Even More on the Lost Finale…
Yeah, yeah, I know: I kind of blew my Lost wad with my first column on the finale. But the number of arguments I’ve gotten into regarding the finale, the logic (maybe) behind it, and whether or not it was any good is starting to climb. I was going to do a “Five Things to Do With My Life Now That Lost Is Over” column, but in the interest of milking the cow and fueling the debate over the ultimate ending of the show, I figured I had one more of these comprehensive things in me. So, without further ado, I present to you, once and for all, five reasons why the Lost finale, and the final Lost season in general, was great. Stick around for a second opinion afterwards.
Five Reasons Why the Lost Finale Was Great:
1: There Was a Happy Ending.
-I mean, as happy an ending as you can get considering that, when all was said and done, our Lostaways were all dead. But considering all the freaking misery each and every one of them went through over the show’s six seasons, seeing everyone get their closure in the afterlife was incredibly satisfying. Even big bad Ben Linus, although excluded from the final journey into the great beyond, seemed to have come to terms with his life as a villain, and made a serious effort to repent. His apology to Locke and decision to remain in limbo (or whatever) so he could work out his own demons brought redemption to Ben in a way none of us saw coming (or, in some cases, even thought was possible). Not happy enough? I’ll go you one better. It was love that ultimately redeemed everyone; Jack and Kate, Sawyer and Juliet (my favorite Lost couple of all time), Rose and Bernard, Desmond and Penny – love was the catalyst that made them remember. Now that’s a warm and fuzzy ending for a show that had been absolutely ruthless with its characters up to that point.
2: Hurley Didn’t Die.
-Well, retract that. Everyone died, I guess. But at least we didn’t have to see our favorite fried-chicken enthusiast go down in flames or get mauled in a showdown with the Man in Black. That, all joking aside, would have been the biggest tragedy of them all.
3: They Didn’t Sell Out.
-Maybe I’m alone in this (more on that later), but for me, a Lost finale that put whatever questions we hadn’t gotten the answers to yet above what happened to the characters would have been completely inferior to what ultimately was put onscreen. I said it before, and I’ll say it again: Lost is probably the greatest sleight-of-hand TV show ever made. We got hooked because of the crazy stuff happening on the island, but, without even recognizing it, we got more invested in the characters than we did in the mysteries. Or at least that was the idea of the thing. The finale, much as the show has always done, put resolving the characters over resolving the mysteries, and we got those resolutions in some truly wonderful ways. Desmond (it’s implied, at least) got to go home to his wife and son; Ben found redemption as Hurley’s number two, and Richard Alpert, sprouting his first gray hair, finally recovered the joie de vivre the island had sucked out of him over the previous 180-something years of being Jacob’s lackey. I, for one, would much prefer that over a big “aha!” as to why that big peacock-looking thing screeched out “HURLEY!!!” all those years ago.
4. They Did Answer the Important Stuff (or At Least Enough of It).
-As I mentioned in my previous column, there were, for me, three and three questions alone that absolutely, 1000% needed answering going into this final season: what was the monster; why didn’t Richard age; did the nuclear bomb work. Had my memory not failed me, I would have thrown the whispers in the jungle onto that list as well. All four of those questions were answered. To recap: the monster is the Man in Black, aka Jacob’s brother, or at least his disembodied spirit WHAM! Richard doesn’t age because he was afraid he’d go to hell and asked Jacob for eternal life. WHAM! The bomb did work; what we thought was an alternate version of history throughout all of Season 6 was really the afterlife. WHAM!!! And the whispers are the ghosts of men, women and children whose past sins prevent them from leaving the island in death, i.e. double-murderer Michael. WHAM!!! Now: I really, in all honesty, would have loved an explanation for the Egyptian stuff on the Island (I always figured Jacob’s people brought it, but they seem to be hinting he comes from Roman roots. So that doesn’t add up), the women-can’t-have-babies thing, and Walt’s powers. But my enjoyment of the finale – and the show as a whole – doesn’t live and die with those answers. As far as the Walt thing goes, here’s my theory. We’ve seen people who can resist the island’s light (Desmond) and talk to the dead (Miles, Hurley and the Man in Black). These people are evidently “special,” with no further explanation required. Walt was special in that he made birds fly into glass screens. Works for me; can’t say I’ve cared for a long, long time.
5. It Makes Sense.
-Well, at least I think I’ve made moderate sense of it. Take out the flash-sideways from this season and everything we’ve seen actually happened. The island is real, the flashbacks, flashforwards and time-travel were real as well. I know Lindelof and Cuse aren’t the most trustworthy bunch, but I’ll buy that the island wasn’t actually Purgatory or hell or the like.. What we thought was a glimpse at an alternate life this year was really the great hereafter for our Lostaways. Clearly, some had been dead longer than others, since Kate seemed to have outlived Jack (“I missed you so much, Jack”) but Jack was the last one to be enlightened. Hurley and Ben had that conversation that implied a long, prosperous rule over the island. So the flash-sideways life didn’t start, or at least couldn’t be deciphered, until all the Lostaways were dead. More to the point, the sideways world was “the place they built,” according to Christian. What I’m guessing that means is that it was where they could have all the things they thought they wanted before the 815 crash: Hurley was lucky, Desmond had Widmore’s respect, Sawyer and Ben were decent men, etc. But their lives still weren’t complete, because once Jacob touched them, they were destined to end up together when all was said and done. Desmond knew about this place in both realities because…I don’t know, he’s special; let’s go with that (see Number 4). So it was the place the Lostaways’ built where they could be together with their loved ones, ideally. But the entire theme of this season has been choice. They can choose not to join the group and “move on,” as Ben does, for whatever reason. But once they made peace with their lives, deaths, faults and past transgressions, they were able to “let go” of their imperfect lives and move on from their finally completed sideways lives, with Jack’s father leading the way. I think. Either way, that seems like the gist of what happened. It’s been real, Lost.
