Posted on 05/23/2010 11:06:39 PM PDT by JoeProBono
Edited on 05/23/2010 11:17:47 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
Once upon a time, there was a television show about a bunch of people on an island. For six years it was one of the most fascinating things on TV. And then it ended, in the worst way possible.
Lost ended tonight, and with it the hopes and dreams of millions of people who thought it might finally get good again. SPOILER ALERT: It didn't. What did we learn? Nothing. We learned nothing from two-and-a-half hours of slow-motion [expletive deleted by Mod] backed with a syrupy soundtrack.
Everyone loves to see characters who haven't been around for a while, right? Juliet! Where have you been? Shannon! Long time since you were around, irritating all of us and ruining Sayid. But good to see you, I guess! Rose and Bernard! Nice beard, bro! And Vincent! The goddamn dog! There you are, doing dog stuff. How great is it to get all these characters back? Not very great at all, as it turns out.
The distinction is whether the writers treat them like a prop or a person and whether, when you try to interpret the character, whatever their role and actions in the story, makes sense in terms of a person or sense in terms of a prop. Saying that James and Juliet are together at the end because they are each other's soul mates is a person explanation. Saying that Charlie and Claire are together there because Charlie loved Claire is a little more problematic because their relationship was rocky and Claire never seemed as certain of it, but one could gloss that over and assume they really were mutual soul mates, so that's a person explanation. Saying that Aaron is there because he's important to Claire or Penny is there because she's important to Desmond is a prop answer. There are there because the other person is there, not because they have their own compelling reason to be there.
But why would Ben bother to make it look like Dharma drops? It makes no sense, it's a lot of effort to accomplish nothing. If he wanted to keep the guys in Swan in supplies he could just give them supplies, he doesn't have to go through all the troubles of putting Dharma logos on everything and air dropping the supplies. Heck if he actually knew about the guys in Swan and what they were doing there he'd probably actually rotate people in and out so they wouldn't go stir crazy and fight each other failing to push the button and bringing a plane full of unwanted visitors to his favorite Island. So no that theory doesn't hold. Occam's Razor actually says it was probably some remnant of DI, trying to get it back together to re-establish themselves on the Island.
First, we're talking about the guy who actually murdered the entire Dharma project. He finds out there are still guys in the hatch, armed with a high powered rifle (remember that?) and given the paranoia that we see later in the show surrounding The Swan, the fact that it was in hostile territory, and the problems with the others (assuming that this was all anticipated and planned by the authors), would have been told not to let any unauthorized people into The Swan. Remember, the guy who was was in there was an Iraq War vet who had served with Kate's father. Why put a military guy in there with a rifle?
So Ben kills everyone with gas but can't get the guys in The Swan with gas because they are sealed in. He needs them to keep pushing the button, anyway, and to make them stay put so he makes up the plague story, which is a good match for the gas in terms of killing everyone else, and gets them some fake vaccines and tells them to retrieve them in the bio suits them to stay put.
This totally fits Ben's MO throughout the early series. Remember when he was "Henry Gale"? Misdirection. Manipulation. Lies. You say that this is "a lot of effort to accomplish nothing" but remember all of the effort Ben went through to get Jack to operate on him instead of just asking? Why didn't the others just make contact with the survivors, invite them to the Dharma village for tea, and ask Jack to save Ben's life? Why all of the fake villages, disguises, infiltrations, and other lies? Wasn't that an awful lot of trouble for nothing, too?
He probably doesn't even need to go out of his way to get the Dharma logo food because he could just keep paying the same contractor to supply it, since he inherited the Dharma infrastructure, or he might even have a warehouse full of the stuff. And, remember, when they find the food drop, none of the survivors recall having heard any plane and the station locked down while the drop was being made, making it impossible to see how it was done. The logical explanation was that there was no actual plane coming in from the outside. Further, in The Flame, Sayid finds a Dharma binder labeled "Supply Drop Protocol" and it looks like drops were initiated with the code "24", strongly implying that the drops were initiated from The Flame, which was under the control of Ben and the Others.
Now let's ask some questions about your theory. Suppose a skeleton Dharma Initiative continues to exist that can fly a supply plane over the island every 8 months, which means that they can reliably find the Island (without controlling the pendulum) and safely fly a sizable cargo plane over it and then leave. In a decade or more, they never include a single note in the supplies telling Kelvin that the hostiles have taken over the Island and instead concoct a plague story to fool him into staying there and taking a fake vaccine? They never send in reinforcements, their own replacement team, or try to retake the Island? (Being able to reliably find it and carry people to it is 99% of that problem.) Also, somehow Whidmore doesn't find them and, through them, find the Island? That's a lot of hoops they'd have to jump through.
