Lost Week: It's Like Shark Week, Except Different in Every Conceivable Way

Last Sunday night, Lost ended with a two and a half hour extravaganza. This sparked a fury of conversation between Joe and I which was interrupted by the demands of real life. Neither of us were content to let it end with that, and so we have decided to let the dialogue seep on for awhile. As there is a real void of Lost related discussion on the internet by random people, we thought we would chronicle this discussion online on this here blog. Anyway, be forewarned that we will definitely spoil many major plot points for those of you haven't seen the show and plan on doing so.

The following entry was written by Joe.

In the words of Dewey Cox “there’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly…. obvious”.  That quote correlates well to what I’ve taken away from the show, the finale, what the island was and what the show was really all about. The more I think about, the more I find myself disappointed with the writers’ chosen approach to conclude this amazing and historic show.  

As the urban idiom goes, “haters gonna hate”, but even haters must concede that Lost was an unprecedented (and likely to be unequaled) achievement of network television. It was the antithesis of most network goals in a sea of compartmentalized dramas and cheaply produced reality television. It was expensive, complicated, genre focused and exceptionally serialized to the point where each episode had to be watched in order, and along with 24, really kicked off the TV-on-DVD revolution. A show who’s driving focus ab initio was the finale. This was a show that achieved things in a way that Twin Peaks teased at without the benefit of an endgame (or the internet), and the X-Files flirted with but never embraced the hidden-clues-coming-together-at-the-end-you-have-to-watch-from-ep1-to-really-appreciate kind of storytelling Lost did. It was without hyperbole one of the best examples of what network television can be.

Before I get into things however, some general comments I believe are in order, before we delve into the nitty gritty of specifics throughout this week. For those who don’t know (which is everyone save for 3 people) I will be providing a divergent viewpoint than that of Rick throughout our discourse. I don’t imply viewpoint as in my opinion of the show/finale differs from his (though I suspect it might) but divergent in that I literally viewed the show from a different position than Rick. Not to suggested an air of authenticity or entitlement but I was “hardcore” as the kids say. Starting with the 3rd season four years ago, I was forced to wait a week between my episodes, and then months between seasons. These were incubation periods where the desire to find answers to the shows mysteries multiplied to critical conditions. Cliché though it may be to say, Lost wasn’t just “a show”, there was an entire sub-culture underneath it that the producers actively propagated that communicated to the fans that the island’s mysteries were integral to the show (more on this later). There were dozens of “podcasts” (like radio shows on very specific topics) that tossed theories back and forth and re-caped episodes. There were online interactive stories to occupy hardcore fans during the frequent hiatuses that provided more mysteries to the island. Take a look at some of them at LostPedia and understand how (perhaps other than Star Trek-dom though it lacks the overarching mystery) Lost became a part of audiences lives in a way most shows could never compare. And it is from this viewpoint that I can say the finale of Lost both left me sad to see it go and also significantly disappointed.  

Not disappointed with the final scenes of Jack stumbling to his origin point, or even the non-corporeal dénouement; in actuality I really enjoyed the finale 10 minutes of Lost and think they would have been perfect conclusions if there was more exposition throughout the 6th and final season. Lost was a show that frequently and consciously kept the viewer returning with a tantalizing world of mini-mysteries that the show runners promised time and time again would pay off. We were encouraged to be Lockian men of faith in contrast to Shepherdian viewers who walked away from the proverbial hatch button and assume the show couldn’t deliver on its promises. It’s easy for me to envision that JJ Abrams pitched this show and planned out the first episode and truly did have the foresight to say “and then the show will end with the flashbacks of the final season turning out to be a kind of purgatory with all these season 1 characters and the show ends with a plane taking off with whomever you choose to keep alive and Jack’s closing eye”. I’ll give them that, I think they had that in the bag all along, and it is quite a good conclusion. The problem that I’m beginning to realize is after that point, when JJ handed the show off to Damon Lindeloff and Carlton Cuse, they didn’t understand how to get there properly. They literally built mysteries on top of mysteries to keep viewers coming back only to go into the final season treading water to build to an interesting season ending twist and then said “the show is about the characters more than anything else”. To that I say horseshit (pardon my German). This show made its living on the promises of answering the many mysteries in a satisfying way. It is not simply a “character show” like Grey’s Anatomy or most television shows (not that there’s anything wrong with that).   A show like Friends is a character show, where if one is vaguely familiar with the show they might ask a fan “so who does Rachel end up with in the end?” As a Lost fan who works at a video store I’ve heard a myriad of questions from casual viewers and not one was “So, who does Kate end up with?” or “Will Sun and Jin ever be reunited?” I always hear “do they ever say what the island is?” or “what is the smoke monster?” or “why are there polar bears?”  These questions literally are the show. To abandon the mysteries in the final hour is an incredible disservice to the show even if the character conclusions were flawless.

To conclude my opening statements I put forward the following thesis: the conclusion of Lost provided exceptional, virtually perfect emotional closure to the series but hardly any narrative closure; as a show that built its longevity upon the foreshadowed  unknown being satisfyingly resolved it can only be described as, at best, disappointing.

Now, let’s begin.