Aloha friends. The extremely belated arrival of this message probably falls into one of three categories for you:
1. Don’t Care Anymore
2. Never Cared to Begin With
3. Dude, What the Fuck?
Whichever category you fall into, an apology is appropriate. For those of you in number three, I’ll spare you my excuses, legitimate though they may be. I’ll merely say that this was a challenging one to write, and I got so irritated a few times, unable to get across what I was attempting to say, that I had to shut it down and walk away. It didn’t help that I wasn’t doing the usual recapping. There was always more of that than I’d ever intended anyway, and the point was to look at what had already happened in an attempt to figure out what was coming next. But now there is no next. So I’ll offer some thoughts and opinions, simple and unsophisticated as they are (and all over the map – this is the most disorganized write-up I’ve ever done), and that will pretty much be that.
Once more into the breach…
GOODBYE YELLOW BRICK ROAD
I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question more often in the span of a day or two as I was asked on the post-finale Monday and Tuesday what I thought of the episode. Even people who don’t watch the show asked me. My reputation is known. The short answer was that I liked it, I was happy, it was an emotionally satisfying conclusion. But there’s a longer answer. A much, so much longer answer…and lucky you, that’s what you’re about to get.
I did like the finale. In fact, I loved it. At the end of the previous write-up, I laid out my hopes and dreams for The End. A finale that has my heart racing with suspense? Check. A finale that’s surprising? Check. Brings back old favorites? Check. Answers some of the big questions? Umm…we’ll come back to that one. Carries the story and the character journeys to an emotional and thrilling climax worthy of the six spectacular seasons that got us here? Megacheck.
It had me at hello, with the opening scene cross-cutting between the characters on the island, their SidewaysLand-selves and the coffin of one Christian Shephard arriving in Los Angeles – a development which I didn’t expect, since it was Desmond who called Jack in the previous episode to inform him of the coffin’s impending arrival. But there it was, and my curiosity was further piqued (and hopes slightly raised) when Desmond had the body delivered to Eloise Hawking’s church, Our Lady of the Electromagnetic Pocket-Detecting Pendulum. The episode also made me smile early on by giving top billing not just to the current cast, but to all the returning and recurring actors as well, from L. Scott Caldwell and Sam Anderson (Rose and Bernard) to Maggie Grace and Ian Somerhalder to John Terry (Christian). It was a classy move that honored their indelible contributions throughout the life of the series.
AS I LAY DYING
I’m not quite sure where to begin since I’m not following the usual pattern, so why not start right at the major “what happened,” because even now it still seems to be a matter of uncertainty for some. I can’t say that I was in the Writer’s Room looking at the final script, but I can say with confidence that no, they did not all die when Oceanic 815 crashed on the island. Everything that they experienced on the island was real, from Jack waking up in the jungle to Jack entering his final sleep in the same spot after Ajira 316 soars overhead carrying Kate, Sawyer, Claire, Richard, Miles and Lapidus (Lapidus Lives!!!!) away to safety. 
Presumably. We really don’t know what happens to them – do they stay on the necessary bearing that allows them to break out of the island’s hold and enter real airspace so that they can make their way back to civilization? Do they have enough fuel? Working radar and radio to keep them from flying into other planes? Imagine being the air traffic controller who gets the call that the lost Ajira 316 is suddenly back in action and looking for a place to land…without most of its original passengers. But I digress. Naturally I believe that Ajira makes it home safely; that Kate helps Claire re-adjust and become a mother to Aaron; that Sawyer gets to meet his daughter Clementine; that Richard invents a line of cosmetics for men; and that Miles and Lapidus do anything that allows them ample opportunity to fire off dry, sarcastic, awesome one-liners.
And while they’re all doing that, Hurley and Ben preside over the island. Though I’m not sure I can claim it as an accurate prediction, I think I earn some points for suggesting halfway through the season that Hurley would be the ideal guardian for the island. The scene in which Jack passes on the responsibility to him was one of the episode’s emotional highlights, thanks largely to Jorge Garcia’s vulnerability, a skill that has always kept him from being mere comic relief. I did wonder about the fact that while Jack gives him water from the creek, he does not recite the incantation that Jacob did when passing on guardianship, or that the Woman in White did when anointing Jacob. Does that mean that the water from the creek alone is what gives the island’s guardian his power? Is the incantation just for show – a verbal Ring of the Schwartz? (Spaceballs? Anyone? “Forget the ring! The ring is bupkus! I found it in a Cracker Jack box! The Schwartz is in you, Lone Star! It’s in you!”) Was there any power associated with the island guardians at all? Perhaps Jacob’s long life and special abilities came from someplace else, and Jack – in his brief stint as the protector – had no such gifts. So without the incantation, did Hurley have any special protection to aid him in his…protection? And why do I suddenly feel like I’m writing a condom commercial?
Whatever the case, the implication is that Hurley remained on the island, with Ben as his second-in-command. Of all the great duos Lost has given us, each worthy of sitcom spin-offs – Hurley and Sayid, Hurley and Miles, Miles and Sawyer – I’d never thought of Hurley and Ben. I was surprised that Ben even survived to the end. As I’ve mentioned before, I’d long been expecting him to die a noble, sacrificial death. When he pushed Hurley out of the way of that falling tree in the bamboo field, I thought my prediction had come true. Obviously Hurley, Sawyer and Kate – with a little help from the shaking island, I think – managed to free him, but the effort was there. In the moment, Ben put himself in harms way to save Hurley. And later he chose to stay on the island when escape was a viable option. I think we can safely say that Benjamin Linus completed his transition from Machiavellian manipulator to good guy, and I like the idea that thanks to Hurley, he was given a real sense of purpose on the island for the first time. With the Man in Black gone, I wonder if Hurley and Ben oversaw an era of peace on the island or if there were difficult times. With Jacob gone, I wonder if people kept crashing into the island. Probably not, just like it might have become easier to get away from the island (based on Ben’s remark, “That’s how Jacob ran things. Maybe there’s another way.”) We don’t know if they were able to get Desmond home to Penny and little Charlie, but we know there were at least a handful of others left on the island to keep them company: Rose and Bernard (and Vincent, another long lost friend who returned) as well as any of the Others who had left the Temple with Man in Locke and survived Widmore’s mortar attack (hopefully Cindy the Flight Attendant and kids Zack and Emma). Apparently the DVD is going to include an extended epilogue that shows us a glimpse of Hurley and Ben’s reign on the island. That will certainly be worth checking out.