The existence of a fail safe key doesn't negate the idea of needing push the button. That's like saying that if you have a fire control system you don't have to follow fire safety protocols with your fireplace. At some point people were being put in that hole by DI which apparently wanted to keep the bunker available for experiments, and so people were instructed to push the button and keep it all safe, whether or not DI still existed they thought it did and handed down those instructions. Yes there was a fail safe, but use of that ended any potential usefulness of the bunker, thus they had to keep pushing the button or bad things would happen all the way up until somebody triggered the fail safe.
Yes, the Dharma Initiative had a reason to maintain the status quo and take the risk. But from a global safety perspective, the real fix was destroying the station. Similarly, someone might have a reason to keep the Island's light going but from a global safety perspective, the real fix may be to let it go out. Since we don't have enough information to know for sure, this is all speculation and my point here is that the speculation doesn't have to assume that the light had to be preserved just because Jacob said so because the woman who murdered his mother said so. It's fine to assume it and for the writers to go with it, but it's not established as a certainty. We don't know what would have happened if Jack left the cork out other than the Island falling apart, because we see that start.
We're not told the Smoke monster is evil, it's pretty obvious that he's evil. He likes killing people, lots of people, painfully. When not killing people he manipulates people, often into killing other people. He's evil.
I'm pretty sure that in the context of explaining that he couldn't be allowed to leave the Island that it was made pretty clear he was evil and would bring evil to the world with him.
Pulling the cork is only a good thing if it doesn't stay pulled. Keep the cork pulled too long and the Island goes away. The Island, when stupid people aren't doing stupid things with it, seems to be a pretty nice place, cures disease, heals injuries, nice weather. That's the downside, and there's probably a lot more to what the Island can do that we ever saw, we actually spend remarkably on the Island with anybody who knows much about it. Jacob knew the most, and like Hurley said, Jacob had a strong Yoda streak.
It also kills pregnant women, apparently drives women who lose their children crazy, can curse people who get healed by it, and poses a danger to the entire world if the wrong people get a hold of it. Was the danger of the Swan station worth maintaining because of the value of the experiments the Dharma Initiative still wanted to do there? Was the danger of the Island worth maintaining because of the good things it could do? And we don't know how much of what Jacob knew was true since he learned a lot from a woman willing to lie and murder. So we're left with a strong but vague impression that it's important to keep the Island going but no certainty that that's the case or what would really happen if it sank into the sea.
We're given more than enough information to know that the world will be a better place without Smoke at all, and if he has to be on it contained on the Island is better than roaming free. And we're given plenty of information that the Island is pretty nice and might actually be useful to the world in the right hands, so the world is better with it.
Unless the bad things on the Island get loose in the future and destory the world, in which case the world isn't better off with it. It's a risk assessment. And like all risk assessments, one can make the case either way depending on how much risk one wants to take.
Destroying Swan, like destroying the Island, is only a good option if you assume nothing useful can be done with it, maybe by DI maybe by somebody else. A big ol source of magnetic power could be pretty useful harnessed right, but you need some sort of Swan station to harness it. So no destroying Swan didn't work out fine, it ended any potential usefulness of Swan.
Destroying the Swan is a good option if you assume that the risk it poses outweighs anything useful that can be done with it.
The old decongestant in Dimetap (not the new formula) was not approved in many other countries and was eventaully banned in the United States. It was probably the best decongestant available and worked better than anything else on the market, but it also poved fatal for a small number of poeple. So the FDA made a call about whether the benefits (effective decongestant) outweighed the risks (death for a few people) and came down on one side, first, and then the other.
We know that the Swan was dangerous but we don't know what benefits might have come out of it. Nobody seemed to care much that it was gone and the hatch became something of a joke. We also know that the smoke monster and, by extension, the light are potentially dangerous, we know some of the benefits of the Island, but we also know that powerful people try to control it to their own ends. So do the risk of a world destroying evil getting loose in the world at some point in the future justify the benefits? I don't think there is one clear right answer to that, especially given all of the unknowns.
I don't think it would have necessarily been better for the authors to let the Island sink, but I think it could have been a viable alternative to consider.
Penny isn't a real character, but whether or not to save the Island is a WITHIN the story decision. You want to know why the characters should keep the Island around, other characters not having escaped is a good reason.
