Lost: The Final Boner

[Tinker to Evers to Chance]

I heard there's a deleted scene where an usher tells Ben he can't go into the church, which explains why he spent the entire episode sitting outside by the fountain.

[R-V]

I'm going to go ahead and go the other way and say it fucking sucked.  All this time, the writers had me convinced that it WASN'T going to be a "they're just dead" finale.  And they were.  And that was a cheap and easy way to go.  And now I don't really believe that the writers had ANY clue how this show was going to end.  And I'm mad.  Boo.

They were only dead in the sideways world.

Kerm, you do understand that everything they've shown in the 6 seasons actually happened, right? The sideways/waystation stories happened AFTER they were dead.

The end was a guy closing his eye after he watched a plane full of his friends get the hell off the island thanks to what he did. The beginning was a guy opening his eye after a plane crash of a group of strangers. I don't give a shit if they thought of the ending during season 1, after season 5, or whilst taking a dump last month. It was a cool and appropriate ending.

Yeah, I get that.  But then how come Sawyer and Kate have waystation stories?  They didn't die on the island.  Hell, neither did Locke.  Nor Hurley.  If that's the correct interpretation, then the writers were sloppy.

I liked the eye thing.  I liked several moments during the episode (mostly the comment that Jack was the "obvious" choice).  But I thought it was a huge disappointment.

Not the correct interpretation. They have waystation stories because they died. Doesn't matter if they died on or off the island. As Christian said, some of them died before Jack, some after. The common thread of everyone in the church was that their time on the island was the most significant part of their lives.

So how did you find out that the fans spoiled the writers' originally planned surprise ending?

Walt showed up on my doorstop soaking wet and told me.

Okay, so why does Kate's alt-story blow for her?

I don't think the point is that the alt-stories are supposed to be some ideal setting where everyone is happy. The idea is for everyone to see what their lives would have been like without the island or the plane crash. And to eventually accept what actually happened and deal with it.

[Kermit IV]

I'm going to go ahead and go the other way and say it fucking sucked.  All this time, the writers had me convinced that it WASN'T going to be a "they're just dead" finale.  And they were.  And that was a cheap and easy way to go.  And now I don't really believe that the writers had ANY clue how this show was going to end.  And I'm mad.  Boo.

They were only dead in the sideways world.

Kerm, you do understand that everything they've shown in the 6 seasons actually happened, right? The sideways/waystation stories happened AFTER they were dead.

The end was a guy closing his eye after he watched a plane full of his friends get the hell off the island thanks to what he did. The beginning was a guy opening his eye after a plane crash of a group of strangers. I don't give a shit if they thought of the ending during season 1, after season 5, or whilst taking a dump last month. It was a cool and appropriate ending.

Yeah, I get that.  But then how come Sawyer and Kate have waystation stories?  They didn't die on the island.  Hell, neither did Locke.  Nor Hurley.  If that's the correct interpretation, then the writers were sloppy.

I liked the eye thing.  I liked several moments during the episode (mostly the comment that Jack was the "obvious" choice).  But I thought it was a huge disappointment.

Not the correct interpretation. They have waystation stories because they died. Doesn't matter if they died on or off the island. As Christian said, some of them died before Jack, some after. The common thread of everyone in the church was that their time on the island was the most significant part of their lives.

So how did you find out that the fans spoiled the writers' originally planned surprise ending?

Walt showed up on my doorstop soaking wet and told me.

Okay, so why does Kate's alt-story blow for her?

I don't think the point is that the alt-stories are supposed to be some ideal setting where everyone is happy. The idea is for everyone to see what their lives would have been like without the island or the plane crash. And to eventually accept what actually happened and deal with it.

Where is MY alt-timeline where I accept that Lost is over, huh?  HUH?

[Kermit IV]

I'm going to go ahead and go the other way and say it fucking sucked.  All this time, the writers had me convinced that it WASN'T going to be a "they're just dead" finale.  And they were.  And that was a cheap and easy way to go.  And now I don't really believe that the writers had ANY clue how this show was going to end.  And I'm mad.  Boo.

They were only dead in the sideways world.

Kerm, you do understand that everything they've shown in the 6 seasons actually happened, right? The sideways/waystation stories happened AFTER they were dead.

