Warning: This post may be a bit whiny. It’s largely directed at stuff I’ve read online by writers, fans, and commentators whose take on the Lost series finale differed dramatically from mine. My next post about Lost ought to be rather more constructive and interesting.
I was deeply disappointed by the grand finale of Lost. I mean, I didn’t think it was a total bomb; I liked some things about it, and for better or worse, it did keep me engaged and entertained for most of its two-and-a-half-hour duration (all except for the last twenty minutes or so of the “sideways world” story). I thought the revelation about what the “sideways world” really was, though, was completely dumb, and one of the biggest disappointments ever as far as resolving an until-the-end intriguing storyline goes. And the more I’ve ruminated over the rest of the episode and how it affected the nature and meaning of the story of the show as a whole, the less satisfied I’ve become.
We all knew going in that it was going to be impossible for the show to answer all our questions and a near-miraculous achievement to give the show an even reasonably coherent and satisfying denouement—but there’s still a part of me that feels sort of stunned by how colossally I feel they dropped the ball. This is probably because over the course of six seasons, Lost rarely if ever disappointed me to any significant degree—until now. Every step of the way—even at times when the show’s mind-blowingness threatened to escalate out of control—I’ve been intrigued and impressed and left eager for more. Sometimes the paucity of answers, the ever-increasing number of baffling questions, and the maddeningly coy or cryptic tendencies of those characters who (presumably) were more “in the know” than the protagonists could get frustrating—but that was the show, and until pretty recently, I always looked forward confidently to everything all eventually coming together and making some kind of sense (and along the way, I usually enjoyed the way the show teased us by never showing us what the writers knew we were most eager to see at any given moment, then slipping in answers (when we got any) in sometimes subtle ways, often when we were least expecting them). I know there are various episodes that were widely criticized and unpopular, but in most cases, I haven’t shared the disillusionment; sure, okay, there have been some episodes that weren’t quite as good as most, and maybe one or two that just seemed odd, or a little off—but never in ways that really impacted my feelings about the show as a whole. Lost was utterly unique, impossible to summarize or easily define, and consistently engaging, thought-provoking, and moving for six solid seasons—until they dramatically botched the ending.
I read internet stuff about the show (blogs, fan reactions, reviews, etc.; most notably the Jeff Jensen recaps and columns at EW.com), and I’m very much aware that a lot of people are saying they were “blown away” by the finale. I also know that there exists something of a divide between people who are very upset with the show for not providing the answers to all of the mysteries and questions that it introduced over the years, and people who feel that that perspective “misses the point” in some way. The show’s creators themselves have expressed the latter view at times, I believe. I totally agree that there was much more to the show than its “mythology” and mysteries and questions, and I also agree that there are some (some) things that a show like this one can get away with leaving ambiguous. There are also things that, while they definitely should have been answered or resolved better than they were, aren’t so crucial that my feelings about the show as a whole are hugely impacted by the fact that they weren’t. But fundamentally, I feel strongly that this “mythology vs. character drama” or “answering questions vs. exploring big thematic ideas” dichotomy is an utterly false one. I am totally behind the view that the characters and their stories are what mattered in the show, and the fact that Lost explored profound themes (free will vs. fate, redemption, faith vs. science, etc.) is a huge part of what made me like the show so much. But to say “the characters were what really mattered” as an excuse for spinning an unbelievably convoluted mythology shot through with dozens of utterly baffling questions about what, fundamentally, was actually going on throughout the entire show—and then never even resolving half of it!—is just a total cop-out. It’s unbelievably lazy and shoddy storytelling. It’s a huge cheat: incomprehensible crap happening to people for no reason is not an interesting story, whereas mysterious things happening for reasons that the audience expects to eventually find out about is. But if the audience never ultimately does find out those reasons, then the story reverts to having all along really been “incomprehensible crap that happened for no reason”—all promise, no payoff. I don’t ask for my fiction to provide a definitive answer to every “big question” that it raises, or to tell me, in the end, exactly how it wants me to feel about every character or story element—but I do expect the storyline to ultimately cohere and make sense (and to reveal enough of itself to me so that I can see how it makes sense), and I also expect, when a story raises “big questions,” for it to ultimately have something to actually say about those questions. To play around with profound ideas for six seasons and then ultimately go nowhere with them makes it hard to take the show very seriously, in the end. I’m being harsh, and almost certainly overstating how negatively I feel about what the finale did to the show. But I wanted to put into writing my response to everyone who ridicules the idea of letting an unsatisfactory finale alter one’s assessment of the show as a whole, even if you’ve loved it for six years—and I wanted to try to put to rest this whole notion that being upset about “unanswered questions” makes one somehow small-minded.
I’d also like to address the issue of “spirituality” or “spiritual themes” and Lost—because one thing that I read online the other day mused that some of the negative reaction to the finale may have been about people being “uncomfortable with the show’s spiritual themes,” even though those themes have always been present as a part of the show (if usually less explicitly than at the end). I don’t think this is fair, either. Sure—I consider myself a rational secularist; a “man of science” rather than a “man of faith.” But I don’t necessarily have a problem with fiction that explores themes and ideas that are inconsistent with my own beliefs—and still less do I object to fiction that involves fantastical or mystical elements, if they’re used to interesting effect. For instance, it’s not because I don’t believe in an afterlife that I hated the revelation about what the “sideways” world was; if the writers wanted to make their fictional world one in which there’s an afterlife, that’s fine with me (and indeed, it’s been apparent for some while now that death is not necessarily “the end” in the Lostverse). I hated the sideways resolution because it proved to be an irrelevant, tacked-on thing having no organic relationship to the rest of the story; there was this whole intriguing, mind-blowing, moving, unique story about people who crash on a mysterious island that’s gradually revealed to have mystical properties and be cosmically significant in various ways…and oh, by the way, there’s also an afterlife, and you think you’re still alive until you finally remember your actual life and then let go of it so you can “move on.” Groovy—but who cares? We were led to believe that what was going on in the sideways world was in some sense related to, and a part of, the ongoing story—that it mattered. Sure, you can argue that rebooting the characters in an “afterlife” allowed for a new kind of character study of each of them—another unique way to investigate what “made them tick”—but for it to prove to have been totally disconnected from any of the choices made by the characters in their actual lives in the real world (when the initial presentation so strongly implied otherwise, and had us guessing all along about what this alternate world and its differences from the original timeline “meant” in thematic terms and for the character arcs of the various players)—and for the events to have not been “real” in any sense at all—made it all feel very hollow and meaningless. In short, it’s not that I’m upset that Lost raised profound questions, or even that I’m upset about it “answering” some of them in ways that I disagree with. The show employed religious and mystical story elements, but although I see that stuff as nonsense in real life, I for the most part enjoyed them as story elements; and the “big questions” that the show played with were, on the whole, thought-provoking and often inspiring. What upsets me, rather, is that in the end, the show simply failed to bring things to a particularly coherent or satisfying resolution—either on a plot level or on a thematic level.
So there. 🙂