Whether the other characters take Penny or Ji Yeon or little Charlie or Aaron or fake David into account when they make decisions or do is also a decision within the story. So when I ask you why Jin and Sun didn't think of Ji Yeon when the sub was sinking and want Jin to escape to be with her, you basically tell me she's not a real character worthy of consideration because the characters something important that the writers needed them to do. What that suggests is that characters have a pass to ignore other minor characters if they have something more important to do.
The Vorlons and the Shadows were never MacGuffins. Neither were the Reavers. They were all in story things, not sought after things, and they all had intrinsic value in the story (Vorlons and Shadows had great tech, and made useful allies in the short term, Reavers were a kick ass super army).
By the same token, I could argue that The Force was never a MacGuffin in Star Wars because The Force was very much a story thing that was dealt with in quite a bit of detail in all three of the first movies -- what it was, how it works, what you can do with it, and so on. Yet you are holding midichlorians up as an example of a revealed MacGuffin.
Sorry but I've never seen a MacGuffin revealed that wasn't a disaster. I suppose it's theoretically possible, but so far in story telling history there's a big fat 0fer on doing it successfully.
Given that I'm still not certain we have a working definition of what is or isn't a MacGuffin and if we are going to keep using the term, I need a definition that can be used to sort out story elements and some examples. George Lucas, Mr. Midichlorian, has said that R2-D2 is the MacGuffin in Star Wars yet Alfred Hitchcock, credited with coining the term for movies, defined a MacGuffin as something where the audience doesn't care what it specifically is. By Hitchcock's definition, anything in Lost that a large part of the audience cared about isn't really a MacGuffin while according to Lucas, you could claim that Ji Yeon, Penny, and Aaron are all MacGuffins.
It might be more constructive to talk about what differentiates a mystery that the authors should solve versus a mystery that they can or even should leave unsolved.
There's nothing wrong with the mystery being unsolvable until the end. That doesn't change the fact that those clues were a clear indication that this alternate reality was not just the same world with the same people sans-Island.
I agree that there is nothing wrong with the mystery being unsolvable until the end but it changes the way the audience reacts to it. The audience can't be expected to guess exactly what's going on so they are going to speculate. And that means that one should expect the audience to react to a revelation that they weren't expecting and that they may react negatively to it if they don't like the official explanation or even if they like their own explanation better. When people care about a mystery, they care about the answers to it and they care if the answers seem dumb to them.
The clues might not have been enough to give us the pocket heaven explanation, but they were enough to rule out alternate reality.
While I think your observations about the behavior of the characters was sufficient to warrant some suspicion, I don't think it was strong enough to rule out anything. As you've pointed out, all television shows have rought spots and things that get dropped or handled poorly. And given that people are alternately being told that they should have just gone with the flow of the story instead of getting so caught up in the details of the mysteries, I don't think anyone could be expected to give much weight to that sort of clue. I've seen movies and shows that can do that but Lost just wasn't tight enough for that.
I'm not blaming anybody for making a wrong guess, I'm pointing out that your complaints about your wrong guess aren't the writers' fault, you came up with an answer you liked and ignored the evidence that your answer didn't fly. I don't blame you, it just makes your complaint that they gotcha'd in the last episode invalid. There was no gotcha, the clues were there all season that your answer was wrong.
As I've already explained, I do not think my theory is inconsistent with the evidence as presented up until the end. You choose to assume that Jacob and the Island had no real effect on the lives of the characters if before they got on that plane and I don't make that assumption. Simply changing whether Jacob talked to various characters as children could have changed everything about their lives, even just because it changed the pacing and timing of the rest of their lives. A split second can change everything because it throws all the timing of a person's life off. The time travel drama Journeyman did an excellent job playing with that. In one episode changing the main character's child because a change he had made had made him busy the night they had conceived the child he knew and they had a different child, instead.
The numbers also seemed to turn up everywhere in the lives of the characters and that changing, too, could have changed everything. The alternate reality Hugo and Miles also don't seem to be able to talk to dead people, which could explain why Hugo doesn't wind up in an institution and while Miles is a cop.
Yes, your thematic and spritual explanation for all of those change also makes sense but it is not the only sensible explanation for what we were seeing until the very end. That the Island was destroyed in the 1970s makes it entirely possible that the changes in the alternate reality didn't consist only of the plane landing instead of crashing but of entire lives going in different directions. All sorts of other things would have changed without the island before those people even got on that plane.
