LOST

[Taem]

The title says it all.

Well, it's finally over! Six years worth of episodes and it all boiled down one grand finale! I'm still in shock! Lost, as T.V. series go, had excellent writers that managed to keep the viewer glued on the edge of their seats from episode to episode, waiting for all the puzzle pieces to come together so that it would finally all make sense, but it never did. There were so many plot twists, side-stories, and character 180's, I may have to re-watch the entire series over again to understand it all - if I ever find the time . One of the benefits of watching Lost - other than it's fantastic writers - was that it had a very memorable and well-rounded cast whom were all terrific actors. Yes, it was a fun show, but it was an emotional roller-coaster from start to finish. Yet somehow, the outcome, while still leaving us with many questions, was beautiful, even if the concept used for the ending had been used over a thousand times before; the writers just nailed it!

Having said that, the season finale titled appropriately, "The End", while it left me with a good-feeling inside, one of completeness - very rare for a series ending - part of it also left a bad taste on my tongue, and not just because I was sad this wonderful series was coming to an end! In any case, I felt the acting was absolutely stellar for this final performance and the actors hit it right on! Below, I'm going to discuss the finer points of the ending, so if you haven't seen it yet and plan to, steer clear!



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***HERE THEY ARE***

If the flash-sideways were all a Jacob’s Ladder of each [dead] characters wants and desires of how they wish their life had been, then this brings up a few illogical questions:

1) First and foremost, I assume the “people” they were interacting with whom were not dead yet (i.e. Jacks son for one) were merely thoughts, memories, or figments of this type. Based on this logic, then how and why was Aaron a baby in the church at the end, much less there at all? In the “real world”, he was a toddler and Kate’s last image of him was as such, so if Aaron were somehow dead, he would take on such appearance, however this is assuming Kate and Clair never made it back to the mainland to raise him, because if they did, he would be even older than that.

2) If those in the church were the dead ready to pass on – the ones who all knew each other and had a close personal relationship in life – then why was Jacob and Richard missing from the church? I’d go so far as to say rather the characters in the church realized it or not, Jacob was the most influential person in all of their lives. As for the reason Ben stayed out and Michael, Mr. Eko, etc. were not with the main group was because, in my opinion, they still had negative karma they had to work out and weren't ready to pass on just yet.

3) It was logical to piece together that the main characters who were still alive had died of old age due to a few tip-offs: Hurley says, “it was great to have you as number two” to Ben, implying they had lived on the island long after Lapedis and the others left the island on the plane. Also, Christian Sheppard says to Jack, “these people whom you lived with, this was the most important time of your lives,” again implying what had happened on the island was in fact real. Having said this, we can discount the possibility of them having died on impact from the initial crash-landing since none of them knew each other very well before the crash. Okay, so Christian Sheppard said to Jake, “There is no time,” and Jon Lock tells Jack in the hospital bed, “You have no son,” both implying they were in a reality of their own choosing – similar to Star Trek: Generations when they get caught up in the ribbon of energy – and that Jack’s son had actually not yet died! Interesting, but if so, Aaron was about 15-years younger than Jack’s son, so why was Aaron in the church, and as I pointed out before, a baby at that? Penny and Desmond’s son was not there, nor was Jin and Sun’s child, nor Walt.

All this, my questions above, would be a mute point if Aaron was not in the church as a baby with Clair and Charlie, with the exception of Jacob and Richard missing from the church! A simple slip-up I'm sure, and I can choose to ignore it for the greater good of the story. Bravo J. J. Abrams on a terrific story that kept me captivated for years, and possibly years to come when I choose to re-watch it!

[--Pete]

Hi,

I'll jump into this thread *after* I actually get to see the show. I screwed up. In its normal time slot, Lost had no TiVo conflicts. When I saw it was going to be on Sunday, I checked the To Do List, saw the first 2 hour (summary) thingie and thought I was set. Well, after we finished watching the summary and were ready for the show, we found 2 episodes of Leverage and one of Sanctuary instead -- all re-runs at that.