…But wait! There’s more, and here’s a first for Fame Hype: I have some help on this one.
As I mentioned in my Lost finale recap/rumination/rant, my cousin Frank is one of the folks who was disappointed by what went down in the finale. Now, while I disagree with his ultimate reaction, I have to say he articulated his arguments extremely well when I spoke to him on the phone, and while Rule #1 of my columns is that I am always right, I think this is one of those instances where a second, differing opinion is required. After all, this is now the fourth column where I go on and on and on about how great Lost is, the idea of bringing someone into the discussion that walked away disappointed – and who can voice his complaints in a way that makes sense – is an interesting one. This finale was designed to be polarizing; whether or not that’s a load of crap is your opinion, but as Lost has always told us, there are two sides to every story. And besides, Rule #2 of my columns is that any idea I have is automatically great. So: without further ado, I give you, in his own words through the magic of e-mail, Frank (Not Lapidus), my cousin, the Man of Science to my Man of Faith, with the five reasons why the Lost finale, and the final season in general, sucked.
Why the Lost Finale (and final season) Sucked
1: The Part that Makes Sense… Doesn’t Make Sense.
-Regardless of your level of confusion following the closing minutes of Lost’s final episodes (and I’m not going to even try and make sense of it here), I’ll give them credit that the one aspect of it that they made abundantly clear was that those people in that room all made that place so that they could be together for the rest of eternity… or something. Even if that does make sense to you, however, it makes no sense when you take the history of the show into account. For one thing, Rose and Bernard are there? Why the hell do they want to be there? They’ve spent the better part of the last few seasons avoiding everyone else on the island. Even in the finale they were willing to feed a crippled and beaten Desmond to his own devices just so that they could avoid everybody else. Even more strangely, Sayid and… Shannon? Really? Not Nadia, the woman that he shot himself in the leg for? Not the woman who’d driven him to murder many people over the course of six years in efforts to keep her safe and avenge her death? He wants to spend eternity with… that girl that he only knew for a month and a half that he hooked up with once? And why’s Aaron there? He never even met most of these people. Is he there so he can be with his mom? No one else there decided to spend eternity with their mom, so why would Aaron? Jack’s there with a parent, but Jack and his dad never even got along? When you take a close look and think it over, a lot of that last scene just makes no sense whatsoever.
2: They Didn’t Solve Any Mysteries.
-Walt’s powers? The experiments on Walt? The reasons why certain 815 survivors were kidnapped? The sickness? No one can get pregnant on the island? Polar bears? Miles can talk to dead people? Why did a wheel make the island move? Where did the food drops come from? How the Dharma Initiative kept going for decades after all of its employees were gassed to death? Where did the statue come from? Why did spinning a wheel make the island start shifting in time? Why did Ben banish Widmore? The numbers??? I could give a list a mile long about mysteries that weren’t solved, and I almost left out this fact entirely because it’s the easiest gripe to come up with. But I had to leave it in for two reasons. First, a massive part of the allure of the first three seasons of the show was that it was able and willing to solve a ton of tremendously interesting mysteries. And secondly…
3: They Created a Ton of New Mysteries in the Final Season (…And Didn’t Bother To Solve Them).
-Why was the island sunk in the flash-sideways world? Why couldn’t the man in black ever find the lit up cave? Why did pulling that rock out of the pool make the island fall apart? Why did putting the rock back in the pool stop the island from falling apart? What was the deal with the lighthouse? Why was Hurley so willing to let a proven sociopath in the middle of a murder spree be his ‘number two?‘ What exactly was that light in the cave? Don’t even try to say they explained that last one. It’s ‘the heart of the island? Really? That’s all the explaniation you’re willing to offer? Gee, thanks. That’s so informative and fulfilling. That almost as good as the time you explained that the man in black can’t leave the island “because it’s against the rules.” Wow. Earth shattering explanation. Thanks, Lost writers, for bestowing that bit of knowledge on us.
4. So Much Wasted Time.
-Now that the show is over, honestly, what on earth was the point of spending so much time focusing on the Asian guy that wouldn’t speak English and his cohorts (Anthony’s note: he means Dogen and the Others’ Temple). The show introduced them to us any the beginning of the season, they seemed pretty intriguing, but before we could get anything interesting out of them, they all got wiped out in one fell swoop. What was the point of all that? So we knew that Locke was mean now? The time would have been better spent clarifying ANYTHING from Point # 3 or 4. (And by the way, after watching the finale, you can now tell your friends that if they want to watch season, 1, they can skip past every scene that takes place on the island after the crash, because it has no bearing on the series in the end.)
5. The Writers Knew that it Wasn’t Any Good.
-We were bombarded throughout the finale (and the week leading up to it) with advertisements for the special post-Lost edition of Jimmy Kimmel Live. One of the main draws that ABC gave us to watch this was the promise that they would show us some ‘alternate endings’ that were filmed but not used. If you stuck around until the end of the special, however, to actually watch these alternate endings, you saw that they were merely parodies of other much maligned series finales recreated featuring Lost’s cast with interspersed cameos by writers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. Instead of getting anything that clarified the morass of the Lost finale, we got send-ups of the ‘it was all a dream’ ending from Newhart and the spontaneous cut-off from The Sopranos. Cuse and Lindelof couldn’t have made their point more clearly: our finale probably sucked, but at least it wasn’t as bad as those ones.
