I watch . Or rather, I watched . I was one of those fanatical people who could never miss an episode and would not be able to function if I did not watch the night it aired. Needless to say, I was pretty excited about the finale.
I realize that people get extremely irritated when you spoil what happens in the first season of a six season show because they have not had the “time” yet to get around to watching the series, so I will preface the next column with an all-caps SPOILER ALERT. While I know some people have legitimately not seen the episode that just aired on Sunday, I find it very hard to sympathize with those who try and avoid the spoilers from years ago. It would be like trying to not know who won the presidential election until you have the “time” to catch up. Guess what!? Obama won.
The finale certainly provided resolution, but only for the characters of the show and not the mythology or the plot. And let me be the first one to say that it is idiotic. Maybe I am just an antisocial type of guy, but for me, the mythology of was always much more appealing than the characters.
The mythology behind it all drove people to watch the show differently than anything else on television. It forced people to pose questions on the meaning of a certain object or why a character is reading a particular book in one scene or what do a bunch of random numbers mean. It probably made half its viewers at one point look up a website on theory and then spend an hour reading about Purgatory. At its core, it made its fans think and I loved the show for it. I know it sounds pretentious, but it is the same reason they make those math video games for toddlers: wrap something that does not seem interesting to a lot of people (philosophy, history) into an inherently entertaining package (television) and it will likely make both better.
But the producers and writers disagreed with me that plot was important and instead attempted to resolve everything for only the characters instead in the finale.
The characters were somewhat compelling, but I do not watch because of the beautiful character development and actors. If I wanted that, I would follow a show that actually advertises itself to be a character driven plot. In fact, I hated a lot of the characters, specifically Kate. What was the point of her on the show? She constantly argued and whined about any sort of authoritative action, she tried to act independent but had no identity without another male in her life and she had by far the worst back story. A criminal with a heart of gold who doesn’t know how to live a real life? Definitely overdone.
That does not mean I ever wanted the show to have a neat conclusion which would resolve everything at once. It would betray the fundamental character of Lost if it was to pose all the questions and then give all the answers at the very end. Instead, I was just hoping that would continue to be Lost-like. Give some answers while posing more questions and make the viewer think. The finale did none of those things. It gave the characters a happy ending and that was it.
I read that they keep a continuity guy, who keeps track of every little detail and makes sure that they do not screw up anything. For example, if a character was punched or kicked a couple of episodes back, this guy needed to make sure that the wound would appear in later scenes. When I read this, I thought the idea was ingenious; it minimizes the size of the section of inconsistencies page on the Wikipedia, but now that the show has ended, I am just mad. They had this guy who probably had a file of all these loose ends that had to be tied up and they did not resolve the majority of them?
They left the show with a conclusion, but only for its primary characters. But another one of its main characters, the island, was completely ignored. We are left to believe that maybe there is this magical island out there with all this crazy stuff happening and that there is not really a meaning to any of it. No meaning behind it, no theory unifying the show, it was just a figment of some producers’ imaginations. It was a device to have a bunch of romances that are probably better done on other shows. Great.
I almost wish that it had all been Jack’s dream. There is something you can at least take from that. Instead I am feeling empty. Now it feels like kind of a waste of six years.