"How do you plan to do that?" — Smokey
"It’s a surprise." — Jack
Lost ended its six year run last night, and as I predicted last Tuesday, it ended with a whimper, not a bang. That was me, whimpering.
I have not been a huge fan of the Jack Shephard character. Over the last six years, I’ve found him whiny and at the same time inexplicably headstrong, but that didn’t keep me from crying like a baby during the final scenes of last night’s episode. A good thing that I didn’t attend any last Lost parties; I would have embarrassed myself. Not that I was invited, mind you.
Now that the tears have cleared, and the writers have skipped town, what do we have left? What was that?
The “End,” making little narrative sense, went for the emotional jugular. In a sleight of hand, distracting viewers from thematic and unanswered questions of “what was the island?” and “why were the castaways part of a larger plan?” the episode concentrated on the alternate or sideways stories, a recent plot device for this season. Mysterious Scot Desmond Hume, set up since season two to be a big player in the island’s arc, proved to be surprisingly ineffectual on Finale Island, just a pawn between two competitors. In Sideways World, Desmond gathered all our castaways together in an enigmatic Messenger of Heaven function; he was the unexpected harbinger of the end for Doc Shephard and his not-so-motley crew of castaways.
Co-creator J.J. Abrams and writers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have been swearing up and down for years that the island was not Purgatory, but what about the Sideways World? "Not Purgatory" may have been a lie of omission. Last night, the alternate reality proved to be not a reality at all but more an Occurrence at Eloise Hawking’s Church: an instant 'would-could-have-been' life that flashes before Jack’s eyes as he lays dying in the bamboo field.
“I think you’re a little confused as to what I came here to do.” — Smokey
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Article comments
1 - rcgldr
The ending essentially turned Lost into a remake of Jacob's Ladder. In Jacob's Ladder, the entire movie ends up being the hallucinations of a single dying man, none of the other characters were real. The dying mans finds his "peace" when he hallucinates that he sees his daughter "leading him to the light" just before they flash back to the war scene where he dies.
In the case of Lost, the entire series could simply be the hallucinations of Jack, who is in a prolonged coma before dying, perhaps not even in an airplane crash.
2 - Kate
p.s. I would love to hear what people thought of the last scene - the plane wreckage. Does it mean anything? or just impetus for further conversation.
3 - Triniman
Jacob repeatedly tells Smoky that there's nothing outside of the island. Yet, Jacob appears around the world, over the course of several years, in the lives of those who end up living on the island. So, Jacob was lying. I feel for Smoky!
4 - Jennyct
I can't get how one could be more evil than the other. MIB, pre-smoky did not go around killing everyone (though he did kill the woman who killed his mother after she killed his whole village). Who was worse? FMom was hardly innocent and no better than smoky himself. Jacob cared nothing about the hundreds of casualties he left in his path. So was MIB, pre-smoky, really evil? Did he deserve to be made into smoky? So why does everyone take Jacob's word? He seemed to be manipulating everyone from the get go.
5 - Victor Lana
Oddly, I was satisfied with the ending, Kate. I liked that it ended with Jack closing his eye (and Vincent lying next to him).
The church scene was reminsicent of the "group hug" at the end of The Mary Tyler Moore Show series finale many moons ago, but it was followed by the bright light that tells us sequels or spin-offs just ain't happening.
6 - Kate
Hi Victor: Thanks for the MTM reference - made my day! I agree - spin-offs just ain't happening. btw - long overdue congrats on the book!
7 - Dr Dreadful
"You were a great No. 1," Ben Linus tells Hurley in one of the best lines of the night.
Yes, but the absolute best line was Miles, as he helps Lapidus repair the plane:
"I don't believe in a lot of things, but I do believe in duct tape."
8 - sHx
Lost had a dreadful finale. I felt cheated in the end. When Sun and Jin first remembered their experiences on the island, I thought this was going to be a really clever ending to the series: as each character died on the island, they 're-awakened' in the sideways world with a flood of memories of their time on the island. The flawed characters that went down with the Oceanic 815 would be rewarded and healed for all their troubles. This would not only allow a somewhat scientifically plausible explanation (similar things happened to Desmond throughout the series, remember?), but it would also help the characters live happily ever after in true Hollywood fashion.
Instead, there was nothing scientific in the finale at all. Everything was inexplicably spiritual, all of the characters became men and women of faith, and now they were all dead.. dead happily ever after in the worst Hollywood fashion.
In The End, Lost turned out to be a Fantasy show for the spiritually minded people who don't mind if their questions go unanswered. In The End, Lost was never a show belonging to the Sci-Fi genre, which appeal to people who seek rational answers for the mysteries they encounter. The finale of Lost has made the whole series appear like religious propaganda of Christian variety, especially of the Catholic kind.