Thoughts on "The End"

One week ago, Lost wrapped up with a big tearjerker finale. Was I disappointed? Mostly. Yes. I've loved Lost for three years now. I remember when it first premiered, on the helm of Survivor's raging success. My mom loved it because she thought it was going to be a fictionalized version of Survivor. I dismissed it for the same reason. Somewhere near the end of Season 3, my then-boyfriend Silas gave me all the DVDs and demanded that I watch it. I got hooked, and passed it on to my next boyfriend and my sister, who both got hooked and passed it on themselves.

That's the kind of show Lost was. It captured you. It made you want to spread it, to create communities around it. You loved and cared about these people, about the incendiary nature of being stuck with strangers in desperate situations, of alienation. It echoed and enriched the feelings I had the first time I realized just how big the universe was, how little of it I understood, how beautiful the mystery. For me, this feeling is a source of life. I get up every morning because there is hidden ground in every day, soft patches of in-between places and infinite libraries of the unknown. There are no reruns in life, and little satisfaction. It sparks the desire, the urge to move forward, and if anything, Lost was a reiteration of a child's dream, a sometimes nightmarish wonderland of wild cards and veiled forces.

In that way, I am trying to remember the show for the questions it posed, rather than the conclusion it drew.

Carlton Cuse said in one video interview "we're not like J.K. Rowling", in that they require the intricate collaboration of a taskforce of team members. It's cyclical. Ideas go out, run through the tints and filters of hundreds of interpretations, and becomes a self-directed entity by the time the show hits the waves. It's beautifully organic in this sense, but the downside is loss of control. Even Cuse and Lindelof couldn't seal it off in a vacuum tube in the same way that Rowling could create the infinitesimally complex system of Harry Potter on the unified front of one brain.

After watching the conclusion I couldn't help but see this comparison as ominous. They both suffered the same pratfalls in the end. I didn't feel emotionally involved in the ending of Lost because, like Harry Potter, I mostly just felt confused and shortchanged.

I trusted the writers because the characterization was so good, and there were some amazing payoffs in the course of the show, but ultimately I made the conscious decision to trust. If you don't trust, you can't feel the tension. Like a string tied tight between two poles, if you don't believe in the second pole, the thread just hangs loose on the ground.

Fear of rejection, and fear of being let down, those things preemptively clash with the possibility of a meaningful experience. If a fictitious work doesn't read as authentic to me, I stop watching. I stop reading. What I won't do is suffer a show for easy weekly thrills if I think there is no binding universe. Lost was a let-down only because it was so good, only to be so amateur in its final moments.

There is a difference between open ended mystery and glaring plot hole. There is an art to the unanswered question. One, the question must come from an authentic place. Two, there must be a matrix in place by which it is possible to surmise an answer, or at least to believe that there is one. My unease stems from the sense that I cannot imagine the writers had this planned all along. That means the story lacks structural integrity. Not honoring the questions is far worse than not answering them.

Some elements don't need explanation because, though they are big and generative, they serve only to give birth to real point. Where did Mother come from? I don't care. In Satanic Verses, why did Gibreel and Saladin morph into deities and then fall back? It matters not in the least. In the same way, the large and sweeping mysteries of this island, the cosmic forces of good and evil, the mysterious and mythic properties of science, none of that needed explanation.

Katey Rich, as a guest on the Slash Filmcast made a really good point when she said that, based on the answers we did get, we really wouldn't want more answers from the show. I think that's true. I'm more unhappy about the silly answers than the nonexistent ones. I wasn't disappointed that they took a spiritual approach, but that they used the gauze and the inspecificity of spirituality to blur over the frayed plot threads, like cauterizing a wound so deep it couldn't heal naturally.

The Sideways world seemed like a giant fake left, distracting us from the "answer" of the Island, which was simplistic, incomplete and hastily cobbled. There is a particular Dashiel Hammet style of writing wherein the lead character figures things out much faster than the audience. But past a certain point this is narrative laziness. But when characters know so much, and know it mysteriously through no system of interrogation or reason, the audiences are isolated.