OB-LA-DI, OB-LA-DA
Going back to Desmond, I’m not sure I grasp how his storyline played out. When Widmore brought him back to the island and exposed him to the electromagnetism, his consciousness went on a journey that took him into SidewaysLand. I don’t think I even want to go down the rabbit hole of how his mind was now traveling not between time periods – as it did in The Constant or in Flashes Before My Eyes – but between life and afterlife. But however it happened, he made the connection between the two worlds when he found Penny at the stadium. And when he woke up back on the island, he carried with him the knowledge of SidewaysLand’s existence – and apparently he carried understanding of what it meant as well, since in SidewaysLand he immediately set out to find and unite the Oceanic 815 survivors and friends. Okay, so far so good. On the island, he is possessed of a new calm and lack of fear, apparently because he believes that nothing happening on the island matters anymore…a sentiment he explains to Jack before he is lowered into the tunnel of light.
Desmond goes down to the heart of the island – to what the Woman in White called “the source” – and he steps into the pool of water, which immediately begins to flash wildly and bubble up. The effect is much like what Desmond experienced in Widmore’s shack when he was caught between the two solenoids. But despite the pain he expresses, he keeps walking to the center of the pool, where he removes that long stone pillar that acts as a stopper. (One can’t help but think of Jacob’s wine bottle analogy to Richard: “The cork is this island. And it’s the only thing keeping the darkness where it belongs.”) Would anybody else have been able to withstand the energy that Desmond had to move through in order to reach that stone?
Here’s what I’m getting at. Man in Locke tells Ben of Widmore’s confession, “He said Desmond was a fail-safe. Jacob’s last resort in case, God forbid, I managed to kill all of his beloved candidates. One final way to make sure that I never leave this place.” And Man in Locke believes that only Desmond can help him destroy the island – which would suggest that yes, only Desmond could have withstood the energy in the water. Meanwhile, Jack tells Sawyer that he believes Desmond to be a weapon. So does Desmond serve all of those needs? Did Jacob somehow make it that only Desmond would be able to survive going down into the light and removing that pillar, which does begin the destruction of the island (“It looks like you were wrong,” Man in Locke says to Jack) but which also strips Man in Locke of his invincibility (“Looks like you were wrong too,” Jack says in return)? And if so, why doesn’t Jacob tell Jack about Desmond when he makes Jack protector of the island? Jack makes a point of telling Sawyer that Jacob didn’t mention Desmond having a role to play. And did Desmond simply misunderstand his own gift, thinking that once he did his task in the tunnel he would die, knowing what awaited him in SidewaysLand? When Jack goes down the tunnel and finds him, Desmond says that putting out the light didn’t work, and that he thought he would “leave this place.” He says he has to replace the stone – that it has to be him and that Jack will die if he tries. Of course, since Jack is already dying, he sends Desmond back up the rope and remains at the bottom to take care of business.
So I get all the individual pieces. I’m just not sure what they add up to in terms to Desmond’s intended role. How was he Jacob’s last resort to keep Man in Black from escaping? Would Jacob have seen the island destroyed rather than allow Man in Black to leave, in which case the last resort would be for Desmond to enter the tunnel and the remove the pillar, thus initiating the sinking of the island and, as I’m sure Jacob assumed, the Man in Black with it? Or was it that by removing the pillar, Man in Black would become human again and therefore he could be killed? And if he became vulnerable to an ordinary death, would he have still posed the threat to the outside world that he apparently posed with his powers intact? We never really did understand what would happen if Man in Black got off the island. None of it matters now, I know. Whatever happened happened. But this is just one of the vague shadows left in the show’s wake.
DEAD ALIVE
If Desmond’s role on the island remains a bit hazy for me, his role in SidewaysLand couldn’t be much clearer: find his old friends and help them remember their former lives. The episode made it clear to what end he was on that mission. Simply put, as he said to Kate in the car outside the church and later to Eloise during the concert, he wanted to leave. And by the end of the episode, we had an idea of where to. The season-long mystery of the sideways-flashes was resolved with the revelation that in that timeline they were all dead. I hesitate to call it purgatory, as my interpretation of that word carries a somewhat negative connotation. I think of purgatory – perhaps incorrectly – as a limbo between heaven and hell where you face a final judgment that will determine which arena you ultimately enter. That’s not what this was to me. It was a better place – a place that, according to Christian, they made so that they could find each other. But it was also a place where they could make themselves and/or their circumstances better. Jack had lived in a constant state of insecurity instilled by his father, with whom he had a relationship that, while not devoid of love or affection flowing in both directions, was definitely challenging. In SidewaysLand, he gets to be the supportive, nurturing father he didn’t have. Sun and Jin get to escape from the reach of her father (and Jin doesn’t need the island’s power to solve his infertility and knock up the boss’ daughter). Hurley coasts on an endless wave of good luck. Ben gets to be a positive influence in people’s lives, most importantly Alex, who pretty much loathed him in life but who regards him as a father figure in SidewaysLand.
Others, for whatever reason, still had to endure some of the darker events that marred their real lives, but got to explore a more positive side of themselves. Sawyer’s childhood remained tarnished by the murder-suicide of his parents, and though he still seeks revenge, he channels his energy into being a cop instead of a criminal. Sayid sacrifices his happiness so that Nadia can have a better life and a family (that didn’t entirely work out, but I think a case can be made for the nobility of his actions). Locke is still in a wheelchair, but he has a healthy relationship with his father and holds onto Helen. He has love in his life instead of loneliness and abandonment. Then there’s Kate, whose sideways circumstances didn’t seem much different. Maybe that’s because she never believed that she did anything wrong in the first place, so her sideways-self didn’t turn away from her original actions. Still, if they all created this place for themselves, you have to wonder why she would have put herself through the hassle of always being on the run. But I’m probably looking at it too literally. We can’t really examine it too closely, because the how’s and why’s of this afterlife are thinly constructed. They created this place so that they could find each other again? Okay, but how does that work? How did they create it, and what accounts for specific circumstances like Jack and Juliet having been married? Did Sayid’s spiritual entity or subconscious or whatever part of himself contributed to the “creation” of SidewaysLand actually determine that Nadia would be married to his brother, or did he have nothing to do with that?
One of the earliest and most prevalent theories of Lost was that the survivors of Oceanic 815 were not survivors at all, but had in fact all died in the crash and that the island was purgatory. The creators always said that wouldn’t be the case, and it wasn’t. But cheeky monkeys that they are, they took the notion and twisted it on its ear to fit their needs, using the idea to draw the show toward its conclusion without negating everything these characters had experienced over the course of six TV seasons. I kinda love that they did that. They got to have their cake and eat it too by affirming that all the events on the island were real – including the many casualties we had to endure – yet finding a way to bring comforting closure by taking us to a place where things were better for all of them and where we could see them embark on a new journey that would be free of the turmoil and heartache that touched their troubled lives. We experienced the hard times with them, and then said goodbye knowing that it was all behind them and that happiness lay ahead. Damon and Carlton always maintained that death had to be for real on the island or else we could never invest in the character’s fates, but in the end we got to rejoice in the reunions of Charlie and Claire, and Sawyer and Juliet, and feel elated rather than cheated. And to those who might argue that this whole Sideways thing is a hokey device typical of a show limited by its sci-fi/fantasy genre, I’ll remind you that grittier, more realistic shows like The Sopranos and Homicide: Life on the Street (precursor to The Wire) offered up similar storytelling devices during their respective runs.
