When I was a kid I believed in Santa Claus. I don’t think I was alone in this one.
I remember the moment in Mrs. Nichol’s class in the first grade when one of my classmates told me (*Spoiler Warning) Santa didn’t exist. That it was just my parents putting those presents under the tree.
That feeling, which I will never forget, finding out the myth was a hoax, probably still ranks as one of the biggest disappointments in my life. Christmas, this event which once felt so magical and special, wasn’t really so anymore. Sure, it was fun but it wasn’t the same. I would later come to understand the true meaning of Christmas in my early adulthood but what I originally thought it to be was, in short, a lie to make me behave better lest I end up on the “naughty” list.
Then six years ago, I watched a very exciting pilot for this new J.J. Abrams show, LOST and in short time, I became a believer again. As one season turned into another, as one mystery was raised only to be followed by another and another, I assured myself there was meaning to all of this.
Why did the Others want Walt? What was the real significance of Nikki and Paulo? Who the heck really was Alvar Hanso? How did the Island move? The list goes on…
Every week I religiously read Doc Jensen’s amazing Lost episode recaps where he detailed the links between every small detail like the books characters were seen reading and their existential relationship to the overall story. I could tell each of these props was in fact, some kind of clue. An Easter Egg. Even as some of my less sci-fi geeky friends would lament that it felt like the writers were pulling it out of their asses from week to week, I reassured them there was a greater meaning to all of this. It was just all too damned clever for there not to be.
Easter Eggs be damned… (*Spoiler Warning) The Easter Bunny doesn’t exist either.
Season Six started out so strong. I was eager to see how what I felt was one of the greatest TV mysteries of all time would wrap up. I knew it would be a case study for brilliant storytelling that would be discussed for years to come. They (probably Doc Jensen) would write a book detailing how all the clues were there from the beginning, pointing to this brilliant and satisfying conclusion.
Boy, am I a sucker or what?
Then, as the season started to draw to a close, right after I saw the 2nd to last episode “Across the Sea” detailing this whole backstory between Jacob and the Man in Black, I got a real sinking feeling. A warm glowing light in a cave? 118 hours into a 121 and a half hour story you reveal that it’s all about protecting something that essentially proves there is a meaning to life? Talk about Deus ex Machina. This is when I really started to get concerned.
(NOTE: This is where it may get spoiler-y for the finale. If you haven’t seen it, stop reading)
So in the finale, Fake Locke/MiB wants to destroy the island and Jack, the new Jacob, must stop him. Okay, I can see the dramatic potential in that. I can see that since they are now unable to kill each other because of Jacob’s mother’s whamma jamma that the only way Jack can do so is to trick Fake Locke. I get that turning off the island’s magic, held in place with a big stone cork, like that wine bottle Jacob carried around, would also make Fake Locke’s human body human again and now, capable of being killed by Jack. But it’s all this sickly sweet sentimentality heaped upon us in those two and a half hours with so many questions unanswered that makes this Lost series finale so ultimately unsatisfying to me. I have to say that even that final fight scene on the cliff between Jack and Locke really didn’t feel that climactic to me as a final battle between good and evil should.
And then there’s buzzkill Desmond. So all of these characters who were lost in real life and suffered through unspeakable horror on the island finally get into a world where, while their lives may not be perfect, they certainly sucked a lot less than their pre-Oceanic 815 days. Locke gets to walk down the aisle, Jack has a relationship with his son, even lonely and invisible Napoleon Ben finds a conscience by not revealing his slimy principal’s school-nurse extramarital affair, gets his daughter back and finds love. But no, in the true Lost world, the flash-sideways are just a mass halucination… a dream, Bobby Ewing waking up in the shower, looking into his snowglobe and turning to Suzanne Pleschette and blaming it all on halucination-inducing bad clams or something.
You know, for a show that preached choice and destiny an awful lot, it seems like the castaways never really had the power of choice in their lives unless you count having to always, and I mean always, pick between “run” or “die” as a choice.
So, in the end, the flash-sideways was Limbo… a faux Matrix-esque construct of the real world for everyone to hang out in while Jack finalized his Christ-figure story arc (complete with stab wound in the side) and then goes back into the bamboo forest, lays down in the same spot where he woke up after the crash and in a reversal of Lost’s iconic extreme close up of an eye opening, Jack closes his eyes and dies.
