Cowboy Pete Has Had a Day to Think About “Lost.”

Posted By: Peter DavidPosted On:

So I’ve had a day to think about it.  Here are my thoughts:

I think what it comes down to is this:  The finale works a lot better if you’ve only been watching the show for the past season.  I mean, yes, it helps to know what happened before.  But I feel like it works as a better conclusion for the series as we’ve seen it from the beginning of season 6 in terms of story and thematics.

When you get down to it, there’s a ton of stuff that, in a grand story of good versus evil, really didn’t matter all that much.  There is an astounding amount of material that could have been cut because it was ancillary to the main storyline, and naturally that’s because for the majority of the series, the writers didn’t know what the main storyline was.  I find the finale is more satisfying for me if I simply don’t think about all the stuff that’s left hanging, wasn’t addressed, and really was pretty much irrelevant.

Basically the producers went for the Wuthering Heights ending, in which our lead character(s) meet death and disaster, but it all ends happily because, hey, they’re all in heaven together.  Having it turn out that heaven was in fact the sideways-verse was pretty clever, I thought, because since the flash forwards and backs were all in the real world, the assumption was going to be that this was likewise the case with the sideways verse.

What further helped “Lost” was the fact that the series was uncategorizable.  It’s a survival drama.  No, wait, it’s science fiction.  No, wait, it’s mysticism.  It’s…oh, screw it.  The “screw it” point was probably what drove away a considerable portion of the viewership in the past, because people generally dislike something when they can’t put it into a convenient pigeonhole.  Since they couldn’t get a fix on what the hëll they were watching, they simply gave up.

The advantage for the producers is that it enabled them to conclude their show in whatever genre they wanted.  They settled on a Biblical mystical epic involving a knife fight between an immortal creature-turned-mortal and a protector of a glowing force at the bottom of a deep well.  With a little tweaking, it could have been a season ender for “Angel.”  The advantage of this is that whereas survival dramas are knowable, and science is definable, mysticism is pretty much whatever feels right and salves your soul.  So although Jack is dead and doesn’t wind up with Kate, and Jin and Sun are dead, and Locke is dead, and the sociable Hugo is stuck on an island with the ever-scheming Ben Linus for company, no clearly defined mission and no exit strategy…it’s all good because they’re all united in heaven where everything is going to be A-okay.  Which basically means that the finale is a litmus test for your personal philosophy.  If you believe in an afterlife and a just reward, you’re going to get misty eyed.  If you’re more pragmatic, then you’re probably going to feel that the producers were trying to eat their cake and have it too.  It’s a tragedy, but a happy tragedy, like having Romeo and Juliet show up as angels at the end, wave to their parents and give them a thumbs up.

This is where the mixed bag of the series can either help it or hurt it.  Back when this was a series about survival and later about science fiction, this conclusion would have been absurd.  What the hëll did an epic mystic struggle and an entire parallel storyline set in a collectively conceived purgatory have to do with the Darma Initiative and electromagnetic pulses?  Not much, really.  But this past season, when the producers finally had their conclusion firmly in mind, has felt more of a piece.  After experimenting with different genres, they finally settled on the metaphysical and thus the whole thing seemed more consistent.

And because of that, what we saw Sunday night was the only conclusion it could be.  A survival drama or science fiction epic needs answers, needs closure, needs its terms defined and clarity at the end.  The metaphysical is, by definition, unknowable.  Faith is what is required when the real world falls short.  If the conclusion to this season had given us a full, complete, tidy explanation of everything and tied off all the loose ends in a neat package, it would have felt wrong.  Sure, people said that’s what they wanted, but it isn’t really, because then the complaint would have been, “Oh, they tried to do too much, oh, it was too pat an ending.”

I mean, what the hëll did you expect from a series in which most of the protagonists are named after philosophers?

And hey, considering that the original plan was to kill Jack at the end of the pilot episode, he did pretty well for himself.

I suppose my greatest regret is that the producers didn’t actually have a clear vision throughout the entirety of the series.  Considering how much they were able to pull of by retrofitting material that they tried to make sense of belatedly, imagine what they could have accomplished if they’d known what they were doing from the start.

PAD

89 comments on “Cowboy Pete Has Had a Day to Think About “Lost.””

  1. A lot of what didn’t get answered are also essentially technobabble questions that invite technobabble answers. All of those questions and answers are essentially meaningless no matter what kind of show it is. (There are any number of answers, for example, that could be provided for the “no babies can be born on the island” plot that was totally left behind. But would any of those answers change the way a viewer felt about the characters?)

    Obviously, all of this assumes that characters (and, by extension, people) are the most important part of a story. Honestly, I think that the producers/writers made the correct choice here, but maybe all that shows is that I have a strong bias toward character over, say, plot.

    While I definitely see what you’re saying about wishing they’d had a clear vision the whole time, I think this show still stands as a pretty good example of the fact that satisfying endings can still come from relative randomness. Compare this ending to the ending of the X-Files, and this blows Chris Carter’s pathetic whimpering ending out of the water. I’m not sure that every show needs to be B5, as cool as B5 was.

    Finally, I don’t think this finale requires a strong belief in the afterlife to really enjoy it. I’m coming to see the light in the church as the ultimate source of the light at the heart of the island, and that the whole Sideways thing could be basically metaphorical. I see it less as “Jack goes to a Heaven world” and more as “Look at all the connections that were made on the Island, and the fate of the Island depended on those connections. These are the things that matter in life, that give life its spark. Value this.” And note that Smokey isn’t there. Neither is Jacob. Neither one of them made strong connections. Jacob might have kept the light from going out, but he didn’t make it any brighter, and I think Jack does.

    But maybe I’m just full of it. Who knows?

    2. “Finally, I don’t think this finale requires a strong belief in the afterlife to really enjoy it.”
      .
      Speaking as an atheist, I’ll agree with that. I think the message of Lost is the same as what Shepard Book tells Mal in Serenity, “I don’t care what you believe in, just believe in something.” Lost is largely about Faith, and I can appreciate a story about Faith.

  2. PAD, you’ve cited the phrase of “Show, don’t tell” as being the axiom of a good writer. I’d be curious how you think the writers of the show followed this philosophy. Personally, while I feel they definitely never “told,” what they “showed” was rarely very clear.

  3. My first thought was, “Well, that was pointless.” My second thought was, “At least it wasn’t as bad as BSG.”

    Frankly, I got what I needed from the show last week. This series ending tied up loose ends I really didn’t care about. From the beginning of the show, all I cared about was finding out what was up with the island. And I got that. I’m happy with the mysticalness of it. But I stopped caring about the characters a long time ago. Well, maybe not Hugo. I just wanna hug him.

    The way you’re talking about having a happy ending in the midst of tragedy kind of reminded me of the end of _Cloverfield_. I thought it was rather clever that it was sort of a happy ending.

    I do agree with you that the writers did very well with the material they were handed. And I got a little thrill out of seeing the dog again. And Rose and Bernard.

  4. I think part of the problem tracks back to the fact that American television as a medium doesn’t do endings well. Because, for the most part, the goal for any series is to continue indefinitely. And when the end comes, it’s most often abrupt and without resolution because the show was cancelled with no warning.

    Now, unfortunately, Lost had none of these excuses save the fact that tv writers as a whole are primed to write awesome beginnings, so-so middles and lousy endings. So what we ended up with is really unforgiveable from that standpoint. They were afraid to fully embrace the science fictiony fantasy crazy setting they had created and shied away from bothering to explain it, instead pretty much abandoning every mystery that mattered before in favor of this brother vs. brother mystical epic that they came up with for the final season.

    The ending was awful. It answered nothing, it was trite, and if you poke at it too hard, it doesn’t even make any freaking sense. (Why was Aaron a baby in the church? Whose shared hallucination was it? Why were all those random people from the island there if they weren’t part of the ‘group’ that was creating the hallucination? Why was Eloise aware of what was going on? Does that mean she was part of the gang creating the group purgatory? Surely she didn’t want to be with all these people for eternity. Etc. Etc.)

  5. I admit that I didn’t see the last episode, but I did say before it aired “The only thing that would make sense is that they’re all dead and The Island is really Purgatory!” Imagine that!! An ending that makes more sense than over half the episodes in the entire series!

    At least it was better than the disappointed ending of “Quantum Leap!” While Sam was able to give Al a “happy ending” of sorts and it was indicated that he would have more control over his leaps, he didn’t make that promised “final leap home!” Foul!!!!

    Oh well, there’s always “Fringe.”