THE FLAW IN THE PLAN
Stories don’t have to be perfect to be great. Lost is one of the greats, but its imperfections are many and must be covered. I loved the finale, and the show itself takes its place in my top five favorite TV series ever (really just a top four, I guess, since I’m not sure what the fifth would be. Lost, The Sopranos, The Simpsons, Seinfeld and…Cheers? The West Wing? Arrested Development? The Larry Sanders Show?). But I’ve always been quick to point out the show’s missteps and mistakes, and now that it’s all over, the problems have to be talked about, for they will always be there. Everytime I go back and re-watch the series – and I expect I’ll revisit Lost many times over the years – these failures will remain, and at the same time that I love the show I will feel a sense of disappointment. It’s kind of the same feeling I get when watching a movie or performance that was screwed by the Academy. I can’t watch Donnie Brasco without being angry that Pacino wasn’t nominated, or Traffic without being angry that it lost Best Picture (despite wins for Director, Screenplay, Supporting Actor and Editing. C’mon, are you kidding?!?). I know, these are two completely different types of circumstances – one is an outside factor having nothing to do with the work itself while the other was totally in the hands of the creators. But what can I say?
So what was the flaw in the plan? The way I see it, the flaw was that there wasn’t enough of a plan. No, I don’t think they were making it all up as they went along, but it wasn’t plotted as meticulously as we would have liked either. Season One was the only one which had real involvement from J.J. Abrams, and his fingerprints were all over it. Abrams has famously talked about his love of mystery (read his 2009 essay from the Wired Magazine edition he guest edited) and more specifically the concept of the “mystery box” (included in this 20 minute presentation he made in 2007 at the TED conference), and the beginnings of Lost were built on these ideas. A mysterious island with a large, unseen, tree-shaking, airplane-pilot-chomping monster. An island with runaway polar bears. An island from which a French woman’s radio transmission has been emanating for 16 years. And an island that literally had a giant, mystery box in the form of a hatch buried in the ground. Classic Abrams. But that kind of mystery won’t work over the course of a years-long TV series. Eventually, we need to see that monster. We need to find out why that polar bear is there. We need to learn about the French woman. And we need to see what’s in that hatch. (Bad examples, maybe, since we did get answers to all those questions. But you get the point.)
Who knows at what point they figured out that a guy named Desmond was down there, and that he crashed on the island during a solo race around the world sponsored by the wealthy father of his ex-girlfriend who himself had once lived on that island, or that the hatch was one of many on the island built by a group called The Dharma Initiative, which was the brainchild of University of Michigan graduate students Gerald and Karen DeGroot and was funded by The Hanso Foundation. But as the show went on, more of these mysteries started cropping up and fewer of them were getting resolved. So we entered this final season with high expectations of resolution, and we didn’t quite get it. I know that answers are more important to some than to others. For some, it was enough to have a show which was thematically rich and had engaging, complex characters that we came to know and love. Answers weren’t necessarily important or required. And if I agree with those viewers about anything, it’s that not every question needed answering and not every mystery needed solving. Some things are more important than others (although we surely all have our own opinions as to what we wanted explained and what we were willing to overlook). Plus you want a show like Lost to leave you thinking and debating. I wouldn’t have wanted it all wrapped up in a bow.
But there’s a middle ground somewhere in there, and the show failed to deliver on promises it made. For all the viewers described above, there were those for whom the mystery was everything. What kept them coming back week after week, season after season was the promise – the expectation – that all the WTF plot twists and fascinating but frustrating developments would be paid off. They wanted their patience to be rewarded, and instead they got majorly blue-balled.
“EVERY QUESTION I ANSWER WILL SIMPLY LEAD TO ANOTHER QUESTION”
So said the Woman in White to Claudia, biological mother of Jacob and the Man in Black, before crushing her skull with a rock. That may be true…but does it mean you can use it as an excuse not to answer questions that you’ve not just posed, but repeatedly teased us with? I’m no Robert Stack, but let me attempt to walk through some of the unsolved mysteries that Lost left hanging.
Walt – This is number one with a bullet for me. We got tantalizing glimpses in Season One that Walt was in possession of certain abilities that made him…special. Special, in fact, was the name of the episode that showed us Walt’s life before the crash (and Michael’s). In Season Two, after he’d been kidnapped from the raft, he appeared three times to Shannon, dripping wet and speaking unintelligibly. I’ve never been sure whether those instances were extensions of his own abilities or whether it was the Island doing that, but I mention them here anyway. Walt’s talents were further alluded to by the Others a few times at the end of the season, but then he and Michael boated away before we got to learn anything of substance. Walt appeared a few more times – on the island to Locke after he’d been shot by Ben, and off the island when he visited Hurley at the mental institution and was himself visited by Locke outside his school. He didn’t appear in the final season at all, other than in a brief flashback moment.
The Walt question was among the most frequently asked by fans, and last October, Damon addressed it yet again in an interview with USA Today (I included this quote in my first pre-season write-up back in January):
“I think a lot of people are justifiably frustrated by the Walt of it all. We said he has this special ability, and the Others obviously grabbed him and studied him for awhile, then they got freaked out by him and decided to let him go. I think that there are certain stories on the show that feel like dangling participles based on external factors. For us, we were incredibly limited by the fact that Malcolm David Kelley was growing at an exponentially faster rate than the show was progressing. So, you know, when we showed him in Season 5 and Locke is trying to recruit members of the Oceanic Six, the only way that it worked was to see him three years older. But hopefully, why Walt was special and the role he played on the show will have a new significance when all is said and done. And I’m not sure we really need the character of Walt to explain the significance.”
Well guys, all is said and done, and there is no new significance about why Walt was special and the role he played on the show. And don’t try to hide behind the growth thing. What did you think was going to happen when you cast a pre-pubescent kid on a show about a bunch of people trapped on an island? Here’s a mystery I can solve for you: kids grow up. If the creators chose to build a story like this around Walt, then they should have factored in the inevitable aging that would occur, rather than pretending five years later that it caught them by surprise. The fact that they never re-visited the storyline was even rubbed in our faces during Season Four. By then, the show had long moved on from the Walt storyline, but they brought it back to our attention in the minisode Room 23 (taking place during the events of the first three seasons, the minisodes were created as content for Verizon subscribers but then made available online and on the Season Four DVD set). Sure, they weren’t widely seen, but they were canonical contributions to the story. So why go back and remind us of Walt’s powers if there was to be no payoff? (I made the same complaint at the time…and in commenting on last season’s finale…and probably several other times.)
