The LOST Finale and Season 6, Reconsidered

I’m just spitballing, but here’s an idea: characters who died ON the island (Charlie, for example) don’t experience a re-redemption, and are already “awake” when they reach the Sideways world. Then they work as a team in order to help the others (who lived lives before and after the island which may have placed that experience into a different context) in order to put it into perspective and rekindle their connections with one another.

I think you’re right that the element of “re-redemption” makes the Flash Sideways problematic: unrealistic is obviously the wrong word when dealing with the spiritual, but even if we accept the “how” there are a lot of big and small “why” questions that it doesn’t feel like the show answered beyond the meta “because it gave us a chance to say goodbye to the characters.”

I LIKE a lot of the theories that tie in the Flash Sideways to the characters and their attempts to have one final moment together (see: Hurley and Ben using the power of the island to create it), but introducing an element of “creation” raises a lot of questions both logistically (How could they make it retroactive to include people who died beforehand? Time travel, we presume?) and in terms of why they would design it this way.

The sixth season has some high moments, but it is not able to stand up to that sort of scrutiny when considered in the context of the finale.

“How could they make it retroactive to include people who died beforehand? Time travel, we presume?”

This is why I find it EASIER to interpret the “afterlife” through a metaphorical/atheistic frame than through a literal/religious one. That is, it’s easier for me to explain it as the combined, life-affirming fantasy created by the last firings of synapses in the characters’ brains—which circles back to how important each was to the other, and what they wanted for themselves and each other—than it is to literally see this “place” as purgatory or the gateway to Heaven. (That, again, would explain to me why Juliet literally says, “it worked” before she dies.) It makes more sense to me as a kind of timeless collective dream, or an amalgamation of all the characters’ dying thoughts–which are what “create this place.”

But that’s partly a matter of personal worldview, I guess, and I don’t think it affects the effectiveness of the finale for better or worse.

yeah, my thoughts to how the sideways world is different is that it was meant for them to find each other so they could all move on. They found redemption together on the island, so the only way they could move on to the next place (be it heaven or whatever) was together in that group…so they all had to wait as long as it took until they remembered their island life, found each other and let go of this “purgatory” world…

The one thing that really sticks out and bugs me about the Purgatory timeline is when Ben and Roger were talking: they were on the Island, they were in the DI, but they were there. Or is the Purgatory world exclusive to the Losties, and everyone’s brains get sort of rewired to make sure they end up in the church?

I’m hoping to start a whole series rewatch pretty soon with some family, watching just 2 or 3 episodes a week, so it’ll take a while. But right now, I think I like s6 better than s2. Maybe that will change.

First, thanks for these articles on Lost. I’ve followed them faithfully throughout this season.

Second, my thoughts on the Alt World (waiting room, if you will) were that it was a reward for their service to the Island. Here, they were given a chance to to work out their previous issues without the traumatic, pressure-cooker experience of the Island. Now, I guess you could say that it was that traumatic experience that hastened about their initial redemptions, and I would agree (to a point… not everyone achieved this, and some didn’t until the very end). But I think that just the fact that all the characters seemed better equipped to handle their problems in the Alt World is a sign that they subconsciously learned some lessons from their Island life.

I would like to think that it was one last thing that Hurley did for his friends, but I truly think that it was the Island itself that helped create this place as way of thanking them for helping to protect the Island. Jacob may not have given a damn about them, but the Island itself did.

I think timeless collective dream is a good way of putting it.

Agreed – to be honest, I had never for a second considered such a “logistical” explanation for the Sideways before reading other reviews, presuming it to be something left unexplained (not entirely unlike the series’ mythology, I guess).

Darlton have (has?) always said that each season of Lost is like a book with a beginning, middle and end. So, I guess I feel like S6 works on it’s own as a mini book within the series. They did pull quite the long con on us, because I definitely thought the bomb had worked and created the sideways world. I don’t know that I love, love everything about this season, but if I think of it as a mini narrative within the whole of Lost — one that was created as a long and touching way to revisit each of our characters and then say goodbye to them, it works for me.

And if I think of the sideways world as a purgatory, spiritual thing then all of the “why/how” details about why Penny is there or why Walt isn’t or where Ji Yeon is don’t matter as much to me.

AND, kudos to the writers for season 6, because they were able to make me love and root for Jack after I spent at least four seasons thinking he was a complete tool.

As a whole series, I think seasons 1 and 2 were probably my favorite. I also loved the end of season 3. I would probably place season 6 ahead of season 4, though. But, obv I loved the whole show with all my heart. :-)

