My take: people complaining that a show having an afterlife sequence when the whole thing was one extended religious allegory pretty much right from the beginning are a bit odd.
(Also, despite what people saying: afterlife sequence not explicitly Christian, nor even vaguely so. See Philip Pullman for alternate illustration of the concept of dead people “letting go.”)
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The peeps I watched it with noted that a number of religions were represented on a stained glass window in the background.
I noticed that too, Pronoiac. I wasn’t bothered at all by the Purgatory stuff. I’d hoped, all season, that it was “real” in some way, that we were watching a season-long happy ending the characters deserved, so I felt pretty good about that.
What irks me is the show suggesting that all the answers we’re given have been in the playbook all along, when so much is clearly just the third- or fourth-quarter writing team saying, “Well, what if it was all about GOOD VS. EVIL???” or, “I know! A cork!”
What the hell? A cork? It bothers me when even stuff in the last season doesn’t really make sense, when so much of it seems square-pegged into the complex web the show developed when it didn’t know what the hell it was doing.
Yeah, you’re right. They totally tacked on that whole good and evil thing. That wasn’t specifically spelled out in the first episode AT ALL.
Sure I’d have liked to know more about the inner workings of Dharma and the Hanso foundation; I’d like to have seen Desmond sailing home instead of Hurley and Ben saying he’s going to sail home. Ultimately I’d want a diagram of how the island works with a Carl Sagan voiceover explaining it to me in a calm, reassuring tone, but Carl’s dead and so’s everyone else, apparently.
I totally called the last shot, with Jack’s eye closing. But with the flash-sideways I’d been expecting more of a 12 Monkeys showdown back at LAX, where everyone confronts each other and THEN remembers the island.
Everything that happens on the island can be boiled down to “people make a lot of mistakes”, which pretty much sums up religion, too, so in that sense Cuse and Lindelof did wrap it all up in a nice, big, vague package. There are no intellectually satisfying endings, just emotionally satisfying ones. Anybody read Y: The Last Man? Same deal.
All of that said, I was holding out for a final scene with some futuristic craft crash-landing; survivors crawl out, one wanders into the jungle to find Hurley sitting on a log: “Hey, dude.”
Trying to square the events of the last few episodes with even the few that came before it is maddening. But I can live with that. I’m a comic book fan, so I’m used to half-assed, jerry-rigged endings to long, rambling mysteries.
What sucked ass in the last episode was how poorly the “final showdown” worked out. Tension? Feh. Surprises? Nope. The whole “uncork-recork” bit wasn’t exciting or dramatic; it felt pointless. Or, more accurately, “Lost” at its worst: mechanical.
“How can Jack kill Locke? Uh…make him human again! How can he do that? Uh…one of the characters screws with The Light! Then what? Well, we need a big, apocalyptic ending. But we can’t actually sink the island, or we’ll lose our ‘Jack in the bamboo dying’ bookend part. So, um, how about Jack has to un-do the light-screwing!”
Oy.
The flash-sidewayses proved to be a season-long TV adaptation of Jacob’s Ladder?
Oy again. At least it mattered to the story. Oh wait, no it didn’t. Or at least it tied into the themes of the show, like “free will and fate.” Wait, no, it didn’t do that either.
Argh.
BR, “letting go” was at least a theme at some point. Ditto, forgiveness was important.
The thing that most amused me was that there wasn’t any black smoke whatsoever in the finale.
Liked the episode, on the whole, but it does leave me wanting a Hurley/Ben/Desmond spin-off. Or just a spin off showing what happens when the plane gets back.
Interesting question I played with in my head: Oceanic six returned. Kate, Sawyer, Miles, Richard, Claire and Frank make it off the second time. Was it worth it? Discuss.
[I think it was. And can’t help thinking Lost does rather break into two chunks of “first plane crash –> rescue” and “second plane crash”.
Emotionally, very satisfying; intellectually, not really. But I want emotion from Lost.