The end was a guy closing his eye after he watched a plane full of his friends get the hell off the island thanks to what he did. The beginning was a guy opening his eye after a plane crash of a group of strangers. I don't give a shit if they thought of the ending during season 1, after season 5, or whilst taking a dump last month. It was a cool and appropriate ending.

Yeah, I get that.  But then how come Sawyer and Kate have waystation stories?  They didn't die on the island.  Hell, neither did Locke.  Nor Hurley.  If that's the correct interpretation, then the writers were sloppy.

I liked the eye thing.  I liked several moments during the episode (mostly the comment that Jack was the "obvious" choice).  But I thought it was a huge disappointment.

Not the correct interpretation. They have waystation stories because they died. Doesn't matter if they died on or off the island. As Christian said, some of them died before Jack, some after. The common thread of everyone in the church was that their time on the island was the most significant part of their lives.

So how did you find out that the fans spoiled the writers' originally planned surprise ending?

Walt showed up on my doorstop soaking wet and told me.

Okay, so why does Kate's alt-story blow for her?

I don't think the point is that the alt-stories are supposed to be some ideal setting where everyone is happy. The idea is for everyone to see what their lives would have been like without the island or the plane crash. And to eventually accept what actually happened and deal with it.

I'll accept your premise, as Sayid's alt-life also sucked.  But I still don't like the ending.  No, sir.

[R-V]

One explanation for the waystation world that I saw on the tubewebs: the Incident didn't cause it. Hurley, with his new Jacobian powers, made it hai.

[R-V]

DPD. Kerm if you didn't like the ending it's your fault. YOU DID THIS!

The finale's premise isn't that hard to grasp, but it confused us because it executes a switcheroo: It substitutes a "big" mystery of relatively slight interest (What is the status of the flash-sideways reality?) for all the littler enigmas that we actually do care about, such as why Aaron and Walt were so important, the reason for the fertility preoccupation in the first couple of seasons and the meaning of the numbers. You don't have to count yourself among that flock of literal-minded viewers who bleated incessantly for "answers" to everything (The glass eye! The Hurley bird! The Dharma food drops!) to find the answers we did get unsatisfying.

A series like "Lost" doesn't need to solve all of its riddles, but it does need to address the right ones. (The first season of "Twin Peaks" is a object lesson in how to provide enough resolution while preserving the delicious mysteries of a fictional universe.) From statements the producers of "Lost" have made over the past five years, they developed a dynamic with die-hard fans (and disillusioned fans and skeptical non-fans) that was infinitely more complex than any of the personal relationships among the series' characters. Could it be that in resisting the geekiest, nitpickingest, most Aspergerian demands of their audience they swung too far in the opposite direction, dismissing as trivial everything but the cosmic (the tedious and largely unnecessary Jacob-Smokey background) and the sentimental (making sure that every character receives his or her designated soul mate or therapeutic closure of the most banal Dr Phil variety)?

If so, "Lost" may be the quintessential example of a pop masterpiece ruined by its own fans. The comic-book paraphernalia and texture of the island -- its secret bunkers with their code names, Jacob's migrating cabin with its creepy paintings, the ersatz normality of the Others' compound ringed by those sonic pylons and the fantastically mechanical grinding and dragging sounds that used to accompanied the appearance of the smoke monster -- were not peripheral to the heart of "Lost." They were the very essence of its appeal, what that show did better than any other.

[Kermit IV]

I blame myself.

I had really hoped they would do something with the fact that Jack woke up after the crash apart from everything in the cane field.  Especially when they said the cave of light was near there.  Like that Jack might have been planted there and might not have been on the plane at all.  I thought there were a lot of really interesting choices they could have made, but they made none of them.

[PenPho]

I blame myself.

I had really hoped they would do something with the fact that Jack woke up after the crash apart from everything in the cane field.  Especially when they said the cave of light was near there.  Like that Jack might have been planted there and might not have been on the plane at all.  I thought there were a lot of really interesting choices they could have made, but they made none of them.

Don't worry, RV is going to post 30-40 more times until you like it.

[R-V]

I blame myself.

I had really hoped they would do something with the fact that Jack woke up after the crash apart from everything in the cane field.  Especially when they said the cave of light was near there.  Like that Jack might have been planted there and might not have been on the plane at all.  I thought there were a lot of really interesting choices they could have made, but they made none of them.

Don't worry, RV is going to post 30-40 more times until you like it.

