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.
This, more than anything, is what really bothered me about the ending.
Walt? Nothing despite all of the drama revolving around Michael getting him off of the island. The kids on the island wandering around like extras from Lord of the Flies and the kids taken by the Others? They seemed to vanish without a trace. Aaron? I guess he gets to be a perpetual baby in Heaven or something like that and all that time Kate raised him doesn't matter. Jack's and Juliet's son David? After being taken to the concert, he seems to vanish and nobody seems to care what happened to him, since I guess he wasn't real, anyway. As for Sun and Jin, not only does Sun leave Ji Yeon, but when she's dying, neither Sun nor Jin even mention her. And in the alternate reality, she's also pregnant and it seemed important that she not lose the baby there, either, but what of the pregnancy and baby? Not really? Perpetually pregnant in Heaven? Alex gets a happy ending in the alternate universe but that's not real and Ben doesn't seem to bothered by it. So kids in lost were important, motivated characters to risk life and limb and pregnant women being in danger of death was important until, well, it just suddenly wasn't important anymore. Ugh. The more I think about it, after the emotional manipulation of teary reunions and and dramatic music wears off, the worse it gets.
I’ve come to the conclusion, because this is common in anime (Japanese animation) is that people often equate incomprehensible with deep and meaningful because they assume there is a meaning there that they can’t really see. Sometimes, it really is just a bunch of nonsense that’s not particulraly deep or profound but simply a confusing mess.
I think the dropping of Walt has a simple explanation. In the four months or so (give or take a few flash forwards and flash backs, Walk would have grown up about four feet into a teenager now, six years later.
Either they come up with some hokey story line about how fast he’s aging, or they drop it. A practicality they maybe didn’t think through before initially proposing he was ‘special’.
We’re looking forward to watching it all again, when it comes out on DVD, and see what we see differently the same or had forgotten about the first time around. :~)
Correct (IMHO, of course LOL) ....he was waiting for Alex and Rousseau.
I think the biggest clue to figure it out yourself came outside the church when Hurley thanked Ben for being a good Number 2 and Ben said Hurley was a good Number 1. That was a huge nod to The Prisoner, a show that never answered any of it’s questions, and the creator was quite fond of turning the question around when asked, and frequently agreed with whatever idea fans presented. McGoohan at least publicly seemed to consider the viewer’s theories to be important and internally correct, what you think the show is is what the show is, at least for you. And the Lost guys seem to have taken that path, I don’t know if that was their original goal, but they did seem to really like hearing from fans and fan interpretations, so I think in the end they took the McGoohan approach, don’t contradict the fans, give them an incomplete canvas, let them paint the rest, and thank them for caring.
The kids on the island and the kids the Others took away? Walt? Ji Yeon? Aaron as a child rather than a newborn? Desmond and Penny's son Charlie? Do any of the show's writers actually have children?
It's all pretty reasonable, the Island stuff happened, the flash sideways was a pocket afterlife, we still don't know what the Island is but any deeper explanation beyond "it happened" would get hokey.
How do we know it happened? What difference would it have made it if were simply a fanasy? The net result in the end is that it didn't really make much of a difference other than, perhaps, to a handful out of a much larger group of people, who were there or believe they were.
I think of it as a lot like Fantasy Island, FI was a place people went to get fixed, all the characters on Lost were seriously broken people at the beginning, but most of them managed to finish in some semblance of whole.
Maybe it's the narcissism behind the idea that only that handful of characters ever really mattered through everything they went through in the show is what bothers me. Everything else, the children characters had (I forgot to add Desmond and Penny's son Charlie to the list above), the Dharma people, the "extras" ranging in importance from Zoe and Arzt to Rousseau and Alex, and even Jacob and his brother all didn't really matter and were just props for the few characters that did matter to realize themselves and move on without a second thought. Blech. Maybe I just cared about the wrong characters or too many of them. It's like the classic Star Trek episode Spectre of the Gun.
They could have at least made an attempt to deal with Walt in the show, especially since they raised him as an issue, again, later in the show.
Walt left the Island and stopped being an Island guy.
Aaron was even less an Islander, born there sure, but left at just a few weeks old.
Jack and Juliet’s kid only existed in pocket heaven. He was more a symbol of Jack having finally beaten his father issues.
Sun and Jin’s kid from the Island era was a definite drop, but the pocket heaven one was again symbolic, this time of them finding each other in a permanent way. Remember separation and re-unification is the theme of their relationship.
Ben chooses to stay in pocket heaven, presumably with Alex and her mother.
I have never seen ‘The Prisoner,’ but I have heard of it, and I really appreciate that type of writing. Like I sort of said in my previous, it definitely gave me something to think about while I watched it. I used to love to write in my youth, and this level of creativity fascinates me.
I just mentioned the kids in another post to you so I’ll skip that.
We don’t necessarily know it happened, given that the question of reality is a big part of the show. But Christian says it happened so we go from there. And the net result isn’t that it didn’t really matter. The events on the Island fixed a lot of people, remember who they were in the first season, a large collection of seriously screwed up people many with daddy issues, drug problems, incest problems, dysfunctional marriages, and just generally confused. And they come out the other side whole, having solved their issues. That was one of the first clues that the flash sideways was something else, if you notice most of them in flash sideways are much happier people than they were in the main stream.
The mattered to each other, again remember what Christian said to Jack, these were the people that mattered during the most important time of his life. And if you look at the other characters it runs the other direction. All of them in the church fixed themselves with the help of the other people in the church. There were Dharma people in the group.
