Lost was a pretty big part of my television-watching life, if not my personal life, for quite a few years; it was one of the few shows that I’ve ever considered “appointment viewing,” and, for that matter, one of the few shows that was regularly a social occasion as well as just an opportunity to watch TV. I watched it, I thought about it, I talked about it, I speculated about it. It was consistently great television, with flashes of absolute brilliance. It also deserves a lot of credit for knowing when it should end and working towards that ending, rather than sticking around for a few years too long. [Spoilers are obviously going to be rampant throughout this piece, so stop reading now if you haven’t watched the show and wish to do so at some point in the future.]
I likely would’ve hated any ending to the show, as much as I liked the series as a whole, but even now, two years later, I still have a hard time dealing with the climactic twist that the showrunners delivered to us: that the entire flash-sideways plotline in the final season was some form of purgatory, designed to allow the inhabitants of the island to come together in the afterlife and “move on” together into a blinding flash of light, presumably some kind of heaven.
On the one hand, putting myself in Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof’s shoes, I know that there was no amount of question-answering that would’ve satisfied the true believers out there. The resolution of the island plotline was actually mostly satisfactory to me, aside from the too-quick death of the Man In Black and the epic-level absurdity of that plane actually taking off; I would’ve loved to know more about the origin of the MIB or who built the cave structure that contained the heart of the island, or any of another million unanswered questions, but magicians never reveal their secrets, or, perhaps, never knew the answer to those questions themselves, as Damon Lindelof might have recently explained. Perhaps it’s best to think of Lost as some kind of koan, something that can’t be explained but instead is best left to the intuition. Maybe it’s not “about” anything, instead existing as a vehicle for you to imagine what it’s about.
I should probably talk more about Lost at some point when it’s appropriate and I can collect my thoughts, but again: a good portion of the running time in the sixth season was given over to a flash-sideways, in which each of the prominent island castaways wound up finding each other, touching each other, realizing that they knew each other in some other life, and gathering at a church to “move on,” in the words of Jack Shephard’s father, supposedly because they all formed a powerful collective memory during their time on the island. It doesn’t entirely hold up to scrutiny, as there’s a baby in the church that was unlikely to have had any strong memories of the island, as well as characters that died shortly after they arrived there.
That said, it’s still an opportunity for some moments that are, irrespective of how you feel about the plotline, quite beautiful and touching. And I suspect that that was more important to Lindelof, Cuse, et al than the notion of the flash-sideways revelation being one last twist in a series known for them. It was a twist, sure: I honestly didn’t see it coming until Jack and Christian had their conversation inside the church. (Although all the lingering shots of Christ statues and crosses probably should’ve tipped me off.) The montage sequences that played out whenever character re-connected in their purgatorial lives, the sudden recollections, the knowing look in everyone’s eyes when they finally made the connection; it was all a bit over-the-top, but damn if it didn’t work, in the sense that I was pretty misty-eyed throughout most of it.
It feels like, looking back on it now, that the side-flash was more of a celebration of the series and a way for Abrams/Cuse/Lindelof to step back and say “Hey, we created something that millions of people loved” than an attempt at fooling their audience. There was certainly fooling going on (“Why the hell’s Sawyer a cop now?”, etc.) but the side-flash, and its resolution...how to say this? I think that what Christian tells Jack, in the vein of “you created this place to come together and remember your lives before moving on,” could be applied just as much to the actors and crew, and viewers, of Lost as it can to the characters that exist in the universe of the show. It’s a savvy thing, to build in a moment to reflect on a series into the actual series finale. Certainly, other shows have ended in teary cast reunions, but that would’ve been all but impossible to do with Lost due to the number of deaths and the other various fates of the characters. The side-flash seems like it was a way to get around the vagaries of the show’s “reality” and allow the show-runners to bring back the cast members that viewers had become attached to, and actors that they had worked with, in a celebration of the achievements that Lost had accumulated. They must’ve had a hell of a party after filming that church scene.
In that sense, it’s probably not worth speculating too much on the precise meaning on the side-flash. (Although the news that Carlton Cuse is developing a faith-based drama project with a Michigan pastor might shed some light on the specific theology that the show’s creators was emphasizing.) The side-flash itself, in the end, did not need to exist; the fact that it did was intended to provide closure to the characters without spelling out precisely what happened to them in their time after the island. In different hands, there would’ve been some American Graffiti-esque end cards, detailing the lives and deaths of the prominent characters after they escape from the island. The side-flash seems to me now to be more of an attempt to provide an ultimate resolution to those characters’ lives, while also helping the rabid fanbase transition to a life after Lost, while also leaving the door open for any spin-offs if the creators should wish to pursue them in the future.
Perhaps all of this is just rationalization; I would love there to be an ultimate answer to everything on Lost, but in the end, the finale of the show seems to me to be just as rooted in the real-world desires of the show’s creators as it was in the motivations of the characters in the show itself. That’s a little meta, but I think it makes sense, as much as anything in the world of Lost can make sense.
We’re now almost a year and a half removed from the ending of Lost, which I certainly consider to be among my all-time favorite shows, and certainly my favorite show-watching experience of my lifetime. It was an excuse to get together with friends on a Tuesday night and discuss the latest mysterious events, and in that sense, the finale spurred one of the greater discussions in recent television history, even if we discard the generally rabid discussions regarding its relative quality. But what do you think, now, having had a year to think about it? Does the finale make sense?
Did it need to?
