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* Hmmm, I dunno. Honestly I had to take my cat to the emergency vet tonight and that situation is far from resolved so I don’t know if my head’s in the game, really. I do have two major thoughts.
* I think the main thing I haven’t wrapped my head around just yet is the disconnect between the flashsideways and its resolution and anything having to do with the Island. I mean, yeah, on a certain level that stained glass window is telling us that the Island is connected with whatever spiritual whatsit is in charge of whatever afterlife they went to. But it’s not a specific connection as best I can tell. It’s sort of like, I don’t know, if at the end of…I don’t know, Road House? If Dalton defeated Wesley and saves the town and avenges Wade Garrett and all that stuff, and then also he goes to Heaven. Like, the actual resolution of the show doesn’t really have anything to do with the resolution of the plot. So I’m gonna have to wrestle with that some.
* I don’t really mind, in the end, all the loose ends. I never thought I’d mind the various dotted-I crossed-T loose ends like who shot at the kayak. And I’ll live without some of the “we thought this was gonna be a big deal in the early seasons but then we went in a different direction” loose ends like WAAAAAAAAALT!!!!! I’m not thrilled, but I’ll live. But what I’m really okay with is just how much is an out-and-out mystery. Why did Ben and Widmore have their falling out? Why was Dogen so important? How did the Monster swoop in to manipulate the Others without Jacob stopping it> When the hell did the Island get overrun by Egyptian architects? How long was Mother around? Et cetera et cetera et cetera. I am pretty much fine with not having any idea but what I myself can deduce and infer and other words of that nature. I totally don’t mind looking at the show like you looked at the Star Wars franchise after Return of the Jedi. What were the Clone Wars? How did Yoda train Obi-Wan? Why did Darth Vader turn on the Jedi? Where’d the Emperor come from? What was up with Boba Fett? Folks, are you better off knowing those answers?
My two main gripes with tonight’s episode:
1. “Everything matters, Desmond . . . except my apparently imaginary son and 50% of every episode this season.”
2. After spending several episodes setting up the MIB’s character and motivations in a pretty compelling way, the resolution to his arc fell pretty flat. (I know, I know, I couldn’t resist.) But seriously, it did. All that build up to Jack kicking him off a cliff? I don’t know, it felt like we needed more, or maybe I just wanted more.
There were some nice grace notes — Hurley and Ben — but overall I thought it seemed sort of rushed and sloppy. (The payoff to Juliet’s coffee line, for instance, felt shoehorned in.) Maybe I’ll be less crabby in the morning.
(Also, hope your kitty is okay!)
So do I.
Hey,
Sorry about your cat. Had to take one of my cats and it was an expensive and frustrating experience to say the least. That cat came through it just fine, so I hope that yours turns out OK as well.
Having rewatched Empire last night, your point about the answers is well put. Is anyone happier knowing how Jacob observed off-island events using a magic lighthouse?
I’m still processing the resolution of the sideways plot. I’m disappointed that half of the season was spent on something that didn’t “matter” in the end. We already know that everyone dies eventually (they’re all mortal, after all). We already know that it’s sad to lose friends and happy to be reunited. They could have used that sideways time improving the setup for the rushed on-island events like the temple and the lighthouse. And does this mean that Jack’s Jughead plan accomplished exactly nothing?
The characters didn’t need the off-island redemption. Look at Jack: sending Desmond into the yellow hole turned out to be a bad decision, so he went back and fixed it.
On the other hand, some of the sideways episodes were a lot of fun, especially the succession of “potential lost spinoffs” in the early going. And it seems pointless to complain about flashbacks not mattering when that’s how it’s worked since the first season. Sometimes you learn that John Locke used to be paralyzed, but sometimes you just learn that Kate really likes little toy planes.
None of this diminishes the fun I’ve had watching the show as it aired. Waiting a week between episodes was key. Watching it in a chunk blunts the effect of the week-to-week anticipation, like trade-waiting instead of reading month-to-month.
Did the shaky camera, characters falling over, and styrofoam rock bombardment remind anyone else (in a good way) of original series Star Trek?
1-Sean, I hope your cat is ok.
2-From just a standpoint of emotional impact, it was an impressive and well-done finale for my money. Scenes are still repeating in my head now and haunting me a bit, so that tells me they accomplished something.
3-I resigned myself a few episodes ago that we simply weren’t going to get that many answers tonight (as I think you and many others did as well, Sean), so that wasn’t crushing for me…but I do feel for the people who held out until the end and are pissed. I don’t think they’re necessarily wrong, we’re just coming at it from different angles.
4-Shannon was the great love of Sayid’s life? The thing that snapped him out of the haze? Really? They couldn’t figure out any other way to work Maggie Grace into the finale?
5-For some reason Jimmy Kimmel’s “The show was Jack’s journey” theory that he threw at Matthew Fox during the post-show really both made sense for me and helped me appreciate the episode a lot more.
6-Do we really buy that when all that stuff with the castaways vs the others and the kids being stolen and women not having children and so on and so on was going down, the writers/producers *never* had any notion that the show would end any other way than how it did? It doesn’t really matter, I’m just curious.
7-The big unanswered question for me that I don’t actually think needed to be answered but I’m looking forward to seeing people’s theories on is how Desmond accessed the sideways dimension if it really was purgatory or whatever when Widmore zapped him there. I mean, he did access it, right? Also, did Juliet get a glimpse of it too when she died and that’s why she said her line? Did everybody peep the sideways when they died? And what event in the real world triggered it being time for folks in the sideways to “wake up”? Did the last Lostie die?
8-Kimmel also nailed a good one, I thought, with pinpointing the moment in the season premiere where the turbulence on the plane stopped and Rose told Jack “You can let go” as being the moment Jack died.
9-Why did some folks who weren’t on the original flight (Desmond, Penny and even Ben seemingly had the opportunity) get to “move on” while Miles, Charlotte and Faraday did not? Why wasn’t Ana Lucia ready? Is there any reason Eko didn’t show up aside from the actor not wanting to appear? And how exactly did sideways Eloise know what was up? Again, questions I just want to see theories from other people on.
10-How did Hurley get Boone to “wake up”? For some reason, and I can’t tell you why, that’s the one that stands out for me. The only person he seemed in love with was Shannon, and obviously she was meant for Sayid, so what would have gotten Boone to snap out of it?
11-I don’t think Ben got enough play this episode. I thought his story deserved more closure and that was one of the legit fumbles.
12-For somebody who was consistently “eh” on Jack and Kate, I gotta say, this episode did a tremendous job of convincing me in retrospect why these two were ultimately the focus of the show for six years. Well done there, both writers and actors.
13-After writing all this out, I do realize that there is some level of frustration for me out of not getting a lot of stuff I wanted spelled out for me spelled out, but also in writing this I realize that I’m kinda grateful for the open-ended nature of things as a springboard for theorizing and discussion that’s going to outlive the show itself for years to come.
as someone who really loved the mythology and the Dharma Initiative aspects of this show, I have to say that I’m surprised with how OK I am with all the unanswered questions. I personally love things being more suggested than spelled out (my main gripe with the Richard and the Jacob/MiB episodes was that they were just hammering away at their one or two points like people wouldn’t have understood it otherwise) but I also get kind of annoyed when writers just throw a bunch of shit at the wall and hope it sticks, without having any real idea about WHY they threw it at the wall.. you know?
All that said, this episode was incredibly effective in ways I never would have expected it to be. Considering they threw out all the Dharma stuff and a lot of the “mythology” (in the x-files sense) that didn’t explicitly pertain to jacob (IE mythology w/a capitol “M”) at the beginning of the season, I can’t hold the fact that they didn’t explain the “no babies” thing, or walt’s powers or the blast door map- or whatever you care to point at, more fully. They clearly made a choice to paint in broader strokes this season, and so at some point it has to boil down more to closure for the characters than closure for those of us who wanted more minutia explained (actually I feel like I’m 50/50 in the two camps of lost fans).
Things I loved:
– Shannon as Sayid’s one true love or not, I got verklempt at pretty much every reunion scene in the finale. Loved it, loved it loved it.
– The final showdown btwn Jack and MiB being relatively straightforward and mostly electrifying. Everyone I watched with let out a hoot and a holler at that first commercial break where jack jumps for locke, swinging his fist. Very satisfying.
– I felt like there was some symmetry where Locke gets crippled again one last time on the island before he went sideways.
-the untold tales of Hugo and Ben!
– Lapidus floating in the ocean (not to mention Lapidus getting everyone the fuck out!). I was worried he would be forgotten in all the thread-tying-up.
– The last few shots, close ups on Jack’s eye and the plane flying off, Jack laughing like the acid had kicked in, vincent etc, very nice.
There’s other stuff, but whatever. I mostly liked this episode a lot.
Stuff I didn’t like:
– The musical interlude stuff was at least as embarrassing as I expected it to be.
-Where the hell were Michael and WAAAAALt in all this? (and the other characters people mentioned above)
– the way it got all ultra-xtian in the last 10 minutes (yes I know it’s always played around with xtian symbolism and metaphor but not always so blatantly. (I don’t know if jack’s knife wound is cute or TOO CUTE)
Whatever. I’m impressed. And mildly tipsy, so please excuse me while I go play Red Dead Redemption.
I like that Hurley’s the overseer of the island now, Ben saying how he didn’t have to run it like Jacob, no smoke monster around anymore, so it’s gonna be Hugo’s Happy Magic Vacation Island forever more…
This episode was emotionally devastating for me and so, on that level, it was completely satisfying. All the reunions in sidewaysland totally hit me the right way, even (especially!) Sayid and Shannon (and even Kate and her apparent one true love, Claire’s ladybusiness).
On a narrative level, I’m not sure yet. That’s what DVDs are for, and that’s why discussions like this are fun. I will say though that I think the nuke did create the sideways/purgatory world. Not by sinking the island in 1977 or creating a parallel timeline, but through some combination of nuclear energy, island hoodoo and who knows, maybe Juliet’s love for Sawyer as she smacked the bomb with the rock. Possibly also Eloise had a hand in it, since she clearly knew what was up. (Oh damn: maybe that’s why Eloise sent Faraday back to the island in the first place, even though she knew she would end up killing him–he’d end up creating some alternate world where he’d be alive with her forever?)
And speaking as a dude of similar physical proportions to Hurley, I was really happy that he became the new Jacob partly because he didn’t want to climb down a rickety-ass bamboo ladder on the side of a cliff over the ocean. I’m right there with you, Hugo. I bet his secret candidate-name cave was a Dharmaville living room.
This seems totally obvious, and is probably something that everybody here already understands, but it finally clicked into place for me over the weekend: The reason I’m OK with all the alleged unanswered questions is that ultimately, Lost is a show about Jack, Kate, Locke, Hugo, Sawyer, etc., and not a show about the history of a mysterious island. What we learn about the Dharma Initiative or the Numbers or Jacob, we learn only because that knowledge affects our main characters. Obviously we can all point to times where we learned more or less than we strictly needed to know–in particular, another episode of Ben-centric flashbacks probably would have been extremely satisfying–but I think grounding all the mythology in the characters (in intent if not always in execution) is the major reason Lost has been so successful.
Sean, I join everybody else in wishing you and your cat well.
Hurley woke up Boone by holding up a mirror.
My general reaction is that all the closure moments were emotionally satisfying mostly due to accrued affection for the characters, that the action-aspects of the island material worked out somewhat better than expected — the wideshots worked better than they have in a while, too — and that my overall impression of the show as an achievement will certain diminish over time because every indication is that a lot of intriguing stuff was just narrative dross, or to tie it into one of the show’s themes, people was conned and you can kind of easily sense the confusion and shrugged-shoulder nature of it.
But it’s not so much that I’d ever be angry at that kind of thing. It’s just that if you think about the show in terms of aspects beyond its lovely surface qualities you soon get caught in eddies of nonsense. Not the world-building stuff by itself but the thematic material as well. Like I think it’s probably better not to dwell on exactly what they were trying to say with that Longtime Companion style ending, fuzzy Hollywood spiritualism at its dopiest.
Although on the other hand, maybe all shows should end with reassuring words on the nature of Life and Death from Hawk The Slayer. It would have improved the last episodes of Dinosaurs and Saved By The Bell, that’s for sure.
(The funniest single element to me was Rose and Bernard’s Bedrock Bungalow.)
Boone’s a vampire, Tom. He can’t see himself in the mirror. This is not amateur hour, pal.
Much more later of course, but quickly, Tom points to one of the things about this finale that’s tough to swallow: the banal conception of spirituality that now serves as the series’ capstone. I can think of at least two other very prominent genre dramas frequently referenced in comparison to Lost that both ended with a heaping helping of mysticism, if you know which two I mean, and in both cases, whatever other problems they had, they were anything but banal.