    1. I’m one of the very few who liked the ending to Quantum Leap. Despite Sam’s constant complaints of wanting to go home, I wanted to believe that he was doing this because he wanted to help people. So I wanted him to stop trying to go home and accept that what he was doing was necessary and good. It was painful, but that’s essentially what happened in the final episode. I understand why other people don’t like it, but I’m okay being in the minority on that one.
      .
      Also, it wasn’t supposed to be the series finale. They got cancelled and made some minor changes at the last minute to make it word as a last word on the series. I think that odd fit probably contributed to the problems people had with it. It was actually supposed to be changing things with Al to set up a slightly different status quo going forward.

      1. Sam would never be so selfish as to put himself before others. He even says so just moments before the episode ended. When asked what he wants, he replies (paraphrasing, it’s been a while), “I want to go home. But I can’t.” Of course not, he has to help Al.
        .
        Now, if the final line was “And Sam finally did get home.” I would’ve been overjoyed. He most certainly deserves it. But the actual final line is completely in keeping with his character, so I can totally see that being his fate, as well.

      2. That was the only full episode of Quantum Leap I’d seen. I might have enjoyed it more if that episode hadn’t felt so much like Callahan’s Bar given a treatment similar to what Isaac Asimov’s stories got from the movie called I, Robot.

        Still, if you’re going to borrow an idea, one based on a title suggested to Spider Robinson by Alfred Bester would be a good place to start. In a sense, it was more of a crosstime saloon than Callahan’s was anyway.

      3. The ending of Quantum Leap still bugs the crap out of me. If he didn’t have a wife, it wouldn’t bother me so much. But they made a whole big deal about her being this strong, devoted woman who would wait as long as she had to for her husband to come home. And then we learn she’ll have to wait forever. That’s… horrible. Even more horrible than Sam leaping around until he dies of old age, which is also pretty horrible. I don’t care if he is helping people, there’s selflessness and then there’s pointless martyrdom.

      4. I too heard that this wasn’t suppose to be the series finale (like ST’s “Turnabout Intruder” wasn’t suppose to be the final episode), but I took issue with the “angel” not responding to Sam’s “Even a minister is allowed a sabbatical!” Self-sacrifice is one thing, an open ended “upgrade” with a frustrating tag “Dr. Samuel Beckett never came back home” is something entirely different in my book. NBC dropped the ball big time with that series, classic though it is. ABC, on the other hand, milked “Lost” for all it’s worth IMHO so it’s time for them to find a new “cash cow.” I wish them luck.

      5. Come to think of it, has there ever been a good finale to a sci-fi series? Quantum Leap was depressing; BSG was depressing and stupid (“Okay, let’s all go our separate ways and go camping for the rest of our lives!”); The X-Files finale, though I didn’t see it, is universally reviled; and most other sci-fi shows were canceled before they could even get to a finale.
        .
        Well, there was Star Trek: TNG (“I should have done this a long time ago”… perfect. I don’t even remember anything else about that episode, I just remember that ending). And I do need to check out Babylon 5 sometime.

      6. I liked the Quantum Leap finale, too. Honestly, I watched the show sporadically, and the references to his wife completely escaped me, so that wasn’t a problem from my perspective.
        .
        Robert Fuller: You absolutely DO have to check out Babylon 5. While not a perfect show in many respects, I think it has just about the best build-up/pay-off ratio of any show… ever. PLUS, when you get to the end of the show, there are three separate trilogies to fill out the details of what happens to the characters and situations, one of which was written by our esteemed host (and is the best of the three, BTW).

      7. When I first watched the Quantum Leap finale, I was a bit confused as to what they were trying to say with the ending. Sam’s sacrifice of his “sabbatical” to help Al was an extremely touching moment. The “Dr. Samuel Beckett never returned home.” Tag made me wonder:

        The final episode suggested that “ghosts” were actually leapers who were coming back to help others. I wondered if the the final episode, tag and all, was trying to tell us that Dr. Beckett died in the intial Quantum Leap test and had been “ghosting” throughout the series. This is a bit disturbing considering the “Evil Leaper” episodes, and the episode when Sam and Al switched places and Sam temporarily returned home.

        The “Sam is dead” possibility meshed a little with the “bartender Al is an Angel” idea, but on the whole doesn’t make a lot of sense given the way the show worked (using technology to locate and talk to Sam in the past, using holograms to communicate with him and show certain parts of information, the “we’ve switched places and the guy you’re replacing is in the waiting room”, even the swiss cheese memories were supposed to be because Sam was swapping brainwaives with someone, not ghostly loss of memory. Etc.)

        On the whole, a fun series, a good series, one that didn’t seem to worry that much about keeping the continuity straight or tying everything together too tightly, and maybe ran a bit too long and ran out of steam in the end.

  6. I kinda see it from the other direction, PAD, that they did have a clear vision since the beginning, but they added so much interesting stuff along the way that sometimes WE lost place of it. The ‘battle between light and dark’ and ‘protect the island’ was there at the beginning and it was there when we first met the others, and when Ben became the big badguy in season 3, and when the freighter folk came in season 4, and in Dharma times during season 5. With so many other mysteries, however, it was so easy to start feeling that the show was about the Dharma Initiative, or time travel, or a 200 foot tall Egyptian statue. I’ve been a very avid fan of the show since season 1, watching a re-watching every episode. Yeah, I was hoping for more answers, but I found myself very happy with the ending I got. Maybe I wouldn’t have liked it if, like Auryn above, I didn’t care about the characters and was just watching for answers. Think of it like taking a road trip cross country with your family. You get to California and say “Alright, this is it! This is what we came for” but one of your kids says “But I wanted to spend more time at the Grand Canyon!”. Man, I love that freakin’ statue, though.

  7. Here’s what the finale reminded me of: anyone hear of PDQ Bach? It’s a satire on classical music, the character being the last (and least) son of JS Bach who wrote bad symphonies, bad operas, bad oratories, etc. There’s one opera that ends with everyone dying (as all operas do, right?) but, as the story goes, PDQ was told it was too depressing an ending, so the opera ends with everyone dying, then getting up for one rousing happy ending finale number.

    That’s the LOST finale. They had no idea how to answer any of the unanswered questions and no idea on how to end the story, so they simply killed everyone and gave them a happy ending.

  8. PAD, I’m going to have to disagree with you about the lack of vision for the series.
    .
    Did they have a full outline of the show early on? No, but after the first season they worked out the mythology of the show. If you doubt that, I can point to everything you just talked about in one scene.
    .
    Locke is in the computer room of the hatch, surrounded by several other Losties, but talking only to Jack. He tells Jack about the button and how it has to be pressed every 108 minutes to avoid disaster, but Jack doesn’t believe it. Locke tries to convince him that they have to believe, but Jack doesn’t care.
    .
    Then Locke says, “Please Jack, I can’t do this alone.” Not to everyone, Locke even stopped Sayid from pressing the button because he wanted Jack to do it. He needed Jack to believe with him.
    .
    Every bit of that was in the final episode.
    .
    People say the second season was about the Hatch, but more specifically it was about pushing the button. It was about Faith. It was about needing someone. The theme of “Man of Science, Man of Faith” that was started in the first season was shifted into high gear in season two. The finale doesn’t just rely on season 6, the seeds were planted much earlier and the finale just wouldn’t be as good without those earlier stories.
    .
    The part about not being able to do it alone that Locke talked about was shown in how Jack couldn’t beat Locke without Desmond and Kate and he couldn’t leave the Island in safe hands without Hurley. Even Hurley couldn’t do the job without a redeemed Ben to help him. Christian echoed Locke’s words about needing others when he talked to Jack.
    .
    So even though the show wasn’t firmly planned out in the way that Babylon 5 was, they had an idea where they were going and it did contribute to the finale.

    1. No, Jason, they didn’t work out the mythology of the show. They were making it up as they go. I have that from two friends of mine who worked on the series. They made up stuff as they went because they thought it was cool and/or thought provoking. That’s not working things out. That’s dancing as fast as you can. I already acknowledged that they did a good job of retrofitting what they came up with, but there was no looking ahead.
      .
      PAD

      1. “imagine what they could have accomplished if they’d known what they were doing from the start.”
        .
        Which they didn’t and, while the dancing was impressive at times, it all to soon becomes apparent that their is no real plan for quilt being made. And if they’re not going to invest the time to figure it out, why should I? There are more interesting things to watch than someone else amusing themselves with whatever they think is cool at the moment.
        .
        That’s why I left right around when the serious time jumping began.