I came away from the finale loving it. But after reading numerous posts, I can’t seem to stay away from anything Lost, I’ve become disappointed. When my sister said to me on Monday afternoon “they all died!” I realized I felt let down. I’d invested so much into these characters as well as in the mysteries of the island I’d come believe would be revealed eventually. In the end, all I got was the “privilege” of watching them go into the afterlife and no real mysteries solved unless I decided to solve them myself.
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I’ve come to believe the creators/writers didn’t really know what they were doing. This is evidenced in the reports that Jack was originally supposed to die at the end of the pilot and Ben was originally supposed to be a 3-episode character.
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The unanswered questions are too numerous to count. Why had Ben felt the need to lie to the Losties when he told them he was born on the island when nobody but us viewers ever learned it was a lie? Why didn’t MIB’s “adoptive” mother never give him a name? This is quite interesting when we are led to believe she’d always thought he would be the one to protective the island and not Jacob. If the island had such healing powers so as to allow Locke to walk again, why did Ben get cancer? What was it about the island that caused no children to be born? And why was Claire able to give birth if that were true?
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And maybe one of the biggest ones for me: Why did Claire have Aaron as at the church? It was suggested on another post that baby Aaron is how Claire and Charlie had known him, but Claire had escaped the island at the end with Sawyer, Kate and the others moments before Jack died–at least that is what we were led to believe. If Claire had escaped the island, she would have raised Aaron, with Kate’s help at least at first.
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I won’t even get started on the questions about the island and its “mysteries”. In the end, none of that mattered anyway. Those of us who were drawn into the show because of the mysteries were left behind, we didn’t matter to TPTB at all. I’ve come to a few conclusions about why that happened: a) TPTB just didn’t care about a certain segment of their audience. b) all of the mysteries were nothing more than plot devices to drive the other narrative and they never intended to answer the questions–again, a segment of the audience didn’t matter except for ratings. c) TPTB had no clue what they were doing, had created all this mystery and pseudo-science with no idea where they were going with it or how to explain it.
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Those of us who were drawn into the series because of the island mysteries are expected to accept the fact that none of it will be solved. We watched faithfully week after week for six years, we not only expected answers, we were promised they’d be provided. Yes, the show was about the characters, but asking us to forget years of edge-of-your-seat mystery is disingenuous. Without the mystery of the island, all we are left with is a modern day version of Gillian’s Island: a group of people are stranded on a deserted island, some die before rescue, others manage to make it home eventually. And most are reunited in the afterlife to “live” happily everafter.
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Most of us who were drawn in because of the mystery would never have invested 6 years on a Gillian Island remake. Yes, we’d come to love some of the characters, but a Gillian remake would have had us abandoning the show after the first season. It was the search for answers which drove us.
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I will accept for a moment that it never was about the island mystery. only about the characters. That still makes the finale deeply unsatisfying. We all die sometime. I get that. But to have that as the final theme of such a great series was nothing more than pure laziness.

If the “characters who died ON the island don’t experience a re-redemption, and are already ‘awake’ when they reach the Sideways world,” how do you explain Jack being the last character to remember his prior life (aside from the audience not learning about his death until the end?)

If the Island was this place where these characters were able to work through issues and serve a larger purpose, they needed to go somewhere else to continue to work through those issues before death?

Ultimately, the flashes sideways were really nothing more than a big red herring, designed to give the viewers a fundamental mystery until the end and give the producers a way to bring back characters who died in prior seasons.

If Across the Sea had been one of the first three episodes of season 6, rather than one of the last three, would it have helped to make Jacob and MIB/Smokey the Locke into more fully formed characters?

Remember what were the last words Jacob said before dying? “They are coming”. What if “they” were the characters gathered in the church waiting to enter the light/after-life? what if Jacob experienced in his dying moments the same “transfer” experienced by Juliet when she died and said “it worked”?

I just wanted to say thank you for all of the thoughtful Lost posts over the years. I think when it is all said and done, I may end up missing the Lost reviewers, such as yourself, Alan Sepinwall, Maureen Ryan, Todd VanDerWerff, Doc Jenson, and many others; and the communities of people who comment and participate in the conversation, as much as the show itself. It is a truly rare and beautiful thing that has brought everyone together over these last six years, and surely will be at least a while before it happens again. With that I bid all of the lost fans out there happy trails, until we meat again.

“But I, at least, had spent five years thinking of the Island as a place where the characters tried to achieve redemption and correct the mistakes of their past.”

But how could they? How could anyone? Sawyer killed an innocent man he pegged to be his father. Jack sent his own father throttling towards alcoholism and death. These mistakes couldn’t be unwritten.

Perhaps the grander commentary is that while we seek redemption in life, it’s only in death that we’ll be able to ‘let go’ of our demons and find peace of mind.

But I do want to say what bugged me about the finale and the growing build at the end of the season is that the stakes had diminished because dying on the Island meant rebirth in the sideways world.

By the time they were narrowly escaping the island on the plane, I couldn’t help but wonder if it really mattered whether they crashed or not. If Hurley and Ben had been eaten by a Polar Bear minutes after leaving Jack, would it have had any effect on the ending? Not really.