People going “Oh, you can’t expect them to wrap everything up with a nice bow” are being incredibly patronizing. The show literally didn’t resolve ANYTHING about the overarching plot, to the point where it was hard to care. I mean, how can we get invested in the question of whether the MiB will escape the island when it’s never clear what will actually happen if he does so? “Everyone you ever knew or loved will die?” “Hell on Earth?” How? What? Why? If sinking the island was going to create all this havoc, how did the MiB expect to escape it in a frail little boat? If that wasn’t the case and the MiB was being an idiot, dooming himself with everyone else, it’s hard to take him seriously.
Then there’s the pregnancy thing, Walt, the actual answer to what the hell the island WAS…the show itself clearly had no idea about any of this crap. Which made it that much worse that they would spend so much time in the first two or three seasons lingering on these questions and then slowly tried to make us forget that they’d ever raised them. I mean, jeez. Would it kill you to plan out your plotlines, Lost writers?
I actually liked the fact that it morphed and changed and didn’t have a SPECIFIC direction. I mean, it is a TV show for god sake. In my opinion, the show is about Jack, about wrestling with science, faith, fate, destiny, free will, etc.
Why can’t it be kinda open-ended and ambiguous?
The thing that bugs me most is that way back in the first couple seasons, people were guessing that the Island was purgatory or limbo or whatever, and Cuse and Lindelof straight up came out and said that it was not. What is the obsession with ‘the big twist’ that causes this kind of dishonesty? If the story is good and engaging (which it was), I have no problem with knowing what’s going on before the last act.
Filthy, this is the thing.
It’s not. That’s not what was revealed. It was revealed that the flash sideways timeline is Limbo, purgatory, but the island, to my reading, at least, is real.
I was really happy with the ending until the very end of it. It immediately made me not care about any of sideways flashes because none of them ended up affecting the story, which is so strange because it kept being teased that the two worlds were slowly combining.
But other than that, the final was pretty great. And for ultimately irrelevant bullshit, the Charlie-Claire reunion sure did make me misty.
I don’t really understand how people are interpreting the church scene as “they’re all dead”. What the conversation between Jack and Christian in the anteroom made clear is that Christian is dead, and Jack is dead on the island. When they’re in the church itself, only one person opens the door and steps into the light to reach the afterlife– Christian. Why is he different from everyone else in the room? Because he’s _dead!_
Everyone else in the room is having this big shared experience, and then they’re going to get on with their respective lives in the flash-sideways timeline. You didn’t really think that Jack and Juliet are just going to voluntarily abandon David, did you? Or that Jin and Sun are going to immediately and voluntarily go to the afterlife rather than raise their daughter?
The flash sideways timeline is _not_ limbo, or purgatory, or anything less than an equally existing and equally canon setting.
It was a very sweet ending, and it worked for me.
@ Marty:
Are you suggesting (I’m interpreting your final all caps as sarcasm) that the first episode suggested a titanic, epic struggle between the primal forces of good vs. evil would be central to the series’ plot? Because I would respectfully disagree with that.
Yes. Yes I would. That has been a ruling theory since the show’s inception. “There’re two sides. One light, one dark.”
“Gee, I wonder if they’re all pawns in some giant game?” I said to myself then, and throughout.
After that just about every episode has continued a theme of conflict, division, duality, and otherness. Constant side choosing marked by moral quandries.
I wouldn’t classify it as primal good versus primal evil (though you can interpret it that way for sure), but that the entire show was a conflict of irreconcilable differences personified by (and ultimately between) two semi-mythological figures.
Yeah, totally. That seed was planted in the first episode.
–M
“I don’t really understand how people are interpreting the church scene as ‘they’re all dead.'”
It’s because Christian explicitly told Jack that they’re all dead. The flash-sideways universe wasn’t a real place. They all died at different points in their lives and then wound up in a joint purgatory that they created to help them work out their issues so that they could all move on together.
Jack and Juliet’s son was never real; he was just a mental construct. That’s why he vanished after Juliet remembered who she was and Locke told Jack that he never had a son.
My take: people complaining that a show having an afterlife sequence when the whole thing was one extended religious allegory pretty much right from the beginning are a bit odd.
You know, I said much the same thing about the Battlestar Galactica finale.
“You mean after five years of ‘God is talking to us’ and ‘We’re following prophecy’ and ‘This is all a plain of the Divine’, you’re upset and annoyed because, yeah, it’s all a plan of the Divine?”
