In the end Lost felt a lot like:
1. a big cheat just to keep me in front of the tv (or in my case keep me buying the dvd’s/bd’s, which in the case of season 6 were very expensive);
2. characterwise (since the mistery turned out to be only a means to an end, i.e. see nr. 1) they could have done in 3 perfect seasons what the they eventually did in 6 not so perfect seasons;
3. the closer it got to the end it felt a lot like watching the Matrix Reloaded (“When?” “You’ll know when”; “How?” “You will know how.” “The Island wants (or doesn’t want) this.” “The Island wants (or doesn’t want)” blah blah blah);
4. and then (althoughs from a narrative standpoint well executed) season six felt about as satisfying as ‘These are the voyages’, which was a fake holodeck ‘adventure’ on TNG’s Enterprise and (yes, I still remember it) Bobby Ewing’s Pam waking up in Dallas after an entire season of nothing but a dream.

Lost created a lot of mistery and last september (bought the bd’s in october) I predicted to my friend that Lost could only end in disapointment. I hoped I would be wrong. I find I wasn’t. Emotionally it was a reasonably nice ending. Much like BSG ended. But considdering the expectations that were created, it really felt like a waste of time. Until a few hours ago I looked forward to watching all seasons again to check whether ‘it all fits’. Now I know there’s no need to. It simply doesn’t. If I had known this in advance, I wouldn’t have bought the entire series on dvd/bd. Yeah, cheated is the word.

I think this mostly sums up my position, though I’m a little more hung up on logic than you. It still bothers me that there are soooooo many strings left hanging. The sunken island is one. The question of why Adam and Eve (really “mother” and “dead-MIB” with their black and white stones) are suggested in season 1 as having clothes deteriorated roughly 40-50 years. Odd that the bodies are really hundreds of years old. They were always claimed by the creators as the main clue placed in season one to prove they knew what they were doing from the start, and yet they were way off on the dating.

It’s things like that that I wish could be answered. Like how Ethan ended up as an other, or why they introduced so many Dharma-ites in flashbacks never to really utilize them as characters ever again. There were just too many red herrings throughout the series that tick me off. The worst is probably the inconsistancies with the smoke monster. And why Dogen had the power to keep smokey out of the temple, and why ash protects you, etc. etc. etc.

I enjoyed the ending, but I felt that a massive fistfight and a cork, and an explanation that the only reason THESE people were on the island at all is because Jacob thought “well, these people have nothing to live for.” and his “if you still want the job, you can have it” after crossing Kate off”. That’s a pretty lax statement considering the precision of the numbering and crossing off names at the lighthouse and the cave.

Alas, Lost will never have all its loose ends tied, but It was still a great show

The entire series was set up as a way for the characters to grow past what they saw as their imperfections. It’s about the growth of consciousness. The rest of it was clues and setting.

Sayid and Shannon made sense if you understand that every major character in Lost was Lost not because they crashed on an island but because they were attached to a false image of themselves. Sayid didn’t get Nadia because it would have been a constant reminder of who he saw himself as- the torturer and killer. He needed to get past that and Shannon loved him regardless of his past- he would have never gotten that from Nadia.

Shannon needed to get over being the shallow slut. She had just gotten to that point when she was abruptly killed.

Likewise, Jack needed to fix something big because everything he had fixed in the past ended up more broken than before. He needed to prove to himself that he had worth beyond being his father’s son [since destroying his father didn't give him that satisfaction].

Sawyer needed to get over his pain and need for vengeance but more importantly needed to learn how to trust and that he was bigger than the next con.

John Locke needed to understand that he was far more than his body.

But all of them really thought that all they needed to do to be happy was get off the Island.

But getting off the Island wasn’t the panacea they thought it was because Jack quickly realized that getting himself off the Island wasn’t going to help him find himself, only fixing the situation and getting everyone off the Island would.

So staying on the Island was a failure and running away from the Island was a failure. What was left? Destroying the Island so it never entered their lives! If only that would happen then everything would be perfect, right? So Jack changed his strategy trying to detonate Jughead to set everything right.

Jughead worked- Juliet said so. Because she saw that it gave the lostaways the ability to imagine life without the Island. Of course that led to another place where the lostaways still had their inner turmoil to deal with.

So staying on the Island, leaving the Island and “deconstructing” the Island resolved nothing. The lostaways were all lost in their personal dramas yet again, letting themselves be defined by their circumstances instead of using circumstances as a stage to do what they want.

Only Desmond and Eloise were fully awake in the sideways world/purgatory because they were the only ones who understood how to remember themselves thanks to the timeshifting that took place after the Hatch blew and they defined their lives by what was important to them. Eloise took a service to self path but got caught up in being famous/powerful.