      2. Really? You left in the time travel season?
        .
        Even if there’s reason to believe the show as a whole wasn’t planned out, that season, as a season, was *heavily* planned out. It fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, setting up pieces that were used later on. There’s no possible way they could do what they did that season by the seat of their pants.

      3. That’s definitely the case. By the point at which the serious time jumping started, the producers knew they had an endpoint and were working out an end game.
        .
        Man, I still remember when they first announced the end date. I think it was 2008 and they said the series was going to conclude in May of 2010. That seemed forever at the time.
        .
        PAD

      4. “Man, I still remember when they first announced the end date. I think it was 2008 and they said the series was going to conclude in May of 2010. That seemed forever at the time.”
        .
        Heh. Whatever one thinks of the LOST finale, I think we can all agree that setting an end date well in advance worked out better for LOST than it did for THE TONIGHT SHOW 😉

      5. I agree with Jason despite what you’ve been told. I’ve been told they had most of the major plot worked out including the ending from early on. I listed to every podcast and I choose to believe the Lindeloff and Cuse aren’t lying to me.

      6. According to SciFiWire…
        .
        Former Lost producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse are acknowledging that while much of the recently concluded show’s mind-bending stories and puzzle-piece arcs were mapped out from day one, other stories and arcs were the result of action-reaction or were simply winged as needed.
        .
        “It was a combination of both those things,” Cuse said in an exclusive interview. “There was a big, mythic architecture which included a lot of what’s in the finale, in terms of where we end the show, that we knew way back in the beginning. And then, before each season, we’d have a writers’ mini-camp and spend a month without any pressure of writing other scripts, figuring out the architecture of the upcoming season. That’d sort of take the artists’ rendering and turn it into blueprints, and then, during the season, episode by episode, we built the structure. We allowed ourselves a lot of flexibility to change things around as we were doing construction. It was impossible to have everything planned out, and so it was kind of built in stages.”
        ________________
        .
        Click the link for more, but that’s the gist and it’s pretty much as I suspected.
        .
        There’s no reason why they couldn’t have had the end planned from day one (particularly the specific end they came up with) and not also crammed just about any random crap / weirdness / coincidental circumstances and character meet-ups in as they went.
        .
        Isn’t this basically how most TV shows work? The only complication with Lost is simply that they built up such a hugely massive amount of character and plot detail folding in on itself via liberal use of various science fictional & fantastical tropes and tricks. It all added up to give it an ambitious and grandiose seriousness with a planned feel. And all the coincidental “interconnectedness” would lead viewers to see inkblot-like “patterns” and maybe even further connections that weren’t even intended, just inferred and imagined.
        .
        House of cards… meet gentle breeze.

      7. There’s no reason why they couldn’t have had the end planned from day one (particularly the specific end they came up with) and not also crammed just about any random crap / weirdness / coincidental circumstances and character meet-ups in as they went.
        .
        You’re right, there’s no reason they couldn’t have. But…they didn’t. I have that on authority from two friends who worked on the show, who told me that at two different times in the show’s history under entirely separate circumstances.
        .
        It is not uncommon for writers to back into something and then, like Pee Wee Herman taking a header off the bike, announce, “I meant to do that.”
        .
        I mean, “In the beginning?” Come on. In the pilot episode, Jack was supposed to die. The only reason he didn’t was a network executive intervened. At one point early in the season, they decided there’d be a hatch that the castaways would get open. Terrific. But they had absolutely no clue what was down there even after they’d introduced it. So there goes Jack and there goes Desmond, and without them, there goes the last episode.
        .
        I don’t care what they told the press after the fact. They have a reason to play fast and loose: Future gigs. If they want to craft another mega-series, are you going to have more faith in them if they say, “Yes, we knew in the beginning how we were going to end the show.” Or if they say, “Yeah, we just start on stuff and then keep our fingers crossed we can pull something out at the end.” The guys who talked to me had zero reason to…let’s be delicate…exaggerate. The guys who talked to Sci-FiWire had every reason to.
        .
        In reality, they just threw stuff against the wall with no end-game in sight, saw what stuck over a period of years, and stitched it all together as best they could.
        .
        PAD

      8. PAD, the writers never claimed they had much at all worked out at the beginning. All they’ve ever said about the beginning was that they had a few general ideas about where they wanted the show to go. So Matthew Fox could be telling the truth when he says that he always knew the show would end with him dying, and anyone who worked on the first season would still be right when he says that they were making it up as they went along.
        .
        Even in the second and third season, the writers say that a lot of what they were doing was “tap dancing.” That’s just another way of saying that they were making up whatever stories they could to stall for time until they could move the story forward. That doesn’t mean they are lying when they say they worked out the mythology of the show between the first and second season. Just because they figured out the approximate time that the Dharma Initiative got to the Island doesn’t mean they weren’t pulling stuff out of their ášš in the mean time. Remember the episode that was all about Jack’s tattoos? The writers say that was the episode that convinced the network they needed to stop spinning their wheels and move forward. So what they said about working up the mythology could be true, and at the same time it would be reasonable for anyone working on the show in the second or third season to say that they were making stuff up as they went along.
        .
        Can you tell us exactly what your friends said? As it is, I can imagine situations where everyone is telling the truth, but from different points of view. We all agree that they were making it up as they went along in the first season, which the writers admit to. We all agree that after the third season they had a plan (the fourth season was after they announced the end date). There’s really only a little bit between those areas that we disagree on.

  9. I am one of those who dropped from the show around the first third of the second season, wich seems to be common. In my case, beign unable to categorize the show was not the issue, but rather growing to not care the least about the direction of the story. Fool me once and all that… I am all for suspension of disbelief but this show inconsistency was too annoying to overlook. And now the finale seems like more of that to me.
    .
    Ever since I dropped, people have been telling me to come back. “Yeah, Season2 was not too good but you should see season…3…4…5”. And I peeked and groaned. I’ve been known for pitching shows to my friends to no end (mostly Buffy and The Wire), But “Lost” fans began to sound a bit cultlike to me.
    .
    And now the show finale… wich the broadcaster here opted for a simultaneous release (at 5am no less) has everyone blogging and twittering, the media filling page after page about it and… I am feeling the Nirvana Rage all over again. Remember when Cobain died and people were holding vigils and yapping about how profound his music was and how enormous his impact… and all I wanted to do was shout to their faces “get over it! its not even that good”. Now Ive read some critics on LA Times are labelling Lost as a “mitical” show.
    .
    Please…
    .
    (the only thing I share with Lost fans is my appreciation for Hugo… either the writers created the rest of the cast deliberatly non-relatable or it has all to do with the actor, but Hugo seems to be the favorite for everyone).

  10. I didn’t need everything explained and all the loose ends tied up. I just needed a finale (and a final season) that didn’t feel like it was ghost written by a fourth-grade Sunday school class, and I didn’t get that.

  11. I think PAD’s last paragraph sums up what I have been thinking all along.

    i have also read a lot of analyses today, mostly from people who hated the ending (as I did) and just vented their spleen. This was one of the more thoughtful and balanced analyses.

    Thanks for taking the time to think about it rather than shooting from the hip.

  12. Didn’t stick with it long enough to have the genre problem. I thought maybe SF when one of the characters admitted the whole thing made no sense, that they all should have died in the crash and I wondered when we’d see the mothership which had used its tractor beam … so forth. Unfortunately, only another episode or two later, the doctor behaves in an incomprehensibly loony manner, threatening another character so that he can retrieve a small suitcase(?) which he has absolutely no way of knowing really belongs to the WANTED FELON. He just accepts her word for it?! The bit with the model aircraft in the case I didn’t spend a moment’s thought on – maybe there’s hidden microfilm or a big gem in it – but when the DOCTOR HIDES the guns and ammo he finds in the case because the rest of the party should not find out they now have the means to DEFEND THEMSELVES against the monster out there chomping on people, well … OK, too stupid to live, I’ll root for the monster. It was at that point I asked myself “why am I watching this?” and couldn’t come up with a good reason and switched it off.

  13. My immediate reaction to the finale was mixed. After sleeping on it and reading a lot of thoughtful reviews by people like you and Doc Jensen and Ken Tucker, I feel better about it. It isn’t how I would have gone with things. I am still not sure I like Sideways being a dead end (pun aside). But the finale resonates in a good way, and it’s true to the nature of Lost as an experimental, off kilter show that was often unpredictable and that really made an effort to balance story and characters and to go beyond the norms for network drama.
    .
    I plan to get the whole show on disc, and see what holds together and what doesn’t. I expect I will still love it.

