loop. It wasn’t all just a dream. The sideways didn’t represent some kind of cavalry to stop the Man in Black. And the show didn’t end with Jack and Ben, sitting on the beach, talking about how badly they wanted to kill each other.

I’ll get to the white light, the cork, Hurley and Ben’s tenure as island protector and Assistant to the Island Protector, the re-emergence of Christian Shepard, and what they died for. But, to me, the key to understanding this finale came about a half hour in (maybe, I sort of lost track of time there). You probably remember the scene. Juliet goes to see Sun and Jin, gives Sun an ultrasound, and makes them FEEL IT. Then she gets on an elevator, crossing paths with Sawyer. Spontaneously, me and people I was watching this with all made the following sound:

“AHHHHHHHHHHOOHHHHHNNNNOOOOOO”

In that moment, either your heart leaped at the possible reunion of Sawyer and Juliet and then was slightly crushed when they just walked by each other, or it didn’t. If, like me, you were an emotional wreck in that moment (and the later one where they finally did reunite), you probably loved this finale, what it did for the characters, what it said, and (just as importantly) what it did not say. If you didn’t, then I’m guessing this episode didn’t do what you wanted it to do.

What I’m trying to say is that “The End” proceeded exactly according to the agenda we’ve been following all season: giving each (or almost each, but we’ll get to that) character resolution and some measure of a happy ending, while filling in just enough mythological details to crush whatever your theory was without coming out and giving you the answer. This season hasn’t been about the Magic Light at the Heart of the Island and the two demigods fighting over it. Its been about that cup of coffee, and the long and strange journey it took for Sawyer and Juliet to finally agree to go get it.

But let’s step back for a second and look (somewhat briefly, since its getting late) at what happened tonight. On the island, Jack took over as island protector and started heading toward the light. Sawyer went off to go find Desmond but was quickly caught by Ben and Smokey at the well. Sawyer basically escapes, Smokey kidnaps Desmond (who had been rescued from the well by Rose and Bernard!), and Jack keeps going to the light because that’s where everyone’s headed anyway. Eventually, he meets up with Team Smokey and they have a really awesome staredown. Smokey tells Jack that he’s going to destroy the island and Jack, in a moment that pretty much redeemed all the terrible Jack things I’ve had to put up with over the last six years, says “I’m going to kill you.”

Meanwhile, Miles meets up with a still alive(!) Richard and the two of them set out to blow up the plane since they missed the memo about that never having really mattered to the Smoke Monster at all. They get on an outrigger and start paddling, mainly just to taunt us all one last time (seriously, there was even a rain storm brewing). Instead of finding a time-traveling Sawyer and Juliet, however, they come across Lapidus (!!!) who is also still alive. Lapidus has a way better idea than blowing up the airplane: using it to get the hell off the island.

Smokey, Desmond, and Jack split off from the group and head to the light. They lower Desmond down to the heart of the island, where Desmond finds…something. Let’s call it a cork. He pulls the cork out and the water drains from the center and it seems that the light goes out. The island starts sinking and a triumphant Smokey, though trapped in Locke’s body and now vulnerable to harm, knocks out Jack and makes his way to his escape ship (which was the Elizabeth, right?) Meanwhile, Miles gets ahold of Ben, Kate, Sawyer, and Hurley and tells them to book it over to Hydra Island. Also there’s some business where a tree falls on Ben, but then he’s okay and no one ever talks about it again (I get we had to redeem Ben, but that was, in my opinion, the clumsiest part of this episode).

Everyone meets up back at the cliff from “The Substitute,” but because the island is sinking, that cliff is falling apart. Jack leaps at Smokey like he’s in 300 and the two have a pretty epic fight. Smokey stabs Jack, but then Kate shoots Smokey. Easily the best thing Kate has ever done in the entire run of this show. Everyone else gets to the cliff, but Jack decides he needs to go back and fix whatever Desmond did. Hurley and Ben go with Jack, Kate and Sawyer head to the plane (and talk a reluctant Claire into joining them).