I really liked it. I spent a couple of uncomfortable minutes at the very end morbidly wondering if Vincent was gonna eat Jack after he died, but for the most part I really enjoyed the entire run of the show.
I really liked the finale, except for one thing. While I thought the afterlife storyline made sense and provided a powerful sense of closure for almost the entire ensemble, it also suddenly jumped out at me that they’d just spent about half of season six on what turned out to be an epilogue. In retrospect, that part feels a bit over-emphasised, especially in the first half of the season.
The final epilogue reminded me of the (pre-movie) ending of Neon Genesis: Evangelion in a way, though it was less of a cheat.
I was fairly satisfied, even though I am fairly strongly in the “really wanted to know what the deal with Walt, and with the Aaron/psychic thing” crowd. I can accept, though, that those answers aren’t really part of this story, at least not anymore.
What I was a bit upset about was that we never found out what happened the Christian Shepherd’s body (Island version), which they even drew extra attention to with the shot of the shoe near the end. I’ve developed a “Vincent is actually Christian and Locke was lying about being all of the Christian manifestations on the Island” theory about the matter, but I suspect it’s a looney one…
@Dennis
“– I don’t really understand how people are interpreting the church scene as “they’re all dead”. What the conversation between Jack and Christian in the anteroom made clear is that Christian is dead, and Jack is dead on the island. When they’re in the church itself, only one person opens the door and steps into the light to reach the afterlife– Christian. Why is he different from everyone else in the room? Because he’s _dead!_ –”
They’re all dead. Christian is opening the gates to Heaven or whatever the greater great beyond happens to be. Everyone in the church is getting ready to follow him through.
The thing is that they didn’t all die at once. A handful of survivors escaped the island to go on and leave relatively productive lives. Benjamin and Hurley remained as the island’s caretakers. Many – like Sun and Kim and Sayid – had died already. But, in the end, everyone passes away. And so they all ended up in Purgatory, where time is irrelevant. And after a long time of waiting, they eventually “woke up” to the realization that they had died, but that they were now reunited.
And that was, frankly, a really compelling and entertaining twist. All those Flash-Sideways moments were the build up to one big Happy Ending for everybody. And it did work well with a story full of ghosts and immortals and psychics.
But there was another large chunk of LOST that simply got dropped on the floor. Lots of questions surrounding the nature of the island were ignored or papered over. The “light” was pure MacGuffin, dumping concrete in the massive plot holes the writers had created. The conflict between the Jake and the MiB remained fairly anti-climactic. And the shocking conclusion – that everyone was just floating off to the afterlife – sucked a lot of the air out of what was going on in the real world. Who cares about Dharma or Widmore or why children can’t be born on the island or what was up with those magic numbers?
It just feels incredibly incomplete, leaning hard on the emotional aspect of the show but abandoning so much of what made it more than high budget Soap Opera. :-p
Oh no, a twelfth of a show took place somewhere not even Catholics believe exists, along with half of it taking place somewhere which also does not exist.
Heaven is whenever we can get together….
Pardon the rant but I’m going to go with the “bitching” option, for the most part. You’ve been warned.
Look, I’m feeling stupid even for asking these questions (as I know there’s probably no real answers) but if the Sideways-verse was Purgatory, why the hell were Ben, Hurley, Sawyer, Rose and Kate there? They are shown alive on the island/plane in the “real world”, correct? So what the fuck? Hurley and Ben remember being #1 and #2, as well – so was this just the place where everyone died ‘eventually’ (“There is no ‘now’ here.”)? Does every dead soul just catch up across all time and space after they die in Our Universal Church of Goofy-As-Fuck Glowing Light? And if that’s the case where the fuck were Ana Lucia, Walt and Michael? If Libby’s happy ass died on the island and she gets to go to the Church/Purgatory, where were the rest of them? Hell? Hanging out with the Smoke Monster?