They could have found ways after Walt left the island to bring him back into the story more prominently than with the cameos he had after the Oceanic Six returned to society. Walt could have played as important a role on the island as Desmond was supposed to play if they had chosen to go that route. When I heard that Harold Perrineau was returning to the show in Season Four, my theory was that Jack was going to enlist Michael and Walt’s help in getting back to the island, playing on Michael’s guilt for the murders of Libby and Ana Lucia. But they went in another direction (I’ll talk about that later too), and again this season they ignored an opportunity to bring Walt back and address the mystery of his Shining. Last season, when Eloise Hawking told Jack, Sun and Ben that they had to re-create the conditions of the Oceanic 815 flight as closely as possible, I thought they were going to get Walt to come back with them. Once again, I thought wrong.
Eloise Hawking – And speaking of Eloise, she’s right on Walt’s tail, given that all the intrigue surrounding her never went anywhere. We first met her in Season Three’s Flashes Before My Eyes, the first episode to explore Desmond’s time-traveling consciousness after he turned the failsafe key in the hatch. She appeared to be the proprietor of a jewelry store, but in fact knew who Desmond was and what was happening to him. She went on to appear in a number of episodes, one of the most notable being last season’s 316, in which she instructed Ben, Sun and Jack on how they could return to the island. We also met her as a younger woman, living on the island – first in the 1950’s and later in the 1970’s paired up with Charles Widmore – and came to know her as Daniel Faraday’s mother. There’s no denying that this dame was plugged into the mothership in a pretty singular way. And yet nothing about her was ever explained. How did she have the unique knowledge that she did of the island and the way to access it? How did she come to be running a Dharma station in the basement of a Los Angeles church? What was her history with Widmore? What were her goals in relation to the island? There were many things that she did or said in individual scenes that were mini-mysteries in themselves, so cryptic that they seemed certain to pop up again, and yet they never did. She was a fascinating character who was key to the Lost universe, and yet we never got to understand how or why.
The Cabin – Originally built by The Dharma Initiative’s Horace Goodspeed, “Jacob’s cabin” was the site of some freaky paranormal activity and the home to a mysterious wide-open eye. Oh, and it liked to move around the island. Whether the cabin was ever used by Jacob we don’t know (Ilana and her team did go looking for him there), but we eventually learned enough to know that it had been occupied by the Man in Black in the island’s more recent days. Maybe we’re supposed to infer that the eye belonged to him. But inference doesn’t cut it in this case. What was up with this place? If it was meant to keep the Man in Black trapped within, which seems likely based on the circle of ash that surrounded it, then how was he able to travel around the island in other forms (Smoke Monster, Christian Shephard, etc.)? Why did it change locations on the island?
Death by Pregnancy – So much was made during the first three years of the show about the fact that pregnant women died on the island. It was the reason that the Others brought Juliet there. It was the reason they kidnapped Claire (and planned an attack to kidnap the rest of the women). It was a danger hanging over Sun. Eventually, it was a source of tension between Ben and Richard. And yet after all the emphasis paid to it, the plot point disappeared entirely and was never explained in the slightest. I guess we have to chalk it up to a storytelling miscarriage.
The Dharma Initiative – It’s not that there were burning mysteries around Dharma, but more that there was so much to know about it that remained unexplored. Eloise Hawking explained in the Lamp Post hatch in Los Angeles that the Dharma Initiative had “gathered proof that it [the island] existed. They knew it was out there somewhere, but they just couldn’t find it. Then a very clever fellow built this pendulum on the theoretical notion that they should stop looking for where the island was supposed to be and start looking for where it was going to be.” She references the “clever fellow” a few more times, yet we never learned who it was. And why was the Dharma Initiative looking for the island at all? How did they know about it? Once it was established there, what was happening back in Ann Arbor, its off-island base? Why were food palettes still being dropped 30 years later? Why did Dr. Chang appear under a series of related false names in the orientation videos (Marvin Candle, Mark Wickmund and Edgar Halliwax)? Why did Ben…like…kill them all? (There was an online multimedia game during the show’s early years called The Lost Experience, which delved into some of the Dharma backstory and even offered up an explanation of the Numbers, referring to them as the Valenzetti Equation.)
The Others – The earliest incarnation of the group we saw was in 1950’s, when it was led by Richard and included Eloise “Ellie” Hawking and Charles Widmore in their late teens or twenties. Other than being a little defensive, protective and all-around intense, they seemed a far cry from the vicious and cruel Others who operated under Ben’s rule. (Actually, strike that – they launched an attack of flaming arrows that barbecued some of the castaways, which does fit the “vicious and cruel” mold. But Richard, at least, seemed like a reasonable leader when he met captives Faraday, Charlotte and Miles, or when Sawyer talked to him at the Dharma barracks after the apparent Truce violation.) But going back to that early group in the 50’s – how did Ellie, Charles and the others come to be there? Were they brought by Jacob? How did Widmore and Ellie eventually come to power? How did Ben get Widmore banished and get the remaining Others to acknowledge his authority? Did Ben know Eloise on the island? We always heard about The Others making lists and working off lists, and eventually those lists were tied to Jacob, but if you go back and watch those first few seasons, the way the lists are talked about and even some of the specifics of who was and wasn’t on them does not sync up with what we learned about Jacob’s list in this final season.
Secrets of the Island – We eventually got an explanation of the whispers in the jungle (something else I’ll discuss later), but what about all the strange sights that were seen around the island? We already talked about Walt’s appearances to Shannon. There was also the horse from Kate’s past that she (and Sawyer) saw; Harper Stanhope, the Other whose husband Goodwin had an affair with Juliet, suddenly appeared out of nowhere to Juliet to deliver a message, then disappeared into thin air; Ben’s mother, who appeared to him during his childhood, prior to his first encounter with Richard; Richard’s wife Isabella, who spoke to Hurley and then to Richard; Young Jacob, inexplicably popping up in front of Man in Locke, Sawyer, Desmond and Hurley at various times; and maybe there are others that I’m forgetting. Were all of these actually the Man in Black, taking on those forms just as he took on Christian Shephard’s? (That couldn’t be the case with Young Jacob or Isabella, but maybe the rest?)
And random apparitions in the jungle are not the beginning and end of the island’s mysteries. How was it able to hold sway over people, such that despite all of Michael’s efforts to kill himself back in New York, the island wouldn’t let him die? And what was the deal with the source of light on the island? When we follow Desmond and Jack to the bottom of the tunnel, we see a vast cavern with openings in the walls that look like small caves. There are more Egyptian-looking markings and structures down there (the island’s many ruins being another unexplained feature). And what’s with the pillar plugging up the hole in the bright pool of water? The pillar which, when removed, begins to destroy the island? And on the topic of island holes and electromagnetism, how does the Man in Black make the leap from “we have discovered places all over this island where metal behaves strangely” to figuring out that by inserting a big wheel-crank into a wall beside this energy, he’ll be able to leave the island?