Snap reactions, because I’m still not sure what I thought of the last 5 minutes in particular…
“Kidnapped them,” not killed them. Though he did that too.
Sean: Best wishes to your cat.
Ben/Gardner: I don’t think Eloise engineered the purgatory, I think she was in the same position as Ben– she was aware of where she was, but she wanted to spend more time there making up for the ways they hurt their children.
Ben: By the same token, I think that just like Ana-Lucia wasn’t ready, perhaps Eko was ready before the others, and already moved on to the next stage. At least that’s the fanwank I’m going with.
Zack: Agreed on the heavy-handed Christian allegory (“Christian Shepard? Seriously?”). It makes the ecumenical gestures in the church feel a bit disingenuous. As Rev. Lovejoy said, “God didn’t burn your house down, but he was working in the hearts of your friends be they Christian, Jew, or… miscellaneous.”
As for the episode as a whole, I thought it was emotionally almost overwhelming– the Kwon’s awakening was terrific, and Ben and Hugo was incredibly sweet.
On a narrative/thematic level, I was disappointed. Above all, I was disappointed that it came down to a kicky/stabby climax. Since Jack’s whole theme was supposed to be that he fixes people, I was kind of hoping that he would find some kind of solution to get out of the old Jacob/Nemesis feud– to somehow restore MiB’s humanity so that he could have his freedom without destroying the world.
If it did have to come down to a fight though, I feel like it could have been more resonant. I had one idle thought that if MiB copies bodies exactly, that pulling the stopper would cause his borrowed legs to go gamy, and he would thus be brought down by his own hubris and by his callous exploitation of Locke in particular.
I wasn’t too sad that the show abandoned previous mythology, but I was upset that the final mythology was simultaneously simplistic and incoherent. What was the nondenominational purgatory and where did it come from? What was the difference between being an island ghost like Michael and a purgatory ghost? Is that world populated entirely by ghosts, or are the “extras” there just constructs for the edification of the chosen few?
And that, perhaps, is my real problem with the show. That in the end, it seems to really be about the unique elect, whose search for a satisfying life really is meant to outweigh all the death and destruction that surrounded the final stages of the Jacob/MiB feud.
Well, hopefully Hurley will make some changes as boss.
I enjoyed it, even though it pretty much unfolded exactly as I expected it would. (I told you Richard wasn’t dead.) My favorite moment was when Jack punched Fake Locke outside the happyshiny cave, and Fake Locke’s shock as he realizes he is flesh and blood again. (My only real complaint is that I would have liked for Ben to have had more of a part in getting rid of MiB, though. It really looked like they were setting him up to come in and shoot Vader’s TIE fighter so Jack could blow up the Death Star, but oh well.)
Oh, and WAY TOO MANY COMMERCIALS. I’ve been watching this season on iTunes, but last night we watched it live at a friend’s house. There was a commercial break every 6 or 7 minutes, for crap’s sake!
“Although on the other hand, maybe all shows should end with reassuring words on the nature of Life and Death from Hawk The Slayer. It would have improved the last episodes of Dinosaurs and Saved By The Bell, that’s for sure.”
Spurge FTW!!
Sean: I’m kinda steering clear of judging/really thinking too hard about the spiritual stuff just because my own relationship with all that is tricky at best so, for lack of a better way to put it, it makes me uncomfortable…but in some ways, I think that the finale made me a little antsy is an accomplishment for it? Maybe? Probably more just a me thing.
Justin: I’ve got a lot of thoughts about Widmore and his journey that I’m maybe gonna expand on in writing later or maybe just keep to myself and tell you when I see you (and others). Bottom line: I do think Widmore was ultimately one of the good guys and most of the shittier stuff he did may very well have been guided by or in (slightly) misguided service to Jacob’s dickish mandates that you mentioned. I think Widmore was always Jacob’s guy and Ben was always Smokey’s to a degree we never really saw (and that neither fully understood).
Justin2: I think Jack’s kid was a construct of the sideways and that reality will adjust for him once his parents “leave,” whether he ceases to exist or whatever. I’m not too concerned about him. I am curious about how the castaways shaped the sideways to suit their needs though. It seems clear Jack gave himself his sideways arc to deal with his daddy issues, but did he make Juliet his ex-wife for a reason? Did she give herself a kid for a reason? Was it just the sideways’ way of keeping the people who needed to be in the same vicinity close? Did the sideways have a mind of its own?
Simon: I agree with you on both the Eloise and Eko stuff. Good thinkin’.
General: If there was one character who got shafted by the finale, it was definitely Smokey, as we never did learn what would happen if he left the Island and he was definitely taken out pretty easily. On the other hand, Jacob’s plan carried out by Jack to make him vulnerable was actually not bad and the final fight was great.
If there was one character who I feel like got shafted by this whole season (or at least the second half), it was Ben. He was such an MVP of the past few years, and ultimately I feel like a big chunk of his arc got skipped over. He went from broken man/questionable villain to “Whatever you need, Jack/Hurley” yes man without any real explanation in the finale. I don’t feel satisfied by how the one-time Big Bad of the series went out.
I very much agree with Gardner about the mythology and loose ends. This show has always been about these characters and it just happens that their story took place on this wacky island. Not everything was answered, but their stories were given resolutions and in that regard, this finale was perfect in my book.
And it’s interesting to me that so many people view what’s going on with that last scene as some kind of purgatory or heaven. It seemed so obvious to me that, based on what Christian said, this group so badly wanted to be together that they dreamed up another reality.
To me it’s like that one story in Sandman, ‘A Dream of a Thousand Cats’ (and I hope your kitty is well Sean), where people were once the playthings of cats until they all got together and dreamed that they were the rulers and made it so.
We’ve seen Desmond move through time, which is why Widmore brought him back to the island. It seems so much more likely that he can move between real, concrete worlds, as opposed to one real world and then this odd, metaphysical place. It also seems like Eloise knew of the dreamed up reality and perhaps she thought it would crumble away if Desmond woke everybody up. But he was like ‘fuck it, they should get to enjoy this shit.’ So he woke everyone up so that they could realize what they’d done and how powerful it was.
I’m very much looking forward to creator commentaries. Not so much for answers, but just on their perspectives and where they were coming from.
But all in all, I was super please. And I teared up like 5 times. It was a lot to take in.
I’d also like to think that Smokey got a similar post-death constructed world to live in, because if there’s one thing this season taught me, it’s that Smokey got a raw deal.
Ben: I’d be very interested to hear your Widmore theory. I also think a lot of his dickishness can be attributed to his shared, slavish dedication with Eloise of making sure the events in Daniel’s diary come true, which is why he sent Desmond to the island.
Ben 2: I’m particularly sensitive about issues relating to children, of course. But I don’t like the idea that Jack had this child, who he loved, and who he obviously had a lifetime of memories of raising, and then he was comfortable just walking away no questions asked when he realized he wasn’t real. It’s the same issue I have when comic books kill characters’ kids, and then two issues later they’re back to their old status quo. Having a kid isn’t just a temporary shake-up, it changes you on a very fundamental level. Whether or not David was “real,” he was real to Jack and Juliet, and I didn’t see that addressed to my liking. In fact, he literally just vanished after the concert – everyone at his table ended up in the church. Everyone he knew ended up in the church. Where did he go? I know this is an incredibly minor point to get hung up on, but I think it plays to the notion of what is real and what matters in the Sideways, which is at the heart of whether or not the season and the finale were satisfying (leaving aside entirely how the finale wraps up the on-island stuff, which I was mostly fine with).
I agree with pretty much everything everyone said here, including the part about still being able to enjoy some of it. So all I can contribute is:
1. I think it’s a CS Lewis idea that heaven and hell work backward in time to change the meaning of what went before, so that in the former case Earth will turn out to have been purgatory, and in the latter it will have been hell all along. Unfortunately the equivalent here was “your life will turn out to have been accompanied by boring generic montage music all along.” The only thing I liked about those gloopy flashbacks was that the blown-out lighting effect suggested that life on the island on most days had felt like a massive mushroom trip, which seemed more approriate than the relatively ordinary way the show was usually shot.
2. Good luck to you and your cat.
I don’t think there any such thing as points too minor to get hung up on, Justin, particularly when, as you say, it’s one you’re predisposed to be sensitive to.
Also – Ben Morse: Yeah, Smokey and Ben could’ve gotten better sendoffs, but I really liked at least the idea that Smokey is undone by the thing he wanted most besides going “home”: turning off the magic and becoming a real live boy. And Michael Emerson sold me on the basic always-second-bestness of Ben in the scene where Jack picks Hurley and tells him he’s the only one and starts the water ritual right then and there as if Ben is just obviously not even worth considering, and Ben has this very brief look like “Bu– wh– I don’t fucking believe this… ah well, iy figures.”
As a Lost fanatic, I liked a lot of the Episode. However, after Smoke Monster was killed, I think it went a tad downhill.
What the fuck was the ending supposed to mean?
I have a friend at work that is telling me that all the passengers of Oceanic 815 really died in the original plane crash. I told him he is wrong and that is completely ridiculous.
Was the Flashsideways solely Jack’s movement towards some type of after life and not at all a reality?
Kate, Sawyer, Hugo, Ben, Bernard, Rose all never died in the show. Are they still alive?
I was hoping Sean could explain this to me because he is a lot smarter than I am. Hope everything is alright with you cat.
Why was Jack not supposed to raise Aaron? Not addressed.
The rules. Not really addressed. Kind of addressed between Jacob and Smokey but not between Widmore and Ben.
Sayid and Shannon. Give me a break. Lame.
I saw the Kimmel special but it wasn’t really enlightening. It was fun to learn Marilyn Manson is a huge Lost fan and was giving the Actor gifts at the Aloha to Lost special.
I don’t think Kimmel’s point about Jack on the Flashsideways Oceanic 815 was really accurate. In fact, I think Matthew Fox just kind of laughed that off.
Kimmel was right in that the finale was pretty much a showcase for Jack Sheppard.
Why did they have Juliet as Jack’s wife and mother to his son in the Flashsideways? She goes back to the hospital to basically hit on Sawyer when she is married to Jack and has a son with him? Or are we to believe that the entire Flashsideways was just bullshit and was a way to get the dead but alive Jack to move on to his afterlife?
Why is Ben hanging outside the Church?
Naveen Andrews seems like a weirdo.
What about child birth on the Island? Did we ever get an answer for why babies would die? Was that Jacob’s doing? Maybe we did and I just can’t remember.
Dogen? Ethan? Limo driver (forget his name)? Why were they showing up in the Flashsideways? Were they terribly important to Jack’s life? No.
Walt?
Aaron, a non-factor?
Why did damn Kate have to cap Smokey? So she could use the line about the bullets? I thought there could have been a better confrontation with Smokey? I did like the fight on the cliff with Jack and Locke and Jack’s flying punch but seriously, give me something more.
I don’t know.
In the Kimmel special, the Actors had a good nature spoof on the Sopranos ending and even the Bob Newhart Show. Don’t get me wrong, I like pretty much all Lost episodes and the show was, to me, the greated TV show of all time but for someone that followed the show as closely as I did to be almost completely lost in regards to the ending is kind of weak to me.
“iy”=”it”
So much to say! First I’ll just jot down some of my own thoughts and then I’ll respond to y’all’s. Oh, here’s a memo to Ryan though:
* Your coworkers are totally wrong–everything on the Island really did happen. It’s the Flashsideways stuff that didn’t happen. It’s the afterlife. They actually came right out and said that many of the people there died long after the Island stuff we saw, so that’s why Kate, Sawyer, Hurley, Ben, Bernard, and Rose were all there even though they didn’t die during the show.
* I did a quick post comparing the Lost and Battlestar Galactica finales, for those of you who’ve seen both:
* Yesterday I rewatched “Across the Sea” and it seems pretty clear that all the “rules” referred to by Ben, Widmore, Jacob, and the Man in Black were just what Jacob decided the rules would be when he was put in charge. The clue is in the scene where the two kids are playing that game and Jacob complains that the Boy in Black made up the rules so how can they really matter, and the BiB says “Hey, one day you’ll be able to make your own rules for your own game.” I think this is confirmed when Ben tells Hurley that not letting people off the Island was Jacob’s way, and he can do things differently if he wants.