A friend of mine has a theory, and I’m on the fence about it, but I’m considering it. My buddy is convinced that the first inclination of the creators after the start-up phase of Lost to make it so that the island was Purgatory (of some kind) and that the characters were working out their life issues to ‘let go’. However, fans immediately put Purgatory near the top of their list of theories.
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So Darlton had to do a bit of a switcheroo. They started telling everyone that the island was NOT Purgatory. (Odd in itself because they didn’t usually confirm/deny theories.)
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And then they proceeded to add in all the crazy mythology to get everyone further away from the Purgatory theory, and they used tricks like the S3 finale and Jughead’s detonation to prep us for thinking of Sideways as some kind of split timeline or alternate universe. All of it set up so they could deliver Jack’s death and the chapel reunion scene.
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If that’s so, then it’d go a long way to explaining why Darlton has been so content in leaving so many mythology threads hanging. For them, all of that stuff was a distraction to get us away from their Purgatory storyline and far less important to them than it was to us.
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Doesn’t take away from the emotional enjoyment I got from the finale, but it would annoy me that all the time I spent thinking of time loops and parralel worlds was just the smoke-n-mirrors story stuff to keep us off the scent.
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We’ll never know…

I rewatched seasons 1 to 4 after ‘The Incident’, hunting for clues about Locke/Smokey. I don’t think I will rewatch Lost for a pretty long time. I bought the whole parallel universe con, starting with the fake ads from comicon. In one video that was part of a DamonCarltonandapolarbear (the 5/6 hiatus ARG) URL reveal at Susan Sarandons Ping Pong club New York City were hidden images of Dogen and The mysterious Linder Gallery painting, so I took this for further proof of a parallel universe. But Faraday was wrong, the river of time is fixed, and the incident was always the Losties dropping Jugheads core down the hatch. Jacks death dawned on me at the beginning of the End, when he, the spinal surgeon, peered through that skull X-Ray at us. But I still did not get the whole picture right now, I never expected them to be in pre-heaven, hanging out and waiting for Jack. Plus the frames (empty beach with the 815 wreckage) during the credits totally convinced me that everybody died during the crash, and the whole six seasons were an illusion Jack experienced while dying in the bamboo. Which was not the intended meaning, I guess. So yep, I’m all for Lost, the Motion Picture, in which Hurley and Ben save the world.

James — Of course I have thoughts on this. I have tons of thoughts in general on the finale, on Lost as a series, on these characters….I’m seriously loving all of it more as it sinks in.

I will take issue with your idea of the Flash-Sideways as showing the characters getting unnecessary “re-redemption.” I do not think that was what the Flash-Sideways world was about. The Flash-Sideways world was much simpler: it was showing these character that they indeed WERE redeemed during their lives/before their deaths, allowing these characters to know that they WERE good people who had progressed. Thus, when the characters reconnected with the people that were most important to them (the Island folks) in the Flash Sideways world, they were enlightened and realized that they had “atoned” or “redeemed” themselves, with the evidence being the Sideways world itself that they created for themselves which showed their personal growth.

Jack in Sideways world was a good father supportive of his son’s dreams, a manifestation/affirmation of his ability to let go in the Island/real world of the doubts his own father put in his head regarding his ability to be a hero (I mean, Jack DID become the hero, right? He chose to be the protector and sacrificed himself for his friends.) Sawyer’s Sideways life was on the side of law, not of crime, reflecting his growth from man obsessed with hoarding supplies and conning his fellow passengers to the man we saw in Season 5, in love with Juliet and a good man. Kate’s Sideways life she was still a fugitive (but notably claimed her innocence), but she “stayed” when Desmond got her free, stayed with Claire in “What Kate Does”, thus manifesting her Island lesson. Ben rejected power at the school to save Alex (reflecting his Island growth from wannabe leader to willing #2), Locke took accountability for his own life and stopped blaming his father for the fate of his life, Hurley realized that you make your own luck, Sayid realized he was a good man …..over and over again, the Sideways world didn’t offer “re-redemption,” but reflected that these characters HAD ALREADY redeemed themselves in the real world.

(One other note/theory I have, regarding Jack’s sideways son David: he and Kate slept together right before Ajira 316 right? Crazy theory, I know, but what if David represents a son Kate had thanks to Jack when she returned to the real world? Weird I know, but something that struck my mind when pondering what the existence of David meant)

Which is exactly what makes the finale, and to a certain extent, the entire series a complete failure. As I said in my wordy post above, a certain portion of the audience was left behind.

And I should add that that by learning in Sideways world that they HAD been redeemed in life, the characters were thus able to “let go” and “move on.”

I also wanna advance another Finale theory — namely that of the Finale as a meta-commentary on the actors’, writers’,creators’ and audience’s relationship with Lost as narrative. Follow me through some 4-step syllogism logic:

1. At the beginning of Season 6, Desmond is reading Salman Rushdie’s “Haroun and the Sea of Stories,” a book about the very real power of stories/narrative in our lives, on the plane next to Jack. (Lost itself re-inforced the idea that stories have real power, by liberally peppering the show with references to books and sources that influenced the writers by putting those books in the hands of characters)

2. The Island contains “the Light,” and this source of Light is in all of us everywhere, and is the force of life, death, and rebirth — in other words, it is story (life, death, and rebirth being essentially the “story” of our lives from beginning to (eternal?) end).

3. Jack and Losties ultimately do something that really matters and has real stakes: they save the Light on the Island. As Christian said “it happened, it was real, and it mattered.” In other words, they “save stories” and the power of narrative (or, arguably, showed us that television has the ability to tell powerful stories that can move us.)

4. At the End, Jack and the main Losties not only go into the Light, they actually are indistinguishable from the Light and BECOME the Light. Jack and these characters, these stories, ultimately become a force, a story, that live on in ALL of us….we carry their stories and their lives on within each of us, because we as the audience cared about them, and the actors played them, and the writers wrote them, and together we ALL saved the Light, preserved the story.