  14. SOunds as if it followed much the same sort of arc as The Prisoner, which started out looking as if it were going to be a slightly quirky but more-or-less normal spy/thriller series, and, over the course of its seventeen-and-a-half episodes, went further and further off the rails until the final episode was 100% metaphorical/allegorical for something, but exactly what it was allegorical/metaphorical for is still (last i heard anything) a matter of some disagreement among fans of the show.

  15. My problem is the heaven/flash sideways storyline was all sleight of hand misdirection and really had nothing to do with the main plot. So resolving that was no resolution at all.
    And the none of the questions about the island were really answered. Even on a mystical/biblical/metaphysical level. (Except that there was some vague good and evil conflict.)
    I don’t even want to begin with the contradictions and plot holes left.

    1. Exactly! That’s my problem with it, the stories told in the sideways don’t matter! Jack being a dad, Sawyer being a cop, Sayid going to jail, all of which was swept under the rug when they remembered their former lives.

  16. Having read opinions on the Finale, both good and bad, I can’t help but wonder if they have a solid plan for how “Fringe” will proceed through the seasons?

    I gotta admit that I hate the fact that no show feels ‘safe’ enough these days to plot out a solid story arc like “Babylon 5” did so many years ago.

  17. I suppose my greatest regret is that the producers didn’t actually have a clear vision throughout the entirety of the series.
    .
    Perhaps this is the real reason why a lot of the viewership was driven away, rather than any ‘pigeonholing’?
    .
    And is it oversimplifying it a bit to say that this ending sounds much like Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle?

    1. I believe the biggest drop off in viewers came during season three, what the writers refer to as the “tap dancing” season. Before they were allowed to set an end date for the show, they couldn’t move forward in any way and had to stall. That was the season where we got stories like Locke at the hippie commune and the the thrilling tale of Jack getting a tattoo.

      1. Season 3 had one of the best season-ending cliff hangers for me though, and had me hooked for the next season. The knowledge that what we actually were seeing was a flash-forward was one of the best mind-blowers of the show I think. One of the reasons I didn’t give up on it.

  18. While I was never an obsessed “Lostie” I followed the show from day one and loved it. To me the trip itself was more important than the destination. I loved the clues and red herrings thrown at us, and being spectacularly wrong about every theory I had (which is refreshing in TV’s cookie-cutter story factories these days). What was Walt’s story? Who built the statue? Yep, those and other plot points I would have liked to know the answers to. But I always knew we had to deal with practicalities such as kid actors growing up faster than the story, and actors who decided they wanted to quit in the middle of their story arc.
    The show gave us some incredibly good television at times, even if it couldn’t live up to our hopes for it. While the ending was too metaphysical for me and not how I would have done it, I’m also glad — once again — that it didn’t do what I thought it would. In the end, it also meshes with my philosophy in that it doesn’t matter *why* we are here, *how* we got here and *if* there’s something of an afterlife. What matters is what we do with the life we have, and how we treat others. Not that I’m an incurious person, but simply that it doesn’t matter in the end why there is *something* and not *nothing*.
    .
    That’s how I’ll choose to view the unanswered questions from “Lost”. I’m probably wrong again in the point the producers were trying to make. And that’s perfect.

  20. The plot was an unmitigated disaster. So they threw it aside. The sideways world was absolutely useless. Charlie needed purgatory? Jack needed a fake son and an ex-wife Juliet? Really? No, it was an alternate reality created by the bomb blast that retroactively the writing staff realized they couldn’t explain without flowcharts and HUGE gaps. (Like how important can the island be if it’s on the bottom of the sea and the world keeps turning? Oopsy…) So in the end they simply cashed in all the emotional equity we had invested in the characters with the universal happy ending. I still believe they could have done far better. Little things, like having the characters react EMOTIONALLY to the dousing of the Light, some clues to WHY MIB became Smokey, why the rules, etc. The Hurley/Ben “number 1/ number 2” is a perfect example if how a little answer can go a long way to satisfy. Two lines of dialog open a universe of possibility. A couple of random dots distributed around the greater mysteries would have given us something to connect. I don’t think it’s the lack of explanation and meaning that is generating the negative responses, it’s the lack of respect for the repeated LOST promise of “answers” itself – a promise not only broken but ignored and trivialized. It is not primarily because we don’t like the resolution, it’s because we were lied to about the fact such a resolution existed or was even seriously attempted.
    I feel like I was promised cake and ice cream and got cake and broccoli instead. Yeah, great cake, but geez, I KNEW you didn’t have any freakin’ ice cream, and you told me you did, and I said “you’re a liar”, and you said “no, I’m not” and there are people raving about how great the cake is, and the least you sorry s-o-b’s coulda done was give me broccoli-flavored ice cream but you DIDN’T EVEN TRY!!!
    Yeah. It feels pretty much like that.

    1. “No, it was an alternate reality created by the bomb blast that retroactively the writing staff realized they couldn’t explain without flowcharts and HUGE gaps.”
      .
      No, it was always meant to be the afterlife. Remember the cut on Alt-Jack’s neck? That was there in the first episode of the season. Halfway through the season we got a reminder of it, plus a scar on his side that he shouldn’t have had. Turns out those were the wounds that killed him. They were definitely planning this ending from the moment we first saw the Alt Timeline.

      1. The cuts and Juliet’s dialog don’t prove afterlife, though. They prove “bleed through” of the realities (ha), which could have been a feature of any number of explanations for the sideways world, including the paradox of it’s very existance.
        It wasn’t a “play fair” mystery. On that level, it was a cheat. I think the cheat cut in the second they realized they’d traded a really cool image of a sunken island for a really insurmountable plot point, but that’s just me.

      2. The cuts do prove something. From the beginning of the season he had a cut and a scar from the battle that killed him. That’s not just generic bleed through, like all the flashes of memory that every character had. That’s a pretty hefty bit of symbolism. It wouldn’t have been required and would have added nothing to the show if it had just been bleed through between two universes, but as a recurring reminder of Jack’s death it means a lot.
        .
        The truth is, the ending really is obvious once you know to look for it. All season long we’ve been wondering how it was that there were so many parallels between the original timeline and the alternate one. If Jacob manipulated their lives to get them on Flight 815, then how come they were all there even without his interference? How come, without the Island or Jacob to nudge them, these characters kept running into each other? If it’s two timelines, then we get some vague notion of how the universe tries to recreate certain events no matter what. With the afterlife-as-a-meeting-place explanation, all that stuff makes perfect sense.
        .
        That’s the real proof that they were planning it from the beginning of the season. Jack’s cut was just an extra clue they dropped to make it more obvious.

    2. Keep in mind, I understand your frustration with that. Spending an entire season on a red herring explanation for the Alt Timeline felt cheep to me. I understand why they did it, it allowed for a surprise ending on a show where the fans guess everything and it gave them extended closure on the characters. Still, it was a little frustrating realizing that all the thought I’d put into trying to figure out those flow charts you mentioned was a waste.

      1. Although I never guessed that the “flash sideways” timeline was any sort of afterlife, it became apparent early on that it couldn’t possibly be an alternate reality created by the bomb blast. There’s no way that changing history so that the plane didn’t crash would’ve also resulted in Jack having a teenage son, James Ford being a cop, etc.
        .
        Even Jacob not being in their lives in the alternate timeline wouldn’t have explained those changes, since while he’d visited Kate and James as children, he visited Jack as an adult and Hurley after Hurley had returned home as one of the “Oceanic Six.”
        .
        I figured we’d see some connection between the two timelines in the end, but again, no possible way it could’ve been a result of changed history. Not with the characters lives different in ways that had nothing to do with a plane landing safely.
        .
        Jason M. Bryant said, “it was always meant to be the afterlife. Remember the cut on Alt-Jack’s neck? That was there in the first episode of the season.”
        .
        Reminds me of certain scenes in The Sixth Sense. For example, you initially think Dr. Crowe’s wife is snubbing him at the restaurant because he’s late to their anniversary dinner. Only at the end, with the revelation that he’d been dead all along, do you see that scene (and her actions) in a different light.
        .
        Rick

      2. Yeah, it was definitely a Sixth Sense type device. Scrubs did a truly excellent episode like that, too. So it’s a valid story telling device, it’s just that building it up over an entire season is a lot to ask from the audience. I think some of the bad feeling I’m seeing around the internet is partly because of the “Everything you knew was wrong” nature of the finale.
        .
        As for the impossibility of Jack having a son because of the bomb going off, I had all kinds of theories to explain that. All pointless now, of course.