* Parts of that afterlife/purgatory finale become pretty problematic after a little thought. For example: Sawyer escapes the Island and presumably lives a long and fulfilling life. During that time, he never finds love again? The true love of his life is Juliet so even if he lives to a ripe old age he gets reunited in the afterworld with the woman he spent part of the ’70s with, apparently. Similarly, Ji-Yeon doesn’t get to join her parents; Kate is also apparently loveless for the duration of her natural life; even though Nadya’s floating around the afterlife, Sayid gets reunited based on his two-week relationship with Shannon.
* Meanwhile, as others have pointed out, what woke up Rose and Bernard, since they were already together in the afterworld but didn’t have a baby to jog their memories like Jin and Sun? What woke up Boone, since Shannon goes off with Sayid? But it’s the stuff above that’s wonkier to me since you could construct good explanations for Boone and Rose and Bernard but based on what we know about the afterlife you can’t really iron out the wrinkles above.
* I will say that I’m pretty happy with the Sayid/Shannon thing for a couple of reasons. One, it’s a nice mitigation of the whole “One True Love” idea in an episode that hit that point really hard in almost every other place it could. I’m fine with Sayid finding happiness where he wasn’t looking for it–it happens! Two, I’m extra-happy about this happening to Sayid, whose star-crossed love for Nadya was tied so tightly to his attempts to atone for his time as a torturer and killer. It makes sense that if he could get past the latter, his need for the former would diminish.
* Maybe Kate and Sawyer end up getting together after the Island, though. I mean, who else could understand what they went through? They have a sort of friendship-marriage (with benefits of course, because come on) but in the afterlife they’re happy to go back to their true loves, Jack and Juliet. Actually you can almost sort of see that reflected in the afterlife-marriage of Jack and Juliet, where they got together and loved each other for a while presumably but then split up and in the end are happy to see one another with Kate and Sawyer. (Well, mostly it’s Juliet and Sawyer who get together, we don’t see Jack and Kate together in the afterlife iirc, but their big farewell on the Island implies that they’re the OTP.)
* The creators doubled down hard on their insistence that this is a show about characters in this episode and I think it redounded to their benefit, no question. Reunion after reunion, moving montage after moving montage. If you ever really loved any of these characters, you were given gift after gift here. Good for the show.
* You know what was truly magnificent? The final charge between Jack and the Monster. Jack leaping into the air to punch the Monster was AMAZING. Better than anything any superhero movie has ever done in terms of hero and villain facing off for all the marbles. Six years of emotion distilled into one punch. Just wonderfully done.
* Smart of the show to give Kate the killshot, too. I mean, Sawyer kind of got dicked by comparison–Ben too, I suppose–but Kate needed some agency and the show delivered.
* That said, it was sort of anticlimactic that all they had to do to defeat the Monster, in the end, was gang up to kill an old man. And its positioning in the finale was a bit wonky too–so much important stuff happened afterwards that it lost some oomph. A race against time to take off before there’s an earthquake or whatever doesn’t have the narrative power of a face-off against a centuries-old entity hellbent on murdering all life.
* So the bomb didn’t matter after all, huh? This was just some spiritual afterlife, not an alternate reality. Unless the idea is that the characters’ collective consciousness willed the alternate reality that would have been created by the bomb’s successful detonation into existence as their private purgatory. Actually, that works great, let’s go with that. That way, Season Five’s central narrative wasn’t totally pointless!
* I’m trying not to read all that much into who was in the church at the end and who wasn’t beyond “Oh, they couldn’t get Michelle Rodriguez’s schedule cleared, and they’re still embarrassed about how they didn’t plan for Malcolm David Kelley to grow up, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje still doesn’t want to go to Hawaii,” etc etc.
* Poor Island Desmond never gets to find out what the heck was up with the alternate reality/afterlife he’d seen! He gets knocked out thinking it was all wrong and never regains consciousness before the show ends. It’s kinda crazy that he’s the driving force behind the flashsideways and the reason the two end up linking up, but he himself never is shown to enjoy the fruits of his labors in that regard.
* Now that the show is complete, and particularly once the furor fades and people who’ve spent the vast majority of their time enjoying the show (like me) no longer feel the need to defend it against people who seem to have spent the same amount of time complaining about it, I think we can be honest about a few things. First, the show jerked a lot of characters around for no good reason. Physically, in some cases: The constant shuffling around the Island really did get as silly and arbitrary as a lot of people said. But also, and more importantly, in terms of their character arcs. Ben alone in this season went from good to bad, what, eight times? Each time seemingly contradicting a heartfelt and irrevocable heel/face turn?
* Second, obviously the show introduced stuff they intended to be a big deal but painted themselves into a corner on by continuously introducing more stuff they needed to get to and thus had to pretend didn’t matter. Walt, the kidnapping of the kids, no babies–that’s basically your first two seasons and none of it was adequately paid off in the finale. As i’ve said, I’m okay with a lot of this, there’s enough information that we can fill in the blanks. But it’s quite clear the story got away from them a lot, over and over again.
* You’ve got to imagine that the militant SF fans and atheists are going to hate on this like nothing has ever been hated on before, including a certain other popular genre drama.
* The more I think of it the prouder I am of my Return of the Jedi comparison. In the end Lost is more of an epic than a whodunit. That’s not to say that there weren’t points where the writers set it up like a whodunit but then bailed–far from it! They did that a lot!–but in the end this isn’t like getting to the end of an Agatha Christie novel and Miss Marple just says “Oh well, who cares, in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make, imagine no religions it’s easy if you try” and walks into the white light.
* i’ve got two more quick points but they both require links and I don’t think you can post more than one link per comment so I’ll dole them out separately….stay tuned…
* My comment interface limits the number of links I can include in any one post, which is really irritating, but one point Todd VanDerWerff raised in his post that I thought was really smart was that in the combination of Hurley and Ben as the Island’s new guardians, you see a pretty direct repudiation of the previous pair of Jacob and the Man in Black. No more good guy/bad guy, no more light/dark, no more centuries-long war of wills between two sides–instead you’ve got the loving caring teddybear at the heart of the castaways and the scheming murdering asshole at the heart of the Others joining forces and explicitly rejecting their forebears’ cruel way of doing things in favor of taking care of people.
* That said, I don’t buy his contention that Hurley used his Island Protector powers to generate this afterlife for them. There’s no reason to believe that based on what we saw.
Ryan: I think the fact that the very end of the episode just showed the crash site (without any people or dead bodies strewn about, like in the pilot) was saying that yes, they did die in the initial crash – and that the show was actually about these people working out their issues (the whole purgatory theory) so they can “move on.” That’s what I took from it, anyway. There is a lot of stuff re: that that I am still trying to reconcile, so I might eventually change my mind. But, for now, maybe 80% of me thinks that they died in the crash.
* Finally (yeah, right), I think Alan Sepinwall’s post does a good job of outlining why many (not all) of the narrative loose ends for both the main Island plot and the flashsideways things (like what happens to Jack and Juliet’s imaginary son) are indeed genuinely problematic–but without resorting to the nitpickery or hysteria or lack of imagination or accusations of show-ruining you see a lot.
Nicholas (and Ryan), Christian comes right out and tells Jack that the reason he’s here in the church with these people is because their time together was the most important time in Jack’s life. That statement wouldn’t make any sense if the only time he spent with them was eating peanuts and watching the in-flight movie on Oceanic 815, you know? The crash definitely happened, they were definitely on the Island, some of them died there, some of them escaped, some of them died there years later, and the afterlife was the product of their collective minds/souls as a way for them to reunite, remember, and let go.
Can’t believe I forgot to say this, but it maybe didn’t even occur to me until now: I love Jack, he’s my favorite character, so I love that he got the ending he did. Ya done good, Doc.
Yeah, like I said earlier, if “Silence the Jack haters” was a box on the check list for this finale, cross if off with gusto, boys. He really killed it.
Y’know, it just occurred to me we got another “Why didn’t Sawyer care more about the Dharma folks he spent years with” type deal with Hurley and Ben. Presumably the two of them spent years together more or less alone on the island, but in the sideways, Hurley didn’t seem too concerned with getting Ben in that church.
Sure, you can explain that as Hurley understanding Ben had more to work out in the sideways, but still, in the end he had to have ended up spending more time with Ben than any other member of the extended cast, so it seems a bit off they didn’t have even more of a moment.
It really just does hammer home the thing we’ve already harped on enough about how screen time > “real” time as it relates to the characters’ relationships.
Sean: Ok, that does blow my theory apart, and I’m ok with that. 🙂 BUT what’s the wreckage at the end mean?
Ben: In fairness to the show, I think they’ve handled that pretty well, all things considered. Clearly Sawyer’s most important relationship on the show is with Juliet, even though it spanned a relatively brief amount of airtime compared to him and Kate. He’s also been shown to be very attached to Miles and Jin, and vice versa. Personally I’m fine with the level of interaction Hurley and Ben had at the end of the afterlife sequence. My guess is that Hurley knows Ben so well that he understands why he’s hanging around outside without needing to belabor the point.
* Here’s another great insight, from Rob Bricken: “Lost was more interested in mysteries than solving mysteries.” That’s EXACTLY right. I think that even more than other divisive finales, this one will be a time-delayed explosion where it’s simply going to take a long time to fully reevaluate the 100-plus hours of the series we’ve seen in light of what the final episode reveals its priorities to be.
If you only knew how tough this was to do with an iPhone.
I feel like a class a ignoramus. The questions (and in some cases, the actual answers) brought up here are fantastic, and they even make sense in the sense that, yeah, maybe 6 years of my (our) lives were wasted. But, and I say this with the utmost confidence in my abilities, I’m nothalf as smart as the smarties in this room. I made a firm choice, early in the first season, to not get caught up in the minutae and symbolism of the show. I watched for the sake of the performances and let the mystery unravel in it’s time rather than try to solve any of them because, invariably, the more you try, the more you’ll get wrong. Granted, with my rose colored retrospectacles firmly in place, the questions posed by the panel do rankle me a bit, but not that much.
As far as endings go, this was top notch. You could see it coming, maybe, but the journey it took to get there was well worth it. The reunions gave me chills (I forgot Shannon’s name!) and as sappy as they were, I still got misty eyed. I thought Kate’s goodbye to Jack in the cliffs was the most satisfying moment of the night, right after Ben’s apology. Early on, when the idea of candidates came up, I picked Hurley, and I’m glad to see that ultimately I was right, but dammit, if him picking Ben as his Richard wasn’t a money shot.
Richard’s gray hair…classic.
There were holes in the awakenings, sure (if touching someone did it, why weren’t Jin & Sun awakened earlier?) but I got the most emotional bang for my buck out of them.
Isn’t it fitting that in the end, a show called Lost ended with them all being found?
That said, I reitterate my tweet from last night: now that it’s over, what was it all about?
Pretty damn good. If I’m grading, at least a B+, the emotional payoffs outweighing the plotting and how certain characters were a bit short-changed. Yes, having a lot of folks smiling and happy that have gone through a lot of crap previously shouldn’t work as well as it does here, but what can I say? I teared up a few times.
I don’t think Ben’s latest turnaround was that abrupt. He seemed to have planned something offscreen with Miles and I think going along with MIB was just sound survival, and he was the only guy who could convincingly pull it off.
The Hurley/Ben stuff was great, especially the idea of abandoning Jacob’s old rules. Maybe it helps that Hurley had two loving, supportive, if flawed parents. I sort of wanted more from Eloise, but it works okay that she ends up the Margaret Dumont type with the figurative pie in the face when the upstarts don’t conform to the rules of Jacobean society.
Would have liked a little more importance for Sawyer here, but hell, between Jack, Locke and Kate someone was going to get squeezed. It’s rare enough that one male character gets developed well on network TV, and we’ve had half a dozen or more here over the course of six seasons.
My feeling about the sideways world, which seemed pretty clear from what Christian said (though not hammered home as bluntly as some of the revelations the past few weeks) was that this was really just the Island corner of Heaven–Paradise Island, you could call it. I don’t think it even really negates that a part of Sayid’s soul could be with Nadya, too, or Jack being able to see his Mom, Charlie his brother, etc., though I admit that’s a stretch. I do agree the inclusion/exclusion of some characters is problematic and supports the idea this is essentially Jack making out the guest list, but also don’t have much problem with the idea that Ana Lucia wasn’t ready and maybe Mr. Eko wanted his own corner of Heaven with his loved ones.
I’m not sure what to make of Ben not being ready to join the group. Did he feel he had more to atone for, and if so, how would he go about it? Continuing to teach in the sideways world or being a ghost in the “real” world?
I thought it was funny how disappointed Hurley was to find out he’d lifted up Desmond. Thanks a lot, brother!
Kate and Jack professing their love, the loving contentment of Jin & Sun, and the awakenings of Claire/Charlie and Sawyer/Juliet were all terrific. I have a friend at work who only started watching from last season on and even she got emotional during that stuff. Well done.