Back at the cave, Jack ends his reign as island protector and transfers the power to an emotional Hurley. He goes down to the light, rescues Desmond, and restores the cork. The light returns, the pond refills, and Jack seems to die. Hurley asks Ben to be his co-leader and Michael Emerson responds by making us all cry with the amazing way he plays that scene. There’s also an indication that Hurley’s reign as leader is going to be a little more benevolent than Jacob’s was. Jack wakes up outside the cave (seemingly around where the Man in Black’s body washed out). He crawls back to the bamboo field and Vincent comes to join him (just like in the Pilot). Jack watches as the Ajira plane with Frank, Richard, Miles, Kate, Sawyer, and Claire leaves the island.

Meanwhile, in the Sideways, Jin and Sun see their baby on an ultrasound, Sayid saves Shannon, Kate helps Claire deliver Aaron, Jack fixes Locke, Juliet asks Sawyer out for coffee, and they all FEEL IT. Eventually they wind up at a church where Jack, who is the last to FEEL IT, does so when he finds his father’s coffin. But Christian isn’t inside, he’s standing there and talking to Jack. They all head into the church where inside is a decent amount of 815ers. Everyone hugs and is happy to see each other and then Christian opens the door to the church and they move onto what’s next.

There are three ways to look at “The End” and I think the best way to evaluate it is by going into each one.

How does “The End” work as an episode of television?

Quite well, I think. My biggest complaint about it is in many ways reflective of my biggest complaint about Lost as a story. There’s a little too much marching from location-to-location, zigging and zagging through plot points in a way that feels too rushed and too guided. This is especially true of the on-island action. Everybody moves to the cave. Then they move to the cliff. Then they move back to the cave again. Obviously it was all necessary to tell the story and get to the really good, impactful parts, but the pacing was a little wonky at time and I think it could have all been handled a little more artfully. At times you could feel the hands of the writers pushing everyone to the points they needed them to be.

That said, once “The End” got everybody to those points, it didn’t disappoint. I loved all the little callbacks and reminders and small character moments, the stuff like Hurley’s “I have a bad feeling about this” or Sawyer saying “Thanks, Doc” in the hospital. I thought the stuff at the light was well-played and the transition of power from Jack to Hurley was nicely done. The action was good and the suspense and tension boiled really well. But mostly, I found “The End” incredibly moving. Just thinking about Sawyer and Juliet, or Ben apologizing to Locke outside the church, or Kate telling Jack how much she missed him gets me going again. Those scenes (and many others) were powerful and they were more-or-less perfect. If nothing else, “The End” was an emotionally satisfying episode of Lost that brought closure to these characters in a way that was certainly tear-inducing, but not overly maudlin or forced. And really, we couldn’t ask for much more than that.

What does “The End” mean for Season Six?

This is one that will take more time but, after letting it sit, here’s what I’ve come up with.

The flash sideways isn’t an alternate universe or some kind of world constructed by Smokey or Jacob as a tool in their war. Its something far simpler and infinitely more complex than that. The Sideways is an afterlife. It was, like we’ve theorized so often about the island, a purgatory. And only by coming together and reuniting as a group could everybody let go and move on to what’s next.

I’m not 100% sure that’s a correct interpretation, but I feel like it’s good enough to get us started. I’m not totally satisfied with a “we’re all dead, this is heaven” style ending, but it also makes perfect thematic sense. Season 5 was the science season. That was the year where quantum physics and formulas could explain everything. But this year has been about faith. Faith in the island. Faith in the light that lies at its heart. Faith in the demigods trusted to protect it. Faith that all of this really did happen for a reason. So I’m willing to accept an ending that builds on that faith and carries its implications through to their logical end.

And, while I’m complaining, this also wasn’t some kind of ending that retroactively makes the flash sideways make a lot more sense. As Alan Sepinwall points out in his review, the stories they told for the first 16 hours of this season are still largely hypothetical stories and knowing what we know now doesn’t necessarily make the sideways stuff from “The Package” any more interesting.