The nature the flash sideways world wasn't a MaGuffin. Flash sideways had intrinsic value in the story, it was a continuing epoch of the characters, and wasn't a source of stress and conflict between the character. Eventually it had to be revealed what they were flashing to, much like the flash forwards.
Jack and Locke argued, in ways that paralleled their arguments from the Island. Jack and Juliet were divorced. Sawyer and Miles argued. Sayid got screwed, again. Kate was still a convict on the run and you'll remember several of them in jail together. Charlie was being a jerk to Desmond right until the end. So I saw plenty of stress and conflict between the characters, without even touching on the characters not worthy to join them in the Church.
I'm not arguing out of both sides of anything. But you're trying to make this about me is getting kind of sad.
I'm addressing the quality of your arugments, not you personally.
To me, you seem to be arguing from opposite positions depending on the subject. You point to midichlorians as an example of why certain mysteries are always better left mysteries and then when I suggest that the alternet reality could have been left a mystery, you argue that doing so would have left people confused, as if they weren't confused about dozens of other things you said were better left mysteries. Is it OK for the writers to leave things mysteries or not? And if you want to claim that the dividing line is whether it's a MacGuffin or not, I want you to explain how you draw that line.
From my perspective, the reveal that the alternate reality was an antechamber to Heaven was a midichlorian-like reveal. I would have been happier if they had just said nothing and left it a mystery in both cases.
He wasn't turning to Jack or question his qualifications anymore. We went over this already, look up 5 or 6 posts ago. And there's nothing wrong with having a lieutenant to bounce ideas off of. We see what a pinhead Yoda-wannabe Jacob turned into. Like Locke points out, you can't do it all yourself, even if you do have self confidence.
I'm going to see if I can rewatch it when it's repeated on Saturday with an eye toward your perspective and see how it flies for me looking at it your way. I suspect it will help improve the events on the Island for me but won't solve the problem I have with the alternate universe not being real.
It wouldn't be impossible to explain, but it would need additional explanation. Which would probably wind up silly. Had their "memories" stayed current with where they were in the parallel timeline it would have required a lot less explanation.
I don't think it needs an explanation and certainly not a detailed one. I'd accept it with expanation just like I accepted everyone bouncing through time for part of season 5 without any real explanation and we're supposed to accept that they somehow all "made" a pocket universe to meet in after death. The Island did it seems to be a good answer for so many other things, I'd be fine with that for this. And anyone who isn't fine with that has plenty of other things to not be fine with because they had the same answer.
It wasn't an explanation, it was just a defining of parameters. Island world real, non-Island world afterlife. No explanations. There's still a certain MacGuffiny aspect in we don't really know how they made this pocket afterlife, it just happened.
Is the alternate reality a MacGuffin or not? That caring too much about it seemed to make it not work for me and that the explanation I got seemed more midichlrian than not would suggest that by the definitions you seem to be using that it was. And as such, wouldn't it be better off if, like th Island, they never really said what it was and just left it undefined?
My perspectives haven't changed and once again stop trying to make this about me. This has been an interesting discussion, but you're turning the corner into making it a stupid personal argument.
And, again, I'm not making this personal. I'm trying to reconcile why you make one argument in one case and a seemingly opposite argument in another.
In one case, you argue that the whole Island was fine as a MacGuffin with no explanation and yet you seem to be arguing that the alternate reality needed to be explained as expressed by all of your reservations over my suggestion it would hve been better off not explained. You also call it "MacGuffiny", which isn't really helpful (is it or isn't it?). You previously said that MacGuffins are best not explained to avoid the midichlorian problem (which is certainly my reaction to their explanation) so then wouldn't it have been better off if they hadn't explained it? Maybe I'm not getting someting here. You said it is preferable that the Island remain an unexplained MacGuffin but you also seem to be fine that the alternate reality was given a specific explanation (that's midichlorian-level risky -- saying it wasn't real) and were raising concerns over the confusion a lack of explanations might cause, which sounded exactly like the complaints people made about the Island never being explained that you'd previously dismissed by declaring the Island a MacGuffin. So what makes the Island a MacGuffin but the alternate reality not suitable as a MacGuffin?