Finally (at least for my current purposes) there were the things that the show did explain…but not quite. It gave us a pretty cool storyline about why Libby was in the mental hospital…except that it was in SidewaysLand, and did not explain why she had been there when we first saw her there, before she and Hurley had ever been to the island. We found out that the Black Smoke was actually a metaphysical incarnation of the Man in Black…but the fact that it made a grinding mechanical sound like a chain being rapidly retracted by a winch, or the fact that it flashed images of people’s lives, were never dealt with. And I already mentioned Jacob’s lists – explained in the final season…but not consistent with information from previous seasons.
I could go on and on and on about ideas, subplots, etc. that played out on the show without ever being explained. And again, those of you who aren’t as infatuated with the mystery-aspect of it all may be asking why everything has to have a reason. Well as I’ve admitted, it doesn’t really. Looking at these last several paragraphs, the further down the list we move, the less closure is probably required. The unanswered questions about Walt and Eloise are the only two that, for me, are egregious omissions. The rest of the list represents a lot of things, big and small, that were thrown at us and never resolved. Okay – they didn’t all need to be…but if the show was going to keep introducing these mysterious elements, then I do believe it should have dealt with more of them than it did. And if it wasn’t important to answer any of those questions, then it probably wasn’t important to introduce many of them in the first place. But the writers kept thickening the plot, even after the show was well established and they knew – and had embraced – the rabid fan base they were dealing with. How could they not expect people to read into things, to build up plot points in their minds, to expect more resolution than they gave us? At what point do you stop saying, “Oh we don’t need to explain everything” or “Oh, only obsessives need every little thing explained” and admit that maybe there was some sloppy storytelling going on? Storytellers have a responsibility – to the integrity of the story itself, and to their audience. I believe there’s some obligation to account for mysteries that you put into your story if so much of your story is going to thrive on those very mysteries.
It’s all the more frustrating because they could easily have dealt with some of these things. The final season felt rushed at times, but it didn’t have to be that way. Each of the final three seasons was abbreviated. The typical network TV series lasts for 24 episodes. But Season Four of Lost was only 14 episodes, while Seasons Five and Six were 17 (Season Four would have been 17 as well, but the writer’s strike threw a wrench in the gears). When faced with writing this final season, surely Damon and Carlton could have asked the network for a few more hours to wrap it all up. Do you really think ABC would have said no? We wouldn’t want them spinning their wheels like The X-Files did in its final years, but Lost could have benefitted from a little more time. Like Marty McFly going back to 1985 earlier than planned so he could warn Doc about the Libyans, so too could Damon and Carlton have taken advantage of the time available to them….1.21 gigawatts not required.
There is a ray of hope on the horizon. There are rumors that the aforementioned DVD-exclusive epilogue about Hurley and Ben’s time on the island may yet address some of these lingering mysteries and curiosities – even the one around Walt. That will be cool, but it will also be a consolation prize.
SCREWING THE POOCH (NO, NOT VINCENT)
While I’m taking Damon and Carlton to task for things they denied us, I must drudge up a few things I wish they’d denied us, for as excellent as Lost’s story arcs usually were (even if they weren’t always complete), there were some that they just flat-out botched. Three, in particular, come to mind.
Michael – I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it one more time: they blew it royally with Michael. So many opportunities to bring that character back in smart and meaningful ways, and they went the lamest route every time. His return in Season Four seemed like a half-baked afterthought, a gesture that reeked of Damon and Carlton feeling obligated to the fans who kept asking what happened to him and Walt when they left the island…as if people weren’t going to want an answer to that. They could have brought him back the way I suggested earlier; the way I thought they would bring him back: having Jack approach him for help getting back to the island. Instead, they saddled him with estrangement from Walt, suicidal tendencies and a deadly mission aboard the freighter. Okay okay, the whole freighter thing…that could have worked. He comes back to try and make up for his betrayal, and finds himself once again living with the people he left behind. If he’d been thrown back into situations with Jack, Sawyer and Hurley, etc., there could have been really great material to mine from his guilt and their feelings toward him. And eventually, they could have built him up to a true redemption. Instead, after he’d barely been back, they shoved him in a room full of C4, blew it up and tried to sell us a bullshit story that he had come back and sacrificed his life for his friends. True? Technically, sure. He died trying to buy them time to escape. But really, it was a total flame-out; the fitting capper to a clumsy storyline and a gross missed opportunity.
They had one more chance this season to repair the damage and give Michael the send-off he deserved – if not in the context of the story itself (since he was already dead), then at least for the fans via a cool SidewaysLand arc. Instead, they fucked him and us again. He got only two brief scenes in one episode – yelling at Hurley (next to Libby’s grave, no less. The gall!) and then telling Hurley that he’s trapped on the island as punishment for what he did. Are you serious? Sawyer killed people in cold blood out of a years-old desire for revenge – one of his victims being the wrong guy, I might add – yet he got to make happy with Juliet in SidewaysLand. They all did bad things – that was the whole point. Yes, Michael killed Ana Lucia and Libby…but he was a father desperate to save his boy, who saw no other way out. I’m not condoning his actions (and surely I’m not taking this to heart and talking about him as if he were a real person, because that would be absurd), but come on! What wouldn’t a parent do to save their child? Michael should have been given the chance to atone properly, and then he should have taken his rightful place in SidewaysLand instead of being relegated to eternal damnation on the island. That shit ain’t right. His absence from that final scene in the church will always sting.
And while we’re talking about disappointing resolutions, the jungle whispers are a chorus of island dead?? I guess that’s not such a bad idea, but it would be easier to accept if it made any sense. When Hurley, out of the blue, solves the riddle of the whispers, Michael tells him, “We’re the ones who can’t move on.” Okay, the island has deemed some souls too corrupt to move on to a happier place, so it keeps them there as eternal punishment. So they roam around the island as a collective, chattering in the leaves at appropriately ominous moments? When Ben kidnapped baby Alex from Rousseau, he gave her a warning: “If you want your child to live, everytime you hear whispers, you run the other way.” What was that supposed to mean? What would have happened if she heard whispers and didn’t run the other way? Was there some kind of pattern to when we heard he whispers? I can’t remember now. All I remember is that when we finally found out what they were, it was a letdown.
And then there’s Christian Shephard. Obviously a big figure in Jack’s life. Also Claire’s father. He traveled to Sydney with Ana Lucia. He drank with Sawyer. He helped Locke move the island. He showed Sun where (make that “when”) Jin was. He was there when Michael blew up. All along it seemed like Christian had a purpose that would factor into Jack’s endgame. Instead, they copped out and revealed that all those times we saw Christian on the island it was just the Man in Black. Nevermind that Christian continued to appear on the island after Man in Black had taken on Locke’s form, even though we were told that once he took Locke’s form he was stuck with it. Look, I’m not a well-paid writer on one of TV’s most creative shows, so I can’t tell you what the truth about Christian Shephard should have been. All I can tell you is that it should have been better than Man in Locke saying, “Oh, that was me. My bad.” Another lame avoidance of dealing with story points they had been unspooling all along without proper foresight.