Fortunately, it is on next week, so I made sure it'll get recorded then.

Y'all have fun.

--Pete

[LochnarITB]

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**********************************************The ending SUCKED! The ending BLEW CHUNKS! Can anyone say "Dallas" and "it was all a dream"? They even blew saying they were all dead. When did they die? Did they all die day one? Did they die getting back to the island? Did different characters die at different times, corresponding with divergence of their story line? They threw up their hands and said "Heck if I know, let's just kill 'em all and let the viewers sort it out." I was greatly disappointed. Leading up to the end, it seemed like they were pulling it together and making sense, in a mystical kind of way, and then they just gave up and made them all dead. BAH HUMBUG, I SAY, BAH HUMBUG!

[Chesspiece_face]

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You should rewatch it then. Because they actually did explain that.

[LochnarITB]

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You should rewatch it then. Because they actually did explain that.

Not to my satisfaction. All it said to me was, "We never did know where we were going but, if we end it like this, none of the twists have to make sense." As I said, I was greatly disappointed and, apparently, I am not alone.

[Chesspiece_face]

If you just didn't like the ending I can understand that. I'm not interested in arguing personal taste. But your previous statement implies more than just dislike or disappointment it implies that you simply missed large sections of context which they in fact did create. You raise multiple questions regarding the ending stating that they did not address those issues when in fact they did. Explicitly.

You can argue why you may not have enjoyed what they did, but if your point is to argue that they left out necissary explanations to make the ending work when they most assuradly did not leave them out I have no recourse but to say you're wrong and that you might need a rewatch.

[TheDragoon]

You can argue why you may not have enjoyed what they did, but if your point is to argue that they left out necissary explanations to make the ending work when they most assuradly did not leave them out I have no recourse but to say you're wrong and that you might need a rewatch.

Or you could chalk it up to personal preference/opinion on what is considered satisfactory and not start telling someone they're wrong about something subjective.


As far as Lost, I never really got into it myself. This thread did intrigue me enough to go read up the episode summaries on Wikipedia. The result of my condensed pseudo-watching was that I think it sounds like all of those Star Trek episodes that focus on time travel which ended up being terrible. Hopefully Lost did it better than Star Trek!

[LochnarITB]

Neither of us is wrong, nor right. As I said, "let the viewers sort it out" and that is what is happening, people are posting their interpretation of what was presented. That does not make other interpretations wrong. By using the "final season as purgatory" plot device, they open all the information to suspicion. All the questions I asked are made possibilities. There was nothing that said definitively the characters of the final season were alive all the previous seasons.

And, no, I obviously didn't like how they handled the ending as you can see from my initial statements. That was in large part to my seeing it coming. Early on in the final season, that they were dead is what came to mind. I hoped that they would do better than that. I also felt that too many things were just left wanting regarding explanations for how and why things happened prior to the final season and what happened to missing people from along the way.

[Chesspiece_face]

There was nothing that said definitively the characters of the final season were alive all the previous seasons.

They did say this though. When Jack was speaking to his father. Christian said that there was no time in the "purgatory" as you call it and that the people there had died both before and after Jack. It is also implied by the interaction between Hurley and Ben in the afterlife. They both congratulate each other for being good "number ones" and "number twos". The implication there being that they lived on past Jacks death and built a relationship while watching over the island. This also supports the explicit statement by Christian Shepard that the people in the afterlife had all died at different times.

The ending does not overwrite everything that happened before it. In Lost terms: What Happened, Happened.

[Taem]

There was nothing that said definitively the characters of the final season were alive all the previous seasons.

They did say this though. When Jack was speaking to his father. Christian said that there was no time in the "purgatory" as you call it and that the people there had died both before and after Jack. It is also implied by the interaction between Hurley and Ben in the afterlife. They both congratulate each other for being good "number ones" and "number twos". The implication there being that they lived on past Jacks death and built a relationship while watching over the island. This also supports the explicit statement by Christian Shepard that the people in the afterlife had all died at different times.

