What "Lost" Did
One of what’s sure to be a million different takes on the end of “Lost,” and the series in retrospective.
(A warning: The following article includes significant spoilers about the end of Lost. If you intend to watch the episode or show as a whole in the near future [which you damn well should], avoid this page and go read some of the other work by the fine folks here at Heave.)
It’s over. I don’t often get worked up over TV shows because a) you typically know when they’re coming to an end and can prepare accordingly and b) I’ve never found one that stuck with me on a primal level. Lost destroyed both of those standards. After the lull of the third season, which lost the show a good chunk of its viewership, show heads Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof stated that they had an end in sight. The show would run six seasons, and be done. And now that it is, I know I’m not alone in saying that it feels, right now, like it just wasn’t time yet, that there was more to do. (This Twitter-sized eulogy page speaks volumes to that alone: http://tinyurl.com/37u2rnc)
Part of this is that not every single thread of mythological minutiae has been answered. It won’t be of much comfort to know that Lindelof and Cuse said going into the sixth and final season that they would only answer questions relevant to the characters. So, if we never quite got an explanation for the polar bears, the Egyptian statue or the Dharma notebooks, it’s because Jack, Kate and company had bigger fish to fry. This isn’t to say it shouldn’t be aggravating; there are plenty of hardcore fans (myself included to a degree) who feel a bit cheated, like all of the effort put into speculation and research was all for naught. I feel for Doc Jensen over at Entertainment Weekly, who’s done some of the best writing on the series since day one, and connected more dots than even the show’s creators probably had in mind.
This is possibly the show’s greatest feat as a whole. I believe at this point that not every single tidbit of trivia was ever supposed to tie in to the show’s endgame. It was auxiliary, there for fans to take as they would. The show could be enjoyed on its surface level with a certain degree of effort needed, or audiences could go the full nine and spend hours poring over a paused shot of the hieroglyphics in the Hatch to figure out its significance. There were rewards to these references, but they weren’t what the show was about. The show was always about the castaways. Seeing the end now, it’s particularly striking how the Island itself, for all of its mysteries and lunacy, was always the secondary player. The ideas proposed by the relationships were what mattered, whether it was the battle of faith versus reason as embodied by Jack Shepard and John Locke, the idea of love as a constant that transcends time and space or the need for all men to leave this world feeling as though they were not alone; that the show’s early ethic of “Live Together, Die Alone” doesn’t really hold salt in any world.
Somehow, though, last night’s finale didn’t leave me feeling conned in any way. In fact, it was quite possibly the most poignant I could imagine. I half-called the final turn earlier in the week, as I figured that Daniel Widmore’s concert in the Sideways world would be the site of some major crossing-over for everybody. I’ll get back in a second to what actually happened, but the point is that I missed the mark. Over in the Island world, every thread was wrapped up nicely. The smoke monster is dead, and John Locke in all his forms finally got to rest. Lapidus survived (!!!) to load the remaining castaways onto the Ajira plane and fly home. Hurley and Ben stayed to become the new protectors of the Island, and Jack (in a very literal completion of his redemption arc to Christlike figure) gets stabbed and dies in the same place the entire series began, so that everybody else can survive.
The Island story won’t be what people are talking about for years to come, though, at least not right away. What they will be discussing is how the Sideways world that appeared to be a parallel universe storyline throughout the final season was actually a purgatory where all the castaways went when they died. This might seem hackneyed to some, but I disagree wholly. It drives home the idea I mentioned above, that the show was about what these people meant to each other and not what happened to them. To complete the circuit of shared experience, the Sideways versions of the cast all connected to one another and met in the church where Jack’s father was to be buried. Jack opened his casket only to find his dad standing behind him. (I won’t front like that wasn’t an eye-roller, at least at first.) Jack then realized that he was dead, and old man Christian then completed the circuit: “Some died before you, some long after. Everybody dies someday.” Some (not all) of them met in the church, and it was together, and not alone, that they finally did what Desmond has been telling them to do for half the season: “Let go.”
I’m not here to argue the ideas of the finale, or whether it’s good or bad. What I’m here to say is that the show, in remaining true to what it wanted to say, ended perfectly. Personally, to have started watching the show on September 22, 2004 having just started my sophomore year of high school, it’s almost surreal that it’s now over. The idea of letting go wasn’t just for the castaways, it was for those of us who followed it every week from the beginning as well. For a show that never forced a life lesson on viewers during its six seasons, it was full of them. “Whatever happened, happened” is an idiom of the show that’s been used in debating its theology at length, but it’s the truth. I’d say that the show’s biggest lesson, and the best way for fans to say goodbye to it, is to just remember Jack’s method of survival from the very first episode. If you’re afraid, sad, enraged, whatever, just count down: Five, four, three, two…
One.
Posted by Dominick Mayer on May 25, 2010 @ 8:08 am
