While I generally enjoyed watching the finale with a good friend, with plenty of commercial time analysis, I was completely disappointed with the final ending and twist. At the moment, my reason for disliking the final “answer” provided to us is twofold. First, it was a cheap and hokey trick. Second, it was too forced with its odd blend of religious soup. I’ll take up that last point in part two of this post. Also, remember that I wasn’t really looking for answers, so I may have had a different expectation than you.
So, apparently, they decided to go all Shyamalanian on the series (making this April Fools joke pretty ironic). A Shyamalan film is what it is and ever since the “Sixth Sense,” we’ve known what that is. It’s like the whole movie is building up to this “Oh, I guess I am dead people” moment. With LOST, the Shyamalanian sort of twist on it, revealed in the last fifteen minutes or so, cheapens the entire series for me. I agree with one blogger who compared LOST to Shyamalan’s Signs: “Signs was a 2 hour movie. Lost was a 6 year series. With a lot more twists and turns and unanswered questions. I think in the end, I felt like the first 5 seasons were one show and this one was something that belonged on PAX.” I’m not sure I’d wrap together the whole season that way, because they could have gone another way with the sideways world. But, yeah, the twist explanation ruins it for me.
A lot of people thought the ending was beautiful. I have a hard time seeing the beauty when I feel like the whole “answer” to the big question this season (”What’s the deal with the two parallel worlds?”) was a cop out: the easy, cheesy way to go with it. It reminds me of when I was starting out in my brief high school acting career (you know, a couple musicals, a couple plays) and totally blew an audition to a sought-after play at the school. The audition included an improv game portion, similar to “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” You’d freeze the two people who were performing some scene, and then jump in and replace one of the improvising actors. I had never done anything like this, so I waited until someone was making some really strange pose. I froze them and jumped in to say, “What are you DOING?!” Of course it was lame, everyone groaned, and I didn’t get a part. Instead of trying to come up with some original and creative new narrative, I just put all the responsibility on the other guy, showing I had no improv skills. To me, the last fifteen minutes or so of the finale took a similar “easy way out.” How do we explain this strange alternate world? Afterlife! That solves everything! Yeah, and then we can really ham it up and make people cry about it too.
But maybe you like the Shyamalan thing.
James McGrath mentioned that many people are saying the finale was more emotionally satisfying than intellectually satisfying. After it was over, I suppose my cold and heartless side came out. People were trotted out for the local late night news after the show and asked, “What did you think of the finale?” They were all choked up at how beautiful it was, I just thought, “Are you kidding me?? Those people are going to get mocked at work tomorrow.” I’m not real impressed with the “emotional satisfaction” of an otherwise intellectually satisfying series.
[continued in part two . . .]
I’m not convinced that they all have arrived at the afterlife…
Hey Ben, You mean, you think people who were actually there weren’t really there (as in they were in this afterlife, but weren’t actually dead yet)?
I liked this: “I guess I AM dead people.” That’s a good summary. But it didn’t bug me too much. In fact, I think it (mostly) worked, thanks to the show’s longstanding emphasis on character relationships.
The showrunners have always made a big deal about character connections being the thing that makes LOST work. Sure, we’ve got polar bears and weird psychic kids and a world-saving button and an ubervillain made of smoke, but all of that is window-dressing. What makes the show rock is Desmond and Penny, reunited via an unlikely phone call. It’s Jack and his dad, acting out a conflict that goes back decades. It’s Sawyer and Juliette, an unlikely romance that somehow worked. It’s Hurley and Miles, bantering back and forth.
Rather than using the finale to to answer the plethora of questions the series has raised, then, the writers wisely kept us focused on LOST’s greatest character ties.
And, to me, it’s these connections that help rescue the last few scenes from mediocrity. It seems right that the LOSTies’ ultimate redemption emerges only in a communal context. They need each other to become whole, and it is only in relationship that their sanctification is possible. The work begun on the Island continues in the next life–it is an enduring vision of communal redemption that I found pretty refreshing. “Die alone, then live together,” we might call it.
Oh, Matt. You’re such a cheese ball
I like the relationships too, of course, but this last scene was just too much for me. I think saying “it’s about relationships” can also be a cop out from writing a solid plot.
LOST has never given us ’solid plots.’ The show specialized in the ridiculous-bordering-on-the-ludicrous; it boasted plot holes wide enough to drive a DHARMA van through. The finale ultimately stripped all that stuff away and focused on the one element of the show that consistently worked.
I’d be interested to hear WHY you felt “sideways=purgatory” was ‘the easy, cheesy way to go with it.’ What about it felt cheesy? Was it the fact that it had been done before (e.g. Sixth Sense)? Or was it just executed poorly?
It started to get cheesy to me when everybody started to get those stupid, creepy grins after their awakenings and acted like they were going to some sort of suicide pact cult, culminating in the kumbaya room full of hugs and happiness and the door to the bright light. You don’t see any cheese in that?
The fact that it had been done before doesn’t help, especially when the thing that’s been done before is a surprise ending. But my critique about the Shyamalanian approach is more about the fact that LOST has never been really Shyamalanian. They’re tacking on a Shyamalan ending to a non-Shyamalan thing. For me, it doesn’t fit.
But I have always like the relationships and, like you, that is a big part of why I have watched the whole series.
Two thoughts in response:
I liked the enlightenment moments; the revelatory flashbacks offered some needed redemption for several characters who died prematurely. These are the real ‘loose threads’ that would have bugged me, had they not been tied up. Juliette needed some more Sawyer lovin’. Charlie Pace deserved one more shot at not screwing up his romance with Claire. Above all, we wanted some sort of happy ending for John Locke, the Man of Perpetual Sorrow. We got all of these, but not the way we expected. When their memories broke through, the characters we loved were suddenly, unexpectedly back. If it was all a bit too saccharine, it still worked, since we had the tragedy of their earlier lives balancing things out.
Re. “LOST has never been really Shyamalanian”… to me, LOST is the most Shyamalanian thing on TV. What other show generated more WTF moments than this one? The dissonant trombones and dull thud have accompanied dozens and dozens of mini-Shyamalanian endings:
- “What?! Locke never really came back to life?”
- “What?! Locke is in the coffin?!”
- “What?! This has been a flashFORWARD, not a flashBACK?!”
- etc., etc.