The ending does not overwrite everything that happened before it. In Lost terms: What Happened, Happened.

LoL, you guys are funny. I already mentioned ALL OF THAT in my original post guys - a lot more about what they said about their lives on the island - along with actual quotes directly from the scenes to boot . I just assumed Chesspiece_face either didn't agree what my interpretation of the script, or simply did not care for it and choose to substitute his own thoughts into the mix, both perfectly valid in an subjective and opinionated post about The End. I don't feel his statements necessarily constitute ignorance of what was said in the script regarding their past lives on the island, merely an alternative interpretation behind the meaning of what they said. Fine by me.

To start another ball rolling, I personally was hoping that the "sideways" flashes were actually the alternate time-line in which the atom bomb detonation stopped them from ever setting foot on the island, and that Desmond figured out a way to get them (those who wanted to go with him) back to the island to live in peace for the rest of their lives. When this, what initially felt like cheap cop-out of an ending rolled by, I was dismayed and shocked, I mean, how many times has an ending like this been done before? So cliche... But then I slept on it and really gave it some thought. The more I thought about it, the more I really enjoyed the ending for what it was and can appreciate how the writers really did end it! There is no room for "do-overs" or going back to Lost... It's OVER! You gotta give the writers credit for that! While what I expected and wanted did not happen, what ultimately did happen I ended up feeling equally justified with... well, a small part of me feels cheated out of season-6, since all the flash-sideways were merely Jack's vision in his death-throes, meaning it was all completely irrelevant to the Lost storyline... oh well. I still enjoyed it!

[Chesspiece_face]

The more I thought about it, the more I really enjoyed the ending for what it was and can appreciate how the writers really did end it! There is no room for "do-overs" or going back to Lost... It's OVER! You gotta give the writers credit for that! While what I expected and wanted did not happen, what ultimately did happen I ended up feeling equally justified with... well, a small part of me feels cheated out of season-6, since all the flash-sideways were merely Jack's vision in his death-throes, meaning it was all completely irrelevant to the Lost storyline... oh well. I still enjoyed it!

One of the things I've most enjoyed about lost is how meta it is. They started out with the flashbacks. Moved on to the suprise flashforwards and then took the structural presentation of the story itself and incorporated it into the mythology with the literal time travel.

One of the (arguably) worst episodes in the series as far as the mythology goes is the season 5 episode when they get to the Dharma Lighthouse station and Eloise tells Jack how they need to get back to the island. It is an absolute train wreck of an episode and the deus ex machina of the whole thing reeks. And the writers admit it the whole way. Jack himself when faced with the situation responds at how absurd and ridiculous it all is and Eloise comes back that he needs to stop thinking about how ridiculous it all is and start thinking about if it is going to work. This interaction is less about the characters figuring things out and more the writers speaking directly to the audience saying "We know this is BS, but if you let it go and suspend your disbelief we will get you back to where you want to be."

The ending of the series itself works in the same Meta fasion. The journey of the characters and their struggles to come to an acceptence of their lives and that it is over mirrors the struggle of the viewers. The fact that it is ending for them is just as real as the fact that it is ending for the audience and that after it is all over for both the characters in the story and the audience the thing that is most important is the times they spent with each other (both good and bad.) I would argue that this is the reason that Aaron is a child in the afterlife. Less so that it makes strict sense for the characters (although it's not too far out there) but that Aaron as a baby is the character that had the greatest impact on the audience. In that, it is more important for the audience to see him off as the baby then at some other age.

It's also reasonable why the other characters are missing from the end. Walt doesn't need to be there because he has his whole life ahead of him after the island and, most likely, much more character defining life events. The same with Lapidus and Richard. Although these characters had a lot of interactions with those at the end their defining moments happen elsewhere. As far as Richard is concerned one could argue that he came to his own peace through Hurley and coming to terms with the loss of his wife. Jaccob also doesn't need to be there. He was at peace when he left the island to Jack and moved on at that point. Those that couldn't come to their own peace with the lives they lead, Michael and Ben, stayed behind. And in Michael's case it was implied that he would forever stay stuck in between worlds wispering to people on the island.