The one other significant complaint I need to lodge is that given how everything was resolved, the sideways timeline was emphasized too heavily. The sideways flashes were central to the final season, but not to the series overall – yet they wound up being a huge part of the show’s ultimate destination. I remember being disappointed by the finale of Friends because it focused too much on getting Ross and Rachel together for their inevitable Happily Ever After (spoiler alert?) at the expense of storylines for some of the other characters. The Ross and Rachel stuff should have been resolved a few episodes earlier so that the finale could focus on the group of six as a whole and what was happening next for them. By the same token, the finale of Lost was too preoccupied with resolving the sideways-flashes than with ending the story of the island itself. Now given what SidewaysLand turned out to be, it was only fitting that the show end there. For the ending they wanted to deliver, it had to be that way. Yet if the show had run for a few more episodes and if more time had been taken to wrap up the island stories, the time devoted in the finale to the resolution of SidewaysLand wouldn’t have felt like it came at the expense of other subplots and mysteries.
TAKING SIDES
Okay, I don’t want to harsh on the show too long. My overall feelings are definitely positive, not negative. But it is interesting – many things seem so stubbornly unresolved that you almost wonder if they did it to see if they could. Could they wrap this up without dealing with a lot of the mysteries, but tell such a satisfying story from a character point of view that people would still feel like it was all worth it? We may never know their intention, but for me, the answer is yes. As much as I think the show failed to give us answers we were owed, I was fully swept up in the emotional conclusion, enough so that the lack of finality did not leave too bitter a taste in my mouth. I know there are some on the other side of that fence; I randomly stumbled upon this blog from a guy who was so disappointed at the ending that he’s re-editing the final season to remove the sideways storyline completely. I’m not sure what that accomplishes; cutting out SidewaysLand doesn’t magically create the answers he felt cheated out of. But the point is, I’m sure this guy is not alone. And if the paragraph above suggests that I didn’t like the whole sideways angle, nothing could be further from the truth. I dug the concept from the moment it was introduced.
With a couple of exceptions, the finale’s most emotional moments came via SidewaysLand, which is no surprise given the reunions to which we were treated. When Sawyer and Juliet reconnected, the guess made by me and many others that some of her dying words in the season premiere (“We could get coffee sometime. We can go Dutch.”) would come back into play proved correct, and of course had me wondering how a near-death Juliet was able to see into SidewaysLand, causing her to speak those words to Sawyer as he cradled her broken body. (Also, I liked how when he unplugged the vending machine and then plugged it back in, releasing his stuck candy bar, she said to him, “It worked” – the same thing she was attempting to say to him on the island when she breathed her last.)
But of course no reunion for me could top Charlie and Claire’s. Emotion was already welling up when he was onstage at the concert and spotted her in the audience, knowing her only as the woman from his vision of true love which he had described to Desmond earlier in the season. His stares were not lost on her, and taking in his gaze almost seemed to jumpstart her labor. Aaron’s birth and its triggering of both hers and Kate’s memory of the island was a great moment, but then when she realized that she knew Charlie and took his hand, and then he remembered her and started to cry…well the tears on display in my living room weren’t just on the screen. Even though they didn’t recognize it through all of Season Four, when the writers had Claire completely forget about Charlie, they remembered here what a sweet and special relationship they had in those two and made their reunion the episode’s emotional highlight, next to the closing scene.
Nice but not quite as successful was Sayid finding Shannon. It would have been better if Shannon got to play a larger role, but their meet-up felt oddly abbreviated and sort of vaguely arranged. Hurley had apparently found Boone and somehow gotten him to remember the island, then sent him back to Australia to get Shannon and bring her back to the states (not sure how all that could possibly have transpired in the limited amount of time this all happened in, but oh well). I would have liked to see Boone make the connection, and I would have liked more time with both him and Shannon, but brief cameos (including their presence at the church) was all we got. I think it also felt strange because people in SidewaysLand were reconnecting with their true loves, and yet most people would probably agree that for Sayid, that would be Nadia and not Shannon. He and Shannon had a nice little thing going, sure, but weren’t Sayid and Nadia really the ones who belonged together? I wanted to see Maggie Grace return as Shannon, but it should have happened in a stronger way than this.
THE FATHER, THE SON AND THE HOLY GHOST
Of course not all of SidewaysLand’s reunions were romantic. The pivotal encounter came between father and son. After the disappointment of learning that Man in Black had been impersonating Christian Shephard on the island, I thought that was it for the character. But as played by John Terry, Christian was always one of my favorite things on the show, so having him make a final appearance was huge for me. He was there to live up to his name (so overt in its religious connotations that when Desmond tells Kate early in the episode the name of the man whose coffin they were looking at, her skeptical reaction was, “Christian Shephard? Seriously?”), even though the finale didn’t play into one particular religious belief. The room where Jack and Christian meet has images from Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and possibly other isms that I missed or can’t recall. I liked that while Jack kept experiencing flashes back to the island – first after Locke makes his own realization post-surgery, and then when he arrives at the concert and Kate kisses him – he seemed almost determined to suppress them whereas everyone else’s flowed freely. But Jack’s didn’t come until he touched his father’s casket. And then it all came pouring back. It always seemed like Jack was destined for some kind of final encounter with his father, and while I always expected it to happen on the island, it turned out to be in the afterlife.
As I said earlier and as the clip presents, Christian describes SidewaysLand as a place they all made together so that they could find each other, adding that the most important part of his life was the time he spent with them. “Nobody does it alone Jack. You needed all of them, and they needed you.” They were each others’ best hope for redemption and they became a family after real family had failed them. I’ve always loved the cosmic interconnectivity of the Lost universe, and the ways that characters crossed paths off the island. There was always the implication that they were bound to each other, and these scenes at the church were a beautiful, final reinforcement of that notion, bringing them all back together so that they could travel to the next plane (no, not the kind of plane that corralled them all in the first place). Although we’re told that they created this place themselves, I like to think that it was Jacob’s final reward to all of them – his way of thanking them for the role they (mostly) unwittingly played in his game. There are no clues to suggest that, but I like thinking of it that way. And if I knew more about religion, there might be other theories to explain it. Reader Denise B. shared an interpretation involving John the Baptist, but you’ll have to research him yourself if you’re so inclined.
