Why the Lost finale sucked
I am inaugurating this tumblr with an outline of my thoughts on Lost, now that the finale has come and gone and many barrels of ink have been spilled trying to figure out what it was all about.
I felt brutally let down by the entirety of Lost’s 6th season. Many people are arguing that Lost was always mostly about redemption and spirituality. They can believe that, but I submit that it’s blatantly false. Yes, Lost had great characters — without great characters, what’s a TV show? But it was not a soap opera a la Grey’s Anatomy or Desperate Housewives, light on exposition but heavy on characterization and character-driven plot events. It was a balanced show where character-driven events lead to clues outlining a greater underlying story of mystery: what is the purpose of this strange island, why are these people there, and why do all these strange things happen? Without these underlying questions, Lost would have fallen flat early. Try to imagine the first two seasons playing out without the general focus on the island’s mysteries. It was the sense of mystery, of why these strange and flawed characters with oddly intertwined pasts all wound up on the same plane that just happened to crash on an island that defies space, time, and medicine that kept us all coming back week to week. Yes, we all were interested in what Kate would do next or how Locke lost his legs. But in the end, the characters were stereotypes: well-written stereotypes, to be sure, but stereotypes nonetheless.
Lost involved extremely consistent elements of mystery. Consistently, entities suddenly transported from the island would end up in the Tunisian desert. Consistently, time itself behaved erratically on the island. Consistently, buildings and artifacts were covered in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Consistently, different characters would encounter supposedly-dead people walking around the island. Consistently, when people tried to sail away from the island, they would end up on a course right back to it. Consistently, people with incurable illnesses were healed when they arrived on the island. Consistently, when time travel or other “extreme island events” occurred, the sky would fill with bright light and temporarily blind the characters. Consistently, certain characters were immortal or resistant to extreme energy as demonstrated by multiple events. There are countless other consistent elements of mystery.
Here’s my point: if the elements of mystery were inconsistent and merely served to provide context and motivation for character-driven plot events, I could buy that Lost was “always about redemption and spirituality.” But that’s the problem: the elements of mystery were so consistent that we all were lead to believe that there was reason to them, that they would one day be explained and would give us greater insight into the characters we had grown to love. Save for a few, they weren’t.
Season 6 was supposed to finally provide us with a greater context for why the events of the first 5 seasons had occurred. Instead, it invented new reasons. We find out that Widmore wants to get back to the island so he can kill the smoke monster, a motivation completely unrelated to his character’s background (Why did he create a fake plane crash? Why did he kill Ben’s daughter? Why is he framed as a bad guy the whole damn show?). We find out that the smoke monster itself is on a quest to get off the island, a motivation that does absolutely nothing to explain its actions in the first 5 seasons (Why does Ben go to it to be judged? Why does it randomly kill people?). I could keep going for a while.
Perhaps the most absurd part of season 6 was the “sideways reality.” We are led to believe that this reality is what would have happened to our characters had the island ceased to exist in the 1970s when Jughead exploded (as per the whole plot arc of season 5). Given that background, we watch our characters’ lives unfold in new and interesting ways. We are introduced to new characters, e.g. Jack’s son. And in the end, we find out that the “sideways reality” actually had nothing at all to do with Jughead and was instead some sort of psycho-magical pseudo-afterlife constructed by the characters themselves to facilitate passage into the afterlife. Never mind the fact that the sideways-reality characters were “awakened” to this reality by real-world Desmond catching a glimpse of it while he was still alive. Don’t try to wrap your head around it. It doesn’t make sense. The entire sideways reality plot would have worked better as a device contained entirely within the finale, as that way we wouldn’t have wasted hours of our lives trying to figure out why we were being shown this alternative reality at all only to find out that only the “awakenings” — which could have been accomplished in half an hour of TV time — mattered.
But that was the problem with Lost in general. We would be shown a string of events — Event A > Event B > Event C > Event D — without proper rationale for any of it given. We’d assume all of it happened for a reason. Then, several episodes/seasons later, rationale would be given for ONLY the Event C > Event D portion of the string, leaving us aware of why the events make sense in the immediate context of recent episodes but unsure of how we got there.
For example, we know Smokey wants to leave the island. He says repeatedly that everyone has to leave the island together in order for this to happen. We don’t know why. As a result of this, several plot events occur: he kills everyone in the temple, he magically corrupts Sayid, and he tries to convince people to get on the Ajira jet, among more. We soon find out he was just trying to kill everyone. But then it turns out all he really wanted to do was to abduct Desmond and use him to “uncork” the energy beneath the island and destroy it. There is no reason that Smokey had to say or do anything he did in previous episodes if that was actually his goal all along. The plot line turns out to be a bait-and-switch. But if you don’t think of the larger context, it can make sense event-to-event:
1. Smokey says he wants to leave the island
2. He says “we all must leave together” for that to happen.
3. Once he gets everyone congregated, Smokey tries to kill them. We thus assume Smokey needs to kill everyone on the island to leave.
4. Smokey abducts Desmond to try to uncork the energy and destroy the island. This would presumably kill everyone on it and allow his escape.
Why bother with steps 1-3 when he could have accomplished the same thing by starting on step 4? Why all the nonsense about the plane and the submarine when he could have simply abducted Desmond in secret and done his dirty work?
Here is the sad conclusion I have settled upon, one that was driven into my head by critics of show for years but which I never believed: the writers wrote explanations as they went. They didn’t settle on secrets and write story arcs around them, as they should have done. Lost’s explanations were as haphazard as its mysteries, and when it came time to explain the show, the only consistent element the writers could use to wrap things up were the stereotypes on which the characters were based.
I invested a lot of time in this show. I loved it. It was my favorite show for years, because I believed that, as stated obsessively by the show’s characters, “all of this was happening for a reason.”
Here are the reasons we got for why the characters were brought to the island:
1. To protect the island.
2. To “live the most important parts of their lives together,” so they could…
3. …meet one another in a psycho-magical pseudo-afterlife and go to heaven together.
If you’re reading 2 and 3 as circular logic, you and I are on the same page.
I hate the fact that I’m writing this. I desperately wanted Lost to pull itself together. But season 6 was a standalone saga that ignored 90% of the content of the previous 5 seasons and provided little satisfactory explanation for the underlying mysteries that drove Lost forward. Really, it ruined the underlying mysteries by explaining many of them away with, frankly, lamer mysteries (“How did that dude become the black smoke?” “Oh, that’s easy, his twin brother Jacob, adopted by a mysterious unexplained woman who killed his mother, threw him into a pit of magical light.”)
In conclusion, everyone should still watch Lost. Just stop at the end of season 5 and assume everything gets explained in whatever manner most pleases you. Unless you come to the conclusion, after those 5 seasons, that the show is “about spirituality and redemption” and not about a weird f-ing island.
Cheers,
Ben
