[The following post is about the final episode of Lost, so if you haven’t seen it yet, consider yourself warned.]
Rebecca and I got home from our weekend trip to Hamburg around midnight, and then we stayed up to watch the finale on Hulu. And we were both disappointed. Ok, so the island may not be the afterlife (unless you’re Michael), but the flash-sideways timeline is? What a cop-out.
This last season has been frustrating to say the least. After the third-to-last episode this season, here’s what I wrote:
Since I’ve watched Lost from the beginning, I had faith that there had to be at least some semblance of where the story was going, some architecture to the narrative arc of the show. Sure, maybe not every character was fleshed out, and maybe not every episode was totally storyboarded, but still. But in a show that’s kept its ever-growing audience watching through the use of ridiculously complicated, serial storytelling with astonishing details and countless self-referentialism, you had to believe that there was some
I’ve watched every single episode faithfully, poured over Lostpedia and discussed with friends and family alike. I’ve liked the show so far, even when it got a bit weird (time travel?) and kept going, confident that there was going to be some sort of satisfying arc to the larger five-season narrative. But this week’s episode, “Across the Sea,” (the third to last!) was wholly unsatisfying. And it makes me sad that after having loved the complexity of the entire story, that each time something gets explained, there are five more questions that come after it.
In fact that line in the first minute of this week’s episode: “Every question I answer will simply lead to another question.” might as well be a tagline for the entire show, which to me, is massively disappointing.
Still, two obvious remaining questions (of a thousand):
– The Numbers, in the context of the show, remain random? They seemed almost arbitrary. Ok, yes, they were associated with particular people on Jacob’s cave — but then how/why did they turn up everywhere else in the show?
– Walt?
Many smarter people have written a lot smarter things about Lost, but here’s my favorite lines:
Jack Shafer (Slate): “Finally, did not Lost’s creators promise again and again that the survivors of Oceanic 815 were not in purgatory? They did. So where do they get off making the whole sideways world of Season Six a purgatory in which the inhabitants must come to grips with their lives and deaths before they move on? I call this cheating!”
Seth Stevenson (Slate): “But how does this connect to the intricate plot we’ve been following for six long seasons? Ultimately, the sideways universe is a world completely apart from the saga of the island, and it illuminates nothing about the island’s mythology. It’s simply a place where people who’ve shared a meaningful experience—could be a band of plane crash survivors or could just be some folks who did Outward Bound together—can gather for a final, ethereal hurrah. Presumably, anyone who dies with some issues left to work out enters this dream world along with their friends and loved ones, living a shadow life until it’s time to walk into the white light.
That spooky island that so much blood and treasure were spilled over—the one that holds the key to life and transfixed 20 million viewers each week at its peak? Oh, it’s still out there. Don’t trouble yourself about it. Just join us in this cheesily nondenominational church and let the good times roll. In lieu of a truly clever conclusion, please enjoy watching a minute of slow-motion hugging between the characters. Is that Penny we caught a glimpse of? She doesn’t get any lines, and we have no idea what became of her in the timeline we actually care about, but she’s smiling and her hair looks great, so that’s cool.”
Chadwick Matlin (Slate): “Jack, for the last two years you and I have been engaged in our own struggle of reason vs. faith. At nearly every turn, you told me that the show had written itself into a corner, and the only way out was through a hackneyed trick-door. I didn’t believe you—Lost had righted itself so many times that I was convinced it could do it again.
Now I say to you the same thing Locke said to Eko in Season 2: “I was wrong.” Last night Lost crashed, and crashed hard.”
Mike Hale (The New York Times): “So that was the answer: the island was college, or home, or Outward Bound. The sideways reality was the former passengers of Oceanic 815, plus selected guests like Desmond and Penny, gathering for a self-affirming reunion before heading off into whatever sort of afterlife the swelling white light symbolized. (The producers hedged their bets by placing symbols of various religions inside the church.)
Rendered insignificant, in this scenario, were the particulars of what they had done on the island. Pushing buttons, building rafts, blowing up hatches, living, dying — all the churning action and melodrama that made “Lost” so addictive in its early seasons — none of it was directly connected to this final outcome, beyond that it constituted “the most important part” of all their lives.”
Mary McNamara (Los Angeles Times): “Instead, it turns out the passengers of Oceanic 815 are all dead, victims, if the end-credit imagery is to believed, of the same tragic plane accident that started the whole thing. Six seasons of polar bears, bachelor pad hatches, landlocked ships, personal submarines and a fleet of fallen airplanes, and it was all apparently some sort of shared afterlife experience. Excuse me, but what are we supposed to do with those religious statues full of heroin, with Fionnula Flanagan’s pendulums, with the crazy Frenchwoman and the time shifts and the whole glorious Richard Alpert back story? And what on Earth are we supposed to do with the Dharma Initiative?”
Compare all of these reviews to this concluding line from the NYT’s review of the ’24’ finale: “After eight seasons, it was high time for Jack Bauer to go away. But the series ended in just the right way — leaving viewers wanting just a little bit more.”