First off, I’m not Lost hater or even Lost love-hater. I’ve been with this show since the pilot aired. Every time I’ve gotten frustrated to the point of maybe giving up (the Season One finale, the first half of Season Three), the show has blown my mind and brought me right back into it.
That said, count me among the disappointed. For me the show was so engaging because of the promise of this wonderfully constructed world where all the crazy plot elements meant SOMETHING. I thought they were building to some kind of grand design. But really many elements didn’t connect in any major way. It was like, yeah, the Island can travel in time and space. But it doesn’t really mean anything that it can.
I think Sean makes an excellent point that the creators introduced way too many story elements along the way and let things get away from them. (Right up to the end. Why did we need Dogen, the Temple, the Lighthouse, the Cave …)
Sure, the show is about the characters’ journeys. But you could say that about Gray’s Anatomy, too. The thing that set Lost apart was its mythology. For so much of that to be pushed aside and never addressed is a major failure of the final season.
And I have to strongly disagree with those that say that the audience can solve the remaining mysteries themselves. There’s not enough solid information to make judgments about a lot of this stuff without resorting to fanfic.
The one “unresolved” element that I can forgive is that we never find out whether the world would really end if MIB escaped the island or if the Light went out. I do like that we have to just accept that on faith.
But what about Widmore’s motives and backstory, Eloise Hawking’s seeming omniscience, Walt, the child abductions, the lack of island births, why Ben was “tainted” by being saved at the Temple, what was up with the divisions of the Others, Jacob’s cabin, etc, etc, etc.
That said, the finale didn’t bother me as much as the final season in total. I think the introduction of the Sideways universe, with its lack of a tether to the show’s main plot and its hokey spiritualism, will ultimately be viewed as the shark-jumping moment for this otherwise excellent series.
@COOP – I was thinking a lot about what the commercial/content ratios were going to be like, given that this was going to be such a big deal. So I decided to track them with a stopwatch. Here’s a list of times that Lost was actually on:
? (I missed this first one, since I was so excited about it starting. Call it 7 minutes)
7:32
6:02
6:01
4:45
6:15
6:55
8:42 (ending on Jacks Flying Dragon Punch)
5:20
5:34
4:52
14:35
18:38 (not including the ending credits)
Another random thought (I’m sure I’ll keep having them all day and beyond and thank you so much for this thread): It’s kinda crazy how via the flashbacks and even just thinking back to early seasons, for a desert island that place was just teeming with people (castaways, Others, etc.) and then by the end it was just two guys, a hermit couple, and a dying guy.
Do we think there were still random castaways, Others, Widmore lackeys and more straggling when it all came crashing down? Are the stewardess and the kids still out there somewhere, waiting to be brought under Papa Hurley’s wing?
Last ep of Lost and my first entry into this long-running blog dialog… just a few thoughts… here goes…
+ The flash sideways, while wrought with loads of confusing aspects if you try and apply logic to it, was just a big bundle of emotional pay off. For a whole season it was essentially just moment after moment of things playing out better than they ever had on the island or in the character’s real lives off the island. So, when they all start waking up and get their big moments of happiness, it was just the topping on a “here’s a reality/plane of existence where things are better” pie. I got wrapped up in the emotion and enjoyed it. That said, I also think aspects (as Justin pointed out) like Jack’s construct son there to allow him to get over his daddy issues just disappearing are problematic, and make for good examples of why people who hated the finale aren’t wrong to do so. But, as Christian said, the flash sideways is a time without a “now.” So the flash sideways also just being a venue for the characters to get over certain things, to let go, without a ton of logic placed on things like disappearing kids doesn’t bother me much.
+ I’m generally pleased with how the storyline on “island present” ended. They wrapped things in a way where I can sit down and reason out why we never learned more about the island’s history and mythology. When the episode ended, I was actually really thrilled with the idea that it might spawn some sort new Lost that answered a bunch of that stuff, essentially the Lost prequel trilogy to Sean’s RotJ analogy: an extended universe of answers to things explaining the Egyptian connection, the origin of the Others, more about Dharma and Dogen’s importance. Josh Wigler talked me down from that desire, but I still hope the DVD special features (as Sam also hoped) would enlighten us on a great deal of that stuff. I realized that I don’t need whole new episodes explaining the Egyptians who landed on the island, but a short explanation from the creators as to what small back story they came up with (or possibly didn’t come up with) to keep in mind while writing episodes that dealt with it would be nice. Certainly a lot of connections can be made through assumption, but if the “Walt creeps out his stepdad and has powers of some sort” plot had a potential outcome, I’d love to hear it
“…count me among the disappointed. For me the show was so engaging because of the promise of this wonderfully constructed world where all the crazy plot elements meant SOMETHING. I thought they were building to some kind of grand design. But really many elements didn’t connect in any major way. It was like, yeah, the Island can travel in time and space. But it doesn’t really mean anything that it can.”
“Sure, the show is about the characters’ journeys. But you could say that about Gray’s Anatomy, too. The thing that set Lost apart was its mythology. For so much of that to be pushed aside and never addressed is a major failure of the final season.”
Quoting Pat Kastner above as he describes how I expected I would feel at the end of the show given a finale like the one we got. I’m still a little surprised that I’m so pleased. I mean, when it’s revealed to Jack that he’s dead, my initial thoughts were “Bullshit! Cop out!” but now I just want some DVD special features or companion books to hash out the mythology a bit and I’ll be ok (Iguess I am more-or-less ok with it now, more info would just be a bonus.). I love the idea that instead of the island’s grand design
Hope your cat is okay, Sean!
My thoughts so far can be summed up as “C.S. Lewis/The Last Battle.” Also, so many annoying questions have answers that are external not intrinsic to the story — i.e. Eko doesn’t want to go back to Hawaii. Sticking with the core characters thought allows a more satisfying narrative.
Ugh..stupid iPhone didn’t show that my post posted. Three times. Sorry, dude!
And hope your cat is home again!
Do we think the folks moving on to the next level retain all their sideways memories? Specifically, do Jack and Juliet recall conceiving a child together and is that going to make things awkward with Kate and Sawyer (or rather even more awkward given that all four of them are one step away from a key party)?
BTW – anyone here who is not yet watching FRINGE, please grab the season 1 DVDs (and season 2, which just wrapped up) and play catch up. It’s a fun show, with the same kind of puzzle-solving as LOST, but with a lot more payoff, IMHO. And John Noble is fucking fantastic on the show.
In similar sentiments as COOP has for Fringe, I would say check out Flashforward but it has been cancelled, so that would be a huge waste of time.
I liked it while it lasted.
Check out Gossip Girl. It balances character and mythology like no other show on network television.
Oh, dammit, I have a question…
Did Jack die in the same spot he woke up in/on in the pilot?
Roughly the same spot, yeah.
Ben, I think you’ll find it was actually 4 yards, 8 feet, 15 inches, 16 decimeters, 23 centimeters and 42 googlepops away from the spot he woke up in. See, the numbers did mean something!
Hey, I just realized they never told us why Hugo’s nickname was Hurley! Damn them all to hell.
I must say that I never watch Late Night television but I do enjoy Jimmey Kimmel when I have seen him.
I gained a lot of respect for him when he was on Leno and basically ripped Leno a new one for the whole Leno vs. Conan fiasco. He even was able to do it while answering a legitimate line of questioning from Leno which was very clever.
Anyway, I found it quite funny when he thanked Harold P. (Michael Dawson) for killing Anna Lucia.
Something that’s been bothering me the more I think about it, why didn’t Jack turn into a smoke monster when he was down in the light pool? I guess Desmond didn’t because of his deal with electro-magnetism, but shouldn’t Jack have gone all Smokey? Did I miss something there?
Pat K: I doubt someone that went through the induction ceremony as the protector of the Island can become the Smoke Monster later. I understand that before he went down, Jack turned those duties over to Hugo but still…
BW:
* You know, last night I was more disappointed with the relatively easy defeat of the Monster than I am today. Today I just keep seeing that shot of Jack jumping, fist cocked, over and over again. That is sheer magic. As a wise man once said, personality goes a long way.
Nigel:
* You have a good point on the banality of the sideways resolution: “We already know that everyone dies eventually (they’re all mortal, after all). We already know that it’s sad to lose friends and happy to be reunited.”
Ben:
* The spiritual explanation instead of the alternate-reality explanation does indeed make Desmond and Juliet and Jack’s Island-side glimpses of the flashsideways stuff a lot harder to explain.
* I think Ben got away from the writers to an extent. He’s a classic heel turned face due to popular demand, Lost‘s answer to The Rock if you will, and I think that cut them off from several more dramatically fulfilling resolutions for him. I mean, dude slaughtered countless people, but Michael’s the one sentenced to wander the Island because he plugged two ladies to get his boy back?
Zack:
* If anything I think the show went out of its way to downplay Christian allegory, up to the point where they were making fun of Christian Shepard’s name on-screen. That’s just some basic nondenominational “go into the light” imagery.
Josh:
* Everytime you post here you suggest something I’d like to see you make a comic out of. I would pay money to read Hugo’s Happy Magic Vacation Island by Josh Simmons.
Gardner:
* I think the position that this is a show about characters rather than plot or genre trappings or mysteries can be overstated, and I’m sure I’ve done that myself, but allowing for the obvious appeal of the Monster and the Dharma Initiative and all the gunplay and clues and such, it’s certainly a show about character as much as is possible with a story like this. By divorcing the resolution from the plot, the show really made its case about this.
Tom:
* That’s sharp analysis of the show’s weakness. I think as time goes by, though, you may be able to get some of its thematic material a little straighter in your head. In the end, free will vs. destiny wasn’t the driving conflict it seemed to be–it was more “don’t be an asshole.” Which I suppose is a banal insight itself, but I can’t get enough of it.
Justin:
* Yes, the Purgatory revelation was Chutzpah City.
* The show really does have some odd and contradictory things to say about parenting, I suspect because Damon Linedelof feels a lot of odd and contradictory things about his parents, based on what I know of his biography. I’m fine with that, I suppose.
* I’m glad I was right about Lapidus living to be masculine another day!
Simon:
* I approve this fanwank.
* You know, they really did themselves a huge favor by emphasizing the big character reward moments. If you have any affection for the characters at all and don’t automatically shut down at the sight of the supernatural, you’re guaranteed to love a decent chunk of the episode.
* I have no problem with kicky/stabby climaxes. They’re to action genres what singing is to opera. I do like your idea of the MIB’s legs giving out, though I feel that Jack’s reproaches tie him to the morally superior Locke enough.
* The show is indeed about an elect/select group, but I don’t think it’s endorsing that approach. Jacob is the lesser of two evils, but the show makes clear he was a screw-up.
COOP and Ken:
* I was running far enough behind due to cat stuff that I was able to fastforward through all the commercials, but those stats are absolutely outrageous.
Ben:
* Yes, I think it’s good the show made you and lots of people antsy. I don’t mean that in the Cry for Justice sense of “if people think our book is stupid, then we’ve done our job” sense, I mean it in the sense that it stuck its nose in a place people didn’t think it would go. I think it could have done a better job for all the reasons I’ve described, but yeah.
* I don’t think Widmore was Jacob’s man–he was always a murdering creep even before Ben came along to fight with. I think they’ve all been at the whims of an absentee/aloof Jacob and a manipulative out-for-blood MIB.
* How would the Monster’s departure have done anything to anyone given that he was just a human being at that point?
Sam:
* Christian came right out and said it was an afterlife, didn’t he? I don’t think it’s a physical place.
Justin:
* I don’t think it’s fair to look at the decisions of the reawakened flashsideways characters in the strictly logical/linear way you’re doing. Jack isn’t walking away from a child, he’s walking away from an afterlife he constructed. There is no child. Once they realize that, the kid’s NOT real to them anymore. He didn’t go anywhere–he’s gone.
Hob:
* Re: the montage flashbacks: YOU’RE DEAD INSIDE
* Good call on the Monster and Ben getting thematically appropriate if not super-awesome denouements.
Ryan:
* I’ve already answered a bunch of your questions, I think? To the best of my ability, that is.
* Haha, I bet hardcore atheist Manson was less than pleased with that ending!
* Juliet and Jack were divorced in the flashsideways, don’t forget.
* I assume Ben’s just not done working through his issues, since he has a whole lot more of them.
* I was not crazy about that “I saved you a bullet” line either.
Nicholas:
* I just assumed the crash footage during the credits was the show’s salute to Where It All Began. I didn’t even see it as part of the series itself. The creators have said that the eye closing is The Final Shot.