The first thing said in the opening episode of this season when it is revealed that the plane doesn't crash is Rose saying to Jack "It's Ok. You can let go now." If you want to get really really Meta about the whole thing you could say that the viewers that can't come to terms with the ending will be like Michael forever wispering away their discontent on message boards. To those people I have two things to say: I hope that someone does for you what the Lost creators have done for me. And secondly: It's OK, You can let go now.

[Taem]

Whoops, big clerical error on my part. In my last post I wrote,

I just assumed Chesspiece_face either didn't agree what my interpretation of the script, or simply did not care for it

However, that was directed at LochnarITB. Sorry about the mistake.

The ending of the series itself works in the same Meta fasion. The journey of the characters and their struggles to come to an acceptence of their lives and that it is over mirrors the struggle of the viewers. The fact that it is ending for them is just as real as the fact that it is ending for the audience and that after it is all over for both the characters in the story and the audience the thing that is most important is the times they spent with each other (both good and bad.) I would argue that this is the reason that Aaron is a child in the afterlife. Less so that it makes strict sense for the characters (although it's not too far out there) but that Aaron as a baby is the character that had the greatest impact on the audience. In that, it is more important for the audience to see him off as the baby then at some other age.

I just assumed by there being no "time" in the afterlife in the Lost mythology, that it meant it didn't matter "when" you died per-say, so long as your essence was not currently inhabiting a physical body (see my view on time-travel in Jim's time-travel thread, or more appropriately why I think it's impossible). This means in the current realty that is what we experience as time, so long as your essence is not in a body, you will not be stuck in time, hence who was and was not in the after-life with Jack (I'm talking real essences here, not figments like Jack's son).

As you can see, the ONLY loophole with all of this is Aaron being in the church. Oh well. As for the rest of what you've said in this thread thus far, I agree with it all; we are on the same page.

[Chesspiece_face]

Whoops, big clerical error on my part. In my last post I wrote,

I just assumed Chesspiece_face either didn't agree what my interpretation of the script, or simply did not care for it

However, that was directed at LochnarITB. Sorry about the mistake.

Let me say that I've recently seen some people who seem to have misconstrued the shots of the original plane crash which played over the credits to have implied that they all died in the crash. I never saw this as anything more then a decompression and a calm look back at where this all started. Nothing related to the story. And this is confirmed from ABC and the Lost creators.

I can understand how these images could be misconstrued however.

[--Pete]

Hi,

The ending SUCKED! The ending BLEW CHUNKS! Can anyone say "Dallas" and "it was all a dream"? They even blew saying they were all dead. When did they die? Did they all die day one? Did they die getting back to the island? Did different characters die at different times, corresponding with divergence of their story line? They threw up their hands and said "Heck if I know, let's just kill 'em all and let the viewers sort it out." I was greatly disappointed. Leading up to the end, it seemed like they were pulling it together and making sense, in a mystical kind of way, and then they just gave up and made them all dead. BAH HUMBUG, I SAY, BAH HUMBUG!

I'm 100% with you. Until I watched The End tonight, I'd been planing on re-watching the whole series and seeing how well they pulled it all together. No sense even bothering now. I think the writers started out with a good idea, had no concept of where they were going, let it get away from then, and then gave up trying to pull it together.

Bah! Humbug! indeed. A sorry ending to a fascinating series.

--Pete

[--Pete]

Hi,

When this, what initially felt like cheap cop-out of an ending rolled by, I was dismayed and shocked, I mean, how many times has an ending like this been done before? So cliche... But then I slept on it and really gave it some thought.

You should have stuck with your initial assessment.

. . . how the writers really did end it! There is no room for "do-overs" or going back to Lost... It's OVER! You gotta give the writers credit for that!

Yes, indeed. They deserve great credit. They were able to do in a single show what usually takes a season or more. After that show, no one would even want to make another.

