Snap Review: "LOST Finale"
Warning: CRUSHING, SERIES-RUINING SPOILERS AHEAD. DO NOT READ BEFORE WATCHING THE LOST FINALE.
OK...In spite of my better judgment, I liked the "Lost" finale. It was sad, epic, funny and it felt emotionally satisfying. In the end, it was about the people who landed and how they learned to live together, not about the island and its special brand of baffling magic. I get that, and overall, it was probably the right decision. A finale that was more focused on explaining away all the fantasy elements and minutae wouldn't have really worked dramatically. (A lot of people got obsessed with stuff like Walt's powers in the early seasons, or why everything was influenced by Ancient Egypt, or the Dharma food drops...but I knew they'd never bother to go back and explain that stuff. Just no way to do that and make it an actual episode. Like in a David Lynch film, the surreal touches are just there to be surreal, and really exploring them robs them of their appeal.) But having said all that, it's still quite bold of Cuse and Lindelof to even try to get away with such an obvious trick. They made up an entirely new story for Season 6 as a pretext to abandon the main narrative that has dominated the entire series up until that point. By inventing "alternate reality" at the beginning of 6 and then focusing almost the entire final episode on it, Cuse and Lindelof escape the corner they painted themselves in over 5 seasons. To torture the metaphor, they basically said..."Well, this whole room is painted, but look next door! A room without any paint at all! What's going on over there?" And because they thought up a nice ending to THAT story, one that gave them an excuse to explore all the main love stories that have played out over 6 seasons, the audience is tempted to overlook the fact that essentially NONE of the main questions get answered, and none of the big plot points of the first 4 seasons are dealt with in any way. (Seriously, imagine trying to tell people watching the Season 3 finale or something what happened in the last episode. "So, um, they were all in this parallel universe, or it seemed that way, but it's actually where they all go when they die. And the island is a cork holding in an evil presence." Not a single thing that would have seemed really relevant to the show back then - like the significance of Walt and Aaron, or island's ability to heal people and hurtle them through time, or the strange experiments of the Dharma Initiative, or Libby's peculiar backstory, or the meaning of the "numbers" and their origin - means anything or gets any sort of conclusion.) I don't know...this was a great episode of "Lost," but I sort of feel duped. It feels more like a season finale than the end of the show.If you think about it, you could start Season 7 really easily in the Fall and it would still totally make sense. - Rose and Bernard wake Jack up in the jungle. (Presumably, Vincent wandered over from their camp.) He's injured but he'll be fine.- Hurley is now figuring out what they need to do in order to continue "protecting" the island. Hurley begins to discover he has Jacobian powers, but hesitates about using them. There's now tension between Hurley and Jack over who is really calling the shots.
- Ben gets jealous, maybe starts plotting how he can get rid of Hurley and Jack and run the show himself (?)
- Sawyer, Desmond, Kate, Claire et. al. return to the US. Kate and Claire discover that they will need to bring Aaron back to the island, as he's the rightful heir to Jacob, not Hurley. Unless they bring Aaron back...mysterious unspeakable bad things will happen. (Possibly involving Alvar Hanso, the founder of the Hanso Foundation, which funded the Dharma Initiative? Remember him?)
- We follow Richard as he struggles to begin a new normal life in the real non-island world.And so on. My reasoning is, if this were truly going to be a FINAL episode that would give us all ACTUAL closure, there should have been a bit more of an effort to give it a real END. The island is destroyed or de-magic-ified, or a perpetual motion machine where these events are just going to repeat themselves ad infinitum. Either of those would be an ending. Ignoring the lion's share of the show's genuine existential questions while setting most of your main characters off on new adventures, after assuring that they will all eventually meet again in the afterlife? I guess that's an ending, but it's not a real ENDING ending, if that makes sense. Part of me almost feels like they've intentionally left themselves with a loophole in case they ever want to do a follow-up movie or mini-series. I know they SAID they wouldn't ever do this...but then why not really close the sucker out?
2 comments
First, I thought they certainly did give us an ENDING ending--the circle of life continues. The Island didn't need to/shouldn't have been demagicified because it was a well to the source of all life/good/evil/death, everything. And the ENDING ending was that it found its next steward: A capable and compassionate man named Hugo. It was also the ENDING ending that the evil manifestation that was the smoke monster was defeated. Hugo and Ben began their reigns as Island guardians with a very minimal risk to the Island. They had navigated through tremendous threats and had emerged victorious on the other side. Epic.
And for the rest of your unanswered questions? The writers gave you the Lincoln Logs. You have to build the cabin.
Here are some examples:
1. Ancient Egyptian Influence - was because clearly ancient peoples had been discovering and exploring the Island since the beginning of man, practically. They settled there. They built statues. They fought. They destroyed. They died.
2. Walt's Powers - Walt was a boy with telekinetic powers that were enhanced by the Island's light. On the Island though? He wasn't much more than a pawn in the plot to get Jack to operate on Ben. And maybe a mild curiosity.
3. Dharma Food Drops - Arranged by Alpert, Linus, and the Others. They needed Dharma food stocks for their people, and made arrangements from the mainland. Under the Dharma brand name, they had been sending food stocks to feed the people of Dharmaville for years (post-Dharma).
Why didn't we get a lot of these answers last night? Because we had most of the Lincoln Logs already. The puzzle was already nearly complete, and all that was really left for the finale was to take care of the Smoke Monster, assign a new guardian to the Island, and resolve the fate of those who survive. Done!
I think upon repeat viewings of the series, you'll see all those pieces fall into place for you.
This ending concludes the Season 6 arc, and it does so quite well, but save for getting all the couples back together, it really has very little to do with the lion's share of "Lost" episodes. I'm sure I'll be able to go back over the entire series and fill in a lot of the gaps myself, but by that line of reasoning, it really doesn't matter what they do in the final episode. I could always invent an explanation that makes sense to me.
I sort of feel like the litmus test for a truly satisfying conclusion to a show would be, does it deliver on the show's central premise? Does it give us the one thing we've ALWAYS wanted to see actually happen on the show. If you asked me after Seasons 1-5 what the finale of "Lost" should be, I'd say "we finally get to understand the island's true nature and why everyone was brought there."
And the finale says: "The island is full of magic. Everyone was brought there so Jack and Hurley could protect a cork that was holding back evil. Also, hey, look over here, they all meet up again when they die!" It's not a complete wash, but it's not a total victory either.