Vito:
* First of all, your triple-post was the fault of my horrible comment interface, not your iPhone. Don’t sue Steve Jobs just yet.
* I think you have a pretty healthy attitude toward the show and how to watch it. Aside from the self-deprecation, which I never do because I am a brilliant genius, it’s pretty much verbatim things that I’ve said about how I preferred to watch the show over the years.
Christopher:
* “Ben seemed to have planned something offscreen with Miles” = oh, of course! GREAT call. I should have picked up on that.
* When you think about it, the series had a huge juggling act here in that it had such a large number of people you could call “main characters,” whether in terms of driving the plot or being the marquee stars and emotional lynchpins. Way I see it, you had Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke, Ben, Desmond, Fake Locke, and Juliet. No matter how you slice that, they probably couldn’t have given everyone the moments they needed in this episode to make them feel like they had enough to do. That of course raises the question of whether they should have had that many characters in the first place, but whatever.
Pat:
* Your self-introduction as neither a Lost hater nor a Lost love-hater raises a point I really want to make, which is that I don’t want to come across like I’m dismissing everyone and anyone who didn’t like the episode as kneejerk haters. There are a lot of those types of Lost watchers out there, obviously, as everyone knows. And then with this episode, you’re going to run into hardcore SF fans who despise mysticism, and unimaginative nerd-culture people who want everything decoded, and militant atheists who’ll start ranting about the Flying Spaghetti Monster in tedious fashion. But you also have people who just don’t think it worked. I think it’s pretty clear that that’s a valid reaction to have to an episode like this.
* You also raise a good point that the show is about the characters, but it’s also about the mythology and such–otherwise we could all just go watch ER.
* I don’t think there’s anything wrong with fanfic. Again, see my Jedi comparison–I bet you your fanfic was in many ways superior to George Lucas’s! And I say that as someone who enjoys all the prequels. Just not as much as the ones in my head.
Ben:
* Yes, I like to think that Ben and Hurley, and perhaps even Bernard and Rose and Vincent, will pull together a much more humane group of Others from the surviving castaways, Others, Widmorons and so forth.
Jim:
* Welcome, Big Jim!
* “A big bundle of emotional pay-off” is exactly what the flashsideways stuff was. I wonder if they tried and failed to figure out how to deliver that without resorting to the afterlife concept.
* Okay, your mention of the astonishing Lord of the Rings behind-the-scenes docs makes me salivate for something along those lines for Lost, though I have a hunch we won’t get that at all. I do expect the extended edition of the finale to include a scene where Walt shows up and explains live via satellite from Alvar Hanso’s office at the Dharma Initiative headquarters in Ann Arbor why no one on the Island could have babies, then travels back in time to help King Tut build the statue and throw Mother into the light waterfall.
* I do know they’re releasing one official and complete Lost Encyclopedia. I remain of the opinion that if it didn’t happen over the ABC airwaves, it’s not canon, but that should still be pretty interesting.
Heidi:
* I don’t know how you feel about The Last Battle, but I thought it stunk, so should my takeaway be that you thought this stunk? My problem with all of Narnia but especially the last book and its treatment of Susan is how neatly everything had to map to Lewis’s Catholicism, allegory at the expense of story. Tolkien Was Right! That said, I don’t feel preached to by Lost. My day job entails a lot of Christian fiction, and the difference is plain as day.
* Oh man I HATE when external problems affect the story! My classic example is how the Frankie Pentangelli character in The Godfather Part II was supposed to be Pete Clemenza but Richard Castellano held out for too much money. Imagine if that had been lovable old Clemenza in that bathtub, you know?
Ben:
* I assume that the enlightenment granted by the flashsideways afterlife makes everyone okay with everything. That’s how I always wanted the afterlife to be–total forgiveness and acceptance.
Ryan:
* Is there any chance FlashForward will actually work BETTER since they only had one season, so it’ll feel more cohesive? Or did they not get to wrap things up?
* Good call on Pat’s question about why Jack didn’t turn into the Monster.
Phew!
You guys are seriously the best group of Lost commenters I’ve ever seen anyplace. If you had any idea how happy it makes me that somehow I helped create a space where as wide-ranging a group of people as some great cartoonists, some great comics critics, my former coworkers, my blog buddies, my kid brother, and total strangers could all get together and talk about one of my favorite things with this much decorum and insight…it’s really made my year, folks. Thank you.
My grand theory on the Others, Widmore, Ben, etc.: http://thecoolkidztable.blogspot.com/2010/05/lost-figuring-out-others.html
“I don’t think Widmore was Jacob’s man–he was always a murdering creep even before Ben came along to fight with.”
I had a bad feeling that my lack of total recall about Widmore’s pre-Ben actions would hurt the big hypothesis I just posted, but oh well, I took the swing.
Ben as The Rock–I love you, Sean T. Collins.
I still think Ben as the last sacrifice either as the sub-boss Sawyer gets to kill or redemption-seeking cannon fodder going after Smokey would have been a better ending for him, but oh well.
And it has been an absolute pleasure to be a part of this ongoing discussion with the caliber of folks involved. I hope it doesn’t have to end with the finale!
michael giacchino rulez
I didn’t comment on a lot of the last few episodes prior to the finale. So I would like to make a few points.
I made a big deal and argued with some people about the cave with the candidates’ names on the wall. I asserted it was probably a “hit list” of sorts and was MIB’s cave. Jacob said that he wrote those names on the wall. So I was wrong to an extent. Obviously, towards the end, MIB was crossing off names but Jacob was responsible for that list. I thought it was clever when Kate asked about her name being crossed off and Jacob explained it was because she had become a mother and was not an ideal candidate anymore. The he said, ‘It’s just chalk on a wall.’ I am paraphrasing. Anyway, I like when the writers kind of directly or indirectly take shots at all of us bloggers and over-analyzers. It’s humorous.
Matthew Fox is an incredible actor. Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson are as well. It was a pleasure watching that trio for all of these years.
When I read these posts and there are comic book references and literary references, it boggles my mind. I don’t read much.
Like I said, I enjoyed the finale. I enjoy everything LOST. I had some issues with it but I think my first post was a little more negative than I really intended.
The Jack and Locke fight was totally sweet. It was a little brief for my liking. In a weird way, the fight scene reminded me of Star Wars: Episode 1. Don’t cringe. Perhaps one of my favorite fight scenes of all-time. Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon vs. Darth Maul. One of the best fight scenes ever put to screen. What really does it for me is when the fight enters the hallway with the force field type contraptions and separates the participants. Darth Maul, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are literally itching to destroy each other. Maul vanquishes Qui-Gon with a nice sabre strike while Obi-Wan is forced to watch behind the last force field. What ensues is where I would start to draw the comparison to Jack vs. Locke. Obi-Wan yells “no,” and Jack yells, “Locke.” In both scenes the pugilists ready themselves literally jumping into action. I only wish Jack, and not Kate, put the real hurtin’ on Locke. At least Obi-Wan got to chop Darth Maul in half…
I must’ve missed Christian saying it was an afterlife. The whole time it seemed so vague to me that I read into as being a different type of reality. Or maybe I just wanted it to be a reality so that they could have another chance to be together. In a non-ghosty type of way.
Plus the Desmond thing through me off. But I suppose if he can time travel (especially in the Faraday way of thinking) he could travel so far into his future that he’s dead? I suppose? Or he’s magic.
But now that I’m on the right track, I’m still super happy with the end. Go team Lost.
Sean: “I do expect the extended edition of the finale to include a scene where Walt shows up and explains live via satellite from Alvar Hanso’s office at the Dharma Initiative headquarters in Ann Arbor why no one on the Island could have babies, then travels back in time to help King Tut build the statue and throw Mother into the light waterfall.”
Wasn’t that the opening act for the Widmore/Faraday and Driveshaft concert?! I mean, those guys are good, but they didn’t hit the stage without a warm up act, right?
As we got a good convo going, I put this new theory about Lost to the group…
While I did enjoy the finale, and still do, I wonder if the gravitas given to it was so great that it actually robs some of that impact from past season finales. A lot of the stuff, like mysteries revolving around the Others, that seemed crucial to the show’s end game kind of fell by the wayside.
So
The thing I’ve always liked about Lost was the fact that it was quite happy to mix hopeless romanticism, metaphysical malarkey and good punching scenes all together in one giant mess, so the final episode hit all the right buttons.
Besides, it’s nice to know that in Lost, nobody dies alone. Live together, die together.
Thanks for the forum, Sean.
“Wasn’t that the opening act for the Widmore/Faraday and Driveshaft concert?! I mean, those guys are good, but they didn’t hit the stage without a warm up act, right?”
Driveshaft never sounded better than they did during the finale. Add a Faraday/Driveshaft “Spinal Tap” mockumentary with Eloise in the Ian Faith role and Charlotte as Jeanine as another spinoff I’d like to see. Charlie spontaneously combusted.
The best analysis I’ve seen so far, with some funny lines to boot:
http://jezebel.com/5546559/lost-finale-recap-case-closed
“To me, the heart of the Island looked like a butthole after buffalo wings pass through.”
All I have to say is WOW!
I haven’t read the comment thread yet, but wanted to chime in relatively promptly for once instead of a week later like usual. 🙂
Maybe I’ve drunk too deeply of the Lost Kool-Aid, but I thought that was great!
I found myself deeply moved by the finale.
I do have some quibbles: the storm? Cliche (dramatic and sort of neato, but still) and then POOF! It’s gone in like, an instant? Huh? Did I miss some clue that time has passed?
I think I had another 1 or 2 but can’t remember them now.
Anyway, these quibbles about unanswered questions miss the point, I dare say. DO we really need to know where the Statue came from? The Heart of the islands hot tub to hell with stopper? Not really. Would it be nice, sure, but if ABC made them drag it out indefinitely and the writers used these details to pad extra fluff episodes, we’d have to endure more episodes like the one where we find out about Jack’s tattoos in Thailand–snooze…
I woke up today doubly moved and knowing it was moving and emotional, but wondering if it was truly Good. Or is it Good because it’s moving? (and what is good anyway? I’ll leave that to the Yale-educated literature and film buffs to answer). For me, it’s both Good and Moving, and the whole is greater than the sum. This is a rare TV moment that invites you to really think and appreciate life, and that is a gift.
So what did I like? Just about everything else! I was moved by the reunions in the flash-sideways and by Jack’s protracted death scene (which I hated watching, but I think it was well done), and loved the parallel to the Pilot when the plane crashed and jack opens his eyes–a plane takes off and jack closes them. Poetry. (Just a bit creepy, to be frank, but very affecting).
The collective consciousness afterlife holding cell that was the flash sideways (non) reality: very cool! I loved that! I had been afraid that as Stephen King fans the producers would pull a Dark Tower and somehow have it all restart in a loop–and that would have sucked, IMO.
Hurley taking over as guardian with Ben–totally down with that. (sequel? Movie? Nah)
Great fight scene with Fake Locke and Jack. The ‘reunions–in the flash sideways with the rememberings, all very sweet and cool and poignant. (maybe a little rushed, but to spread them out over several eps would have made it too clear too soon what was happening). And a shout-out to duct tape! WORD!
I’m rambling.
Point is I loved it. 🙂
I dare say this will be remembered well as a strong series finale and a great series in TV history.
Aside: how funny (but so out of place and just wrong) would this have been? While Frank is getting the plane ready to fly, Richard leans into the cockpit and says, ‘I just wanted to say, ‘good luck.–We’re all counting on you.’
This is supposedly from someone on the inside at Bad Robot:
http://lostmediamentions.blogspot.com/2010/05/someone-from-bad-robots-take-on-finale.html
some good stuff here, whether or not it is the real deal.
Like I said, take it with grain o’ salt after consulting your physician.
More thoughts, having read half the comments now… (I don’t promise these are insightful or helpful, but what the heck, they can’t hurt, right)
Recall that Jack’s dad said the characters’ time on the island was the most significant things they did in their lives. I think that’s why the loves and everything they felt then are what they take to the afterlife with them.
While Jack’s dad is a Christian Shepherd (sic) and the last scene is in a church, I think that’s pretty much just because Jack and Christian are themselves Christians, not because the producers are saying Xtians have it right (I think Cuse and Lindelof are both Jewish? Am I confabulating that?) The stained glass window is a clue. My wife was like, ‘What kind of church is that?’ and I said, trying to sound smart, ‘ It’s not really a church, it’s an allegory this kind of BS got me my English degree. ‘ Sean may recall my college days when I was working thru issues with religion, so for me to say the xtian imagery isn’t a big deal and isn’t necessarily xtian in this context I think says a lot, that it isn’t, I mean. (or that I’m a narcissistic prick, but I think I’ve grown out of that too).
