There’s no appropriate way to post spoilery discussions on Twitter, so I have to come back to the blog to explain my thoughts on the Lost finale. All I could say in 140 characters without spoiling the whole thing is that Lost was in retrospect just like the Lord of the Rings, but that doesn’t work so well if you don’t already know what I mean.
Here it comes with proper spoiler tags, then.
Many people are complaining that the overall arc of the show, in the end, is that nothing happened: those people met, and they became important to each other, and someday they died, and that is all. Well, they’re just wrong. (I’m only talking about the people who didn’t mistakenly understand that the whole island had been a purgatory. Can’t be helped, I guess; I found that Christian’s speech struck the exact right balance between under- and over-explanation.)
Lost’s six-year arc was a very simple story, but a story nonetheless: it was all about turning the island off for five minutes, so that the Monster could be killed (and so that he wouldn’t destroy the island, which the show tells us would pretty much be the end of the world, and you just have to accept that it is true).
Everything that happened along the way was just the obligatory adventures — the trials of fate, as it were — that the whole group had to go through in order to reach that very simple goal. Jacob needed someone to pull the island’s plug, someone to do the actual killing of his brother, and someone to take charge of the island after all that. So he brought Desmond and the Oceanic 815 to the island, and it took six seasons to fulfill that damn simple plan because, well, nothing is ever as simple as you’d like it to be, especially on a magical island.
In another universe and another time, Gandalf tasked a little hobbit with the very straightforward, uninteresting job of dropping a ring into a volcano, and hijinks ensued. The only difference, really, is that it took five and a half seasons for the audience (and the characters) to realize that the ring was the smoke monster, and how he had been created, and why he needed to be destroyed. That’s just because Jacob was clearly more of an ass than Gandalf was — and he arguably wasn’t quite as competent, either.
As for the sideways universe: yes, it was the biggest red herring of the show’s history. But after you’ve endured the entire second half of the first season, which was all red herring after red herring, you’re just not allowed to complain about that kind of device — the writers have showed they enjoy it, and it’s just an integral part of the show’s structure.
More importantly, the flashafterlifes constituted a season-long epilogue, and that’s a wonderful invention.
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