On the other hand, Desmond took the service to others path by embracing the chance to be hero he couldn’t be on the Island. He helped everyone to remember who they were so they could move on to the next adventures in their lives, even when it meant doing questionably moral things like running over John Locke.

Maybe this is a long way of saying it was about the characters, I’m not sure.

Totally agree about Sayid and Nadia. I think that the pain she recalled in him, of what he had done to her, meant that instead of simply loving her, Sayid felt compelled to love Nadia as a kind of redemptive action, to make up for what he had done to her. I think that love poisoned everything about him.

His relationship with Shannon, brief though it was, was cleaner, without baggage attached to it. And let’s face it, a lot of the bile towards Sayid/Shannon came from the fact that Shannon wasn’t the most likeable character. Doesn’t mean Sayid couldn’t have loved her. I’ve seen lots of people I couldn’t stand happily married.

“And does no one recall, WAYYYY back during Season 1, that the writers stated in an interview that the characters were “not in heaven or hell?” Well, I guess they didn’t lie since it was “Purgatory.” I call shenanigans!”

Yes, I do recall that. They weren’t in purgatory at all in season 1. Or 2-5. The scenes in the ‘alternate universe’ in season 6 were in purgatory, but none of the other scenes were. All of the stuff on the island happened in ‘reality’.

I generally agree with Jammer. As an atheist, I should be more bothered by the alternate universe resolution, but it was a fantasy show, and I can accept it on those terms. The finale overall was strong, with a big emotional heft, but having all of the alternate universe stuff being relegated to the afterlife does undercut the rest of season 6. Things like Sun (in the ‘living universe’) being given essentially nothing to do for over a season become bothersome.

Looking back over the whole 6 seasons, though, I still rate it as a fairly strong series.

It got me thinking about SO many things that they set up as though they were significant, then dropped completely. I could almost hear the writers in some scenes–

“Wow, this will be cool!”

“But what will it mean?”

“I dunno. We’ll just kill somebody off to make the audience forget about it!”

Where the finale triumphs is actually feeling like it does these characters and their finales a decent service. It /felt/ right, even if it wasn’t narratively satisfying on all levels.

I’d still rank Season 6 behind every previous one except maybe 3 as a whole, though. It had brilliant moments (the Richard flashback, most of the early episodes and, yes, the finale) but as a whole it just wasn’t as a strong as I wanted it to be.

This movie pretty much sums up my problem with the show:

http://popwatch.ew.com/2010/05/25/lost-unanswered-questions-college-humor/

Sometime during Season 4 I stopped making sure my Tivo was set to record it. It had become obvious to me that there was no way to satisfactorily resolve all the scientific mysteries they had created, I was tired of trying to keep track of all the damn new characters, and I was really sick of Jack’s chest-beating.

I tuned back in for the finale after catching up on the plot on message boards and pretty much laughed my way through the whole thing. Complete and utter cop-out.

And does no one recall, WAYYYY back during Season 1, that the writers stated in an interview that the characters were “not in heaven or hell?” Well, I guess they didn’t lie since it was “Purgatory.” I call shenanigans!

It’s sad to me because they started with such a cool concept–then wrote themselves into such a convoluted snarl that they couldn’t get out without a big ol’ “deus ex machina.”

I use Walt all the time as the best example. I think many people wanted him addresed in season six, wanted to know how he was special. The answer seems to be in the end, he just was. And I’m fine with that. No one watches True Blood and asks “why is Sookie telepathic? I want answers!” She just is. I think Lost had a lot of questions leveled at it that were never questions in the first place.

On the other hand, I did hope Walt would come up in some way purely to answer…well, “why” he was special, but as in what was his function? From a writing point of view, was his specialness introduced for a reason or was it by itself his story? (Possibly a bad example actually, I think they wrote out Malcolm David Kelly purely because of his growth spurt and if not for that his story might have turned out differently). Again, this is all material you would clean up a second draft, if you had that luxury.

People also wanted an explanation for the numbers, which was something I didn’t expect. I saw people demanding to how why the numbers kept reappearing. I thought it was just a stylistic flourish. You don’t watch American Beauty and wonder where all the roses come from. And really you can’t answer that, given that numbers are a human concept anyway. If they turned out to be the combination to a lock or some kind of plot device, you’d still be left wondering how they kept inserting themselves in the lives of the Losties. It’s not a question you can answer.

The fact that the numbers of the last six candidates turned out to be the numbers is either another example of the “flourish”, or maybe shows that those six people were so important that the universe was trying to tell them something, at best.