Am I crazy or is this flash-sideways business not that complex to understand?
They blew up a nuclear bomb in 1977. We see the island underwater as an outcome of this explosion. However, they can’t both be brought to the island in 2003 and blow up the island in 1977. Their actions create a parallel universe that the island has to maintain in order to have non paradoxical time-travel. This is a real place. Given that the losties had a hand in creating this universe, they get to choose whether they prefer this life that allowed 815 to land or their entire life in the parallel universe.
Most losties choose the life with the island story.
Random things to consider:
Desmond: When he gets hit with Widmore’s magnetic blast he only gets a glimpse of the parallel universe and blindly pursues it because he believes this is his only chance to be with Penny. He is perceived as crazy by others and guess what… he is. When he pull out the cork he’s trying to get himself to the other dimension because he believes happiness is there. Desmond! (off-island) meets Penny! and flashes. This flash is his entire life in the original universe. From that point he knows they defeat the smoke monster and that Hurley helps him off the island. This is why Desmond! behaves as he does in the flash-sideways. There is no cross-agency between Desmond and Desmond!
Flashes/Realization: When characters in the sideways arrive at their realizations, they understand the entire line of their original lives. It’s not that the sideways takes place in the future or in parallel to the original timeline, it just takes place in a different dimension. When Libby! flashes Hurley! he understands in that moment that he becomes the new Jacob and Ben is his number two. This is why he and Libby! act to resolve their sideways lives because they too prefer their original lives. Think of Ben! who decided that he wasn’t ready to move on. Why? Because he had a crappy life serving as a villan and pawn to MiB. The sideways provided him an opportunity to be with Alex and Rousseau, as well as possibly be judged by them for his sins.

The Sideways flashbacks work best for me if what we saw was Jack’s final moments before he died, Jack’s going-toward-the-light. I know there are problems with what Jack would know or not know about the other characters when he has his vision of what the afterlife is all about, but since in the end the producers seemed to want to make it All.About.Jack it sort of makes sense.

I think the final message, if you will, is that redemption is always possible, we all die but there is something waiting for us after we leave this earthly coil.

I have much more trouble with the Castaways mutually constructing a place where they could all “meet” before they go to the next level of existence.

I can believe that the Sideways characters were not there to redeem, or re-redeem, themselves. But the narrative seemed to be pretty clear that they did have *some* kind of work to do there. Ben chose not to move on because of his uncompleted business. Ana Lucia was not ready, &c. They had to, it would seem, accomplish something to be ready to let go. What was that thing, then?

And if they were already redeemed, if they were already ready to move on–then what was the need for a dozen episodes and change in which they ran from the law, did surgery, chased criminals, and so on?

It seems to me that the need, at least in good part, was driven by the meta-need to stretch the Sideways over the season, and that it therefore needed some kind of narrative thread. Which is why I say that the finale itself worked much better for me than the Sideways throughout season 6 did in retrospect. But again, That’s retrospect talking: maybe an actual second viewing, next time I have 17 free hours, will make me feel differently.

@James: “And if they were already redeemed, if they were already ready to move on–then what was the need for a dozen episodes and change in which they ran from the law, did surgery, chased criminals, and so on?”

I think the reason for those episodes, for that time in Sideways-land, was so that when the characters WERE illuminated by their “real life” memories of the time on the Island, they’d be capable of “letting go” by realizing that they had changed — their actions in this Purgatory proved that they were no longer the flawed people who crashed on the Island, and that they had indeed learned what they needed to from their shared lives together.

This lends itself to another level of analysis of Sideways world. Remember at the end of Season 5 when Jacob tells the Man in Black “It only ends once. Everything else is just progress.” ?

Maybe some people in Sideways land are NOT in purgatory, but rather are living a parallel life, still hounded by some issues, still on their path to progress towards an End. Ben could have left, but chose not to, feeling that he wanted to continue this life: either to “purge” his mind of his island sins (pun intended), or to die in Sideways land and be re-booted yet again into ANOTHER Sideways life where he had progressed even further before going to his end.

Similarly, for Ana Lucia, she wasn’t ready yet — she had too much baggage, or too many issues (perhaps she had give up her wrath from the island times, but still had greed given that she took the bribe), and thus needed to progress further in the Sideways life, so that when she was rebooted into ANOTHER Sideways life, she had let go of those issues and got “move on” to her End.

What is undeniable, though, is that those Losties in the church at the end HAD reached their End — they had, through the shared experience of “living together” on the Island been able to destroy the other half of that equation — the dying alone part. Thus, they were able to go forward together into the Light (or, if you buy my meta-commentary on narrative idea of Lost, BECOME the Light).

And another thing…..(I just can’t stop picking at this even though it’ll never heal if I don’t.)
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As far as plot loopholes, one that is just bugging me a lot is this: Jacob made such a huge deal about the candidates having a choice because he never got one. And Jack volunteered for the job.
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Yet, at the end of the day, what choice did Hurley get? None. He had to drink out of that filthy water bottle from Jack with no more option than Jacob got from his mother.

Right on your sister site/blog:

http://techland.com/2010/05/27/j-j-abrams-employee-explains-lost-14-minute-epilogue-to-appear-on-dvd/

Short answer: Sideways happened temporally apart from the island which was the real world. They couldn’t die until they all died, or at least their spirits couldn’t move on. The island wasn’t about redemption so much as killing MIB.