And if you need one last eye roll, let’s at least give the Lost writers credit for having Kate acknowledge the hacky pun of the Christ figure’s father being named “Christian Shepherd”. I was almost waiting for the LOST sound effects team to insert a rim shot into the audio mix.
So in the end there are no answers to all the questions, everyone gathers around to say goodbye and then off you go into the light not knowing what, if anything at all good bad or otherwise, awaits on the other side. Sounds like a metaphor for life if you ask me. But after six years of putting my faith in the storytellers of LOST that I would feel somewhat enlightened, I can honestly say that more than anything I feel disappointed they couldn’t have ended with something a bit more clever and compelling that would make me want to believe life has purpose and is not just a never-ending balancing act of pulling stuff out of your ass in the hope that some mythical man with the big bag of toys will deem you worthy of being rewarded.
*****
Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff is the bestselling author of several books including: “The Killing of Osama Bin Laden” and “Where’s My F*cking Latte? (and Other Stories About Being an Assistant in Hollywood)”
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Well written! I will not invest my time in the six seasons only to be short changed. Thanks for heads up.
you’ve given by far the best summary / explanation of the Lost finale. It sucked to find out that the place that most everyone had found some happiness turned out to be a matrix-esque limbo complete with an ending copied straight from the final scenes of the matrix reloaded. The way i see it, the island was in fact a sort of purgatory. Not in sense that they were already dead, but in a sense that they were all brought there to die and move on to limbo. Well, at least Kate, Claire, Sawyer, Miles, Richard, and the coolest character on lost, Frank Lapidus got to go home and presumably lived happily ever after. I wonder what ole Frank ended up doin the rest of his days.
And what the hell happen to Michael and Walt? that kid was supposed to be special somehow? Michael even showed up a couple of times to hurley, I guess blacks weren’t allowed in purgatory, I’M KIDDING! the black lady was there I know….
At the beginning of Lost, we were excited – drawn in to the classic disaster-movie-who-will-survive scenario; the drama was intense, the characters promising, the mysteries intriguing.
Then came the hatch. And the button pushing every 108 minutes. And Locke’s unrelenting faith that there was a purpose to it all. From there the show descended into a pointless maze of false clues, red herrings, flashbacks, flashsideways, and sheer inconsistent nonsense, compounded by introducing wave after wave of new character sets, only to kill off most all of them pointlessly after taking loads of time to painstakingly give us their character backfill in endless flashbacks. It got so bad, we were left finally with a group we could only call the other Others.
After the third season we began realizing that what we were watching was writing which truly was lost, and instead of correcting course simply kept tacking on more answer-less storyline branches in an attempt to distract viewers from the fact the writers no longer knew what they were doing. However, the distraction worked; Losties began to believe that it all made sense with such strength they were able to come up with numerous detailed theories which would tie things back together. The more obscure, random and counter-intuitive the clues were, the more the Losties believed with Locke-like faith that it was all for a reason. Unfortunately, our faith turned out to be as useful as believing in Baal.
While the sins committed against the viewers were many, there were a few major reasons that Lost ended up being little more than a 6-season hoax:
False Advertising: all season long ABC kept running ads which promised that finally, in this final season, we would get answers. If truth-in-advertising laws apply to ads about TV shows, somebody needs to be hauled in to court. In a show which raised literally hundreds and hundreds of questions, the final season provided almost no answers, while insultingly raising dozens more. Ultimately, there were only two answers given by the show; one, that the nameless smoke monster was human, and that six people did get off the island. Somehow, though, the writers succeeded in making me not care about the one thing which should matter in a disaster/survival show, which is “who lives?”. By the time we see the jetliner somehow managing to take off from a beach, it just didn’t seem to matter any more – probably because the purgatory world which dominated the last season made it seem irrelevant. Probably also because the writers used the characters more like pawns on a chessboard than people; kill Sayid, but then put him in some water in the other Other’s temple and he comes back to life – sort of, just so he can be killed again. Or can you say Walter? Most of the characters became unreal, so caring about them no longer happened. While a few (very few) questions about some characters were sort of answered (Richard’s story was interesting), those weren’t the answers which mattered. The questions which mattered were about the island (obviously a product of technology alien to us), and of those answers we were treated to exactly zero.