Things that really blow my mind are ‘what is the Source’, ‘what is the Island’ type questions. How do you expect them to explain that? What is the origin of the planet? The Source was probably always there. People even want to know who was the guardian before Jacob’s mother, who was the first guardian? But how far back can we expect them to go?

The real brilliance and the main reason I respect the finale, whether it was intentional or not, was that it split the fans into Men of Science and Men of Faith. I thought the show was always fantasy at heart, so a Gaia-like “heart of the island” that exists there but also exists inside us all, as if the life of the island is also the life of us all, didn’t seem like a stretch. No more than a sentient cloud of smoke anyway. A great number of fans though were expecting sciency explanations for everything though, I think. I didn’t realise that before season six, although it’s fair enough, the fantasy elements were not as overt until season six. I’m not even religious or particularly faithful, but I’m happy to take fiction on its own terms.

I’m not a complete finale defender though, hehe. Like I said above, the narrative didn’t always “fit”. Walt seemed functionless, a dead end. Lapidus was I suppose required to fly people around, but I wish they had the time to flesh him out.

Worst of all for me, the whole theme of birth and fertility felt unfinished. Given birth was possible in 1977 at the latest, they seemed to be implying the detonation of Jughead somehow caused it. Again, an answer I’ll deal with, though I think they could have spelt it out more clearly. Blowing up a bomb next to the source of life might lead to unexpected consequences like that I suppose (and blow people forward in time apparently). I don’t know, there’s a shaky, fantasy logic to it but I don’t find any of that satisfying.

Jacob’s cabin is also infuriatingly messy. The Others thought it was Jacob in there but it was actually MIB trapped in ash (muttering help me to Locke and turning into Christian to confuse Hurley and us). But he was also outside as the smoke monster? Was his consciousness trapped in the cabin? Again, maybe you can piece that one together and I like my fiction to be hard work, but a bit more “flow” to the whole thing would be nice.

Sorry for the lost post, a mixed bag of pros and cons. Overall, I enjoyed it. It wasn’t the tidy ending I hoped for regarding the mythology, but it answered enough to leave me feeling content and hit most of the rights character notes.

PS As an aside regarding Sayid and Shannon. I didn’t like that either, but here’s the thought I had to explain it. I think sometimes love can be a plague on our souls. Even between two good people who love each other, sometimes they’re not meant to be and they’ll push and fight for it so hard until destroy everything around them. Just like the whole theme of letting go, Sayid had to let go of his love for Nadia.

It’s sort of oddly related to why Sawyer and Juliet worked, despite how awkward it felt at first. Kate and Sawyer were cut from the same cloth, they fit each other so well…but their relationship would have been anything but smooth. It’s like their feelings for each other were *too* epic, too big for themselves. Juliet on the other hand was a nice counterpoint for him, calmed him down. Their relationship clicked with fans, I think, because it felt normal somehow. They didn’t end up together because of a fate-induced, meant-to-be, perfection, but because they liked each others company and decided to give it a shot.

Does that make sense? Even in the afterlife, maybe Sayid was aware that he loved Nadia too much. You’ve got OMG-meant-to-be, I’ve-spent-years-searching-for-you Nadia. Or you’ve got Shannon, bit of a fling, but it was comfortable, it kind of worked. Their love wasn’t bigger than each other, it was the right size.

I agree with Jammer in that the emotional payoff was spectacular. The final ending wrapped up the characters in quirky yet satisfying way. It was nice to see them all together and all smiling. I thought they handled Ben extremely well, it doesn’t let him off the hook, yet there is hope and a possibility for redemption. The ending religious symbolism also pulled together a lot of the doubts, fears, strengths, and weaknesses of each character. Finally, my favorite scene was the penultimate scene between Jack and his father. I thought that hit all the right emotional notes without descending into melodrama or emotional manipulation. They went with the “less is more” approach and pulled it off perfectly. In summary they earned full points for the emotional payoff.

Unfortunately, the plot payoff was horrible. I think that David’s analysis of the plot problems are spot on. If this series was just about the characters, then why invest so much time in the mythology? In the first couple of seasons the mythology was a device for driving the characters forward, and so one could justify the mythology on the basis of character development. However, by season 4 the plot was everything and there was very little that we learned about the characters. So, at a minimum 2 seasons (4 & 5) were dominated by the plot. You can’t make the audience process and sit though all of that and not have it have some sort of payoff in the finale.

For LOST the mythology was as important as the characters if not more so I would argue. A lot of times they were there providing answers, exposition and reactions as well as being moved around and into places storywise the writers needed them. If you read the interviews, the Q&A, read transcripts all they talked about was plot and mythology. I know it has become the mantra since the end of the series that it was always about the characters but in my opinion that is revisionist history. Go back and watch S3-5 and those are plot-based seasons focusing on teases, exposition, twists, intriguing plot developments, seeding threads, pulling threads together, establishing a timeline, showing how things unfolded with action adventure thrown in.