Blargh.

Thanks. It’s interesting & makes sense in many ways. But I’d take it with a grain of salt w/o solid confirmation. I would think, for instance, that a Bad Robot employee would know that it was not only “season 1 characters” in the church.

The idea that the entire last sequence, from when Jack enters the church, was written right after the pilot is tantalyzing. And I suppose it would comport with what Cuselof have said; they’ve said that they fleshed out the mythology of the show after season 1, but they could have done that with a fixed final sequence in place.

But I don’t know whether to buy it. I didn’t think they ever claimed to have had anything fixed from the beginning but the final SHOT, which I took to be Jack’s eye closing. On the other hand, if it *had* actually been written six years ago, that could account for any seeming tonal shift in those last minutes.

Unless and until we know this is solid, though, I can’t take it as more than an interesting what-if.

Like you, James, I don’t have a problem with the Sideways world in the finale. It was moving and I appreciate the experience of much of it (especially the Sawyer/Juliet reunion). The issue is that it was used as a device the entire season and nothing all that meaningful happened until the very end. From a thematic point of view, the whole plot of this storyline doesn’t jibe.

It’s not a matter of “what it was about” but the way it was told. Across the Sea was an important story in terms of the “meaning” of the series (it was not God/Satan but two powerful humans) that set the series on the right path for me. That said, it didn’t work as an episode because its story was not told well. I feel the same way about the Sideways universe.

The other issue is the answer to the Sideways storyline is so dang, well, conventional. I’m not saying that’s always bad, but this series has a history of delivering unexpected turns on conventional stories. For me, the fact that they were all getting together to “move on” is a bit too Ghost Whisperer to me. It was better than that show from a character and dialog point of view, but the level of creativity in it was about the same.

It doesn’t kill the show for me, as I love what happened in the main storyline and the last episode gave me some real wrenching moments, but I do chalk it up to one of the series’ mis-steps.

I stopped watching Lost after the writer’s strike and after learning how it ended, I’m glad I didn’t waste any more time with the show.

The “it’s all purgatory” ending (or wherever the heck the characters were), is kissing cousins with the “it’s all a dream” ending. It is one of the weakest plot devices in storytelling. Anybody who suffered through the dream season in “Dallas” will understand this.

When you are invested in characters to the degree people are with shows like Lost, learning that nothing that happened to them was “real” is nauseating. I don’t know if this ending was what the writers of the show intended from the beginning. I suspect not. But in an effort to keep the twists and turns coming they put themselves in a corner where explaining the island and the strange things that happened on it was nearly impossible.

Boo, hiss.

So with the finale several days behind me now, my head is much clearer. Here’s how I sum up the sideways world and season six generally, the sideways world was a device to illicit an emotional reaction from the audience. I think it worked in that capacity up until the finale when it was revealed that it had absolutely no bearing on the plot what so ever. In hindsight it was just wasted narrative that could have been used to make season 6 awesome. Sad. Still a great show, but the flash sideways only worked moving forward without the knowledge that they were, in fact meaningless. Now that we know that there was no interaction between the worlds (with the exception of Desmond whose interconnectedness turns out to be a total red herring/misdirection) there’s really no point for the flash sideways in a re-viewing of season 6.

As I said, briefly in the NYTimes earlier,
you lost me, Cuseloff… for two and a half hours.

BAD Robot. Bad. Don’t even do that again.
Oh, you won’t. Phew!

What a waste.

I (Atheist FWIW) found it, not as James called it a “timeless collective work” but more a timeless individual work. I saw the season as Jacks reconciliation with his most important part of his life by fixing the problems of those that meant something to him in the best possible way.

The show was always about the man of faith vs the man of science.

Faith won.

So, men of science that HATE men of faith are pissed.

Oooops!!! LOL!

I get so frustrated with the people who say they are disappointed with Lost because they didn’t explain everything. So, are you really asking them to explain time travel, the after life, the miracle of childbirth, mythology, etc? How could they possibly explain these things? The writers infused those themes to entertain us and to get us to think and discuss the topics. The writers don’t know the answers to life’s great mysteries. They don’t know what happens in the afterlife. I have often wondered myself about the afterlife. Who will I get to see? How old will I be? What if my husband passes and I remarry? Will they both be there together or will I have two alternate afterlifes, one with each of them? Come on people, just enjoy it for what it was and enjoy the discussions the show creates. I can’t believe someone would say this show is a waste of time. I’ve never seen a show, movie, play, or any piece of entertainment that has made me have to think as much as this one. For that, I say THANK YOU!

To me it allowed us to remember that it isn’t about the mythology or some philosophical debacle; it’s about the characters. In the end they were only truly happy when they remembered the Island, all of them. So to say that none of it was real is a mistake.

But I guess I enjoyed the finale so much because I don’t care about the Island, what it does, what it is, or anything like that. I watched characters I truly cared about find happiness, forgiveness, and acceptance that people are (and they are, I guess) dead.

The way Lost is done we would need another season to understand the Season 6 finale….which of course, would need another season to understand the 7th…

But as for the characters, who they were, what they went through, and who they are now is clear. I think it’s best to focus on that.