Of course, seeing everyone together in the church can’t help but make us think about who wasn’t there. We already covered Michael, who’s stuck whispering in the jungle. I assume Mr. Eko is there with him, having met his end in the wispy yet firm grasp of the Smoke Monster. Ben remained outside the church, choosing not to move on with them – maybe because he didn’t feel he had really earned a right to be there with them, maybe because he wanted to enjoy the better experience of his sideways life for a little while longer, or maybe for some other reason. I wish that Faraday, Miles, Charlotte and Lapidus had been there. None of the 815ers got to spend much time with Charlotte on the island, but Daniel, Miles and Frank each had strong bonds with some of them, which would have made their presence welcome and appropriate (it still bugs me that Lapidus never even showed up in SidewaysLand). It was Faraday – or make that Daniel Widmore – who helped Desmond make the connection between the island and SidewaysLand, even if he hadn’t quite finished making it himself. But Desmond doesn’t return the favor, telling Eloise that he’s not going to bring her son with him. There are some others that were absent from the church – like Richard and Ana Lucia (the former having been described by Desmond as “not ready”) – but maybe their absence is due to them never having been as closely tied into the group. And of course Walt wasn’t there. But, you know…the producers didn’t expect him to grow up, so…what can you do?
LOOSE ENDS/FOOD FOR THOUGHT
-After Jack’s eye closes and we see the final appearance of the closing L O S T credit (nicely done this time as a slow fade-in rather than the usual crash), the credits rolled over images of the Oceanic 815 wreckage on the beach. Ever looking for an angle, many of the fans took this to have some kind of meaning, and thought it really was a way of saying that none of them survived the initial crash. But ABC soon confirmed that they added this, and that no meaning should be taken from it.
-The previous couple of episodes left us wondering about the respective fates of Lapidus and Richard, so of course I was happy to find them both alive in this episode. But I also like that Miles, the guy who’s gifted and cursed with hearing the thoughts of the recently deceased, is also the guy who finds Richard and Frank alive and helps them continue their journeys. (And I haven’t talked about it yet, but the whole sequence with the Ajira plane getting fixed and then taking off was just stellar.)
-I like that Sun’s memory of the island was triggered by Juliet giving her an ultrasound, though I wasn’t sure how Jin’s memory was jogged, since it seemed to happen when he saw the baby on the monitor. He has no corresponding experience from his island life, so it seemed more a matter of necessity and convenience than one of logic. Even less logical? Why he has absolutely no accent once he’s made the connection. Daniel Dae Kim was using his normal voice, which lacks any kind of accent.
-The episode had a lot of clever dialogue that either harkened back to previously used words and phrases, or else came loaded with foreshadowing. When Jack tells Kate that he took the job from Jacob because he had ruined everything in his life and the island is all he had left, Kate tells him that he didn’t ruin anything. “Nothing is irreversible,” she says – the same thing Jack told Locke about his spinal cord injury when they met at Oceanic’s lost baggage desk in SidewaysLand. As Jack and Man in Locke hover over the edge of the waterfall in the tunnel, waiting for Desmond to do what he goes down to do, Locke tells him that when the island drops to the bottom of the ocean, he’ll realize this had all been a fool’s errand. Jack replies, “Well we’ll just have to see which one of us is right then,” – a line which I am positive was used previously, I think by Man in Locke, but I can’t recall when it happened. There were even visual examples of this, such as the shot that showed Man in Locke and Jack peering over the edge of the waterfall in the tunnel as the camera descends, a shot which evokes the last image of Season One, with the two of them peering down the newly-blown open hatch as the camera retreats from them into the abyss.
It all makes you wonder how much of a Usual Suspects element there is to the show, in that re-visiting it from the beginning with the knowledge of how it ends might give certain lines or scenes new meaning. Will it be a new experience watching the show all over again? Probably not too new, since so much of the mythology was ultimately ignored, but I’ll bet more allusions like the ones mentioned here pop up along the way. I suppose it’s possible that at least a second viewing of the final season will reveal lots of clues within the dialogue. For example, in Lighthouse, when Jack approaches his son after tracking him down to a conservatory audition, he tells him that as a boy he was told by his father that he didn’t have what it takes. “I spent my whole life carrying that around with me,” he says. Now that line totally works on the surface of that situation. But another reading could also place it in the past tense. If Jack said, “I have spent my whole life carrying that around with me,” it would be clear that up to that moment in his life he has carried the comment with him. But “I spent my whole life…” could be taken to mean that he’s not alive anymore. Semantics? Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, it will be fun to eventually look for similar clues.
There are also the ironic lines peppered throughout the episode, like Jack telling Locke just before his surgery, “I’ll see you on the other side,” or joking with him that the surgery could fail and that he could kill him…which, on the island, he does. Or when Jack tells Sawyer that it doesn’t matter if they find Desmond or if Locke finds him, because they’re all going to the same place. And later, when Jack tells Hurley he’s going into the tunnel to undo whatever Desmond did, and Hurley says he’ll die. “I’m dead already,” he explains, obviously referring to the knife wound in his gut. But by the end of the episode we know that the line also carries a less literal meaning. Surely there are more of these that I missed or can’t recall.
-Did anyone else get a strong Star Trek II, Spock’s-sacrifice vibe from Desmond entering the pool, the electromagnetism blazing all around him, and removing that oblong rock from a hole in the center? Once again, the needs of many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one, brotha.
-If Eloise knew what SidewaysLand was, why did it bother her that Desmond was trying to make the others aware as well? Was it because she wanted to continue existing in a place where she hadn’t killed her son and where he was healthy and happy? Wouldn’t she understand that it could not be a permanent resting place for any of them, herself included?
-I feel like I must have missed something here, but I never felt like we got an explanation for why the island was on the bottom of the ocean in the beginning of the season. Sideways Flight 815 flew over the island and continued on toward Los Angeles, and then we plunged into the depths of the ocean and found the island resting on the ocean floor. But what was it doing there? In reality, Jack prevented the island from sinking and we are left to assume that it continues to exist under the leadership of Hurley and Ben. Are we supposed to think that it sinks at some point in the future, so that in SidewaysLand the island is “dead,” just as they all are? Are we supposed to think that it sank sometime during the course of their sideways lives? Remember that the island did exist in SidewaysLand, as Ben and his father made reference to living there and being part of the Dharma Initiative during Ben’s childhood. Obviously the image of the island under the sea was a bold beginning to the season, but again, unless I missed something, it was a provocative notion that went absolutely nowhere. Anyone?
-Not to be forgotten, here are the final installments of Lost Untangled with Muppet Dr. Chang, as well as Lost Slapdown with special guest Kermit the Frog.
-As you know, the season finale was followed by a special episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live, featuring several cast members and some funny alternate endings. If you don’t want to watch the full episode, linked above, here is just the alternate ending portion of the show.
-I’ve mentioned the epilogue that will be featured on the DVD set, but if you’re interested in seeing what else the DVD’s have in store – both the Season Six set and the Complete Series set – take a look here. Of course I’ll need to get that complete series collection, and will be selling my individual season sets to help offset the cost. If any of you who don’t plan to splurge for the big set happen to be interested in buying the previous season sets, let me know. Or feel free to just send large donations my way. The set hits stores on my half-birthday. Just sayin.’
