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 . . .]