Lost thoughts revisited: “The End” and other endings

The series finale of Lost aired two years ago today. Many critics are celebrating by digging up their reviews at the time, and I figured I’d do the same.

I wrote four separate posts on the finale:

Part one
Part two
Part three
Bonus Finale Face-Off: Lost vs. Battlestar Galactica

The first was a brief, in-the-moment reaction to what I’d just seen. The second and third were long, detailed responses, posted as comments in the thread for the original post. (That thread is the single best, largest comment thread I’ve ever hosted, and is well worth reading in its entirety. It’s a real who’s-who of smart comics people, too.)

The fourth post was a comparison to the end of Battlestar Galactica that’s obviously quite spoilery for both shows, but which is where you’ll find the best explanation of my main problem with the Lost finale. For the benefit of those of you who haven’t watched BSG and don’t want it spoiled, here’s an edited version:

The first problem with the mysticism in Lost‘s finale, i.e. the purgatorial afterlife, is that it’s not tied to the show’s central driving conflict and overarching mythology. While it does seem like the Island is the world’s most direct manifestation of the force for good behind the flashsideways afterlife, that’s only a link in a very general sense. It seems like any group of people who were tied together by anything would have ended up in much the same place; moreover, the Island plot is resolved without requiring any knowledge of the show’s conception of the afterlife, if that makes sense. The afterlife ties things together emotionally, not narratively, and has no significant connection to the show’s big plot questions.

The second and more damning thing for Lost is that its conception of spirituality as articulated in that final sequence is awfully banal: The afterlife is a place generated by the force of goodness behind all major religions where you reunite with your loved ones, atone for your sins and shortcomings, and find true happiness before achieving literal enlightenment. Generic New-Age self-help stuff—whoopedy doo! The creators of Lost could have just mailed every viewer a copy of The Celestine Prophecy and been done with it. Nothing about this idea challenges me or haunts me, and thus I find myself mentally returning to the show very infrequently, if at all.

The best series finales I can think of are both sharp and sticky. They hurt you as well as wow you, and they keep you coming back, and you end up thinking better of the show because of them. Put The Sopranos and Battlestar Galactica (and even Twin Peaks, which was approaching it from an entirely different and more desperate direction) in this category. The worst devolve into sentimentality and didacticism — an unearned victory lap that alienates you from what’s gone before. The Wire‘s entire final season qualifies. Some are a sort of lateral move, in which you get a nice summation of the appeal of the series without any kind of real valedictory oomph. The final episodes of Deadwood and Dan Harmon’s last Community — neither of which were conceived of or billed as series finales, yet both of which were done by showrunners who’d seen the writing on the wall — fit this bill.

And then you have Lost, which is almost a category unto itself: nailing it in some ways (everything involving Jack), blowing it in others (the flashsideways — its unimaginative ecumenicism, its superfluousness to the rest of the final season, its negation of so much of the preceding season’s central narrative drive), and coming out as a wash in others (I love that so many factual questions were left unanswered, but like everyone I also hate that my pet factual questions were among them). As time passes it’s become undeniable that the finale hurt the show for me, but not so badly that I don’t still appreciate and enjoy everything I appreciated and enjoyed about the show before it aired. I don’t feel I wasted my time.

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12 Responses to Lost thoughts revisited: “The End” and other endings

  1. Adam Lichi says:

    Good article. Lost is one of those shows that I really wanted to love 100%. Unfortunately I felt that in the end the bitch burned me. We had some great times, but she joined scientology or some shit. I’ve yet to watch Battlestar but did recently re-watch the entire Sopranos series again. I actually enjoyed Sopranos much more than when originally viewed, especially the later seasons. The Sopranos ending is probably the best I’ve seen in my lifetime. Twin Peaks ranks #2. Breaking Bad will probably surpass everything when it’s all said and done, just because of it’s pure enjoyment level. The Wire for me was kind of a let down, despite Season 5 being incredible in some regards. Omar’s story by itself was just fantastic and mythic, I’m really not able to pinpoint what exactly let me down about it. Maybe re-watching the Wire S5 will give me a kinder remembrance. Deadwood was fantastic despite it’s jilted demise. Game of Thrones ? who knows the world may end before we get to see that finale

  2. Kiel Phegley says:

    I hadn’t realized that the finale was two years ago this week (maybe I should have), but seeing a lot of chatter online about the show in the past week has had me thinking about the legacy of the show and the finale. Ultimately, I feel like the last episode is super indicative of what the whole show was in two ways:

    1 – From day one, the writers cared far more about the characters and their emotional journey more than they did about big spooky mysteries, and their level of interest was as close to a complete 180 of the interests of internet fandom as you can imagine. But setting aside the particulars of what we could have gotten, the writers love for the characters was totally satisfying for me as a viewer even as I’ve grown to feel like totally satisfying endings are pretty boring. In the moment watching the finale, I was 100% there, but I haven’t felt a lot of need to go back and rewatch that. I will someday, but when I do I think it’ll be with an eye towards the sci-fi stuff. Maybe the real trick here is that if they would have engaged the crazy mysteries more at the end – even in an unsatisfying way – their legacy would be more intact.