But regardless of that, what I am satisfied with is where we left these people. Remember what Jacob said in “What They Died For” when talking about why he selected them to be candidates. They were all lonely, broken people. And it wasn’t the island or some magical light that fixed them; it was each other. The Sideways showed them the happier lives they could have had without the island. But it also showed them how hollow and empty those lives were because, in the end, they were missing out on the single most important experience any of them had. They missed out on the bonds and relationships they formed on the island and they also missed out on the people they became as a result of being there. Maybe we didn’t need to have that point delivered in 6,000 scenes of people touching each other and having the memories rush back to them, but it created enough powerful moments and gave such wonderful closure to the arcs that we’ve been tracing for six years that I’m willing to overlook the structural redundancy (and the fact that Sayid and Shannon were together for like a week and never had the most emotionally realistic relationship).

In a way, this year really has just been a sci-fi retelling of It’s a Wonderful Life. And if I prefer something a little darker and grittier and more based in science, then I’ll always have season 5. But Lost is a more optimistic show than that and, to my surprise, a more spiritual one. At the end of this story was death, but Lost ultimately buys into the notion of death as a beginning.

What does “The End” mean for Lost as a series?

Short answer: I’ll get back to you on that.

But, as of right now, what people obviously hate about this episode is the way it casts off the show’s meta-mysteries and basically didn’t address them at all. But that’s by design. The questions of the island and the light and Jacob and Smokey and time travel matter, but they really on matter in terms of how our characters experienced them. And, ultimately, its just a question of how much you can come to terms with that.

There’s not nearly enough there to provide us with closure on every single point. But that’s what this season (and, by extension, this show) has been about: there are certain basic truths that, in the end, just aren’t quite capable of being understood. That’s a cop-out, but at least its a thematically resonant, emotionally earned cop-out. I imagine that upon rewatching the show, we will know enough to theorize and fill in some of the gaps ourselves. But I also imagine that it won’t entirely hold up as a unified work; that there will be a number of legitimate loose threads that the show never addressed (and, on the Walt thing, does anyone have any theories about why he and Michael were left out of the purgatory party? Does it have to do with the fact that Michael is still trapped on the island as one of the whispers? And what about Daniel and Charlotte and Miles and Ana-Lucia?).

So, in the end, what was Lost? I stand by what I wrote on Friday: objectively, its a very good show that falls just short of greatness. But it also pushed television forward and used it to try something completely new and kind of crazy. The lesson to take away from Lost is not its failures, but its successes. Lost was ambitious, it was willing to trust its audience, it stretched and bent the medium in new ways, and it was fiercely ambiguous and singular to the end. For better or worse, this show refused to compromise, whether that meant negotiating an end-date or failing to present the answers to questions that we all wanted to know. Maybe publicly promising people answers to those questions wasn’t the best way to go about it, and maybe this show could have been more focused and sharper about its mythology.

But Lost was vibrant and alive and captivating in a way that few TV shows are, and its flaws are a byproduct of its ambitions. It is thanks to that ambition that we got a number of truly great hours of television, stacked with moments that were suspenseful or fun or mind-bending or moving. Lost wasn’t afraid to miss and so it was able to succeed as often as it did.

I can feel my brain starting to shut down, so I’m going to turn it over to you. Do you think more or less of Lost as a series than you did yesterday? Is it possible to cast aside the expectations and demands we had for “The End” as the finale of Lost and just consider it as an episode (and is that hypocritical of me, since all along I’ve been suggesting that Lost doesn’t function on an episodic basis like it used to)? Are you satisfied with “The End,” and with Lost as a whole? I’m certainly not done thinking about these issues, and I don’t know how my opinion will change in the days and weeks to come. Regardless of everything else Lost has been one hell of an experience; one that, as hard as the networks try, will not be duplicated for quite some time.

Jonah’s Score: 95

TUIW Grade: A

P.S. Thanks to all of our wonderful readers for indulging me and going along with these long and unwieldy recaps. I’d also like to thank all of our awesome commenters. Lost is a show that’s best enjoyed as part of a community and its been really fun reading what everybody else has to say about this show. Thanks for making this season such a fun ride and for taking this trip along with us. Namaste and see you in another life!