My hope is that the sheer volume of my posts can generate enough energy to obliterate your internet existence.

It's totally reasonable to not like the episode. Christian's wise afterlife words to Jack were a little lame and I was disappointed that they went with a more faith-y than science-y ending. But I thought on balance there was a whole lot of awesomeness in the finale and the show in general, and endings in these types of stories aren't ever as interesting as the beginning and the middle.

So Kerm, do you already have your last HJE post planned out? If I see ANY evidence that you didn't meticulously plan it out years in advance it will diminish my enjoyment of it greatly.

[Dr. Nguyen Van Falk]

For starters (and sort of responding to Weebs' posts earlier), I don't think the sideways world was "created" by the bomb or by anything that happened on the island.

In fact, I feel that it was almost entirely beside the point of the happenings on the island.

Christian told Jack that, in the sideways world there is no "now." It's an afterlife existence that exists outside of time, totally apart from the real world. I gather the only reason it appeared as "2004" to us was because Flight 815 was the pivotal event in these characters' real lives and thus the key for each of them to resolve whatever each of them needed to resolve before moving on. So that was the timeframe they relived. Other dead people (Alpert, for example) presumably relive other times and places.

The resolution of the sideways world as purgatory (or whatever) wasn't 'the whole point' of the past six seasons of build up. It wasn't 'what the show was all about.' Most of that was dealt with earlier in the season. The island drama came to a climax in the finale, but all of the mysteries behind the island, the mysteries driving six years' worth of story, were revealed to us before this, in various episodes earlier this season.

Yeah, the fact that there weren't really any more BIG FAT ISLAND REVEALS left me very surprised last night. I remember looking at the clock at around 10:15 or so and realizing: "This is it, isn't it? No more huge twists?" And, yeah, I felt a bit let down in the moment when I realized that the other shoe wasn't going to drop.

The more I think about it, though, (and it has provoked a lot of questions) the more satisfying I find the finale to have been. But that instinct to expect a crazy, gob-smacking twist ANY MINUTE NOW that Lost has conditioned me to have was hard to shake in the moment.

So, anyways: as it turns out, the sideways world wasn't the magic key to everything. What it was, though, was a narrative coda, a postscript to the island story.

It was a means of bringing the stories of these characters' lives to a close for us, a storytelling device akin to the flashbacks and flashforwards of past seasons, but this time with an eye towards resolution.

[Kermit IV]

I blame myself.

I had really hoped they would do something with the fact that Jack woke up after the crash apart from everything in the cane field.  Especially when they said the cave of light was near there.  Like that Jack might have been planted there and might not have been on the plane at all.  I thought there were a lot of really interesting choices they could have made, but they made none of them.

Don't worry, RV is going to post 30-40 more times until you like it.

My hope is that the sheer volume of my posts can generate enough energy to obliterate your internet existence.

It's totally reasonable to not like the episode. Christian's wise afterlife words to Jack were a little lame and I was disappointed that they went with a more faith-y than science-y ending. But I thought on balance there was a whole lot of awesomeness in the finale and the show in general, and endings in these types of stories aren't ever as interesting as the beginning and the middle.

So Kerm, do you already have your last HJE post planned out? If I see ANY evidence that you didn't meticulously plan it out years in advance it will diminish my enjoyment of it greatly.

No, but I also didn't tell anyone that I know what I'm going to post in three years, so your silly little analogy just fell apart like the ending of Lost.

Besides, that's definitely not the reason I was disappointed in the episode.  I just think it became pretty clear in the final season that they only said they had a "plan" to buy themselves a guaranteed 3 seasons, or whatever it was.  I'm sure a ton of planning went into the final episode, but if it was three years of planning, they didn't do a very good job with it.

[R-V]

I blame myself.

I had really hoped they would do something with the fact that Jack woke up after the crash apart from everything in the cane field.  Especially when they said the cave of light was near there.  Like that Jack might have been planted there and might not have been on the plane at all.  I thought there were a lot of really interesting choices they could have made, but they made none of them.

Don't worry, RV is going to post 30-40 more times until you like it.

My hope is that the sheer volume of my posts can generate enough energy to obliterate your internet existence.

It's totally reasonable to not like the episode. Christian's wise afterlife words to Jack were a little lame and I was disappointed that they went with a more faith-y than science-y ending. But I thought on balance there was a whole lot of awesomeness in the finale and the show in general, and endings in these types of stories aren't ever as interesting as the beginning and the middle.

