the great debate has begun.
the lost finale: brilliant or terrible?
i choose the former. without a doubt. i've spent six years watching the stories of these characters unfold. six years of brilliant storytelling. six years of laughing, crying, time jumping, flashing backward, forward, sideways. six years of build up for the best payoff of any show/movie i've ever seen. far exceeding my expectations.
if you weren't exactly thrilled with the finale, check out jason funk's review and you guys can gang up on me for some serious etrashtalk.
if i would have made of list of things i wanted, nay, needed answered in the finale if you would have asked me prior to the finale starting, this is the list that would have been compiled...
1) walt. we spent two years of this show with, i believe, walt being the biggest mystery. what was with his powers? why did the others want him?
answered? no.
2) aaron. what was so significant about aaron? why did the psychic tell claire that she was the only one who could raise him?
dealt with? nope. aaron wasn't even seen this season.
3) names!? mr. pierre chang/mark wickmund/marvin candle/edgar halliwax has been an enigma to me since i saw the first orientation video in the swan hatch. if you hadn't caught it, his named changed in every video. in one video, he didn't have the use of one of his arms, but did in the all others. why the different name? what's with the arm? we actually see the arm get crushed during the incident at the end of season 5. what caused him to regain the ability to use his arm. different realities! or so i thought. i hoped for answers in the finale and....
got nothing.
4) the numbers. we got the answer to the numbers, right? absolutely not. seriously. just becaused we saw them used and featured heavily in season 6 didn't mean anything to me. wasn't expecting them to return in the finale and.....
they didn't.
5) no birthing for you! what in world caused women to not be able to have children on the island between the birth of ethan in 1974ish and claire in 2003?
forget about it!!
6) rub some ointment on it? the infection/sickness. apparently in real life terms we call them "zombies." i have no idea. i figured it should be important.
...and apparently not.
7) the hurley bird! if you aren't a die hard and absolutely nuts lost fan you may not know this one. it has bugged me for a long time and i actually read we would get an answer to it this season.
someone lied.
(in case you have no clue what i'm referring to, here's the clip. it's from the season 2 finale)
8) and the island is........
not important.
like i said, these were the answers i wanted, nay, demanded before the finale. how many of them were dealt with? ZERO. and, yes, i thought the episode was absolutely brilliant! why? because i realized i'm a man of resolution. not answers.
did i really want them to spend the whole episode unpacking all these little mysteries? saying, "ok, remember this. here's what it is." i thought i did until about 30 minutes in to the show.
i then did a complete 180 in my thinking. i realized i had been following these characters for six years. i'm invested in THEM. not the statue. not the hatches. not the hurley bird. well, i'm still a little invested in the hurley bird.
the story of these characters is why i began watching in the first place. i wanted a resolution to THEIR story. and i don't feel it could have ended more perfectly.
some people have expressed their frustration of the writers "pretending" they knew what they were doing from the beginning, but in reality threw together an ending because they couldn't wrap this expansive story they created. i disagree.
after the show was finished and i was driving home, i realized the writes have known all along...well, at least since season 3.
"the key was in the appendix." remember the episode when jack's appendix burst and juliet had to fix him? i honestly would put that episode in my five most hated of all time. it seemed like completely unnecessary drama. we were in the midst of the flash-forwards at the time and we all knew jack makes it off the island and is doing just fine. why the appendix thing?
well, in the season six premiere 'LAX' we get our first glimpse into the "sideways reality" which i think all of us that saw the finale last night now realize "sideways" is not the proper term. we see jack looking in a mirror slightly puzzled by the scar on the right side of his stomach. he calls his mother asking when he had his appendix removed as he has no recollection of it. kind of an odd plot point, but quickly forgotten by me. how naive i was.
before i hit my "big reveal" i want to throw a little teaser out there in typical lost fashion. as we see our characters essentially living double lives in season 6 thanks in part to the "island timeline" and the "LA timeline," i steer us to words that have double meanings. for example, i don't know, appendix!
as far as anatomy goes, we all know what the appendix is. wait. i have no idea what an appendix is. anyway, it's in us. moving on.
the other appendix is placed at the end of a book. the 'official' wikipedia definition: a text added to the end of a book containing information that is important to the main text.
i'm dragging this on way to long. sorry, i was really excited when i thought of this (pats self on back).
(MAJOR SPOILER ALERT)
we now know that the sideways world is essentially purgatory. the reason jack didn't remember getting his appendix taken out as a child was because he DIDN'T. that scar, we now know, was from the knife wound he sustained from john locke in what i'm referring to as 'the duel on the cliffs.' the appendix problem is season 3 was slight of hand. a misdirection. a FARCE! the appendix was simply that. a short summary that contained important information about what was really going on.
so, there. lay your "they didn't know what they were doing" junk to rest.
back to the main point. i understand the ending came off as kind of cheesy. they all "enter heaven together. cute!" this was done very well without referencing any particular Creator or afterlife. i understand they simply couldn't do that. jack's dad couldn't say jack got saved by Jesus, buddha or tom cruise. they had to be religiously ambiguous to not offend anyone and for network televison, and i really am ok with that.
i came away with these characters were and always have been fated to be each other. sure, they had free will to do what they wanted with their lives, but in the end they needed each other. their journey into eternity now begins. how cool was it that we got to see how it all unfolded?
so, i'm really ok with not figuring out the mysteries. magic tricks are fascinating. finding out how to do them only leaves you with, "oh, that's all it is?" give me a good story and great characters any day. splash in a little time travel and i'm all in.
in closing....
...lost, keep your secrets. and thanks for memories.
Sorry, Kreb, but I'm still waving the "cop-out" card. Sure, it's about relationships, and there's some semblance of resolution there, but story-telling is not just about the character relationship. If you make it just about the relationships than you can make up whatever plot points you want and raise whatever questions that go unanswered. To me, that's a bit weak.
ReplyDeleteI know, I'm a fun-hater. And I'm okay with that.
-Cribsp