My biggest issue with the finale (and, to a lesser extent, the series as a whole) was that sometimes the writers got lazy with their writing–and got away with it because overall, the writing was amazing and sometimes groundbreaking. If the supposed Bad Robot employee in the link above (post #17) is to believed, the scene w/ Jack and the coffin onward was written by JJ Abrams right after the pilot….and in any case, it is often said they “knew the ending” from the beginning. But, as any fiction writer will tell you, sticking with the ending you originally intended for a story is often not a good idea, because it might not gel with what you ended up writing….ESPECIALLY when that story is written over the period of 6 years and by several different people. I think where the writers went wrong is in not being flexible enough. I can imagine that, when the show’s creators were conceiving of Lost, they thought, wow, it would be really cool to do a few seasons of flashbacks, then 2 seasons of flash-forwards, and then in the final season, THEY’LL ALL BE DEAD!!! But they weren’t anticipating their narrative getting so complicated, to the point to where an “it was all the afterlife” ending wouldn’t be satisfying for viewers. (The worst part is, unlike writing a novel or movie, you can actually get feedback from your audience as you go along!!)

The creators of the show also often claimed that it was “character-driven,” but I don’t feel that’s true. Partly, this was because the dialogue between characters in most emotionally charged scenes was weak (in my opinion). But mostly, if you’re going to write a show with endless mysteries, people are probably going to start talking about those mysteries rather than whether or not Jack is meant to be with Kate or Juliet. However, I think it’s interesting to note that in my circle of friends, people who felt a real connection to the characters (unlike me) seemed to like the finale a lot more.

One last thing – in rethinking the finale over the past few days, I keep coming back to poor Danielle Rousseau. She was balls-out, take-no-prisoners in real life. In the afterlife, she is a making dinner for the murderer who kidnapped her daughter (in a dress, no less). I can’t think of a worse fate!

You guys. If you’re confused about the finale or the “unanswered questions,” you should read this. I think it makes a lot of sense.

http://uk.eonline.com/uberblog/watch_with_kristin/b183078_idiots_guide_lost.html

For me the Sideways world was as rea las life on the island. This new reality was created after the incident. We can find a lot of evidences to prove it.
But the final scene in the church was a Jack’s vision when he was dying on the island.That is why there were only the people HE was close to.

James, the finale makes a lot more sense when you stop thinking of the castaways as heroic and start seeing them as what they really are: self-interested, incurious, and reluctant to engage in the introspection required for real personal growth.

The castaways have always been more interested in their own pursuit of happiness than in anything else, and that’s why season six played out the way it did. The show-runners warned us this was coming, but we didn’t understand because we placed too much faith in the castaways. They told us they’d only be explaining the mysteries that the castaways cared about, and that’s exactly what they did. Since the castaways only care about their own happiness, the show-runners answered the only question that the castaways were interested in: “Will I end up happy or not?”

As hard as it is to say, given our affection for them, the castaways have always been a pretty self-obsessed bunch. They’ve never shown much interest in anything outside of their own personal pursuit of redemption. None of them ever made any real effort to discover the island’s purpose (they — and we — simply assumed that it existed to redeem them in some way, even though there’s no real reson to believe that). None have wondered what the infection was (or if they might all have been infected from the start). Nobody wondered why Charlie, who had recently taken the vaccine, was the only one who didn’t see the purple sky or hear the roaring sound during the Swan implosion. Nobody bothered to ask Jacob how he was able to live so long, or how Smokey was able to toggle between human and smoke forms. Most importantly, nobody bothered to question whether or not it was a really a good idea to kill Smokey or keep that glowing energy source going. Truth be told, none of the castaways ever showed much interest in anything, or showed any real interest in learning about anything. And because they learned almost nothing during their time on the island, neither did we.

In other words, anyone who wanted answers to the big questions shouldn’t be blaming the show-runners – they should be blaming the castaways, who were too self-interested to be curious about those kinds of things.

And that, I think, is one of the big points that Lost has been trying to make all along. The show-runners want us to wonder why the castaways were never interested in any of that stuff. They want us to question our automatic support for the castaways, to revisit the reasons why we decided that team castaway was worthy of so much of our affection.

Because once we stop excusing the castaways just because we like them, they come across as kind of selfish. At least that’s what show-runner Damon Lindelof thinks. It was him who said, when explaining the image of the submerged island, “What we’re trying to do there is basically say to you, ‘God bless the survivors of Oceanic 815, because they’re so self-centered, they thought the only effect [of detonating the bomb] was going to be that their plane never crashes.’ But they don’t stop to think, ‘If we do this in 1977, what else is going to be affected by this?’

That self-centredness is the reason why the final scene in the church felt so contrived. It felt contrived because it WAS contrived. It was contrived by the castaways themselves. Self-centred to the end, they created an alternate reality in which they let go of what little they’d learned, decided that everything they’d done on the island was justified, declared themselves the good guys (despite the death and destruction they’d left in their wake), and engaged in a collective act of self-congratulation and mutual forgiveness. In a final act of self-centredness, the castaways created an imaginary reality (which wasn’t purgatory, by the way, since it was made by the castaways themselves and had nothing to do with God), and gave themselves the happy ending they believed they were entitled to, never doubting for a moment that such a happy ending might have been unearned. They did exactly what Frank kept warning us about: they started thinking of themselves as “good” — as did we — and as a result they stopped asking the important questions or reflecting on their behaviour.