Jacob mattered, he brought the people to the Island. His brother mattered, he was the constant adversary that caused the Island to work the way it worked (Jacob had to keep it hard to leave so his brother wouldn’t leave and destroy the world). As for the others, they were on their own journey. That’s something that actually got discussed sideways in the episode about the jewel thieves, that these other people that were there weren’t necessarily on the same journey. They were to the side of the story, like the second group in Shaun of the Dead, there, certainly on their own story, maybe even an interesting story, but not fully connected to this story. You can see that with Rose and Bernard, they were there with everybody but they fixed their problems before everybody and just bailed, setup a house in the jungle and enjoyed life without all the drama.
If you chose to see The Prisoner (and I highly recommend it, some of it is mindbending and it can be hard to watch, but it’s pretty awesome) avoid the remake at all costs, it’s horrible in every possible way. About the only thing the remake is good for is it shows why these kinds of shows shouldn’t answer the questions, they answered them in the remake and their answers were stupid.
I like shows that give you something to think about after. For one thing it gives more rewatchability. I know 10 years from now when I’m a different person Lost will be a different show for me. Just like Prisoner, every time I watch it the show is different, both from the different things I notice and the different things I bring to finish the canvas.
When was the original series done?
Late 1960s, in England.
My take is that the Sideways world was not so much a purgatory as an anteroom.
And it was JACK’S anteroom.
Christian Shephard (note the name) told Jack there was no such thing as ‘now’ where they were as time is relative. Everyone waiting for him in Church are dead....but they could have died at any time. Before the Island, on the Island, or after the Island.
What matters is that for all these people (those in the church) is that the people with them and the time that they spent on, around and about the Island was the best, most important time in their life and that they want [need] to be together so they can move on out of the anteroom and into Heaven proper as a group…..Jack’s group. It is there they will meet the children and all the others that one would expect.
While many things do remain unexplained, we learned the answer to that in "Across the Sea."
Interesting take that it’s Jack’s pocket heaven. That would explain the “missing” characters, Walt and Michael just weren’t that big a deal to Jack he hardly interacted with them at all, and he didn’t know about Sun and Jin’s kid. Also explains why Ben didn’t go with, he was focal enough that he’s going to have to fill his own church with people who helped him get to where he landed.
Yeah, but what about the ESP and the Outsiders really wanting him and so on? It seems like they just said, "Whatever. That was so last season."
Aaron was even less an Islander, born there sure, but left at just a few weeks old.
That's not the issue. Was Aaron important to Claire or not? Was he important to Kate, who spent three years raising him as a mother and dumped Jack because of him or not? Kate never mentioned (that I can remember) that she leftAaron with Claire's mother. So in the end, he's not really a person and nobody seems interested in him because he's not a person. He's a prop. They could have substituted a Baby-Wets-A-Lot doll for all it mattered in the end, despite how much those two women supposedly cared about him. He didn't really matter at all. That's not how real people think about their children unless they are narcissists.
Jack and Juliet's kid only existed in pocket heaven. He was more a symbol of Jack having finally beaten his father issues.
Let me put it this way to you...
I'm married and have two young daughters. If I were to suddenly find out that my two young daughters were just some sort of pergatory prop that wasn't real and didn't matter, I'd be pretty angry.
Sun and Jin's kid from the Island era was a definite drop, but the pocket heaven one was again symbolic, this time of them finding each other in a permanent way.
Earlier in the show, the baby and making sure she was safe was a primary motivation for both of the characters but by the end, all they cared about was each other? And when they died on the island, which was all supposed to be real and actually have happened, neither one of them thought, "Jin, you should live so our daugther can know her father"? Huh?
Remember separation and re-unification is the theme of their relationship.
So they aren't supposed to be real people, either, but just symbols? While I know character's in fiction often serve as symbols, if they aren't more than just symbols, then I don't have much of a reason to care about them. And I think you are right. What bothered me about the last few episodes was that Sun and Jin stopped being real people for me and by the end of the finale, they all stopped acting like real people.
Ben chooses to stay in pocket heaven, presumably with Alex and her mother.
But what's real and what's not real in the "pocket heaven"? Is any of it real? Apparently Jack's son isn't, so why would Alex and her mother be real?
They finally had the perfect way to have their cake and eat it too, just like J. J. Abrams did in the Star Trek movie, by forking reality into two parallel lines, in one of which they all got their happy ending, but they decided to go for pure symbolism, instead. I'm not impressed.
Yes....I expect it is a very busy church with many services.
Alex, Rousseau Ben and others (no pun intended).
Ana Lucia later on.
I suspect that if anybody is going to close down the Church, it will be the Widmore Clan....[wink]
So, some people didn’t like the show from the beginning, have quibbles with the middle, or don’t like the way it ended. I for one think it was the best TV ever.
It was a wild six year ride and I loved every minute of it. If you do more than just try to follow the story and fit some of the references together (Jeff Jensen at Entertainment Weekly was incredible in his analysis of the show), then you can see how absolutely brilliant the writers and producers were.
Does it bother me that there are some loose end? Not so much. Sure, questions remain unanswered. But that doesn’t spoil the six years I’ve had looking forward to every episode.
I loved the finale and how they all “remembered.” I’m not entirely sold (yet) on the final resolution, but I’m okay with it.
If people didn’t like the show, I have no problem with that. As for the people who want to say it was stupid or not worth watching or poorly done, to quote Hurley, “Whatever, dude.”
Namaste.
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