And why am I so surprised at this lack of a logical ending anyways? Yes, yes, “it’s always been an allegory for Christian mythology – Christian Shepherd, DURRR!”. Whatever, go pat yourselves on the back, Masters of the Obvious Answers. It’s also always been stupid as hell but I foolishly believed “the long con” that it was more than that – thanks to the more than occasional flashes of brilliance. Of course, for every “Walkabout” there were 2 Entire Seasons where nobody even thought to explore the entire goddam coastline OF AN ISLAND except Sayid! They could have had a fucking Yacht Rental place on the other side of the island and these sheeple characters with the intellectual curiosity of sea cucumbers wouldn’t have still been stabbing boars and sleeping in plane wreckage. And yes, I put up with them all being conveniently brainless for the sake of the plot, i.e., not being able to leave the spoooooky island because it was idiot savant television with occasionally great, involving characters and interesting storylines.
And just when I was about to give up, they started giving out answers halfway in Season 3! Shit that made me think that stuff might actually get resolved in a scientific way. More the fool me, what with Alison Janey with bad hair + Maaaaagic Glowy Light taking over. I should have called them gleefully tossing aside actually interesting alternate reality/quantum physics for touchy-feely glowy light afterlife bullshit, I know . . . but, see, the entire season DEVOTED TO TIME TRAVEL made me think that they might actually do something, oh, I don’t know, SCIENCE-FICTIONY. That maybe, just maybe, Desmond might let these people choose between their shitty Magical Island lives and lives where they lived as sensible human beings with functioning brains! Fuck!
Christ, you know what? I’m just gonna blame Brian K. Vaughan for making it watchable again just when I was about to give up on it completely halfway through Season 3. And I’m going to warn my friends who are catching up just to see what all the fuss is about that, if they’re anything like me, they’re gonna end up pretty pissed off when they watch this series finale.
I will grudgingly admit that it had it’s emotional moments and was well-shot. The cinematography nerd in me appreciated the symmetry of the final shot. Plus, I wouldn’t be so pissed off right now if it hadn’t expertly gotten me involved emotionally in the lives of the characters. Lost is going to go down as the show I hated to love, which is something at least.
Kudos to all involved for entertaining us and getting us nerds riled up enough to debate it for years.
@jonny K: I get that. But it kind of makes me feel like they just went, “Whoops, they figured it out too quick. Better change everything around and give them something else to think about for a while. We’ll just slip the Purgatory thing back in later, after they’ve forgotten about it.”
With all the unfinished business, it seems more like a show that got canceled out from under them, causing them to slap together the best resolution they could think of, rather than a show where they knew they had 2 full seasons to tie it all up.
They totally ripped off Jack’s rebooting of the island from Spock’s death scene in Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan.
@KDBryan: The church was all about Jack, and so the people who ended up there were to ones that Jack felt he had to fix, and he just didn’t know Michael, Eko, or Ana Lucia well enough to have developed that need.
Alternatively, people who died on or near the island without first having achieved some certain level of redemption/inner peace wind up part of the Whispers and don’t get to move on.
(And, of course, the real answer includes the fact that CGI just isn’t up to creating new scenes for 2004-aged-Walt on the budget of this show…)
See, Agent Cooper allowed too strong a connection with his world by falling in love; that, paired with his overconfidence about his understanding of the Black Lodge and his ability to fight it, created exactly the sort of conduit which allowed Bob to slip through and…
What?
Oh. Never mind.
I wish you hadn’t done that, Eli. I’m going to be laughing and asking random people “how’s Annie?” all week long, now.
“With all the unfinished business, it seems more like a show that got canceled out from under them, causing them to slap together the best resolution they could think of, rather than a show where they knew they had 2 full seasons to tie it all up.”
Based on the slow crawl of the earlier seasons, I think they’d have gone on for years without resolving anything if they could.
I agree with much of the criticism and I’ll throw in one of my own: Shannon. I know Sayid’s lost love from iraq wasn’t on the island, but she’s the one he should have wound up with.
@Your Obedient Serpent: I think when all the talk about god is used to justify genocide most viewers hope the characters who say that are talking out their ass.
One of the things that really annoyed me was Cuse and Lindelof admitting that Walt was removed from the show because he grew up too fast.
Really?? On an island with polar bears, radiation, smoke monsters, and magic temples a boy growing up too fast stretches our suspension of disbelief too much??