How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Lost

This is rife with spoilers. So if you haven’t watched the finale, go watch it. If you haven’t watched Lost at all… then I can’t help you.

First, a few reasons why I liked the ending:

  • It would have been impossible to please everyone, but it would have been much easier to make a shallow, easily accessible finale. As for left out details: “Here is exactly what the smoke monster is. Here are the technical details of how the island jumps through time/space.” That would have been entirely unsatisfying and let’s face it, nobody watches Lost to get questions answered. I’m glad they stuck to their guns when it came to making the show that they wanted to make and didn’t cater to the lowest common denominator.
  • People have complained that the ending was too happy. What about this ending is happy? Kate, Sawyer, Claire, Miles, Lapidus, and Richard go off in a plane and live out the rest of their lives, sans the people they love. Hurley and Ben protect the island. Everyone else (more or less) is dead. Great. We’re shown their reunions in this purgatory they have created but that is after they have all lived out their lives for however long that took each of them.
  • The whole “letting go” theme was appropriate for the audience as well as the characters. Let go of your expectations of what the finale should have been. Questions will left unanswered. So what? When it comes down to it, the show isn’t about the mysteries of the island; it’s about the relationships between the characters.

My theory on the overarching story is: the “flash-sideways” world that we’ve been watching through season 6 is purgatory. But more the purification definition and less the punishment definition. The characters are stuck in this in-between until they realize what their purpose was in their life. (Their real 815 plane-crash, hydrogen-bomb-explosion life.) All of their awakenings were island-related events; the island wasn’t in itself to give their lives purpose, it just created the backdrop to give their lives purpose through their relationships with each other.

And they weren’t all dead the whole time. Really. Eternity can be a real stickler; time doesn’t exist in a linear fashion as we’d like it to. Everyone who has died or is going to die (i.e. everyone) is there. No past, no future, just now.

Did they “move on” right from the church? Did they stick around for wine and cheese and reminisce about the good old days with caves, rafts, Others, etc.? I’m glad they left it open-ended and didn’t try to shove the story into any particular box.

A more detail oriented theory: when Desmond removed the cork and the light drained out of the pool, the evil went with it. In a very Matrixesque plot device, the system balances itself out. Without the good, the evil is removed from the equation. Thus the “smoke monster” had no power (or didn’t exist at all) and Locke could be killed.

To sum up, the finale was everything Lost has always been. Ignoring the “solve all of the questions” side of our rational selves and satisfying the emotional side. I’m still a fan.

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