    2 – I think I said this to you like 1000 times, but for me the real crux of the show was the whole “Faith Vs. Reason” debate, and I’m still happy that they committed to that story through Jack and found a strong ending for the idea. But again, I think the ending they landed on went for emotional closure rather than hard truths so it’s tough to return to as anything but 100+ episodes of comfort food. I’m a little let down in retrospect that they didn’t engage the wide range of responses you can get from exploring the “man of faith” idea. I mean, ultimately the character I think about the most when thinking about this show is Locke because he believed so much harder than anyone else and was still crushed by the world for it. That Jack comes to the same place but just slips into it peacefully seems like a thought that’s not fully formed considering how much contrast there is there.

    Oh, and for the record, my #2 character is Charlie. It’s really hard to beat moments like “I was wrong” and “Not Penny’s Boat” on TV, and those kinds of moments definitely stick with me even when the finale doesn’t.

  3. Charles R says:

    I had a lot of fun watching the show back then, and just as much fun stopping by here every week to read your reviews and discuss the show in the comments threads. Thanks, Sean!

    I don’t regret watching the show at all, and would still recommend it to anyone. Despite any problems with how the show ultimately ended, or questions that went unanswered, etc, this series remains groundbreaking. Television never looked so pretty (Hawaii and all the other locations and sets were frequently breathtaking), never had such unique storytelling (flashbacks, forwards, sideways; most of Desmond’s episodes are mind bending in of themselves just in terms of how they told their plots), whole seasons devoted to themes of time travel, alternate dimensions, mythology, paranormal, fate, god. This show was astounding and unique, and well worth the time invested in it.

    On the other hand, I don’t know if I’ll ever revisit the show. All those narrative dead-ends of the first few seasons, all those plots and characters they spend so much time telling us are so important that ultimately are not, it just seems like I would be very frustrated by it all.

    So while I’m glad I saw the show, I don’t have any desire to watch it again, but that shouldn’t be taken as a slight against it. You don’t reread every good or even great novel you’ve ever read; some you just enjoy the once and that’s good enough. With the advent of novel-esque series like Lost, Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, there’s no reason that a show’s rewatchability should be a metric by which we should judge whether it is good, worthwhile, or that we watch it in the first place.

  4. Eric Reynolds says:

    Fun to revisit this stuff, Sean. This brings back good memories for me. I didn’t start watching lost until 2008, on DVD, when my daughter was born. I watched all those prior seasons over that summer, in all hours of the night, 10-30 minutes at a time, when I had to get up to rock/feed the baby. I got obsessed to the point that I looked forward to the baby crying at 4AM! You definitely helped fuel my enjoyment of the series thru the end. It’s weird to me how I can’t even think of LOST without picturing a baby in my arms now.

  5. Paul Worthington says:

    1. I agree that the ‘sideways’ part of season 6 was a waste of time.
    The afterlife scene was touching in the moment, but its “meaning” forgettable.

    2. I still really loved the ending of Lost.
    I think it did wrap up the plot and the mysteries — with the one key reveal: Just about everything we thought was important or magical was all part of an elaborate con, one with which a [former] man killed the brother he hated.
    This ending was set up from the beginning, I think [or back-woven in if you are a cynic — same end result].
    The early episodes revolved around cons in many characters’ pasts, and for some, with their regrets over killing.
    And the very first episode of course featured a monster — revealed as the man behind the cons that enveloped everyone.

    3. The final fates of everyone are still evocative to me. Especially the tragedy of Locke: a horrible life, then the crash seems to deliver all his fantasies: he is healthy, viral. Then he is in touch with magic. Then even more: he is important, a prophesied leader. …All a lie. And then he is betrayed and slowly killed by a man he trusted. Then his image desecrated by the monster that used him and caused his death. Yes.

    So, yeah, the writers / Lindleholf got distracted with the idea of purgatory, as so many insisted, mistakenly, that it was actually the main idea behind the island’s mystery — and when they came up with a way to address the issue of purgatory without impacting the main story, somehow they thought that separation would be a good thing, a cool twist, instead of what it was: half the season devoted to a story we were lead to hope would tie directly to the main plot of the struggle on the island against the Locke monster, and instead were revealed to take place long, long after the concurrently told main story. I wanted the timelines to snap together, or the main characters to learn something vital from the fantasy of the sideways stories that would let them win against the monster… but nope. they won through violence and luck, and didn’t need to know anything.
    Despite that, I’d recommend the series to anyone.

    And now that I think about it, it was a neat twist, or a fitting closure, that the final moments of Jack dying, which could have been only tragic, were powerfully bittersweet as they were intercut with the group together, enlightened.

  6. Tim O'Neil says:

    How do you rate the (first) FUTURAMA series finale, from the fourth season back in 2003? I’ve always considered that to be one of the most satisfying series finales I’ve ever seen, right up there with ST:TNG. But then, I do think that ST:TNG probably has the best finale, even to the point where I think the finale might even be the best episode, or at least tied with “Best of Both Worlds.”

  7. justin says:

    Sean, curious if you ever watched Six Feet Under? Probably the best series finale I’ve seen, certainly up there with BSG and fits the bill of “hurts you and wows you” all at once.

  8. Zom says:

    Weirdly I could get to sleep last night for thinking about the Lost finale.

    I had no idea that the show ended two years ago today

  9. Pingback: Lost thoughts roundup « Attentiondeficitdisorderly by Sean T. Collins

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