... well, a small part of me feels cheated out of season-6, since all the flash-sideways were merely Jack's vision in his death-throes, meaning it was all completely irrelevant to the Lost storyline...

The problem is that we don't know when Jack died. Did he die of a stroke on the airplane? Did he die when he landed in the bamboo grove after the plane exploded?

There are really only two possibilities. Either it was all a death dream in which case Joyce did it better. Nothing needs explaining, because nothing really happened and the writers could do anything they liked. Or some parts of it were real, in which case, many questions were raised -- questions which, apparently, the writers did not have a clue as to the answers.

Either way, it was a crappy ending. It was a cop out.

--Pete

[eppie]

Hi,

I'm 100% with you. Until I watched The End tonight, I'd been planing on re-watching the whole series and seeing how well they pulled it all together. No sense even bothering now. I think the writers started out with a good idea, had no concept of where they were going, let it get away from then, and then gave up trying to pull it together.

Bah! Humbug! indeed. A sorry ending to a fascinating series.

--Pete

This is indeed the main problem of this show, that to me is in general quite enjoyable to watch.
When 'making up an end' of a story you started not knowing if people would start watching it (to generate the income needed to finish) doesn't work.

This is also one of the main reasons I don't watch science fiction or fantasy movies that often. Probably I am just a kind of person that cannot stand that things are not logical. Movies like 'the matrix' just annoy me.

[--Pete]

Hi,

This is also one of the main reasons I don't watch science fiction or fantasy movies that often. Probably I am just a kind of person that cannot stand that things are not logical. Movies like 'the matrix' just annoy me.

Usually science fiction is self consistent. Something like the Riverworld series is an aberration. Clearly, Farmer had no idea where he was going and then wasn't able to come up with anything good. "We did it because we could."????

All too often, fantasy isn't. A fantasy author doesn't have to be as meticulous as JRRT, but some background and some framework of rules is necessary. Niven has the right idea, and even discusses it in one of his books. Even magic must have rules, and they have to be self consistent. Most fantasy authors usually just make it up as they go along.

The point is not that the stories be real, but that they be realistic. The universe of the story doesn't have to be consistent with our rules, but it must be consistent with its own.

I enjoyed the first Matrix movie, not so much the other two. My main problem with those films is best illustrated by how one gets into and out of the matrix. There are two worlds. There's the 'real' world of the Nostradamus and Zion and human battery packs. Then there's the virtual world inside the matrix. According to the film, you can enter the matrix simply by plugging in, but you've got to find a 'real' phone line to get out. OK, the second is totally wrong. Inside the matrix, everything is virtual. There may be regions inside the matrix that correspond to places outside, but they are only models of those places. They are virtual, just like everything else, and their 'land lines' are just as virtual. To get in? Well, maybe there's some super WiFi that allows you to plug in remotely. But if you need a physical connection to get in, then that's when you'd need a real phone line (or cable, or whatever) that connects to the matrix network.

So, the problem isn't that the universe of the matrix doesn't agree with ours. It's that it doesn't agree with itself.

--Pete

[Sabra]

I allowed myself to just go along for the ride for the LOST series finale. I'd decided in advance to just sit back and enjoy. I came late to the party when I started watching LOST on my Roku beginning from season 1 over a 3 week period right before the start of the last season, so much of the myseterious content was very fresh in my mind.

Though I can't place when, I recall a point around season 4 when I realized that everyone MUST have died in the original plane crash, and I proceeeded from that assumption. I have a pretty good "gut," so I tend to trust it. Ergo, I didn't expect resolution from the finale. I was just looking for - Man! I HATE this term. - Closure. (Yuck. now I need a shower!) And I felt I got that.

The best thing about the series finale for me was that it jived with some of my personal, half-baked beliefs about what might happen to me if there were an afterlife. My gut feeling is that, if there is an afterlife, it will all be about some sort of reunification. So I enjoyed that.

My heart goes out to all of those who were disappointed. Mystery deserves answers, but man! Do we EVER get them?

Meanwhile, I got a big kick out of this video..