The bomb destroying the island’s energy: this has ALWAYS bothered me. Farraday, as a physicist would have understood the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy, which, if memory serves, states that ‘energy can not be destroyed’ hello? (then again, I’m not a physicist, so maybe I don’t understand, right?) also, maybe the detonation of the bomb was ‘the incident’ but it wasn’t strong enough to crack the heart of the island or anything like that, so it dented the golden light energy, but didn’t snuff it out, so the timeline continues normally. Or something.
Agreed Widmore a little anticlimactic, and I’m not clear on what his plan really was, but I love Ben’s line, ‘He doesn’t get to save his daughter.’ Also agreed, GREAT little scene of Richard and Ben when they walk over Alex’s grave.
Sean: ‘Unless the idea is that the characters’ collective consciousness willed the alternate reality that would have been created by the bomb’s successful detonation into existence as their private purgatory. Actually, that works great, let’s go with that. That way, Season Five’s central narrative wasn’t totally pointless!’
OOH! I think you nailed that one!
I really was moved by James’s (I still call him Sawyer) last words to Jack, something like, ‘Thanks doc. For everything.’ They way he loaded Everything into those few words. Jack just nods. Too much to say, so nothing needs saying. Heavy stuff. And I’m glad James seems to end the last couple seasons as a good guy.
OH YEAH! RICHARD’S GRAY HAIR! How cool was that? He’s free to grow old, what a relief! I’m glad he didn’t just spontaneously decompose from aging 200 years all at once (though that would have killed him at season 5’s finale, duh).
I had a lot of frustrations with the finale but I’m not gonna get into that. What I am gonna get into is firstly a kissing of the butt of Sean T. Collins for week after week hosting the best chat about the show that I’ve spotted anywhere. Thanks, sir!
But secondly, I haven’t seen anyone else argue this so perhaps I’ve just missed it or perhaps my head might be up my own behind (again, so often), but when Jacob told Kate that her name was crossed off the cave ceiling because she stopped being a candidate when she became a mother to Aaron, that seemed to me a clue as to why babies can’t be born on the island. Basically because Jacob wouldn’t let them be born there – he got to make up the rules, remember – because if people could have babies on the island then they’d all stop being able to be candidates for his job. So he couldn’t allow pregnancy to happen. Anyway that’s my theory about that and I consider that mystery sorta solved. Until y’all poke holes in it, inevitably, since I think almost everything ended up being riddled with some inconsistency in the end. Not that I could write six seasons of a tv show and avoid that either.
Works for me, Jason.
Jason, that does work for me too.
Sean: How is your cat? I hope better.
Last one: Did anyone else think Desmond enter the Heart of the Island hot tub with stone cork chamber reminded them of Spock repairing the warp drive in Star Trek 2?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jliR-0oRbTo
Oh yeah! totally! To the point that a couple of us watching the finale started to recite his monologue at the end there, “the needs of the many..outweigh the needs of the few..or the one”, etc etc. we were cracking up.
I think basically the sideways storyline’s final message was that our emotional connections with people are what really matter in the end. While I wouldn’t have identified that as a major theme of the show before Sunday, it didn’t come out of nowhere. Certainly “The Constant” touched on it.
Considering the way Lost’s audience sometimes seems to be divided between those who have an investment in the characters’ romantic pairings and those more interested in the nuts and bolts of the island, it’s interesting that free will vs. destiny turned out to be less important in the end than plot vs. character. (Character won, if you couldn’t tell from all the howling for answers about the plot.) Come to think of it, “The Constant” is also very much a story of character overcoming plot. Desmond is in a desperate, complicated situation, and the solution is no more or less than a love scene.
I’d like to join everyone in extending thanks for the great discussions here.
Three things:
1) My cat’s okay! Crisis passed. 🙂 thanks again for the kind wishes, everyone!
2) I’ll probably be commenting at length again eventually, but for now…
3) Since everyone’s bringing up the baby stuff, I really like Jason’s theory, but keep in mind that babies were conceived and born on the Island up to and including Ethan, right? I wonder if it’s the Incident that put a stop to it.
I like this…
JASON: “Jacob told Kate that her name was crossed off the cave ceiling because she stopped being a candidate when she became a mother to Aaron, that seemed to me a clue as to why babies can’t be born on the island. Basically because Jacob wouldn’t let them be born there – he got to make up the rules, remember – because if people could have babies on the island then they’d all stop being able to be candidates for his job. So he couldn’t allow pregnancy to happen. Anyway that’s my theory about that and I consider that mystery sorta solved. Until y’all poke holes in it, inevitably, since I think almost everything ended up being riddled with some inconsistency in the end. Not that I could write six seasons of a tv show and avoid that either.”
…I was definitely more of a “the incident/bomb is the reason,” but Jacob playing a role in it is an interesting notion.
I still like my idea of how Smokey fits into the two births that actually happened…
Josh Wigler imparted on me a funny and crazy theory about the baby issue. He essentially theorized that the crazy high sperm counts the Island gave the males made their seed lethal. Goofy, but the women who gave birth on the island were all pregnant beforehand and if Jin had essentially no sperm, then a boost wouldn’t have made his lethal.
I’m still sticking with my Smokey theory as the coolest… but there is all that.
Let me flip Jason’s theory and toss in a bit of Jim’s: It wasn’t Jacob stopping the births, but Smokey. Why? Because and island birth was how Mother ultimately found her successor in Jacob, thus Jacob’s easiest path to finding a replacement would be one being born on the island. Bonus side effect was that this forced to Jacob to leave the island more frequently searching for candidates, thus allowing Smokey to get up to mischief (as elaborated on in my blog post on the Others–still available!).
So how did Smokey prevent births? No idea, but where there’s that strong a why, certainly there’s a gotta be a reasonable how somewhere, particularly on a show with this much magic and crazy science.
Josh Wigler is a sicko.
Before I respond to the new batch of comments, here’s an all-new all-STC post #3:
* Jack is my identification character, I just realized. I mean, not gonna lie, that’s what he is. This says an awful lot of unpleasant things about both my ego–of COURSE I’d be the star, the Man of Destiny–and my low self-opinion–of COURSE I’d be the insufferable stubborn walking disaster. But once it occurred to me how this was how I was viewing him all along, I had to admit it to y’all. In fairness to myself, I have his abs.
* When we think and talk about the loose ends of Island history, we tend to focus on the origin of the Dharma Initiative (I mean, I know who founded it and who bankrolled it, but who found the Island, what were their real goals, who knew enough about the Island’s Egyptian roots to do things like put hieroglyphs on the countdown clock, etc.), the devolution of the Others into the murdering tribes of Ben and Widmore that we came to know and loathe, and then more specific things like “why can’t anyone conceive and give birth to babies on the Island” or “Where did Mother come from.” But you know what’s a HUGE mystery that I hadn’t thought about at all until I was showering a few minutes ago? Folks, there was a working American nuclear bomb on the Island! Abandoned! By the United States–the post-World War II, hegemonic-superpower United States! How the hell did the military or government find out about the Island, and what the hell could have made Truman or Ike or whoever it was just say “You know what? Let’s leave that thing there and chalk it up to experience”? I think their stolen American uniforms indicate that Widmore and Eleanor killed off the American troops back in the day–jeez, if they gassed the entire Dharma Initiative because a few hippie scientists wanted to play with magnets and polar bears on the Island, I’d hate to think of the bloodbath that befell people who wanted to turn it into Bikini Atoll.
* I think one of the frustrating things about all the fill-in-the-blanks left behind by the show isn’t so much that there ARE fill-in-the-blanks left behind by the show–we’ve gone over why that’s okay–but that quite simply, a lot of what we’re left to work with is so contradictory through the fault of the writers. For example, when Richard first arrives on the Island, he learns that the Man in Black can take the form of people’s dead loved ones and is also the Monster. Yet years later, he accepts Young Ben into the fold of the Others because Ben was told about them in a vision of his dead mother, and apparently once Ben takes over the group, Richard either instructs him on how to summon the monster or at the very least sits back and lets him do this from time to time. The pieces don’t fit.
* Then there are anomalous things that don’t line up with our later instructions on how things work. And again, I don’t mean stuff like Walt’s psychic abilities, which (you’re gonna hate me for this comparison) I suppose we can view as a separate phenomenon from the Island a la Bai Ling’s tattoo-based fortune telling. I mean stuff that is clearly intended to be related to Island-based phenomena, but doesn’t obey the rules the show itself later established for them. For example, John and Ben cross a ring of ashes and enter “Jacob’s” cabin, where presumably the Man in Black says “help me” in a voice only Locke can hear and then appears in the chair for a split second as he proceeds to trash the place like a poltergeist. Why the invisible poltergeist routine, something we never saw him do before or since? Why could only Locke hear him? How could he even get in there, what with the ashes? And as everyone’s pointing out, if Ben never saw “Jacob,” how was the Man in Black pulling his strings?
* Finally, I’ve got no problem admitting that I would really like to have seen an episode tracing the history of the feud between Ben and Widmore, or an episode that took us back to the founding of the Dharma initiative, or even just a cameo appearance by a shipful of Egyptians, or a couple of sentences explaining the infertility/stillbirth thing, or a cameo appearance by Walt, or any number of other things related to what made the show’s sci-fi/fantasy/horror elements so goddamn entertaining all these years. You know what I mean? They really were entertaining! I know I’m the guy comparing the desire to see all that to the Star Wars prequels, but I’m probably being too harsh there–first of all because I enjoy the prequels (albeit not as much as the originals), second of all because it’s not the principle I’m objecting to, but the execution. Leaving plenty of mystery is great, but so could be filling some of it in.
* Moreover, it goes without saying that all of us could rattle off episodes or scenes that make us think “Instead of that, why didn’t you spend that time doing THIS?”, which makes it a lot more tempting, and perhaps more justifiable, to backseat-drive the show a bit. I will say that I’ve been stewing on the finale pretty much non-stop since it aired, and thinking about What Might Have Been and the ensuing frustration is a big part of that. Again, just saying where I’m at.
* I forget where I read this, but someone suggested that Dogen’s importance and his apparently magical ability to repel the Monster was due to him being one of the few characters Jacob actually touched. Ben may have been the leader of the Others, but he never saw Jacob–Dogen did. Perhaps he was turned into a human Monster repellent by Jacob, perhaps that was his “gift” in the same way that Richard was granted immortality.
* Regarding the no-births thing, we’ve met three grown-up characters who were born on the Island, as far as we know: Ethan, Jacob, and the Man in Black. With that track record, it seems like Jacob would have every reason to put the kibosh on Island births, in order to prevent the MIB from raising a fellow monster at an early age. Perhaps the Incident–and I’m just guessing there, and I think I got that idea from someplace else besides–was just a convenient excuse.
* Kate in this episode settles the “Lost women get hotter as they get cleaner” argument once and for all, if there ever was one.
* Question for the group that I’m putting in boldface for emphasis: If you mentally cut all the flashsideways stuff from the show, are you happier with the story? I sort of am! And that’s probably the ne plus ultra of “Instead of that, why didn’t you spend that time doing THIS?” I say this as someone who doesn’t mind the flashsideways material and its resolution, even if I’m not crazy about it.
* Kate in this episode settles the “Lost women get hotter as they get cleaner” argument once and for all, if there ever was one
I didn’t think that was even a question?
WHICH, since we’re talking about it, brings me to probably the most gaping hole left in the whole show: why was church Kate wearing different clothes than Pre-church Kate? Everyone else was wearing their same outfits.
Uh-oh. I think someone’s coming around as a Finale Hater! Welcome to the Dark Side, Sean. (I know. I’m over-generalizing!)
Since you keep talking about the prequels, I’ve suspected there will be some Phantom-Menace-style backpedalling the more folks think about the last season. Not that Lost is anywhere near as bad as PM, but I think the fact that everyone (myself included), really WANTED the end of Lost to be awesome is coloring a lot of people’s judgement. Or maybe not. Don’t get me wrong. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion on this. There is no right or wrong (except with the Lost cleaned-up women argument. That one’s cut and dried. Did you see Charlotte, people?!!)
Sean, I’ve also been thinking about how much more I would have enjoyed the final season without the Sideways stuff. I wish they would have stuck to the Season Five method of just showing flashbacks or whatever as the story dictates. But I suppose that would have screwed up the big final scene that they wrote so long ago.
Also, good point about Jughead. One would think the Army would be a little worried about losing a nuke. There’s been whole James Bond movies dedicated to this sort of thing.