  21. I’m very pleased with how they ended it for two reasons:
    1) The explained the flashback-sideways in a way that made sense and provided a happy ending.
    2) They didn’t explain the island. To elaborate on this, I think it’s better to leave this part up to the imagination. I’m guessing that any origin story they have in mind, or develop, will likely leave a large portion of the viewership even more dissatisfied. I’d rather not know, because the wondering is much more fun! To play Devil’s Advocate, a prequel/sequel movie that explains everything about the island could be great, if it manages to keep the feel of the series. The one thing about the show that appealed most to me is that there was nothing else like it on TV. Naturally, I had to care about the characters and get into their storylines, but the whole feel and style of this show was new and exciting to me. So, to me, the only way to pull off the prequel/sequel movie would be a plot that ties the survivors’ life post-series to the origin of the island (flashing back and forth).

  22. Totally a mixed bag for a finale, but far from the worst endings. It was satisfying to see the characters come together at the end and re-connect. I guess what irks me is if they intended this to be the end, then why not use season 6 to answers more questions. Everytime they tried to answer stuff they liked to present more questions. I’m sure the mojority of the mysteries could be given some reasonable explanation with a sentence or two. Something as simple as a clearly defined motivation for our characters would have gone a long way. The nature of the island doesn’t have to be mapped out – hëll, for the most part the Island was similar to the Battleworld and Jacob was the Beyonder. It’s tough not to write and write about this because there is so much to enjoy about Lost, but there is also so much frustration.

  23. One thing’s been nagging at me about the ending: in the first episode of this season, Juliet seemed to think the bomb worked and in the sideways world we saw the island submerged. Now maybe the island being submerged could mean that at some point the island “dies” but why did Juliet seem to think that the bomb worked?

    Beyond that I’m still amazed that a show that challenged readers to this degree managed to last 6 seasons on network TV. Despite all the reality shows I do tend to think we’re in something of a golden age of TV.

    1. “One thing’s been nagging at me about the ending: in the first episode of this season, Juliet seemed to think the bomb worked”

      I didn’t catch this, but saw it pointed out elsewhere. ‘It worked’ is exactly what Juliet said to Sawyer when the candy bar dropped. That, along with talking about getting coffee and going Dutch, was the sideways/afterlife bleeding into Juliet’s consciousness as she died on the Island.

    2. When Juliet was dying in Ford’s arms, she said, “We should get coffee.” Then we found out that she was thinking, “It worked” at the moment she died.
      .
      In the final episode, in the Alt-Universe, Alt-Juliet said, “We should get coffee,” to Alt-Sawyer. She said that right after she said, “It worked,” about the trick of unplugging the vending machine to get the candy bar.
      .
      A candy bar. That’s what she was really talking about, not the bomb. I felt that was kind of cheep.

      1. Jason, I am impressed. You remember so many details and it looks like you are hitting the nail in the head with every explanation. Are you reading this somewhere or is it all you?

      2. Practice. I’ve been discussing this stuff all season with the people on the Hulu message boards.
        .
        The internet also allows me to look more knowledgeable than I really am. Any time I’m fuzzy on a detail I go to Lostpedia.com and look up exactly what happened in an episode. Then I go back to Hulu and within 5 minutes I’m looking at the scene and double checking what I found on Lostpedia. For example, I noticed the “we should get together for coffee” thing while watching because I was waiting all season for it, but I had to go back to the episode on Hulu and check the comment about the vending machine trick fixing things.

      3. I knew when she died she was seeing into the sideways universe (or the afterlife now).

        I’m content. I would have preferred some things to go differently, but I don’t think they could have made a finale that would have made everyone happy.. It is our lot to complain.

  24. This is the best “review” of Lost I’ve read. Insightful as always, PAD. But there is one point I’d definitely disagree with:
    .
    “But this past season, when the producers finally had their conclusion firmly in mind, has felt more of a piece. After experimenting with different genres, they finally settled on the metaphysical and thus the whole thing seemed more consistent.”
    .
    More metaphysical, yes. But definitely not consistent in that genre. Not when so little made sense from a basic storytelling standpoint and half the season consisted of the game, “Let’s blow up the plane…no let’s not.”
    .
    In my opinion, no matter what genre was pushed in an ep, the continual introduction of some of the most unnecessary characters and plot devices, and their subsequent abandonment, made the entire season uneven. So very much time was wasted on Ghengis and the Temple Khans. Not only did they serve little purpose in forwarding the story metaphysically or otherwise, they actually ended up making the show more unecessarily conviluted for many, many episodes. For example, the mysterious sickness in Sayid was introduced but never explained in any way, and there was also a mystical dagger that could supposedly kill Lockelganger before he spoke, that just came and went…
    .
    These ideas were billed as vitally important to the characters and the plot, then simply discarded for no apparent reason.
    .
    In order to make the season more consistent and rewarding, the writers needed a convincing and defining transition to the metaphysical. I would have turned Jack into Jacob-Jack earlier and allowed him time to explore what it meant to be the sentinel of light, and to uncover some of the mysteries that made the island transcend science. Then, finally armed with the knowledge he’d sought since the show started, have him lay the smack down on Lockelganger.
    .
    Lost’s greatest strength was its compelling and unique mixture of genres, but its greatest failure was the inability to effectively bridge the gap between science fiction, mystery and metaphysics in the overall story. I felt this shortcoming was more obvious this season than any other.

    1. I don’t disagree about Ghengis or Sayid but the mystical dagger was a trap, Ghengis send Sayid to die expecting fake Loke would kill him after Jack had failed to give him the pill.

  25. OK, I’m happy enough with the Heavenly forever-after character resolutions and all, but I needed much more (or at least some) explanation for all the Island Mythology Jacob/MIB-Smokey stuff they’d given us over the years. That’s the simple gist of what I’m saying.

    Since the producers constantly tossed out all these grand ambitious events with self-important overtones of some immortal Good vs. Evil / God vs. Satan epic battle and the consequences of such to little ordinary folks, I just can’t now chalk all that up to “well, it doesn’t really matter, what matters are people and the connections they make in life.” That WOULD have been enough had we not been given constant strong hints that there was something world-shatteringly significant going on with the Island events. They built all that up too much for me to now be satisfied with being told that it didn’t really matter. Perhaps I’m just not ready to move on either…

    So I guess, yes, it comes down to what my expectations were and I really, really tried not to get too geared up for wanting EVERYTHING explained, but dammit they should explain SOMEthing somehow.

    With a show like Chuck (which I love!) that is just pure fun and has no pretensions to be anything more than that I can overlook occasional plot holes or poor character choices just because, well, it’s fun and those things therefore don’t matter as much or aren’t as important to me to hve explained down to the last detail. But the Lost producers had set up such a vast web of interconnected grandiose weirdness that, yeah, I not only wanted, but NEEDED explanations for a significant portion of it.
    ____________________

    Here’s the thing… For me, the ending just casts into doubt all the previous show stuff, especially the Island events and even to some extent the flashes backwards and forwards. I mean, the events on the Island were pretty dang wild and ultimately more easily explained as some “collective mental construct” just as the sideways ‘verse was explained.

    (Apologies in advance if some of these questions have been addressed already, but I’m copying/pasting this from a facebook discussion and didn’t want to have to selectively edit to account for what may have been addressed here. Besides, taken together it’s all contributory to my thought processes, or lack thereof…)

    Here are some lingering questions for me (though they’re not necessarily in order of significance) which contribute to my thinking that maybe the Island events weren’t real either…