Another example is that you argued that the characters needed to overcome their flaws to move on. Yet your explanation for why Locke doesn't wind up with Helen, who very much still seemed interested in him in the alternate reality, was that Helen respresented the off-Island life that Locke hated. But wasn't that the single-mindedness that got him into so much trouble throughout and drove Helen away? And if he really came to term with his demons and achieved enlightenment, then wouldn't that also have removed all of the obstacles that kept him apart from Helen, who was still important enough that she was part of the alternate reality for him along with his father? In other words, if he's unloaded all of his negative baggage by the time he goes ot the Church, or even before that when he agreed to the operation (which, along with his acceptance of his daddy issues, was what seemed to be keepign him and Helen apart in the alternate universe), then why would that negative baggage have prevented him from being with Helen at the end? My point is that you cannot have baggage and no baggage at the same time. X AND NOT X is a contradicition. So if it's the baggage that's keeing him from Helen, why is he going to the Church and if it's not the baggage that's keeping him from Helen, then what is such that he enters the Church alone and never gets a soul-mate like most of the other characters??
In the first season we get the Smoke monster, Rousseau, the Others, the lottery numbers and the radio beacon. Lots of outsiders, lots of stuff from outside. Then there's all the people dieing, doesn't really make sense in purgatory, especially people like Boone and clearly hadn't redeemed himself.
Evidence of outsiders coming in and being there, too, but no evidence of anyone leaving. As for people dying, people die in the pocket purgatory, too. Sayid kills a few people, for example. But I do think that helps make the case against pergatory. I would argue that Boone had redeemed himself by the time he died and remember feeling, at the time, that he was done as a character. What else did he need to do?
Talia Winters (really Andrea Thompson) was such a vicious drag on every scene she was in that no matter how they got rid of her the end result was guaranteed to be a better story. She was just a horrible actress that caused the character to be annoying and stories that revolved around the character to be painful. That's probably a big part of why the story that wrote her out was bad, it had to focus on her in the A plot for most of the episode, and she was called upon to emote and other things she turns out to be no good at. It probably would have been better to just have one of the characters mention she tripped in the shower and broke her neck.
I didn't hate her that much, though I thought he lesbian side story was a bit forced. Regardless of how bad the character or actress were, the whole sleeper agent story just felt forced and two bads don't make a good.
I realize I'm bucking a large part of scifidom but I'll stand by it. Farscape was a stupid show, poorly acted, poorly written, and I'm glad it's gone.
And that's your opinion. My wife an I liked it enough that one of my children has a Farscape-based name. Neither opinion is the only objectively correct one. And I'm not sure why you should be care whether a show you don't like is on or not.
You might be "qualified to opine" but it doesn't make your opinions right. And it doesn't mean that the things you're saying they should have done would have actually resulted in a better story. All of them would have ground the narrative to a halt for pointless introductions and meaningless emotive scenes. Maybe 3 episodes from the end, but not in the last episode and very much not in the final scene of the last episode.
I gave you three changes that would have changed nothing in the narrative pacing. The first is to have Jin leave Sun behind for the sake of their daughter, which is what normally passes for real character growth in stories (life is about more than just you and parents have obligations to their children, no matter how inconvenient). The second was to either declare the alternate reality a parallel universe or simply leave it's nature ambiguous. No real changes there. Locke's "Jack, you don't have a son." becomes, maybe, "Jack, you have a son?" The third is to detach the church from the alternate reality by only showing them entering from the inside, to leave it's connection ambiguous. The only changes there are to change the dialog as necessary to allow for the alternate universe explanation or for ambiguity.
Some less important changes I might have made would include having some sort of gathering (the concert might have worked for that) where they all get to meet in the alternate universe and greet each other. That would hve taken only minutes of screen time. I would also have had Locke reconcile with Helen and plan to get married so they'd be together at the end, again, a very brief change. That would have fixed all of the major problems I had with the end.
The reason for me talking about Jack reacting to David not being real was an attempt to fix the pocket purgatory explanation in which David isn't real. It helped illustrate why I thought choosing that explanation was awkward and lame. Having Jack not even react damaged the Jack character portrayal for me, just as Sun and Jin not thinking of their daughter damaged those character portrayals for me. To assume that those reactions were suitably for those characters would leave me to believe that all three characters have serious unflattering personality flaws.
Having Jin survive wouldn't just rob me of their final scene together. In the series recap the writers talked about how the eternal question for that was would they or wouldn't they manage to stick together, and having them die together gave that a resounding yes. I wasn't making it up as their goal, I stole that statement straight from the writers, that WAS their goal.