David:
* Michael Giacchino really does rule. Lost and Battlestar Galactica (featuring Bear McCreary) both really landed some MVPs as their composers.
Ryan:
* The hidden meaning of the great “It’s just a line of chalk on a wall” line is that that’s what it is to Jacob, but his power means that his arbitrary rules and decisions totally turn people’s lives upside down. Great stuff.
* Matthew Fox really killed it over the years, I think you’re absolutely right. Don’t get the hate.
* That Phantom Menace fight is one of the best movie fights ever, no question about it.
Sam:
* Wow, I hadn’t thought of Desmond’s lucidity in the flashsideways world as him traveling so far into his own future that he’s dead. That’s great! And it’s an easier way to square it with what we’d come to know about his “powers” (for lack of a better word) than just saying “oh yeah, and he can also go to heaven now and then.”
Jim:
* “While I did enjoy the finale, and still do, I wonder if the gravitas given to it was so great that it actually robs some of that impact from past season finales. A lot of the stuff, like mysteries revolving around the Others, that seemed crucial to the show’s end game kind of fell by the wayside.”
Well said.
* One thing that confuses the baby issue is that you can conceive a baby on the Island and have it off the Island (Ji-Yeon), or you can conceive a baby off the Island and have it on the Island (Alex, Aaron), but you can’t both conceive and give birth to a baby on the Island, at least not during the timeframe that led the Others to recruit Juliet and all that stuff. I believe Ethan was conceived on the Island and he was obviously born there too, but I need to double check. That’s what leads me to believe the Incident has something to do with it–I like a lot of the theories as to why Jacob or the MIB would or wouldn’t want babies to be born and therefore stopped births on the Island, I think a lot of them would work (though I’d lean toward it being Jacob’s doing since he seems to have a lot more control over the phenomenology of the Island than the MIB), but the birth thing was a relatively recent problem, which throws a monkeywrench in things.
Bob:
* “The thing I’ve always liked about Lost was the fact that it was quite happy to mix hopeless romanticism, metaphysical malarkey and good punching scenes all together in one giant mess, so the final episode hit all the right buttons.” True!
Bill:
* I thought of the on-again off-again storm as a callback to season one and its bizarre weather patterns, when Locke was able to predict the onset of a storm to the second, leading lots of us to believe the weather was artificially generated. I liked it. I think the storm ended when the Monster was killed, appropriately enough.
* Moving IS Good, wouldn’t you say?
* Duct tape!
Anonymous:
* Whatever that theory’s strengths and weaknesses, I don’t buy it’s from a Bad Robot person at all.
Bill again:
* I’m glad you liked my theory that the collective consciousness of the characters willed the world that WOULD have been created had the bomb worked into existence as their private afterlife. I think that’s a good way for the show to have its cake and eat it too–to say that “yes, whatever happened really did happen, you can’t change the past…but you can make a better future for yourself.” I actually think it’s pretty gutsy that they had the characters go through Season Five for basically no real payoff except balm in Gilead, if you will.
* I loved Sawyer and Jack’s last exchange too, though I wish Sawyer had called him Jack just once.
hilker:
* VERY good call on the ultimate petering-out of the “free will vs. destiny” debate. I never really bought into that all that much. To me, “we’re here for a reason” vs. “no we’re not” doesn’t really map to “free will vs. destiny,” especially not after you learn that the powerful being who brought them there did so not Just Because, but because of his own blend of free will and “destiny.”
nicholas:
* Because that’s not appropriate church attire?
Pat:
* I thought the final scene was Jack’s eye closing–why would that change?
Everyone:
I’m so glad to hear you dig these discussions as much as I do. Thanks!
The “Lost women clean up nice” theory was indeed proven conclusively by Kate, supported by the reappearance of Charlotte, and put to bed once and for all by evening wear Juliet. That last point also brings up the fact that Elizabeth Mitchell looked hotter in her brief scene at the concert than I’ve seen her look in any commercial for V, so perhaps the effect even extends beyond this show, i.e. cleaned up on Lost > All, not just cleaned up > dirty.
Truly Lost’s most compelling argument rages on.
Consider this…
When you look at a lot of stuff between Jacob and MIB before the season five finale, it doesn’t seem to necessarily follow the rules set up in the final season as strictly as it would have needed to in order to have a really nice continuity throughout the show. If Christian is Smokey, then how did he pop up on the freighter (which the had to use the bearing to get to, so… that is officially “off the island” to me) and in Jack’s office once he’s become part of the Oceanic 6? I think you can explain away Christian in Jack’s office as Jack just freakin’ the fuck out and breaking down mentally, but as that falls in the same season as Christian appearing on the freighter (where, again, I think Smokey is fully not allowed to be unless he has, in fact, escaped the Island), I think the writers
A thought I had last night for no reason: is anybody going to have a worse eternity than Boone? He gets to spend forever with the half-sister he lusted after, her boyfriend (who, oh yeah, is a torturer), a bunch of happy couples and Locke.
I guess it just reinforces one of the show’s oldest axioms: Sucks to be Boone.
Lucky for him he’s a vampire.
SEAN:
Re: Storm, I sort of got there a few hours after posting that comment. It
Another question about side-world, in light of the revelation that it’s unitarian purgatory: were the others we met the actual others, or just the Losties’ collective unconscious “casting” familiar faces in familiar roles, so that Ethan ends up as a doctor and Keamy shows up as a heavy? And Dogen ends up as… a guy in a suit? With a son? And what happens if you get killed in quantum limbo, like Keamy was?
ALSO: Forgurt and Arzt are going to be pissed that they got left behind.
Interesting analysis from the Warren Ellis message board:
http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=7693&page=16#Item_5
-I had a mini meltdown a few weeks ago over Darlton after I read that interview they had with Alan, about the outrigger thing. I didn’t specifically care that they weren’t addressing the outrigger, or other mysteries, but rather their attitude and reasoning behind not addressing these lingering mysteries. It just felt to me like they couldn’t be bothered to address things that, a few years back, were the driving plot points of the show.
-Their standard excuse for this is that, in wrapping up stuff in season 6, they’d only answer questions the characters would want answer. And that’s all fine and good, and I doubt the characters in season 6 would really care about the baby stuff and Walt anymore. But it’s frustrating that they didn’t have this attitude back in seasons 1 and 2 when these issues would have been important to the characters and the characters would have been trying to figure out why they were being terrorized, and their kids kidnapped, and wtf was up with Walt.
-It was even more galling when so much of the non-awesome parts of season 6 were either ultimately relatively pointless sideways flashes (pretty much most of them before Desmond’s) or the castaways endlessly running around the island and reshuffling into different groups, sitting around campsites.
-So yeah, I had my mini-meltdown. But then I resigned myself to appreciate the show for what it was, and I ended up enjoying what was left of the show, and the finale, a whole hell of a lot.
-I like escatolgical b-s in my fiction a lot, so the sideways stuff, especially how it was handled in the finale, worked for me, as banal and feel goody as it could be.
-Learning how the rules of the sideways worked, in that people dying at different times all came to the sideways at once, really helped me appreciate some of the reunions when I thinked about them. Hurley, Claire, and Kate’s grins and awe at seeing Charlie again are much more meaningful when you consider that they probably lived very long lives after the Island and are reuniting with their dead friend for the first time in decades.
-So the reunion of Kate and Jack was especially meaningful then. Kate’s line “I’ve missed you so much” especially. Here’s a woman who’s seeing the dead love of her life for the first time in probably decades, and I think Evangeline Lilly really sold it with how gentle she portrayed it. It came off to me like this was a very precious gift Kate had just received, and she was treasuring it. (And yeah, I’ve always been totally bought into the Jack-Kate romance. I actually like Kate.)
-and rewatching it, I also really enjoyed Mathew Fox’s performance in that scene with his dad at the end. The part where he realizes he died and starts weeping is fantastic. What more appropriate reason to cry than for your own death?
-but saying I liked the sideways resolution doesn’t mean I don’t see the logical problems in it, as Alan in that review linked to above more deftly points out.
-that the Island was the most important part of their lives for some of them makes sense, but for others a little more hard to swallow. If Desmond and Penny live a long time, I would hope some other portion of their lives would be more meaningful to them then this tortuous part of their lives when they were seperated.
-I don’t buy that Shannon is Sayid’s love of his life, but I could see Sayid as Shannon’s. Nevertheless, I could see still see how you just need strong emotions to wake you up, but I don’t buy that Sayid, once awoken, wouldn’t immediately go try to find Nadia and wake her up. The writers sold me too well on the Sayid-Nadia relationship these past two seasons.
-Bet that would be an awkward situation in the church, huh? But I guess that’s the problem with all kinds of heaven scenarios and meeting the love of your life again. Sometime in a relationship, the two people aren’t each others love of their lives?
-I’d rather not think too much about the logic of it all, because the emotional payoff was so great to me. and as we’ve come to see, it’s always been the details and how they contradict each other that has been this show’s main problem. But I guess you just can’t be bothered with the little details when you’re going for totally awesome set pieces like smoke monster attacks, time travelling, haywire electromagnetic experiments, knife fights on a cliff in the rain, and life, death & everything else.
-my best take on the rules is that, as the guardian of the Island, I guess you can change the rules of life, or something. So Mother made a rule that her two sons couldn’t kill each other, that carried over even to when MIB became Smokey. And then Jacob made a rule that Richard could not die or age, and then touched his final seven candidates and made the rule that the MIB couldn’t kill them either. Maybe that’s the importance of that scene earlier this season when MIB and Sawyer see ghost boy Jacob in the forest, and he says “you can’t kill him”
-I think the writers were trying to imply that the Incident was responsible for the birth problems on the Island. I would’ve preferred they implied it had been the Purge. This would’ve placed it after the last known birth on the Island (Alex in 1988), and tied in nicely that Ben was responsible for the Purge that caused the birth problems he was so obsessed with fixing. And they could’ve then come up with whatever sci-fi jank to explain how the purge gas stopped births as a side effect.
-The show established that there are “special” people in the world with psychic abilities. You have Hurley, Miles, and Boy in Black with their dead communication abilities, and Eloise with her precog stuff, and I forgot about Bai Ling and her fortune telling thing. So the easiest explanation for Walt is that he is also “special”, but the Others didn’t know this when they kidnapped him. He was just taken because he was a kid, just like they kidnapped all the other kids on the Island to bolster their ranks. So that when he began doing weird psychic things, they were all too happy to trade him away and get him off the Island to get Ben back.
In reply to Charles R…
++”-my best take on the rules is that, as the guardian of the Island, I guess you can change the rules of life, or something. So Mother made a rule that her two sons couldn’t kill each other, that carried over even to when MIB became Smokey. And then Jacob made a rule that Richard could not die or age, and then touched his final seven candidates and made the rule that the MIB couldn’t kill them either. Maybe that’s the importance of that scene earlier this season when MIB and Sawyer see ghost boy Jacob in the forest, and he says “you can’t kill him”++
So… that really confused me when I saw “Across The Sea.” Mother makes the rule that they can’t hurt each other, she dies and then Jacob hucks his brother headfirst into a rock (presumably killing him at that moment) and then the smoke monster is created/born. So, did Jacob make the rule they could not hurt each other again? Can Jacob break the rules because he is the new Island protector? I guess that makes sense, I just thought it was interesting how they made the point of having Mother dictate they couldn’t hurt each other and then, WHAM!, Jacob ends up killing the shit outta his broham 25 minutes of TV time later. Seemed like an odd contradiction for an episode with such pivotal info, but I guess almost all questions now can be answered with “Jacob had the powers of the island protector and thus made some crazy rules.”
Also, I like the idea that all the bullshit and awful stuff that happens in this show probably stems back to someone being a huge dick to Mother (and someone probably being awful to that person as well). Someone is awful to her, she ends up treating her “kids” pretty poorly because of it, they end up very maladjusted because of her and thus Jacob makes a bunch of dickish rules that more-or-less ruin the lives of everyone on the island for two thousand years. In the end, Hurley (who is a rad dude) doesn’t hold a grudge and is just a nice guy and presumably things on the island go really smoothly after he becomes protector. I forget who said it earlier, but yeah, I think the moral of this show, the message we take away, is essentially “Don’t be a dick.”
If according to Jim Gibbons’ theory I die and end up in a church with all of you I’m turning around and punching my dad in the face.
-yeah, the explantation and then depiction of Mother’s rule that the kids can’t hurt each other was pretty sloppy in that episode. I choose to interpret when she says they can’t hurt each other, what she means is they can’t “kill” each other
-I have to believe the writers aren’t intending us to think that Jacob killed MIB when he threw him on that rock, and that MIB was just knocked out in that moment, because right beforehand Jacob explicitly says he’s not going to kill MIB. Whatever the writer’s intentions, it was very confusing.