[Taem]

Hi,

The problem is that we don't know when Jack died. Did he die of a stroke on the airplane? Did he die when he landed in the bamboo grove after the plane exploded?

There are really only two possibilities. Either it was all a death dream in which case Joyce did it better. Nothing needs explaining, because nothing really happened and the writers could do anything they liked. Or some parts of it were real, in which case, many questions were raised -- questions which, apparently, the writers did not have a clue as to the answers.

Either way, it was a crappy ending. It was a cop out.

--Pete

Let me preface this by saying what I'm about to say is just my interpretation of the story. Based on what could be called, "the facts" within the LOST story, I feel pretty confident that Jack died right there in the bamboo reeds after evil Lock stabbed him in his lung, and that all of the "flash sideways" as the producers called it, were nothing more than some quasi-manifested reality of what Jack wished was reality involving the people he spent time with on the island*.

*Jack would not have visions of these people whom half he had never seen before until *after* the plane had crashed had he of died during the initial crash.

So this leaves us with half a season of useless visions, and a non-ending regarding Hurley and Ben - I can see why you found it disappointing. At issue here however is not the dichotomy of Hurley and Ben overseeing the island, but rather the "when" of Jack's death.

What makes me believe Jack died in the last episode and not before? If everything in Jack's vision was nothing more than a delusional dream anyways, then couldn't the entire story have been concocted in Jack's brain, and everything Christian Sheppard said could have been merely what Jack wanted to believe? All this is possible, yes, however I don't believe that is what happened based on the following:

1) As I stated before, Jack had to interact with these people for them to be in his vision. Assuming they (the people Jack saw in his visions) were all passengers on the plane, it can be surmised that some time had to of been spent on the island with these people for Jack to experience the things he did in his visions.

1b) While all the passengers were interwoven somehow with each other, not all of them met before face to face until the plane crash.

1c) If you are in the "I assume Jack made up all these people in his vision" camp, then there is no way to prove who was actually a passenger on the plane or not, thus this whole conversation is a mute point.

2) Based on the prior assumption that they indeed survived the crash-landing, well the Smoke-Monster was in the Pilot episode, as were the polar bears, so obviously the Island has some mysteries on it before the death of Jack, giving some credence to the idea that Jack died after the discovery of the smoke-monsters origins.

2b) I'd say at the very earliest, Jack might have died when he and the other Oceaniac-6 made it back to the main-land. He might have overdosed on painkillers then. Besides, the whole time-travel stuff seemed a bit far-fetched.

3) Most of the rest of my musings were made on the last episode, with what Hurley said to Ben about him being a great #2 implying a long time spent overseeing the island, and about what Christian Sheppard said to Jack about the time on the island being the most important time of Jack's life. I wish I had time to go into more detail at the moment, but duty beckons. I will have to finish this sometime later.

[--Pete]

Hi,

I came late to the party when I started watching LOST on my Roku beginning from season 1 over a 3 week period right before the start of the last season, so much of the myseterious content was very fresh in my mind.

That's pretty much what Sue and I did.

Meanwhile, I got a big kick out of this video.

Thanks for that link. It pretty well summarizes some of my feelings.

Pretty much, my problem with what they did with Lost is that the writers disrespected their audience. For most of six years, the writers kept throwing out puzzles and clues, leading the audience into thinking that there was something there to figure out, that they were playing a game with the writers. Then, with the last show, the writers effectively said that they were just screwing with the audience's minds. "Thank you for wasting over a hundred hours on something that was totally meaningless." It's like being invited over for dinner, sitting around while everything is being cooked, and then, instead of serving dinner, the food is thrown away and you're told it was all a big joke. It's like an old fashioned detective novel, except that, instead of a final chapter with the denouement and resolution, there's just one final page saying "And then Hercule woke up and realized that there never had been a crime."

Yes, they resolved everything. Simply by saying, in effect, there was nothing to resolve. It is a cheap trick, it is an irritating trick, it is the mark of an incompetent writer. And it is not, to me at least, acceptable.

--Pete