Immorality: while the writers went to great lengths to show each and every character as flawed, I’m not talking about that, or even the Kate/Sawyer hookup. A successful story has to in some way demonstrate a reason for good to exist in the world. Usually it’s a simple good triumphing over evil, but sometimes the story is much more complex, using deeply flawed characters struggling through a morass of difficult situations which don’t offer black and white choices. Ultimately though, as Locke would believe, there must be a reason – some positive affirmation. However, we watched Locke become a man so obsessed with the island that he would murder in order to stay on it. That is not simply a character flaw; that makes Locke a bad guy. Then we learn that the nameless smoke monster is a child imprisoned on the island by the woman who murdered his mother (who then pretended to be his mother), and that all he wants is to leave. That makes him a sympathetic character, if not an outright good guy. He remains imprisoned by his brother (who tried to murder him, only to turn him into the smoke monster) to the point he is willing to kill to get out of his prison, so maybe he is a bad guy, but you could argue about that. The psychological damage of what his “mother” and brother did to him could be grounds for mental duress, and his killing (at least at the end) was only of people he felt were in his way to escape. Because he was revealed as a good or sympathetic character (in a show dominated by characters we didn’t like or ultimately didn’t care about) I was rooting for him to get off the island. The story that somehow he was a danger had no facts to back it up and was certainly a lie (coming from the woman who murdered his mother and imprisoned him). At the least, his willingness to kill to escape was no worse than Locke’s willingness to kill in order to stay. The best you can say is we have moral ambiguity, at worst bad guys were portrayed as good guys and vice versa.
Locke was wrong: the storyline was often presented as faith versus science; Locke versus Jack. I’m sure most were rooting for Locke to be right – that there is a purpose (the allegory being there is a purpose to life). It turns out Lock was wrong. He simply died, the island didn’t need him, and even when his body was used by the smoke monster in an attempt to escape, that purpose didn’t work out either. While the island eventually got Hurley as its guardian (and Linus as “number two”), to what purpose? If the smoke monster was a threat the guardian needed to keep imprisoned, that purpose no longer existed. If Locke was right and there was a purpose, it was never explained, so might as well not exist as far as the viewers are concerned.
Linus never got his: In real life, we always want to believe in redemption, but in fiction we relish the bad guy getting ultimately taken out. In Lost we waited six seasons to see Benjamin Linus finally get what he deserved. Instead, we got nothing but him deciding to, rather than go into the light with the rest, stay a while on a park bench in a purgatory where time has no meaning anyway. Big, stinking whoop.
It was just a lame ending: there are hundreds of examples, but try these – throw someone into the light and they turn into a smoke monster. Except Desmond. And Jack. And apparently anybody except the one poor soul it turned into the smoke monster? We go to great lengths to get Desmond in the cave with the light because only he has the (unexplained, of course) super-powers to withstand it. Oh, except that Jack can go down there just fine and handle the light-stone as well. If you’re going to set up rules, you have to follow them, or explain why there are exceptions. And the whole “we created a purgatory for you where we wouldn’t remember things, and we even made you believe you had a son” crap? Please. It makes the Bobby-stepping-out-of-the-shower-it-was-all-a-dream on Dallas years ago look like Shakespearean level writing.
The result of all this is that I’ve been cheated. It turns out a relationship I gave six seasons of my life to was a scam. Having been burned, I’ll be looking much harder at getting into other relationships. I watched a few episodes of “V”, but when it started to look like (and maybe I’m just seeing things because of Lost) they were setting up some answer-less ongoing mystery story lines, I quit, deciding I can’t trust continuing dramas on ABC for a very long time (ever?). I just don’t want to risk being caught up in another Lost.
Sheltonreb,
You nailed it, man. If I ever see the names of Lost showrunners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindeloff on a TV show again, I’m avoiding it. I should have known that friggin’ statue was just the Egyptian god of pulling stuff out of your ass.
M