So I don’t think it is unreasonable for fans to expect satisfying closure on all the questions raised over the life of the series otherwise why did L/C continuously encourage with a cheshire grin us to overanalyze and dissect everything they did if it wasn’t going to add up to something. If it all was meant as some means to an end they should have discouraged devoting so much time to the mysteries. And I’m tired of hearing Moore, L/C say it was never about the mythology–if you don’t want to be burdened with an expansive complicated mythology and they feel it distracts from the character work then here is a novel idea–don’t develop one. Just do self-contained season long arcs that aren’t overly ambitious and overshadow the characters a la DS9.

I’ve had two months to reflect and I still think S6 was weak and the finale underwhelming.

I think the primary issue for me is the same issue that affected BSG’s final season (and coloured my opinions of that finale in much the same way). It’s all very well and good for television writers to say “we’re not just about the mysteries and the questions; we’re about the characters, and the themes, and the driving ideas”. And what the writers plan is often very different to how much hype the network and the fans give the ‘mystery’ part of the series.

But in the final seasons of both BSG and LOST, the writers – in my opinion – came to believe the hype as much as we did: “Why was the island sunk?”; “Why couldn’t Sun speak English anymore?”; “What was Starbuck?”; “Who was the mysterious God figure?”. I did not require answers to any of those questions when they first arose, because I accepted that the writers would lead me in the right direction. Any excessive hype over the ‘mystery’ was an inevitable part of television as a mass medium. But by the time LOST ended, the writers seemed to be throwing in endless mysteries – like the Sun thing – and endless teases (like, let’s be honest, the number of outriggers in season 6… none of which ends up being that from the infamous shooting scene). They’d taken on that hype, and were enjoying it far too much.

In the end, I’d personally say that the sins of Ronald D Moore were crueller than those of Lindelof and Cuse. LOST, one could argue, left us to fill in the blanks for the most part. So much of season six was character-based, which really should’ve been the tip-off that it wasn’t going to be all answers, all the time. Mr. Moore crafted his entire final season to look like one big mythological orgasm, and then didn’t come through.

Having watched the first seasons of both shows back in ’05, I gave up on LOST and pushed on with love for BSG. I would never have believed that you could take Sayid, Sawyer, Kate and – God forbid – Jack on arcs that would actually grab my attention as a lover of character-based drama. LOST did that spectacularly, and I take my hat off to them, and am very glad I returned to the show.

I don’t require definitive closure on a series – hell, the finale of The Sopranos is one of my all-time favourite episodes of television. It was pure bliss; thematic closure in every sense. And in that respect, LOST did very well.

*However*, having said that, I will find it easier to rewatch BSG than LOST. Because at the end of the day – probably more through the fault of being on network TV than anything writer-based – LOST ended so many acts and episodes with big gasping cliffhangers which in retrospect don’t often mean much. Or so I think, anyway.

Incidentally, isn’t it interesting that both of these shows which featured many thematic and narrative coincidences, and were both forced to become more episodic at times, leading to fan distaste, then both ended by revealing that the actions of pretty much all the characters were just the movements of pawns, often predicted or pre-planned, by a higher being whose motives remain murky and ill-conceived?

Why does the afterlife look so much like the “real” world? Well, that’s part of the story, part of the exploration of death and what that experience is like. It rings true to me. It’s certainly more than an arbitrary misdirection.

I think the idea of spending the last season in the afterlife is perfect in a lot of ways. It provided, in retrospect, a deep exploration of one of the show’s major themes: death, and what lies beyond (if they hadn’t done something like this, it would have left their treatment of the afterlife rather shallow and gimmicky — the real substance is here, not in the glowing cave). It provided a meaningful chance for the characters to face their issues (another major theme: everybody has issues) despite those conflicts often remaining unresolved at the time of their death. Of course, it was superficially entertaining to see characters we love interacting in a different situation, many of which we thought were permanently gone. And it did all this without cheating: “whatever happened, happened”; “dead is dead.” It’s brilliant.

When it comes to character-driven shows like this, I (surprise, surprise) care way more about the characters and their resolutions.

So yeah, your finale thoughts were pretty much exactly like mine. Sayid + Shannon = huuuuh? After he was pining for Nadia the whole season/most of the series??

I liked the overall season more than 5 or 3 (easily the worst ones in my book), but probably wouldn’t say it was as engaging, satisfying or interesting as 1, 2 or 4. Great show, in any case.

TNG reviews to follow soon? Probably not, but hey, one can hope.