I remember the first time I caught Lost on tv, it was the second or third ep I think. It didn't seem too impressive at first, but something about it made me watch the following week..and well, here we are! It was the characters. Sure the mysteries of the island kept me glued too, but that was only a setting for these people's lives and stories to play out. The format of focusing on a different character every week and giving them a flashback (then forward, then sideways) allowed for some of the best character development in any series we have ever seen. The writing -- while at times confusing of course -- was top notch and the performances first class. It had its problems too -- it was a bit too glossy sometimes, and required a few dozen leaps of logic a week while we wondered how on earth everyone's hair and make up stays the same! But that sort of thing is nit picking when everything that's really important is of such a high standard. But then came season 3, and when the show began to answer questions with more questions, and took a pretty definitive veer into sci-fi territory a lot of fans lost patience and wrote it off as simply being made up as the writers went along week by week. That may have been the case at times, but isn't that true of every episodic tv show? No entire story is ever written in one sitting after all. Maybe they are pulling our legs when they say they always had a definite beginning middle and end, but one thing's for sure, after they knew that season 6 would be the last they certainly shifted gears in preparing for the big send off. I got frustrated too, and some episodes were very disappointing, but I am glad that I stuck with it.
The finale will certainly be a divider. I have already seen heated debate online and outright abuse leveled at the show's finish. I'm not going to do my usual recap of events and instead just talk about the big picture. Did we get the answers we wanted? Not really -- certainly, I have more questions! But then from another perspective we got the only answer worth getting, and the only one that's really important. We see what happens at the end, before that, we get some damn fine action and drama. This one really does play out like a Lost movie. I would have been very happy watching it at the cinema. Jack and Un-Locke have their final confrontation in which Jack is mortally wounded and Un-Locke killed after being made mortal by Desmond taking a rock out of a hole! Yeah, we don't really find out how or why, or what this cave of light really is -- I mean I assume it's supposed to be the center of life, death, rebirth..everything. The epicenter of something which burns in all of us. Again, would have been nice to get a proper answer, but for me it just wasn't that important in the end. We find out that Richard and Frank are alive (yay) and they and Miles make it to the Ajira plane and do some pretty damn miraculous repairs (remember those leaps of logic?). Jack stays to put the rock back in the hole with Hurley and Ben, while Sawyer and Kate race to make the plane. They do, and Frank gets them in the air. Meanwhile Jack hands over the responsibility of the island to Hurley because he knows he won't be coming back from the cave. Ben stays too, as Hurley's "number 2". So Jack manages to turn on the light again, as everyone in the flashsideways world lets go and wakes up to the realization that they are in fact dead. Jack is the last to do so and meets his father at a church, before joining his friends and moving on somewhere. Heaven? I dunno, that would imply that they are in purgatory first and I really don't think that's it. To me it seems more like their collective consciousness' creating this place themselves. Like Christian says, somewhere for them all to come back to to be with the people that had the biggest impact on their lives. As we see island Jack succumb to his wounds in the same spot he landed on the island in, with Vincent lying by his side and his friends flying overhead in the Ajira plane, the final shot of Lost is Jack Shepard's eye closing, just as it was his eye opening in the pilot. It's pretty emotional stuff. All through this, the sideways characters revelations as they come to terms with what is happening really gets the lump in the throat going! But of course that "they were dead all along" ending has caused some outrage, and also some confusion. I'm not sure how anyone that was actually listening to what was being said could think this, but a lot of folks online seem to think that they were dead all along, from the first plane crash. This is not the case -- everything that happened happened, they just met up in the afterlife when they all EVENTUALLY died, because like Christian said to his son, they needed each other. It sounds sappy, but sometimes theirs nothing wrong with sappy! These friends that experienced so much and ultimately strove to overcome their own failings and live together instead of dying alone received their reward when they passed on. So we don't get a lot of answers, we don't find out what type of lives Sawyer, Kate, Frank, Desmond, Miles, Richard, Hurley and Ben lived after the island. Would it have been nice to know? To find out everything? Of course, but ultimately, at least for me, it didn't matter. For me the Lost finale was disappointing in some ways but after watching it again just now, I realized that it was only because it wasn't what I was expecting, and maybe not how I would have liked to see things end -- but then I didn't really want it to end! I think if all along the most important thing for you was the show's mysteries and getting answers to specific questions (and don't get me wrong, I wanted some too) then you will have been disappointed. Certainly there are some huge plot holes, and thinking back over the earlier seasons, outright baffling plot choices. But if you loved Lost because of the characters then you will be happy with how things went for the most part I think. I can't argue with the outraged masses either though, I think if your disappointed you have good reason to be. But maybe after a bit of time to mull it over, and maybe even a second watch, you might think that maybe this wasn't such a bad send off for these folks after all. Cheerio Lost, thanks for the memories -- and for putting Kate in that dress for the finale:)
There a lot of Lost compilations online, but this one contains 5 pretty damn great scenes.