(By the way, Lost acknowledges that the ending is unearned during the season six premiere, when Desmond is seen reading Salman Rushdie’s “Heroun and the Sea of Stories”, which features a hero who lives in a world of stories and is, quite literally, granted a happy ending he knows he doesn’t deserve.)

So, if anyone is responsible for Lost’s lack of answers and hokey ending, it’s those incurious, self-centred, redemption-obsessed castaways. We have only them to blame. Because when they were given the opportunity to have an eye-opening experience, they decided they were happier deluding themselves and closed their eyes again.

Some of my questions are asked in a previous post, so I won’t go into them again. There are many others. Suffice it to say, that even if I were to accept what was offered, the ending was still a failure because everybody knows where any story of faith vs. science ends. It’s lame, its lazy and its disappointing to know that all of the unanswered mysteries were nothing more than fillers.

You really should watch the show because it did all really happen and it wasn’t purgatory or “all a dream”. You’re confusing this with what’s called the Sideways world and you’d have to see it to understand that. You may have heard people saying that it was purgatory or some sort of afterlife experience, but they simply didn’t understand what happened.

Hey first time poster long time lurker….

I feel like the sideways was absolutely needed and a success in showing us just how far the characters have come since being on the island. When faced with similar choices and situations most (few head scratchers like kate, sayid) reacted differently and Id argue better to those challenges. Simply as a device to show us character growth and to tell us the viewer that the island made these people better and that when put to the test these flawed characters came out and met the challenge. Ben I can imagine changed his ways with Hurley as the protector. So in a way you are right the island was for that but we really have not seen it in contrast and it was needed in my mind to show just how much everyone came out for the better.

I do not buy this was simply Jacks after death consciousness, it was a collective of everyone’s on the island and a way to tell us, the viewer, that the people who matter most to you will always be there in life and in death to go thru whatever happens next, in a very not preachy kinda way which I dug. I am a sucker for that as an agnostic I have no idea whats next after this but if it was something like that I would be ok with it.

Why Desmond? He died for 20 seconds when Widmore did the test (He was out for 20 seconds remember there is now time or now). He showed consciousness of both realities which was why he thought he leave, tho he didnt die in the cave and did not go back to the sideways. Now what I wonder is he obviously lived during the hatch implosion (see the constant) so what was different this time?

I liked Jacob and I liked MIB and I am ok with not getting more on them, I loved across and I am a sucker for good vs evil stories and to have a gray one like this was pretty amazing and put a whole new spin to the classic tale. I guess my biggest knock on this year was the temple, but as a Stephen King fan I even enjoyed that knowing it was a ever classic battle lines being drawn between good and evil leading us to the epic ending, happens in like every single one of his books that deals with that. Should they have spent so much time in there? No, but I must be honest the lighthouse was one of my favorite episodes of lost and I think I enjoyed it so much because of the temple episodes preceding.

Now in regards to the series over all in the scope of all time greats.. Is it the best ever? No. I still think that season 5 of The Shield might be the greatest season of tv ever and because the series finale was so good and so dark and really the pace of that show never stopped I would have to say The Shield is my favorite of all time(Yes even more so then the holy grail Wire, I have 3-4 above that). But for being a network show with the overall premise, it will stand the test of time. It was a really freaking good show, and while some might not like the last 15 minutes when they tried to leave a message to all of us (and with the bickering going back and forth maybe we needed it), the two hours before hand was just about as good of tv as you can get.

As far as the lingering mysteries, I feel I got what I needed to piece it together and I also feel I got most of the big ones answered this year for better or worse. I am also a realist and understand real life things happen so the creators just could not tie it all up (See Walk, Eko, pre crash Libby).

Its easy to nitpick but to have a show do 70-75 percent kick ass episodes that we all talked about with friends and family for weeks even months after they aired was pretty amazing. I thank Lost for giving me time every week to debate with my dad about what jack did, or who jacob was and I am really going to miss doing that. Now if I could just get him into Breaking Bad.

I enjoyed the finale as it was aired on Sunday. But the more I thought about the finale in the context of the entire series, the more disappointed I about the lack of connectedness and integrity the finale had with the rest of the narrative.

First off, if the island was meant to be a place where these flawed characters could be redeemed, then that certainly worked for some and not for others. The character that stood out most in my mind is Locke? How was Locked redeemed in the Island world? He started off as a man who needed to believe in something, and he ended his life on the island world with the thought, at least according to MiB, I don’t understand. So, what redemption did Locke achieved the Island world?

Second, what is the “sideways world”? According to Christian Shepherd, it is a world that the Losties created. So, does that mean it is a construct of the Losties? If so, what happens to this constructed world when the creators of this world, the Losties, move on? What happen to those who does not move on, like Ben, Daniel, Eloise, Ana Lucia, …, etc., do they just disappear because they are artificial constructs like Jack’s son David?

