Tag Archives: Lost

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!

Warning: This essay is long and bizarre and kind of oddly personal at times. If you’d prefer some pre-finale reading that is a little more straightforward, I highly recommend this article on NPR’s Monkey See blog. There’s also io9′s list of 50 questions Lost needs to answer, if that’s more your thing. And, of course, if you haven’t checked it out yet, there’s Michael’s really funny Lost Finale Fantasy Game (which could easily be adapted to a drinking game, if you’d rather).

On September 22, 2004, I talked my mom into letting me commandeer our family’s big TV so that the two of us could watch the new show by the guy who did Alias. It sounded a little too high concept to us and I remembered watching Gilligan’s Island on Nick-at-Nite and seeing how labored that premise became. Then Oceanic 815 crashed, the show’s title whooshed into view with a discordant noise playing in the background and I was Lost.

And I have been Lost for the last six years, emotionally, mentally, physically at times.  Since this show premiered I graduated high school, went to college, and joined the adult world. And all that time I’ve felt more than slightly adrift. I didn’t fit in at my high school, I REALLY didn’t fit in at my college, I hate my job, I feel disconnected to the universe around me, I sometimes suspect that everyone hates me. I don’t mean to make it sound like I’m this morbidly unhappy person; I’m not. And it’s not to say that I haven’t had some good times. But there’s this part of me that would like to blow it all up and start over again. I wonder what kind of person I’d be if I could go back in time and change the decisions I made. What would I do if I could go back and undo all the pain and bullshit?

*****

In a way, I don’t disagree with this New York Times article. I do watch Lost for the questions. It’s just that my questions are not the same as the ones he’s talking about. I don’t really care about what the light is or why Libby was in the mental institution or what the deal with Walt was. I mean, it is fun to speculate about it and I’ve certainly spent more time than is reasonable writing about it, but in the grand scheme of Lost, I can kind of take or leave the point-by-point mythology. The questions I do care about are the ones the characters have been talking about since day one: does free will exist? Is there a God? If there is, is he even on our side? Can we shape ourselves – our damaged, broken selves – into the people we want to be? And I think that’s why, despite my occasional whining and annoyance with the pacing, I’ve kind of loved this year and especially loved the flash sideways.

After all, if Lost really has been about the characters and their journey, then it makes sense to look at where they would be had they not gone on this journey. And how heartbreaking has it been to come to the realization that, all in all, they are vastly better off without the island, without Jacob, and without us. There is probably some twist to it all, but has there been anything sadder than seeing the kind, well-adjusted person Ben could have been.

That said, I don’t think this season is saying that the castaways’ lives (and, by extension, given how much I’ve personalized this show, my life) could be better. I remember reading a quote from Damon Lindelof about Jack’s plan to set off the bomb and how it was false heroism. Jack’s solution to the problems of the last five years was to run away from them, stick his fingers in his ears, and pretend none of it ever happened. As much shit as we gave the show for last season’s finale, (where everyone wanted to set off a nuke because they loved someone who didn’t love them back), is it really that hard to believe that Jack (JACK!!!) would think that way? And maybe the idea all along was that we weren’t necessarily supposed to be backing this plan? Either way, the point here isn’t that we can wish ourselves some kind of alternate universe where everything is better. The point is what that alternate universe can tell us about the real world; the world we live in.

I’ll circle back to that but, speaking of Jack, one of the things I’ve always wondered about him is whether he is a worse character than Tony Soprano and Don Draper or simply a less likeable one. For all that I rag on the guy, it’s not as if the show isn’t aware of the fact that Jack is a controlling, needy, stubborn jerk whose problems, compared to the conman who killed an innocent guy or the Korean gangster who ignored his wife or the man who was PARALYZED BY HIS OWN FATHER, seem a little smaller. And, in a way, I think I may have to come to terms with the fact that I’m way more like Jack than any of the other characters.

As much as we don’t want it to be, Lost has been Jack’s journey and it’s been his journey from a self-righteous, self-obsessed guy who needs to be needed to…what exactly? Now he’s the island’s protector: a position that one gets by being manipulated and holds by tricking miserable, lost people into coming to the island and then watching as they all die (or, if need be, presiding over a mass murder of all of them except the “worthy” ones). Is that really the note this show wants to go out on? Has Jack accepted his destiny, or is he just assuming another leadership position because people expect him too.

And now, a quick tangent about religion. A lot of this season has been about faith, as Jack came around to being a person who believes what Locke told him back in season one: we are here for a reason. But what has it actually been telling us about religion? That God (Jacob) actually doesn’t know that much more than we do. That he’s just as flawed and corrupted as we are? That the Devil, though he’s a bastard, was actually kind of fucked-over too? And that all of them are stuck in this cycle of violence and betrayal that doesn’t seem to end.