    • So Hurley really was able to see dead people? (i.e. at least Charlie in his FFs, then others on the Island even though most others couldn’t… until the end when the remaining candidates finally saw Jacob.)
    • And Miles too was able to get some sort of dead vibes? (As I remember it, at first he was conning people, but then it started being a real ability on the Island.)
    • What was up with Crazy Claire?… Wasn’t she supposedly corrupted to be “like Locke?” As was Zombie Sayid after being submerged in the (Holy?) water of the Temple after/while he really died?
    • Supposedly the Island had (possibly selective) healing properties? Locke could walk. Rose’s cancer went away. (Note: A lot of this unexplained, but way far out Island stuff is what makes me think that probably those events were not “real” either, possibly just more mental construct a la the sideways ‘verse, though not necessarily Heavenly, but some even lesser purgatorial step toward Heaven. It makes more sense to me than saying those weird events were real given the theological resolution we/they ultimately got.)
    • What about the whole thing with women not being able to give birth on the Island? (Except for Jacob/MIB’s mother and Claire.)
    • And speaking of Claire & her baby, so what WAS Aaron’s fate/destiny? (The mere fact that he was born on the Island strongly hinted at HIS specialness.)
    • What about all the random time-hopping?
    • Did the nuclear bomb go off, or didn’t it? If so, what was the actual effect of that?
    • What about Walt? Why was he so special? (At least I seem to remember that it was strongly hinted he was special.)
    • So Michael’s just a dead whisperer on the Island now? What’s up with that?
    • So Sayid’s true love was Shannon whom he’d known for literally just days, and not Nadia who had been portrayed as the love of his life for years?
    • Did Widmore and Eleanor really have a secretly plottable course back to the disappearing Island? (Of course, if the Island was not “real” as I’m beginning to think, and the flash forward folks, through Eleanor or Widmore or whomever, can get back to it from the future ‘verse, then that may imply the future ‘verse is also not real. Also, the future ‘verse naturally occurred AFTER the events on the Island, which even more obviously means that if one sees the Island as not real then the future ‘verse must not be either.)
    • How/why was Desmond immune to electromagnetism?
    • I haven’t seen anyone else anywhere mention this… When Desmond pulled the cork at the bottom of the cave/well, why did water stop flowing from above? I mean, huh??? And when Jack put it back, suddenly the water started flowing back IN again…? That just didn’t make even a bit of sense.
    • Who were the skeletons in the bottom of the glowy cave/well?
    • Was the Smoke monster really Jacob’s brother or just something (what exactly?) that was released somehow when MIB floated down into the cave/well? (Even though Jacob said he made his brother that way, he may have just been assuming based on events and obvious observation.)
    • Last, even though it’s a relatively simple benign question, just WHAT was Jacob’s brother’s name already?!

    …I’m sure there are many, many others. Those are just off the top of my head and just too many for me to ignore.

    2. Walter wound up in the state he was in because he went down the wrong path beore he died instead of letting the island redeem him.
      .
      The skeletons were Jacob’s brother’s physical body and their adoptive mother; that was revealed in the Jacob/smoke monster origin episode.

  26. There is a comparison to be made between Lost and BSG.

    Both had a strong mystical story line which they were unable to conclude. So in both cases they pretty much said, “god did it” without going into an actual explanation. Yes the glowing light on the Island was saved, so what? Why was that light important anyway?

    Both shows had a charismatic cast of characters, so we cared about them enough that their end had an emotional impact on us despite the unsatisfying ending.

    Both shows were pretty good at creating very emotionally intense and gripping story lines during their runs, so despite the unsatisfying ending you can look back on the whole experience in a favorable light.

    But

    BSG was a very smart and intense show that dealt with many serious issues both on the cerebral and emotional level. This doesn’t change no matter how you felt about the ending. Lost had good characters but it drew the audience in by cliffhangers and the illusion that the show was actually going somewhere, which it didn’t.

    BSG did a bad job of ending the mystical god/visions storyline, but it still had a coherent ending as far as the story of the war and the human race were concerned (going native on earth made prefect sense to me). Lost was just an illusion inside an illusion. They ended the conflict between Jacob and the man in black, but that conflict was an illusion created only in the last 1.5 seasons, and it was never clear what it was all about. All the other issues mystical or otherwise weren’t resolved.

    So BSG wins.

    It seems to me that the ending fitted the show, it was kind of hollow and illusory, yet it was still satisfying in an unsatisfying way. I wasn’t angry with it, I just felt it was typical of a show that pulled us by the nose since day one. They tricked us into believing they were going somewhere but at least for part of the time I enjoyed the ride.

    1. “Lost had good characters but it drew the audience in by cliffhangers and the illusion that the show was actually going somewhere, which it didn’t.”
      .
      I strongly disagree with this. The ending to BSG wasn’t coherent at all. After years of searching for a home, they jumped to a random location and ta-da! There was one. Because God Did It.
      .
      In Lost, sure, the light was an unknowable, god-like thing, but it was also something that would have been fine if it had been left alone. It was basically a force of nature that Jacob messed with, so he had to get some help to fix his mistake. It was a very human mistake, it lead to bringing all these people to the Island, and then those people fixed it. That explains the whole adventure and puts a human face behind the driving force. That’s much more coherent.

    2. I can agree with this. I think both shows lost (no pun intended) their way in their last two seasons, but overall BSG is a much more successful show (and much more intelligent). Because while Lost was basically about the mystery, most of which was never resolved, BSG was much more focused on the mythology-building and the exploration of its themes. The mysteries were secondary. So even though the resolutions to most of its mysteries ended up being pretty lame, and even though it became clear, as in the case of Lost, that they never had a clear plan for the series, this wasn’t nearly as problematic as it was for Lost. And we still have those first couple of seasons of BSG, which were brilliant, regardless of how later seasons turned out. Lost was never brilliant. And as bad as the last episode of BSG was, it wasn’t flat-out idiotic the way Lost was.
      .
      Another good point of comparison is the two shows’ romantic story lines. Both shows had their casts of characters playing musical beds, and just about ever character in both shows fell in love with at least one other character, and in some cases more than one. But in this case, I think Lost tops BSG. I actually cared about most of the relationships in Lost (the exceptions being Jack and Kate, which never felt right, and Charlie and Claire, who were just annoying). But the only relationships in BSG that I cared about (indeed, the only ones that felt genuine to me) were Adama and Laura and Tigh and his wife. Every other couple, even if they consisted of characters that I liked individually, made me want to scratch my eyes out (or maybe their eyes out). With Lost, the love stories were generally organic to the plot. With BSG, they mostly felt like tedious filler.

    3. Jason and Robert, I think we\ll have to agree to disagree on these issues.

      1) Jason, for 5 seasons the human fleet has been looking for a idealized place, Earth, so that humanity will survive. That was one of the many themes of the series. It was combined with the mythical theme (Laura’s visions, all along the watchtower, Starbuck’s resurrection etc.), but it also stood on it’s own. The way they series resolved this theme was brilliant. The anguish of discovering that the reality of ‘earth’ did not fit the ideal followed by the discovery of another planet and realizing that it might as well serve as home, that it was their chance to start over. It doesn’t really matter how they got there. And since this series had few inhabitable planets, and none with much life on them, none the less human life, the choice to make it their home was sensible as well as a fitting end to the theme of the search for the idealized ‘earth’.

      Lost on the other hand pulled a last minute explanation out of their ášš. Jacob, the light, his sin, why the light needed defending, why the humans were brought in, what needed fixing, why were they necessary? all this was either not explained or explained away with a vague last minute explanation in the last season or worse, in the last few chapters.

      2) Robert, I disagree that BSG lost its way during any of the seasons. As far as I’m concerned all the seasons were great and so was the final chapter, except for one thing — the mythical storyline. Their way to resolve it was to say: well, it was god and that is beyond explanation, it should remain beyond understanding, a divine mystery. This is a coherent explanation, I suppose, but I didn’t find it satisfying. I wanted an explanation that will tie together Laura’s visions, Baltar’s visions, Kara Thrace and everything else (my theory was that the colonists too were actually the descendants of ancient cylons created after the real humanity was destroyed).

      3) I also completely disagree about the romantic story. In Lost character were matched together based on no reason but convenience and attractiveness, usually at the expense of the personality of the female characters. You might root for a certain relationship because the characters were likable, but not much beyond that. The-Kate, Sawyer-jack triangle was very annoying. In BSG the relationships were born out of the excellent characterization and the psychological intensity of the story. You often didn’t root for these relationships because they were flawed and damaged and anguished like everything else on the show — but that was the point of the show. The relationships were another organic aspect of the general story. It was of a much higher caliber than the romances in Lost.

      1. “The way they series resolved this theme was brilliant.”
        .
        No. No it was not.
        .
        After five years of looking for a home, they hit the “random” button on the jump drive and it took them to the perfect planet, apparently guided there by God. That’s *literally* a Des Ex Machina. I’m not using the word “literally” lightly, the solution to years and years of searching was that God gave them the answer at the last minute through a machine.
        .
        There were things I liked about the ending, mainly the space battles, but that was laaaaaame.
        .
        Jacob’s explanation made vastly more sense and had a lot more work involved than just hitting the random button. The first weird thing the Losties saw on the Island was the monsters. Turns out, that’s what they were brought there for. Jacob, not a faceless god, made a mistake, which was explained instead of just being the unknowable reasoning of a god, and put a lot of effort into bringing these people here and using them to fix the mistake. *None* of the motivations of God were explained in BSG. Jacob’s motivations were very straightforward. Yes, we don’t know the mechanics of how the light worked and the mechanics of how the Smoke Monster worked. I’d like to know those things, also. However, we know what Jacob did, what the results were, and how the problem was solved. The season could have ended after Ab Aeterno and it still would have been a fuller ending than BSG.