For example, I had no idea what Desmond was supposed to be doing down in the cave, or how Jack knew this would somehow mortalize the Man in Black. The cork in the cave was Rowling's Elder Wand, a suddenly inserted dues ex machina tool, magically understood by Harry to be his through a series of extremely fuzzy chain of events. I can follow that Desmond knows things because he has a wider perspective a la time and dimension jumping, but Jack? And the cork in the cave? How are these rules arbitrated, and how on earth does anyone know them, even Smokie or Jacob? Especially when, over and over again, these island rules are nebulous and inconsistent at best? And this is coming from someone who accepted that a Hydrogen bomb could throw you thirty years into the future.

These are my broader thoughts on the trainwreck (plane crash?) conclusion of Lost. It makes me sad. I honestly wanted to like this finale. Now I honestly am going to have to figure out how to continue liking this show.

One nit to pick in terms of content. One nit and I'm out.

So Across the Sea was a Rosetta Stone, more or less, for everything Jacob has said thus far. The Island is both physically and metaphysically a source of light, energy, life. It's electromagnetic properties shield it from the outside world by creating a refraction, like a straw in a glass of water. It refracts time and waveforms (say, sonar, radio signals) and essentially camouflages itself in this way.

Because some people find it anyway, it needs a protector. Cool.

I can't imagine that we would actually equate Mother with godliness, or Jacob with Christlike love and free will. God does not want (as much as I can presume the nature of God) his/her children to be ignorant thumb-sucking emotional stumps, whereas Mother was pretty insistent this be case. That doesn't sound like the force of good. In fact, it just sounds like the church. An institution of fallible humans built around the righteousness of Knowing the Answer, using violence and seclusion to grow a generation of brainwashed successors. I say that, and I'm not even anti-religion. I'm saying if we are to draw this parallel, religion doesn't look so good in Lost.

If Jacob is supposed to represent free will, why does he determine the fates of people with a touch? Why does he bring people to the island against their will, only to coolly witness their self-destruction from a cryptic and removed perspective? How many people did Mother murder in that first village? How many people died in the Dharma purge, as ordered by Jacob?

What has the Man in Black done that is really evil? Let's review.

He killed some people. Okay, so did Jacob (indirectly) and Mother (directly). Man in Black at least usually offered a choice or looked into their souls first. Smokie knows people in a way that Jacob never did. He chose not to abide in the luxury of being removed. He wanted to get off the island, and for that his choice was either to trick the candidates into killing themselves (because he could not do it) or to take them along. His incentive is usually always the same. His motivation for murder was defensive. Jacob brought people to the island and let them die just to keep patching over his own mistake in creating the smoke monster.

What does the Man in Black want? To get off the island.
Before he became a smoke monster, why did people want to keep him on the island? Fear of sin, which seems to have made it to the island just fine on its own.

Why does he want the light? To get off the island.
In other words, lots of things would have been really okay if Mother just told him the straight truth about the real world and, you know, let him leave.

The thing that irks me is this. The Man in Black resisted being sheltered. Jacob embraced being sheltered. I don't like this being painted as the model of what it means to be noble.

It's amazing to me that the show who brought us "bad" guys like Widmore, and Ben, Sayid and Michael, all of whom were given a serious modicum of second thought, totally phoned it in with the most important villain of them all. He's the monster Jacob created. He was played as standard action movie death. Good, evil is destroyed, we can all get on with our lives.

That's the end of my nit.

I'll only say this as my final thought. I don't appreciate when sentimentality saturates the final moments of an otherwise epic adventure. I don't like when the feelings of the writers seep through, their own heartstrings tugged at the termination of their own work. This is including but not limited to unnecessary jumps into the the future, where-are-they-now segues, lots of white light, mist, hugs, and hodgepodge spirituality. This is another Harry Potter overlap. Please, stop it. What you do when you do that is feel everything for me. You rob me of my own loss. Sandman's "The Wake" (SPOILER in italics) was a great ending because, though they stopped to reminisce on the death of the titular character, momentum never ceased. Daniel carried on the torch, old and loved characters paused for a moment in their dreams and the whole dizzy world tilted on. That allowed me to feel the sadness I should have felt for Lost. When all the nuance deflates like a punctured airbag, when the best characters vanish without mention and we spent half an hour watching Jack go deer-eyed and die, I am left with nothing.

Nothing but the memories, and my imagination to pick up the ball they dropped.