So Kerm, do you already have your last HJE post planned out? If I see ANY evidence that you didn't meticulously plan it out years in advance it will diminish my enjoyment of it greatly.

No, but I also didn't tell anyone that I know what I'm going to post in three years, so your silly little analogy just fell apart like the ending of Lost.

Besides, that's definitely not the reason I was disappointed in the episode.  I just think it became pretty clear in the final season that they only said they had a "plan" to buy themselves a guaranteed 3 seasons, or whatever it was.  I'm sure a ton of planning went into the final episode, but if it was three years of planning, they didn't do a very good job with it.

I was just kidding with my silly analogy, I've never actually read HJE. I think the questions of "did they plan it out ahead of time?" and "was the finale any good?" are two different things.

Maybe they did have a plan, and you just didn't like it? Maybe they didn't have a plan, and I liked it? They pretty much admitted that that they didn't have every last thing planned out:

Do we know the absolute end of the show? Yeah. We've had that in mind for quite some time. But can we hand you a script for the last episode of the show right now? No, because there are market fluctuations that we are unaware of at this point. Certain characters that you want to write more for sort of wear out their welcome sooner rather than later. New characters are introduced, and pop in unexpected ways. The essential nature of that last episode is more specifically about what the last three or four scenes are, and us working toward those has always remained pretty constant.

I can't even imagine how hard it is to make one entertaining hour of television, let alone six seasons. I'm sure there were a few things they planned out after they set the end date, but I'm sure there was quite a bit more they pulled out of their ass. I actually think it's more interesting if they didn't have a plan and still managed to fit 80% of the pieces in place in an entertaining way.

[Dr. Nguyen Van Falk]

I blame myself.

I had really hoped they would do something with the fact that Jack woke up after the crash apart from everything in the cane field.  Especially when they said the cave of light was near there.  Like that Jack might have been planted there and might not have been on the plane at all.  I thought there were a lot of really interesting choices they could have made, but they made none of them.

Don't worry, RV is going to post 30-40 more times until you like it.

My hope is that the sheer volume of my posts can generate enough energy to obliterate your internet existence.

It's totally reasonable to not like the episode. Christian's wise afterlife words to Jack were a little lame and I was disappointed that they went with a more faith-y than science-y ending. But I thought on balance there was a whole lot of awesomeness in the finale and the show in general, and endings in these types of stories aren't ever as interesting as the beginning and the middle.

So Kerm, do you already have your last HJE post planned out? If I see ANY evidence that you didn't meticulously plan it out years in advance it will diminish my enjoyment of it greatly.

No, but I also didn't tell anyone that I know what I'm going to post in three years, so your silly little analogy just fell apart like the ending of Lost.

Besides, that's definitely not the reason I was disappointed in the episode.  I just think it became pretty clear in the final season that they only said they had a "plan" to buy themselves a guaranteed 3 seasons, or whatever it was.  I'm sure a ton of planning went into the final episode, but if it was three years of planning, they didn't do a very good job with it.

I think you're confusing 'the end of the show' with 'the final episode.'

In a lot of ways, this entire season was the ending to the show.

And I don't think it would be totally outlandish for them to claim that they started this show 6 years ago with at least a road map that included all the Smokey-vs-Jacob stuff, the vague magical "light" at the heart of the island and Jack's six-season character arc.

[Chuck to Chuck]

I actually think it's more interesting if they didn't have a plan and still managed to fit 80% of the pieces in place in an entertaining way.

Do you find sausages taste different if you know how they are made?

A very meh ending.  If it's all about the character, I'd hate to see these guys do a remake of "The Fugitive."

Dr. Kimble doesn't catch the One Armed Man, but the Doc and Dept. Gerard have a nice hug and shed a tear.

Jimmy Kimmel had the best answer: It was all in Jack's mind and he died in the plane crash.  It was all Purgatory.  Makes all the incontinuities explainable by "They were all already dead."

[Dr. Nguyen Van Falk]

A very meh ending.  If it's all about the character, I'd hate to see these guys do a remake of "The Fugitive."

Dr. Kimble doesn't catch the One Armed Man, but the Doc and Dept. Gerard have a nice hug and shed a tear.

Great... Now Chuck's bitching about a show that doesn't even exist.