-A real nitpicky thing, but once we saw what was actually at the bottom of the cave in the finale, it got me wondering how MIB’s body fell into the light after Jacob threw him in. It wasn’t like the plug room was overfilling with water that the MIB could just float into it.
Simon” “Another question about side-world, in light of the revelation that it’s unitarian purgatory: were the others we met the actual others, or just the Losties’ collective unconscious “casting” familiar faces in familiar roles, so that Ethan ends up as a doctor and Keamy shows up as a heavy? And Dogen ends up as… a guy in a suit? With a son? And what happens if you get killed in quantum limbo, like Keamy was?”
I hadn’t really thought about this until a co-worker brought it up. Are they real people/souls or just constructs? Ben’s comments about not being ready to go in yet suggest that he was real. Does that mean everyone there is real? Then what does that say about David? And why are people such as Keamy doing such bad, bad things in Purgatory? Ugh, Sideways world.
Whoops. That last Anonymous was me. I stand by my incredibly nerdy continuing obsession over minutia of a television show!
Charles R: “-A real nitpicky thing, but once we saw what was actually at the bottom of the cave in the finale, it got me wondering how MIB’s body fell into the light after Jacob threw him in. It wasn’t like the plug room was overfilling with water that the MIB could just float into it.”
My thought is that MIB must have died when his head hit that rock. Mother explains that entering the light is bad juju, so I think Jacob thinks throwing him in there will fuck him up right good (torture him, essentially). In tossing him, he incidentally slams him into the rock and kills him. HOWEVER, let’s presume the rock didn’t kill him, Jacob still chucked him into it, knocking him unconscious where he would have likely died tumbling head first down the waterfall that Desmond and Jack needed a rope to climb down. So… whether purposely or incidentally, Jacob killed his bro. Perhaps him breaking that rule is partially what created the Smoke Monster as we’ve now seen entering the light/water area (like Jack or Desmond) isn’t what did it.
Is it just me, or while Jack was lying on the ground, bleeding out from his side-wound, would not the plane flying overhead form almost, well, a cross?
Ben:
* Far be it from me to deny the beauty of benefit-concert variant Juliet. I’m a Juliet man as opposed to a Kate man in the same way female viewers are Jack women or Sawyer women. (Or Desmond women, I suppose. Or Ben women, if you’re my wife.)
Jim:
* I’d forgotten about those wonky Christian appearances, although multiple dead people appear on the ship iirc, so I think that’s fair game for the Monster. Then again, he said he couldn’t cross the water to Hydra Island in Monster form, so how could he have gotten to the boat? Maybe they really were ghosts, like Michael was in Season Six?
* Anyway, thank you for making the comparison between Jacob and Cuse & Lindelof, something I’d meant to do myself. The rules are just as arbitrary no matter who’s setting them.
Ben again:
* Ian Somerhalder’s happy ending as a legit star courtesy of The Vampire Diaries is maybe the happiest ending of all.
Bill:
* I thought of Locke’s weather prediction myself w/r/t the storm.
* It’s funny how much we can get out of single sentences, phrases, or even words at this stage of the show, isn’t it?
* Re: Elizabeth Mitchell: Too far, dude. 😛
* That’s a good call about Season Five being necessary to get them back to the present, but their whole goal was to DEACTIVATE the present, not get back to it. You know what I mean? In their own personal terms, everything they did was a waste, in terms of them having a goal and not meeting it.
Simon (and Pat):
* The latest Todd VanDerWerff post, which also includes a quite good line about the way genre-fiction fans shut down when confronted with anything having to do with “God,” has an insightful bit about a line of Desmond’s to Eleanor, which implies that different groups of characters will exit this purgatory in other ways. I assume that could also apply to the various Others and Widmorians we met in the flashsideways world.
COOP:
* “Interesting analysis from the Warren Ellis message board”–hey, there’s a first time for everything!
Charles R.:
* I think you’re describing something we’re all going through. There’s a lot of maddening stuff about the show, now that we’ve gotten to the end–but of course there’s still a lot of fascinating and moving and fun stuff. The interesting thing about most finales is that they tend to root you–or me, at least–rather firmly in one of the two camps. If anything, this one just heightened the dichotomy.
* I think the Island was supposed to be “the most important part of their lives” in terms of its objective relevance to the world at large, more than to themselves, necessarily. I think it’s a blend, I guess.
* Re: Sayid/Nadia–VanDerWerff made the point that if this afterlife is the construction of the characters, he apparently judged his brother a better match for Nadia. That’s kind of a nice thought.
* I definitely think Jacob makes the rules at will, yeah, based on that exchange between him and the Boy in Black back in the day and everything else we’ve seen since.
* Maybe it WAS the Purge that caused the problems! That would make a lot of sense. Again, it would have been nice just to tease that out even a slight bit. Oh well.
* I like your Walt explanation. Man, you’re on a roll.
Jim:
* I think the blow on the head to the MIB when Jacob chucked him into the light just knocked him out. I think the implication is that while his body “died,” his soul never did–becoming the Monster is not dying, but “much worse than dying” as Mother put it.
* The moral of the story is “Fathers, be good to your daughters.”
Tom:
* Your church is going to have Gary Groth, Eric Reynolds, John Ronan, and Mark Waid in it, who the fuck are you trying to kid.
Simon:
* It’s just you. 🙂
Dude, Gary’s totally sitting outside deciding not to come in yet.
The whole “Made it so you can’t hurt each other” thing I inferred to mean mortal injury, in which case poor Nameless’ transmogrification into Smokey was Momma’s response to Jacob’s unintentional-albeit-attempted fratricide. “Wiseguy, eh? Momma said Knock You Out!”
Imagine how deeply dysfunctional & doomed the LOSTverse would’ve been if it’d been Jacob as Smokey…
Speculation said, I’m with STC on the ‘worse than death’ angle, what with all the harping on how Dead = DEAD these last two seasons. Smokey wasn’t dead, he had his humanity stolen.
The more I think about it, the less the Sideways purgatory world makes sense. So Sayid can KILL PEOPLE IN PURGATORY and then move on to heaven? Really?
I just want to be the 100th response. Carry on.
101 ain’t bad, I guess.
I gotcha now, Sean Re: Season 5 being pointless for the characters, since they failed their mission to undo the timeline that brought them to the island in the first place.
Sean: You make a whopper of a point about the US army and their nuke on the island. HELLO! Maybe it was stolen? But even then, what? In the 50
-I’m trying to understand what you guys mean when you say season 5 was pointless. The characters failed, and it was a waste, but that was excatly the point. Jack, Faraday, and the rest of the castaways utterly failed in their plan to rewrite time. Whatever happened happened, period.
-Rather then being pointless, this complete failure being the central character dilema driving both Jack and, less importantly, Sawyer for Season 6. It was because he failed that Jack decided to let go and accept what the Island had for him. It was because he listened to Jack and it cost him the woman he loved that Sawyer was adamant about getting off the island and doing it himself.
-In another sense, the point of season 5 was so that the Oceanic 6 could rescue Sawyer’s crew from the 1970’s. Since all the time travel stuff seems related to the wonky electromagnetic properties of the island, the end result of setting off the bomb is that everyone was reset back to their proper time.
-I think this is what Eloise was aiming for, throughout her life. For Eloise, her goal in getting the Oceanic 6 back to the Island was to rescue the rest of the Candidates from the 1970’s, so they could hopefully defeat the MIB, even knowing it would be at the cost of her son’s life.
-So in a sense, season 5, while a failure for Jack’s goal of rewriting time, is successful for 2007 Eloise in her goal of reuniting all the Candidates in the present.
Now I just want to see someone do a mini-comic spoofing the finale with comic industry people:
Sean: You were a great number one, Gary.
Gary: Leave me alone and let me die in peace. I hate you all.*
Also, Lost women get hotter as the cleaner? 9/10, isn’t that true of ALL women? [though isn’t there some bikini action on the Island?]
*may not be accurate representation
Regarding Jughead, Wikipedia’s “List of military nuclear accidents” page mentions three instances in which the US military lost nuclear weapons during the 1950s. That a similar incident could have happened a few years earlier and been covered up doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. As to why the Pentagon didn’t try to retrieve the bomb, we know the island is hard to find. Maybe the first chance they got to send someone to look for the bomb was when DHARMA recruited Kelvin Inman.
So apparently there’s gonna be a 15-minute long extra “Adventures of Hurley & Ben” scene on the DVD set:
http://www.411mania.com/movies/news/140375
I gotta say, between that and the fact that supposedly there’s an extra Walt scene plus revelations about MiB’s real name and the true nature of the water/light as well is kinda frustrating. It doesn’t absolutely cheapen the finale or anything, but a bit crazy they had all this stuff and couldn’t work it in somehow.
“Rather then being pointless, this complete failure being the central character dilema driving both Jack and, less importantly, Sawyer for Season 6. It was because he failed that Jack decided to let go and accept what the Island had for him. It was because he listened to Jack and it cost him the woman he loved that Sawyer was adamant about getting off the island and doing it himself.”
That’s a dang slick observation, Charles. Kudos.
“Rather then being pointless, this complete failure being the central character dilema driving both Jack and, less importantly, Sawyer for Season 6. It was because he failed that Jack decided to let go and accept what the Island had for him. It was because he listened to Jack and it cost him the woman he loved that Sawyer was adamant about getting off the island and doing it himself.”
That’s a dang slick observation, Charles. Kudos.
“I gotta say, between that and the fact that supposedly there’s an extra Walt scene plus revelations about MiB’s real name and the true nature of the water/light as well is kinda frustrating. It doesn’t absolutely cheapen the finale or anything, but a bit crazy they had all this stuff and couldn’t work it in somehow.”
They better broadcast all of this stuff when the DVDs come out. Otherwise, it’s really a slap in the face to all the people who supported the show for six seasons by actually tuning in and helping build their ad revenue. Not that I couldn’t load it up on my Netflix queue, it’s just the principle of the thing.
Finally, answers.
GUYS! late-breaking news! LOST SEASON 7 GOT GREENLIT!
BLARG. why linky no worky? oh well.
http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l33yhuZt5u1qzax0ho1_500.jpgÂ
UGH.
http://dvvg.tumblr.com/post/641752747/richardfuckingalpert-jameslafleur
awesome. oh well, it was sort of a fun joke before I tried posting it 3 times.
May I derail for a moment?
Maybe I’m dense, but I don’t get who/what was in the creepy cabin… MiB? But we saw the smoke roaming the island long before the Cabin episodes. Jacob? no he wasn’t dead yet. Horace? Why then, wouldn’t he like technology?
Maybe it was MiB in some wounded form? I’m not clear on when he stopped being able to appear in Titus Wellaver form. And someone, Illana? said at some point he was stuck as John Locke now (why?) and it seemed like he was starting to take on some Locke qualities (don’t tell me what I can’t do etc)?
So… huh?
Thanks in advance!
rev’D:
* Yeah, I think you’re right, they could “hurt” each other, but they couldn’t Kill each other.
Pat:
* He killed assholes. I think that’s fine. So did Jin, keep in mind!
Bill:
* There’s definitely going to be an official, complete pilot-to-finale Lost Encyclopedia coming out in a month or two.
Charles R:
* I was convinced I said as much about Season Five being gutsy in terms of the show having the characters set a goal and not succeed–that that is a point all on its own–but apparently I only said this in an email or chat someplace. But you’re right, Season Five isn’t pointless even though they didn’t create the alternate timeline they’d hoped to create. Quite the opposite!
hilker:
* Bless you for consulting Wikipedia regarding Jughead.
Pat again:
Oh, come come now. No one’s slapping anyone in the face. I mean, the idea that the people who watch it on TV are the superfans while the people who buy the DVDs after the show is over are the fly-by-nights is kind of a novel one, no?
COOP and Zack:
* You coupla cutups.
Bill:
* The Cabin’s a big mystery, for sure.
Oh, one more thing: I just rewatched the episode with my wife and mother-in-law, who hadn’t seen it yet. Maybe the week or so of intense discussion of pretty much every aspect of the episode and the series with y’all helped me power past some of the things that threw me for a loop the first time around, because this time I pretty much straight-up loved it. It’s just SOOOO packed with emotional payoff after emotional payoff.
The Missus and I are literally the longest-running fans of the show possible aside from people who worked on it or worked for the network–we saw the sneak preview of the pilot at the San Diego Comic-Con in July 2004–and watching it this time, I felt like it was six years well spent.
I might have you beat – I watched a tape of the pilot at Paul Dini’s house the week they asked him to work on the show.