LINES OF THE NIGHT
“Alright, y’all go ahead to your heart of the island and I’ll go get the magic Leprechaun out of that well.” – Sawyer
“I don’t believe in a lot of things, but I do believe in duct tape.” – Miles
FINAL THOUGHTS
It’s now been four weeks to the day since the finale aired, and I still haven’t read everything I wanted to read or watched everything I wanted to watch before sending this message. For all the time it’s taken me to deliver this, I wish I could say that I had some deep, thoughtful comments to make about the series as a whole, but I really don’t. Flawed as it was in the end, I really do think it was one of the greats, ambitious on levels that most shows don’t even reach for. Just in the six years that Lost has been on the air, its influence has been seen in others shows, from Invasion to Heroes to Flashforward, but none have had even remotely the same impact. It’s truly rare to have a mainstream show so filled with ideas. Beyond the cool twists, the character drama and the humor was a show that actually made people think about more than just the story unfurling in front of them. We always hear that TV rots the brain, but Lost was exercise for the brain, a pop-intellectual endeavor that gave us puzzles to solve and inspired people to read and learn about subjects that the writers intricately wove into story. For years to come, college courses in literature, philosophy, religion and even quantum physics will be taught through the prism of Lost, and books on the same subjects will be written. You can’t say that about many programs.
I’ve spent a lot of time in these messages praising the cast, and the actors that have come through the series over the years – as regulars and as recurring and guest stars – have comprised one of television’s great ensembles, and one of its most international. Terry O’Quinn was truly a revelation – a character actor who we knew from numerous movies and TV series, but who found the role of a lifetime in John Locke. Nothing he’d done before gave him the opportunities that Lost did, and he excelled at every one. He brought such grace, subtlety and nuance to the character, and just when you thought he had outdone himself, he came along and set his personal bar even higher. I can say without hesitation that his performance stands up to the best I’ve seen in the movies. And he wasn’t alone. Michael Emerson, Jorge Garcia, Josh Holloway, Elizabeth Mitchell…I could literally list every actor’s name. I hope they can go on to more great work that allows them different types of characters and challenges.
I was thinking that for most of the last decade, I always had three pop culture obsessions going on at any give time. Early in the decade it was The Sopranos, the Harry Potter books and the Lord of the Rings films. Then the Lord of the Rings ended, and within months Lost arrived. And during the run of Lost, The Sopranos aired its last and the final Harry Potter book was written. Now Lost is over, and nothing has yet grabbed me in the way that any of those works did. I’m sure something will eventually, but Lost holds a special place. You watch your favorite shows for years, and they get to be like friends you invite into your home on a regular basis, so when one ends it’s only natural that you miss it. I had been watching ER for nearly half my life when it ended. Lost was only six years, but it was a full six years. I watch a lot of TV, but I don’t write about it all like I did about this. Lost invited that kind of examination, rumination, consideration, deliberation that I’ve been doing here for half its run. The six years I’ve been watching this show happen to have been the most unstable, unpredictable and uncertain of my life, and like the best of art and culture, it has provided a vivid and welcome escape that I can’t imagine not having experienced. You might say (if you were an incredibly large dork) that Lost has been my constant. Now it’s time to move on to the next thing, or as Desmond might say to me, “to let go.” So thanks for hanging in there with me through these weekly mind scrubs. I feel lucky to have been part of the worldwide community of fans who got to witness Lost in the moment, and to have had a few people like you who, for some unfathomable reason, were interested in what I had to say about it. And here I thought I was sick.
Namaste.
Ben’s afternoon unexpectedly brings him to the home of his favorite student, Alex, and her mother, our old friend Danielle Rousseau. With Ben’s arm in a sling, they offer him a ride which turns into a dinner invitation. I gotta say, it was pretty damn weird to see Rousseau as a member of normal society, wearing a dress, smiling. After dinner, she thanks Ben for the interest he’s taken in Alex and tells him that with Alex’s father having died when she was two, Ben is now the closest thing she has to a father. The compliment chokes Ben up, and he and Rousseau have themselves a little moment. A moment! Ben and Rousseau! I guess his newly-opened window to the island timeline has not yet opened so wide for him to recall getting Alex killed or stealing her from Rousseau.
Hurley drives up in his yellow humvee and hands an envelope with $125,000 to Ana Lucia (who he recognizes now, accidentally addressing her by name even though she doesn’t know him). When she drives off, Hurley asks why she’s not coming with them. “She’s not ready yet,” Desmond says – the same thing Eloise Hawking said to him when he visited her a few days earlier at the museum where she was organizing an impending benefit event.
-I wish I had the time to review every write-up I’ve done this season and to really spend time thinking about all that’s happened to get us to this point, but I don’t. And maybe it’s for the best. Too much overthinking, too much effort looking at all the pieces and trying to make them fit…for all my questions and attempts to understand, predict, make sense of, etc. it’s nice to just sit back and go on the ride. So I don’t have much to offer under this Loose Ends heading this time around. My mind is focused on what’s to come. In SidewaysLand, we have Desmond bringing everyone together at the benefit concert. On the island, we have Man in Locke trying to kill the remaining survivors and destroy the island. Where is Desmond? Does Jack now have Jacob-like abilities? Is Ben really with Locke or does he have a trick up his sleeve? What about the wildcards – Claire, Miles, possibly Richard and maybe-impossibly-but-I’m-still-holding-out-a-sliver-of-hope Lapidus? Where are they and what will they do? How will the two timelines reconcile? Who will live? Who will die? And for the love of God, will we finally find out what happened to Annie, the little girl who was Young Ben’s friend on the island?!? ‘Cause if they don’t solve that mystery…
The one thing that worries me about the revelation that Jack’s vision of his father in the early Season One episode White Rabbit was really the Man in Black – which therefore leads us to assume that every time we’ve seen Christian Shephard on the island it was the Man in Black – is that it absolves the writers of having to deal with Christian beyond this point. Jack still has some daddy issues to work out and it has seemed for a while like he might have one last chance to hash them over with his father on the island. These issues have been deeply entwined in his journey, not to mention that Christian has been a huge part of the show all along, influencing not just Jack’s life but crossing paths with multiple other castaways as well. So as far as I’m concerned, we need to see actor John Terry return as Christian. He’s been too large a presence for this scene with Jack and Man in Locke to be the resolution. However he’s able to take shape or whatever spectral plane he exists on, we’re owed stronger closure on the curious case of Christian Shephard.
Fast forward a few episodes to Namaste, in which Sun and Lapidus travel over to the main island and find the abandoned Dharma barracks at New Otherton. And what else do they find there? Christian Shephard, who shows them the picture with Jack, Kate and Hurley among the Dharma Initiative new recruits from 1977. Therefore…if the Man in Black can’t change his appearance now that he’s adopted Locke’s look, then he couldn’t have been taking on the form of Christian Shephard. So either the writers and producers have once again made a major continuity error – and frankly it wouldn’t be the first time – or there’s evidence to suggest that not every appearance of Christian Shephard on the island has been the Man in Black personally.
I Am DB 