Goodbye, “Lost”

Last night was the much antic­i­pated, much hyped “Lost” finale. I’ve counted myself a fan of the show for some­thing around a year now, and I’ve seen just about every episode (minus around four which I slept through).

With the series wrapped up, undoubt­edly many the­o­ries regard­ing just what on Earth (if they were even on Earth ;) was going on with Jack, Kate, Sawyer, and their rag­tag band of merry men. Pre­vi­ous to last night’s finale, the writ­ers of “Lost” said in a ret­ro­spec­tive spe­cial that they wanted to make a show that chal­lenged view­ers to think and forced them to engage with the events of the show because every­thing wouldn’t sim­ply be handed to them.

I’m glad they said that. They want us to think about what has hap­pened, and with the finale out there now, I want to offer up a few thoughts. Stop read­ing now if you do not want any spoil­ers. They start now…

So the finale fin­ished up, and as it turns out, for the past sea­son, the “flash side­ways” which we have been see­ing haven’t been an alter­nate real­ity or a dif­fer­ent dimen­sion at all… it has been some sort of after­life. Not Heaven, not Hell, not even Pur­ga­tory, but an after­life formed appar­ently by the group con­scious­ness of the sur­vivors of the plane wreck… and a few oth­ers who weren’t on the plane but got to take part anyway.

What does that mean? It means that for the entire last sea­son, about half of the show has been point­less — the events were already set & done, and we were sim­ply wait­ing for the big reveal that “Oh, hey, guys, wel­come to the church. By the way, you’re dead.”

And I’d per­haps be okay with that if in so reveal­ing that real­ity they bet­ter explained the other half of this past sea­son (the events tak­ing place on the island), but that didn’t hap­pen. Instead, the “we’re all dead” real­iza­tion seemed way too con­trived and served as a mech­a­nism sim­ply for get­ting all of the prin­ci­pal cast together for an emo­tional reunion. Cou­ples reunited. Char­ac­ters we haven’t seen in ages are back. And so on.

But where were Michael & Walt? Where was Mr. Eko? What about Ethan? I don’t recall Richard or Lapidus being present either, and while I don’t recall Miles being at the church, he was at least present in the after­life as Sawyer’s partner.

The argu­ment that the church scene was only for sur­vivors of the Oceanic crash doesn’t work either. Juliet, Desmond, and oth­ers being present there throws that the­ory out of whack.

And how did Hur­ley die? Last time we see him on the island, he was endowed with the duty to pro­tect the island, pre­sum­ably as an immor­tal (or as “immor­tal” as Jacob was, at least). The man in black died & Jack was mor­tally wounded while the “light” was out; Hur­ley, how­ever, sur­vived that whole ordeal and should have been able to live indef­i­nitely until some killed him or the “light” was once again uncorked.

But Hur­ley was present in the after­life. So how did he die? Why is there now a pre­sum­ably large part of island his­tory that we aren’t privy to, despite it involv­ing one of our main characters?

Or per­haps the atom bomb explo­sion at the end of last sea­son killed every­one. Per­haps the island scenes of this past sea­son were the true “flash side­ways” scenes and that the after­life scenes were the only part that was “real.”

Then again, per­haps every­one died after Locke pre­vented the num­bers from being entered into the hatch com­puter years ago. Per­haps Desmond’s acti­va­tion of the fail­safe device killed every­one. It seems as though imme­di­ately after that, Desmond started get­ting weird flashes of mem­ory or knowl­edge he shouldn’t oth­er­wise have… which is about what hap­pened to every­one else in the final sea­son. Per­haps Desmond’s unique phys­i­ol­ogy (resis­tance to elec­tro­mag­netic radi­a­tion, for exam­ple) some­how let him to bet­ter real­ize their sit­u­a­tion, years ahead of every­one else.

And if not, then I must have missed the expla­na­tion for how Desmond wound up naked in the woods with pre­scient knowl­edge of var­i­ous cir­cum­stances. What­ever the case here, I’m pretty cer­tain that the entire series was actu­ally about Desmond. Every­one else just hap­pened to get involved inci­den­tally. Even the all impor­tant Jacob didn’t really seem to do any­thing than to pro­vide impor­tant expo­si­tion at var­i­ous points.

But every­one, includ­ing Jacob, was already dead accord­ing to my Desmond the­ory, so Jacob really didn’t pro­vide any­thing that ulti­mately amounted to a hill of beans… Jack’s father’s expo­si­tion at the close of the series pro­vided a big­ger bomb­shell than Jacob ever spoke of.

Frankly, I was hop­ing that once we real­ized that the cof­fin was empty, the cam­era would pan around to see Jack’s father who was, like Locke pre­vi­ously, now the smoke mon­ster. Now that would have made for an inter­est­ing ending.

As it is, the series ended with a two and a half hour long episode that wasn’t really any dif­fer­ent from any other episode in the last sea­son. The only rea­son the episode was so long any­way was to cram in as many “we got our mem­ory back” moments as pos­si­ble — ulti­mately turn­ing the episode into one of those emo­tional flash­back episodes that so many series end on. (Thank good­ness that the “Star Trek” writ­ers of the var­i­ous series actu­ally ended series with strongly writ­ten, inter­est­ing episodes that didn’t use the flash­back cop-out!)

And I think that’s what bugs me most about last night’s finale. A show that has con­stantly chal­lenged its view­ers to think, to sec­ond guess what we see on screen, ends with an emo­tional char­ac­ter reunion that ignores pretty much every ques­tion which the show has asked and failed to answer.

Even the cli­max of the episode — the final con­fronta­tion between Jack & Locke — felt hol­low and dis­ap­point­ing. While there was enough drama in the scene to feel like a cli­mac­tic scene, that drama paled in com­par­i­son to, for exam­ple, the atom bomb scene between Sawyer, Juliet, and Jack. Then the episode dragged on for another forty-five min­utes, fur­ther into answer-free char­ac­ter reunion ter­ri­tory. Only now there was noth­ing to drive the remain­der of the plot, no more chal­lenge, no more con­flict. (Unless you count the chal­lenge of pro­vid­ing much needed expo­si­tion or rev­e­la­tion, but the writ­ers didn’t seem to want to touch that much last night.)

I seem to recall an inter­view or sound­byte wherein the writ­ers said that every time they heard a fan the­ory regard­ing what was going on, they inten­tion­ally tried to not use it. Peo­ple have been the­o­riz­ing that every­one was dead since sea­son one. Turns out they were right.

Too bad.

I will say I was glad to see that Vin­cent the dog didn’t show up in the “after­life,” thereby avoid­ing a pet peeve of mine!