Third, what is the connection between the Island world and the “sideways world”? Does events in the Island world, other than the fact that the Losties met on the island and formed connection, affect the sideways world? For example, would extinguishing the Magic Light and the sinking of the Island cause the “sideways world” to disappear? If not, then Desmond is right, events on the island do not matter (again other than the fact that the island brought the Losties together) because if the light is extinguish and the island sinks causing all the Losties to die, they would still meet in the “sideways world” to work out their issues and move on.

Fourth, what would be the consequence of extinguishing the Light and MiB leaving the island for the world at large? It would seem that both Widmore and MiB believe that extinguishing the light and sinking the island would not kill everyone in the world since MiB threatened to kill Penny when he gets off the island if Widmore did not tell him why he brought Desmond back to the island. What’s the point of the threat if Penny would die anyway what the island sinks? Also, if the sinking of the island meant the destruction of the world, wouldn’t that defeat the main reason behind MiB’s desire to leave the island – to see what out there across the sea?

Fifth, because of the lack of connectedness between mysteries and easter eggs (names like Rousseau, Hume, Locke, … etc) presented by the series and the resolution of the series, what’s the point of all other mysteries other than the fact that Darlton use them as a gimmick to increase viewership and to show how smart that really had not effect on the story. Also, showing the island underwater in the “sideways world” in LA X seems to be solely for the purpose of misleading the viewers. The fact that the island was sunk had absolutely no effect on the resolution of the “sideways world.” Also, if the “sideways world” as a construct of the Losties, why would the island be sunk since the Losties, in the “sideways world” should know subconsciously that the island did not sink because if did not sink in the real world?

Sixth, what are the “rules?” If the island protector gets to make the rules, as is suggested by Ben and as hinted by Boy in Black? Why could Jack, when he became the protector, make up a rule that would kill MiB?

Finally, for me, because of the lack of connection between the mysteries of the island and series finale, how the series ended killed any rewatch value of the series, so the clues and mysteries that Darlton left throughout seasons 1 to 5 have absolutely no bearing on the finale. The finale would have worked just as well if the series was about a group of castaways with various personal issues were left stranded on a deserted or not so deserted island, overcome all the physical and interpersonal challenges to survive and be rescued or not. They die and meet again in the “sideways world,” remembered, let go, and then moved on.

So, in the end, all the theorizing and mental gymnastics that the viewers were an empty exercise.

Time take Darlton’s advice and to let go and move on. Probably the only sensible thing the series finale had to say.

Maybe I’m dense, but I don’t see how all the characters found redemption on the island. Locke died a broken man with his last thougts being “I don’t understandin?” How is that redemption for Locke?

Your friend might be on to something!

I am curious as to your thought on how was Locke redeemed in the island world? According to the MiB, Locke’s last thought was “I don’t understanding?” Is that redemption?

Sorry for the typos.

The distinction here is that the final season and finale were not hack-jobs, but that the writing could have been tightened, and that the Sideway premise could have been better integrated. I’m right there with you. Because the main thrust is so good, so well done, I forgive a lot of these lesser issues.

But, as a writer, I would definitely prefer a tighter season.

Some suggestions would have been to highlight more of the dream-like nature of Sideways-ville. Because part of what Sideways-ville was doing was playing not so much with purgatory as a place, but as a gathering together of a community’s life flashing before its eyes, a review of one’s life, with regrets and wonderings about what ifs. Mythically, and not prosaically perhaps, but akin. Even though one redeems oneself, one still may hold on to certain issues, regret certain failings.

So Sideways-ville is a mythic place connecting to how we do that in life, with those we love, or even at times with ourselves, and not just at death. One of the themes throughout Lost was not just redemption, or of fixing mistakes, but about letting go, moving on, even after you’ve fixed the mistake. And that’s really what Sideways-ville was about.

So I just think there may have been room to develop that more with more crafting of the weird time flow in Sideways-ville or other dream-like qualities of the place. Though it is a precise line to hoe.

The Jacob and MIB character issue could have been resolved with better writing. Less kids, or more strict use of the kids. Drop the idea of infantalizing the early adult versions of MIB and Jacob. You, or maybe it as someone else, suggested integrating this past as flashback sequences with Claire’s squirrel baby story. That probably would have been a way of dropping in what was needed. Though I did like the form of devoting a whole episode to 2,000 years ago, and I did like it in many ways, it needed to be a touch better written.

And forget the over-reliance on “light,” production-wise and in the character’s dialogue and imagery.

Rather than light, find techniques to emphasize the unknown, full stop. That this energy in the underground stream cavern or the light at the end in the church is about being so full, so profound, that light is actually dark, impenetrable, unknown. They could have played that into the motif of balancing light and dark, but in a more vital way.

Or, just make it more about “this is the end of all things, the end of all answers (and thus the beginning of all questions)” Which, at any rate, was primary take away, for me, about this nexus of energy.

At any rate, the point is the reliance on “light” was part of season six being a bit watered down. They could have hammered that out more.

About that Bad Robot employee…

For someone who supposedly worked on the show and was in the writer’s room, I find it pretty funny that he/she misspelled “Roussou” and “Lupidis.”

That alone makes me laugh at the absurdity of that post. They were kind enough to give that person .25% credibility. I give them a John Blutarsky: 0.0.

Bad Robot employee? I’m the Smoke Monster.