      2. I thought the Lee-Kara-Dualla-Sam love rectangle was way more annoying than the Jack-Kate-Sawyer-Juliet one. I didn’t buy any of those relationships (except maybe Kara and Sam, just because it was the sort of self-destructive relationship you’d expect from her), and their attempts to make Lee and Kara into some great, doomed romance were just awkward and irritating.
        .
        “In Lost character were matched together based on no reason but convenience and attractiveness”
        .
        That’s probably true in the case of Sayid and Shannon, but still, that relationship was sweet enough that I didn’t mind how lame it was.

      3. Like I said, we have to agree to disagree. There’s also a subjective aspect to it about whether you liked or disliked a certain relationship. I found the Kate-Jack-Sawyer story much more annoying, mostly because it diminished Kate.

        Jason, I acknowledged that the mystical story was handled in an unsatisfactory way. But, from the beginning finding Earth was presented as either the result of random luck (Adama didn’t believe what he said until much later) or a divine plan. In this case it was Deus Ex Machina because that was the point of the story. So at the end the divine plan storyline was left unexplained, and I regretted that. But for me, this still did not take away from the quality of the solution to two other different major storylines/themes: the search for the promised land and the survival of humanity. The solution BSG gave for these two themes, and even to a much lesser extent the solution they gave to the god theme, were things that had strong roots in the show from the very beginning. Like I said, I wanted more for the god story, but still the idea of a god that does not have a human face is quite fitting for this story. The exact technical explanation of how they got to earth is less important than the journey they took.

        In Lost you have a story they came up with two chapters before the end. Jacob might have a face, but the point of his whole story made sense only as a last minute rushed and unsatisfactory explanation. Like everything else in lost it was just a facade behind a facade behind a facade with no substance. Two weeks before the end we learn that Jacob, a pretty douchy guy who was brought up by a mysterious woman, having been given by her the task of guarding something we didn’t understand for a reason we didn’t understand, threw his equally mysterious brother into said something, mysteriously resulting in a black smoke we didn’t really understand, that wanted to destroy the island for reason we didn’t understand. So now we understood that Jacob, picked for insufficiently explained reasons a group of people to defend the unexplained island and also to defeat the unexplained monster, all for unexplained reasons. The problem is not the mechanics. There are two problems, one, that we still are not given a reason for the Island itself, and two, that this was all a last minute patch, not a theme built over years of story. Lost kept presenting us with mysteries that turned out to be thin unexplained veils hiding other mysteries that were only barely tied to what we have seen before, and at the end of all this was a light and a stone plug.

        I found BSG to be more satisfactory because it gave a conclusion to a very satisfying multi-layered story. My only problem was the decision to leave the god storyline a mystery. I understand this decision but i don’t like it. Lost at he end only gave us another unexplained mystery + everybody goes to heaven. I prefer the faceless god of BSG.

  27. Apropos of nothing (pun most definitely intended!)…
    .
    Religion: Lost in the white light
    .
    Not a tremendously informative article, but relevant enough w/re to the “official” concept of purgatory—on which, not being Catholic or intimately familiar with any, I have absolutely no idea—and how accurate Lost was about it.
    .
    It also mentions…
    .
    But was the show, as some had theorized all along, actually built on the concept of purgatory? Hadn’t Lindelof told The New York Times in 2006: “People who believe that they’re in purgatory or that they’re subjects of an experiment are going to start reassessing those theories. …”? The creator of “Lost,” J.J. Abrams, had denied the purgatory theory, too.
    .
    Which is another reason I found the culmination to be a cheat, I knew they’d denied this long ago and then they went and did it anyway. OK, you can say they HAD to deny it (and to say that people will start reassessing that idea does seem more like a de facto denial to me), but I think they should have just been more vaguely non-committal and just said “Stay tuned to find out.” They could have even added something like “You may be surprised” which would have had the ring of being a denial without actually being a denial of a specific concept/theory. Wishy-washy? Maybe. But it would have gone down better for me that way.

    1. They didn’t need to be non committal. They said the Island wasn’t purgatory and they stuck to that.

      1. Well, despite what most folks seem to be convinced of, as I tried to bring out a few posts above, my own opinion (though I’m not firmly entrenched in it) is that the evidence I saw indicates the Island was, if not purgatory (too?), then a sort of similarly related and equally unreal spiritual mental construct (or something) just as much as the side-verse.
        .
        Even if I’m not right about the Island events not being any more real than the side-verse (and I seem to be alone in that), then that’s some pretty fancy stepping to say that “they aren’t in purgatory,” but mean it only in terms of the Island story (or by any strict theological definition of the term) when in fact the purgatory scenario was THE major resolution to the whole thing for all the characters, only in the side-verse instead of on the Island.
        .
        I feel the ultimate resolution was a cheat and their denial was also a semantic cheat then. I still would have preferred them to be more elusive and coy. Yes, that might have been slightly annoying (especially at the time), but better in the long run. All just imo of course. I’m sure many would disagree.
        .
        .
        .
        One more question I just thought of that I would have liked to have seen answered…
        .
        How was the Donkey Wheel designed/engineered/installed in such a way that (I assume) tapped into the electromagnetism/mystical glowy energy and could then move the Island in time and/or space?
        .
        Sure, the answer would be pure technobabble, but I happen to like technobabble! (“I reversed the polarity of the neutron flow, thus creating a sustainable micro-wormhole breach through the neutronium antimatter containment field, enabling me to channel and focus the energies within.”)

      2. “I feel the ultimate resolution was a cheat and their denial was also a semantic cheat then.”
        .
        No, it wasn’t a semantic cheat. If someone asked you if your house was yellow and you said no because it isn’t, then you’re being honest. If you build an addition onto your house three years later and the addition is yellow, that doesn’t change the fact that you were completely honest at the time.
        .
        Now the fact that they lead us in one direction on the nature of the Alt-Timeline, then revealed it was something else at the end did feel a little like cheating to me. As I said before, pulling the rug out from under the audience Sixth Sense style is a valid technique, but an entire season is a long time to get comfortable on that rug before it’s yanked up.

  28. Literally just found this, but honestly my own feeling about the Island stories not being any more “real” than the side-verse stories had absolutely zero to do with the closing credits images of the crashed plane on the beach…
    .
    ABC Clarifies “Lost” Ending
    .
    Even so, ABC’s clarification does nothing to convince me that the Island events were necessarily real. (Well, at least, you know, *real* in terms of the fictional LOST universe in general. Obviously I realize we’re just talking about a TV show here. For some reason I feel compelled to add this disclaimer lest it seem like I’m taking this all just a little too seriously. Perhaps it was the disembodied whispering voices I hear…)
    .
    It seems to me that surviving a plane crash together would be a very traumatic, but very, very significant life event and possibly even a uniting thing/force in those peoples’ lives binding them together on some level (I envision survivor reunions!). And if you accept the general purgatory concept of working out their human issues/flaws/destiny/true self before moving on to the next life, then yeah, maybe… just maybe… those people WOULD all somehow choose to (or automatically) construct some post-crash alt-Island reality where all the crazy Island stuff of the show took place. Of course that would be in addition to the side-verse as well. And even the flashbacks and forwards maybe.
    .
    Why couldn’t it ALL be part of the constructed purgatorial scenario? That doesn’t mean there were no survivors at all, just that when they eventually died they met in this shared construct using the plane crash as the obvious and natural focal point to start from in order to work out their fates/issues before moving on. Each person could be seeing his/her own story, examining the past prior to the crash (flashback), the future after the crash (especially if they actually survived and left the Island), and then how their lives would have gone(or might have) had the plane not crashed at all (side-verse purgatory where they eventually “get it” and “wake up” to move on.)
    .
    I’m sure most of you will think that’s all crazy and that I’m missing the boat (or plane). Oh well. And please don’t ask me about nitty-gritty character details that may support or knock down (…or what about…?) my speculative scenario. Honestly, I couldn’t possibly say and I admit others have a much better memory of minor story details…
    .
    Perhaps the Island events were all from Jack’s (possibly out-of-body) perspective. And even stuff not involving Jack could still be imagined backstory being filled in unconsciously (just as an author comes up with backstories for all his characters). I’m just thinking “out loud” off-the-cuff here…
    .
    Anyway, the idea of the Island events not being real seems more plausible to me than saying that they WERE real. I mean, those events were easily the most outrageous “out there” events of the whole show! But THOSE were the real ones??? No, Occam’s Razor tells me (probably only me) that the Island events were just as unreal as the generally accepted side-verse purgatory “waking up and moving on” events. I’m becoming more and more convinced of that as I ponder “The Meaning of it all.”
    .
    At least that seems to be where my train of thought is leading me, though it’s quite possible I derailed a few miles/comments back.