*****

So what do I want to see on Sunday? I want Sawyer and Juliet to finally get that cup of coffee. I want Jack to stop judging his own worth in terms of how other people need him. I want Locke to still exist in some dimension somewhere. I want Desmond to find Penny again. I want Kate to get shot in the face. But, most of all, I want that stupid island to be destroyed. Yes, I agree with the Smoke Monster, because, after knowing everything I know now, I think the Losties are the only people who can break the terrible cycle that’s been acted from the prehistory of “Across the Sea” to the island’s present (and, if I may make a quick aside, I think that’s the reason why “Across the Sea” makes sense in the context it did. We now understand that Jacob is as much a victim as anyone else is on this show, and we know what’s at stake). In the end, I think Jack is going to have to make a choice, whether to let this island keep doing what it’s doing to people or to stop it forever.

And the only reason our Losties are in this history-altering position is, paradoxically, because they’ve been through everything they’ve been through. Sideways Jack is a happy guy. Regular Jack is a guy who can save the world. I think, in the end, what this season has said to me is that reflecting on what could have been may be useful, but only because of what it says about what is. Its valuable for me to look at the choices I made and wonder how much better off I would have been if I had made different ones. But only because I can use that knowledge to make myself a better person in the real, actual future. It sounds syrupy and maudlin, but as someone whose mental peculiarities cause him to torture himself over his past decisions, it’s kind of freeing to me to think this way.

And that’s why I watch Lost. Because, for the last six years, no matter what personal stuff I’ve been going through, it’s been there for me. I’ve made friends, grown closer to my brother, stretched my own mental faculties, and even developed the beginnings of theories about art and aesthetics and storytelling all through the prism of this weird little show. And I’ve had a ball doing it. Lost doesn’t owe me anything except two and a half more great hours. But maybe that’s not your experience and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Lost is something different to each of us and, depending on how you’ve been watching the show, you will obviously have different expectations for Sunday night. If you’ve been hanging on the mythology and puzzling over the mysteries then, in all likelihood, you’re looking for a finale that will, in some way, justify the 100+ hours of your life you’ve spent watching Lost. That’s not unrealistic and that’s not unfair. But I personally have had a really great time watching this show and I don’t need the finale to justify that experience or provide me with something that lets me say, “Now I can judge that the experience of watching Lost was worthwhile.”

In the end, I think Lost is a very good show that falls just short of greatness. And I feel totally comfortable writing that and everything else in this essay without having seen the finale because, at the end of the day, it’s just another episode. I’m expecting it to be a great episode, but I like to think I expect that of every episode. And, regardless of my complaints about Lost’s occasional mishandling of its human side, I think no show has engaged with the medium of television as well as Lost has. If this decade of television really has been similar to the 1970s for cinema, then Lost is its Star Wars: a cultural force that utilizes a booming medium for entertainment in ways we had never dreamt of before.

*****

I am a totally different person that I was in September 2004 – I have met tons of new friends, lived in new places, grown and matured, thought seriously about what I want from life – and yet I still love Lost. In many ways, the show evolved and grew with me. It started as a relatively straightforward character show with some mystery elements and, almost as if it was waiting until I was ready, slowly grew into the kind of intellectually rigorous, structurally demanding mindbender that it is today. I’ve never quite understood the “I Miss Season One” camp of Lost fans because, to me, that show is far less interesting than the one that is telling complete stories over a season (instead of an episode) and bending the ways time and space are used in television narrative. Look at how “Through the Looking Glass” pulls the rug out from under the complacent flashback style of storytelling. Or how season five uses time travel to obscure character motivations and logic so that we see what people are doing and then slowly grow to understand why they’re doing it. And this season has committed itself to telling a story in a completely new dimension whose implications and meanings it has stubbornly refused to give the audience.

I hope I don’t sound like an unobjective, smitten fanboy. I could well be disappointed by the finale (and by the resolution of the flash sideways, which is my biggest question heading into Sunday). It’d be easy to just say “it’s a TV show, don’t blow it out of proportion” and it would be even easier to go in actively assuming “The End” will suck so that, at worst, the show simply confirms for me that it doesn’t know what it’s doing. But I think the former is disingenuous (of course it’s just a TV show, but it’s not like I haven’t been writing about it for the last 20 weeks) and the latter is lazy.

I always assumed I’d be sad about the finale, but I’m not. I’m excited. The fact that this episode was coming enabled the creators to make ones like “The Constant” and “The Incident.” It revitalized this show and made it into a truly vibrant and unique piece of art. I’m happy about all of that but I’m also happy that this show gets to go out when I’m still excited to watch it, unlike pretty much every TV show ever. In some alternate universe somewhere, Lost is gearing up for a seventh season and I’m doing something else and we’re both lesser for it. So this weekend I’m not going to stress or worry or obsess. Instead I’m going to crack open a can of Dharma Initiative beer (or a glass of Dharma Initiative Box Wine) and toast to the odd and enjoyable run of a show that, frankly shouldn’t have even gotten this far.

See you in another life.