And once they gave those characters a child, it raised more important "eternal questions" about a parent's obligations to their child. Jin's decision to die with Sun has parallels with James Ford's father's decision to kill himself and his mother rather than think about his son's welfare, or, for that matter, Ben's father who was so distraught over not having Ben's mother that he took it out on Ben. In fact, we're given plenty of other examples of parents that put other things before their children (Ben letting them kill Alex, Kate's mother turning on Kate in favor of an abusive father) and also examples of people putting their children first (Charlie's brother who quits the drug and party scene to take care of his new family). Yet when it comes to Sun and Jin, child comes in last. And I'm hardly the only person bothered by that.
I think that was a clear fumble on the part of the writers, where they were so intent to get a particular scene that they weren't being a character driven drama. They were staging a Kodak moment without regard for what it said about the characters. If the writers really wanted it to be all about Sun and Jin, then they shouldn't have given them a daughter. Discarding the daughter they did give them was not he answer.
Put another way, I think answering the question of would they or wouldn't they stick together, with a "No" because their daughter had become more important to them would have been the better answer.
The metacritic number comes from checking the various places that rate TV shows. It's not random, but it's not a web poll either. It's Rotten Tomatoes for TV, pooling reviews and ratings to look at reaction of a large population of reviewers.
The problem is that it's not taking a representative slice of the entire audience, just the poeple who rate TV shows on the web. That it has good ratings certainly means tha that a lot of people were happy, but I don't think either of us can draw sound conclusions from anecdotal or selective evidence either way. Even the ratings aren't a reliable indicator because of the increase in DVRs and online viewing that impact the ratings.
I don't know why the killed the Cult of Jacob. I just liked that it meant we no longer had to deal with them and their temple that didn't make any sense. From a results oriented point of view killing off that don't make sense is good, sure it would be better if they hadn't existed in the first place, but at least their gone.
They could have avoided that whole Sayid subplot that didn't really add anything to the story, either.
What I understand is that you’re just trying to prove you’re smarter than everyone who watched the show. That, and your wasting my time.
Whatever, dude. I’m laughing at the superior intellect.
I do, however, apologize for mixing cultural references.
Namaste and/or Live long and prosper.
I would have completely avoided the Wizard of Oz thing. That was hokey the first time and hasn’t aged well. Truthfully the first time I saw Oz at 5 or 6 years old I didn’t know what cheesy was yet but I knew that ending was something bad I eventually learned was called cheesy. I did like that it was Gene’s 1973 foot that stepped on Mars though, a cool touch.
SPOILER
In the British one though he wakes up from his coma in normal modern times, hates modern times and all their PC BS, comes to grips with his love for Annie, feels guilt over the situation he left the squad in back in ‘73 (they were about to die) and jumps off the top of police headquarters dies in modern times but goes back to ‘73 to save the day, confess his love to Annie, and fully integrate himself with the squad. While I personally think it’s a happy ending, I can see how American TV producers would have gotten to the “he jumps and dies” part and said: hell no that’s way too big a downer for American TV”.
Really though both versions are great shows, other than the WOZ part the American version is awesome. And of course being set in 1973, which all Simpsons fans know is the year rock and roll achieved technical perfection, the soundtrack is too die for.
I’ll have to come back for the Lost discussion, I’m in final prep for a cross country trip. Truly having fun with this conversation.
They are all dead. In the Island and in the flash sideways, which are purgatory, limbo, whatever. After dying, people have a chance to redeem themselves there. Most of the characters accomplished that. Ben hasn’t yet, for example, and he can’t - or doesn’t want - to move on; some people simply don’t want to move on, like Daniel’s mom - because they are too attached to “life”. They do know they are dead, but just want to stay where they are.
In that scenario, children really don’t matter, because they don’t have anything to atone for. They are just accessories for the adults - as well as are dogs... (I love dogs!)
And the Island is real. It exists. In other plane, in other dimension, but it exists. And it has to be protected, because there are evil forces (aka MIB, smoke monster) that want it to be no more, so there won’t be a place of redemption, people will move on - to nothingness.
Gosh, yours seems more convoluted, but then again, the ending they presented fits my own concept of Heaven better than yours, so perhaps that’s why I liked it better. Since it’s all just fiction anyway I suppose we are free to interpret it as we see fit. I liked the way it fit together, however I intend to get the entire series when it comes out and spend time rewatching it and see if I like it as much afterwards, since I’m sure I”ve forgotten a lot of it. After all it HAS been 6 years!
:)
I am not completely convinced that Ben is dead. I wonder if he isn’t ready because he’s really still alive on the island. Just a thought. And of course....who really knows.
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