    1. “Why couldn’t it ALL be part of the constructed purgatorial scenario?”
      .
      Because it wasn’t.
      .
      Really, you could make that argument about any work of fiction. Maybe Star Wars was purgatory, that would explain crazy stuff like The Force and glowing blue ghosts. Maybe Married with Children was purgatory, which actually makes a kind of sense. In fact, this isn’t even the first time fans have come up with a story like this. The Dungeons and Dragons cartoon that I watched as a kid had the same rumors, people said that all the kids died on the amusement park ride.
      .
      The idea that they were dead all along is not an Occam’s razor solution. There’s really nothing to support it, other than Smokey saying so in a conversation where he was obviously lying with every breath. Yeah, it had a lot of hard to believe elements, but so does most of the stuff that PAD writes. That doesn’t mean Young Justice was set in purgatory. Unless you’re willing to condemn all fantasy stories, it doesn’t make sense to say that fantastical elements mean they were dead.

      1. “Because it wasn’t.”
        .
        Oh… ok.
        .
        I wasn’t discussing Star Wars or other works of fiction. I was discussing Lost, which specifically DID end with a purgatory scenario. So therefore the creators introduced that element themselves, I didn’t.
        .
        And once that element is introduced, then I fail to see how it’s such a big leap to possibly extend the concept to cover all the Island events as well as the side-verse and possibly even more.
        .
        I realize that I seem to be alone in thinking that, but I’m OK with that. I’m not saying I’m right and everyone else is wrong, only that THAT seems to be the interpretation my brain is stumbling toward. But I would never presume to act as if I have the definitive answer(s). That’s just not me.
        .
        The fact that Locke or Alpert made mention of being in Hëll or anything like that didn’t even enter into my thinking. Still doesn’t. I was just going by observation of the events depicted in various universes/timelines and saying that of all of them, the Island events were easily the most unbelievable (in a rational real-life way, even though as I was watching them I was believing them in the fictional “this is what’s happening to these characters” way).
        .
        Therefore, Occam’s Razor (to me) would indicate that I should start with THAT reality as the MOST unreal one. And then given the purgatory (un)reality as presented by the creators, it’s not that hard for me to extend that purgatory concept to include at least the Island events as well simply because they were the most unbeievable to start with.
        .
        If you think I’m wrong, that’s fine. But please don’t just cursorily dismiss it as if YOUR word is the definitive one from On High your Jacobness. Sorry, I tend to get snippy when presented with snotty attitude, so it’s probably best if I just leave it to the rest of you to figure out.
        .
        Namaste…

    2. Even if you think I’m nuts with this interpretation (in part or all of it), it illustrates why I don’t like the resolution they came up with. It’s just too danged fuzzy and (for me) casts into doubt everything I’d ever watched and thought had happened. I could live with many specific questions not being answered (I think) if they’d at least have come up with something that somehow definitively stated which realities/timelines were real and which were fictional/dreams/purgatory/whatever. (Perhaps in the deleted scenes on DVD?)
      .
      Maybe I’m just generally tired of these sorts of endings where it’s deliberately left up to the viewers/readers’ personal interpretations as to what happened. That doesn’t make a work arty or literary, it just makes it vague and frustrating. There’s some admitted enjoyment in discussing it and trying to figure out with other fans what it all means, but at the same time there really can never be any significantly consensus agreement reached because of the intentional overwhelming designed-in vagueness. Unless the creators actually TELL us what they intended. Yeah, right.

    3. I do not think the island was purgatory either. I think “Island-Desmond” though it was a construct base on his conversation with Jack before going into the cave. Then he realized he was wrong.
      .
      I believe that scene was just misdirection to make the viewer think the flashbeyond (it makes no sense to me to call it flashsideway anymore) was the real world.

  29. Jason could well be channeling my own interior monologue of the last few days (including my reaction to the BSG finale). If the Lost finale had been described to me, I probably would have found it sorely disappointing. Yet actually watching it satisfied me in ways I’m still trying to analyze. This, in spite of finding the whole Sideways Timeline to be the Moby Ðìçk of red herrings,and the shot of the sunken island to be the gun in Act One that turns out to be a water pistol in Act Three.
    .
    I would have had more answers, but I’m trying to do triage on my questions to exclude those that hinge on unimportant details (who built the statue, temple, lighthouse and/or installed the donkey wheel?) or concern insignificant ambiguity (what’s with all the inconsistency in Jacob’s post-death appearances?) This leaves a few matters that feel like important links in the overall story we never got to see, such as the mystery of Jacob’s cabin and what role, if any, it played in the MIB’s machinations. Sayid’s resurrection and “corruption”. Still, as on the show, I’m finding that letting go is good advice.
    .
    This is the second time I’ve seen viewing the entire show as Purgatory described as the Occam’s Razor solution. Honestly, it strikes me far more like Occam’s 12 Step Hair Removal System, i.e. an answer far more complicated than the one more widely accepted.

  30. Some Comments:

    (1) “Doctor Who” never got a series finale, because the show was abruptly cancelled. I hope when they run out of Doctors they do give it one.

    (2) The Sideways Universe/Limbo world was clearly developed over the entire season. Each person’s story contains clues about what they were feeling when they died. For example:

    –Sayid feeling guilty over his assassinations, is still a killer in this world, and doesn’t feel he deserves Nadia. So in SUL he can’t have her. (And this is why Shannon has to be brought in, since Nadia isn’t real, but a reproach).

    –People asked why Sun and Jin didn’t mention their daughter in their last few seconds together. Well in SUL Sun is pregnant. Having been apart so long, in SUL they’re unmarried.

    –Sawyer and Miles leave together in the final episode. In SUL they’re partners, strongly suggesting they’re close friends for the rest of their lives.

    –After the finale, Claire takes care of her baby, and Kate helps her back to sanity. In SUL they redo Aaron’s birth.

    –Hugo in SUL is happy and generous, a good sign of his spiritual health and of his reign as Protector of the island.

    –Linus in SUL is still a bit manipulative, but also taking care of the father he murdered on the Island, and trying to help Alex. He also tries to help Locke when he meets him, again out of guilt.

    –Locke is crippled again. Probably one of his last thoughts when he was contemplating suicide was that he had his father killed for no good purpose. So in SUL he blames himself for paralyzing his father. He is in a bit of a funk.

    –Juliet the fertily doctor has a baby. She has replaced her real ex-husband with Jack in the SUL.

    –Faraday has now moved to his first love, music.

    –Ana Lucia in her last scene showed some emotional vulnerability, and was immediately murdered. So it’s not surprising that she is somewhat cynical and corrupt in SUL world.

    –Jack deals with his father issues by having a son, and Dogen sees his son better in SUL.

    –Desmond’s path is different. He has a wedding ring in the season premiere, but he forgets Penny completely. Did Hawking and/or Widmore have somtehing to do with that? Was it because SUL Desmond was linked to the Desmond of Widmore’s experiments in Hydra island?

    –Charlie, of course drowned and gave Desmond one last message. He starts SUL choking on heroin, which is a bit like drowning, and alternates between realizing what happened, and try to dull the knowledge of it.

  31. I’m still of the belief that it was a purgatory within a purgatory. The entire journey on the island was a required for Jack to get to Sideways enlightenment. The fact that they showed the wreckage from the original flight and the fact that he lied down and died exactly where he woke up for the original flight sealed that for me. When they say that what happened on the island was “real”, who’s to say that purgatory isn’t real? He still experienced it.

    1. The original wreckage shots were added by the network. The writers had nothing to do with it and the network has already issued a statement clarifying that. For reference, the writers also never have any control of the “Next time on Lost” segments that usually air at the time and have expressed displeasure with them in the past.
      .
      When Christian was explaining everything at the end of the show he told Jack, “The most important part of your life was the time you spent with these people.” Not the most important part of his afterlife, of his life. So the only character who had any real authority on life and death settled the matter.

      1. That helps Jason. I hadn’t heard that. That being said I am a convert to the island being “real” then.

        Can anyone explain what happened to all the bomb stuff that was wired to the plane?

  32. Nevermind, now I remember that the MIB took the bomb and that is what killed Sayid in the sub.

  34. I loved Quantum Leap, so much so that I kept waiting for Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell to appear on JAG and N.C.I.S. Oh well…

  35. I like the comment that this could have been the series finale for Angel. Lost was confusing but the writers did try to bring it all together.

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