This is my LOST post. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I avoided watching LOST for a long time, despite knowing that I would enjoy it somewhat. I didn’t know back then the extent to which I could enjoy a television serial. I had up to that point read books, watched movies, and played games during my considerable leisure time and I didn’t relish the idea of adding a new FORM to the fold. That changed when I started watching Heroes at the suggestion of my friend Erik. He described it as a live-action comic book, and it delivered on that characterization right up to the part where it eschews clarity of overarching narratives for short-term flashiness and started to suck major balls. When Heroes went on a mid-season hiatus, I decided that I was quite a fan of the hour-length serial drama and I started watching LOST. This was during season 3, when the consensus was starting to form that the show had begun to lose its way, if it wasn’t full-on jumping the shark. I caught up in a matter of weeks, and the first live broadcast I caught was “Exposé”, one of the most polarizing episodes in the history of the show until last night.
I bring this up because I fucking loved “Exposé.” I loved Nikki and Paulo, and their stupid little sexy diamond subplot and their grisly demise under all that dirt and rock. I really enjoyed those self-contained flashbacks in season three, a time most fans would rather forget. The story goes that the producers intentionally made “Stranger in a Strange Land” so awful to help negotiate an end date for the show, and that it worked. These are the types of stories you’ll get if you don’t let us control the pacing of the end of the show. Sure, “Stranger” was a clunker, but I was totally down with the episode where Sawyer conned that guy in jail, or Locke in the weed commune. I look back on that year fondly as I reflect on the reveal of last night’s season-long troll.
LOST has a history of taking long-running jokes and making them into actual plot points and asking us to take them seriously. The first time this came to my attention was in season 4:
When Ben informed us near the end that we were going to MOVE THE ISLAND, it was certainly bad ass, but the guy who made this gif called it (in a way) during season 1. Likewise, Jorge Garcia made a joke at Comic-Con last year about Shannon’s inhaler (a classic example of a “loose end” that only the ‘spergiest zealot would remember), and Hurley ends up finding it in the final season. When Sayid starts acting like a zombie, we’re reminded of the dozens of references Lindelof and Cuse made to the secret ZOMBIE SEASON where shit hits the fan and zombies invade the island. These are all fun little references that reward fans who spend countless hours of their free time watching, rewatching, and discussing the show. One of my favorites was the idea of a giant cork that someone would pull and it would sink the island, cut to L O S T.
As an aside, I have a problem to address about the cave real quick. Over the course of the series, we’ve been introduced to some fascinating mysteries on and off the island. For instance, maybe Hurley would be seen in the Hatch drinking some Dharma Kool-Aid, and he would remark to Ana-Lucia “Dude, this is the best flavor of Kool-Aid I’ve ever tasted.” Ana-Lucia would then ask, “What flavor is it?” The camera would then cut to Hurley’s stoic face for a full ten seconds while the horn music swells and he would say “It’s the most important flavor of your entire life.” At that point, you would get excited. You would say “Holy shit! If only I knew what flavor of Kool-Aid that was, I would have a completely new understanding of what is going on in the island!” You would pore over Lostpedia and all the theory pages for any reference to Kool-Aid previously on the show. Of course you would find some piece of dialogue in season 1 where Boon mentions offhand in a flashback that his mom used to own a company that made flavored drink powder, and there you would have it. A theory about the connection between Boon and the Dharma Initiative would be born. It would be common knowledge in fan communities that Boon’s family was involved in the DI, and half of the fans would believe that Boon is a descendant of Magnus Hanso. That’s how mysteries USED to work on the show. But in the last couple years, something strange happened: we started getting answers, and the questions were so built-up in our minds that every single thing was an anticlimax. In the case of our made-up Kool-Aid mystery, we’d pick it up in season 5, when Hurley was a chef in the 70’s. Some Dharma underline would come up to him with a clipboard and say “Mr. Reyes, we need your signature on this Kool-Aid order,” and Hurley would sign it and say “Hey, make sure you get extra of that one flavor I like.” And that’d be the end of it. By the end of season 6, I was so used to this kind of non-explanation for mysteries that, when shown the weird glowy cave in “Across the Sea,” I didn’t even consider what might be inside of it. It never crossed my mind once. When they started to go inside the cave, I was almost surprised. I never thought “What the hell is inside the cave!?” All I ever thought was “What the hell could possibly be inside the cave that I would care about?”
This Purgatory stuff is way, way, WAY stupider than anything I’ve been talking about.
Back in the day, “The island is Purgatory!” was the go-to joke to make fun of stupid theories. It’s so popular to make fun of this idea that Kevin Smith used it in Zack and Miri Make a Porno, when the dumbest bitch in that movie makes a comment about how she thinks that the island is Purgatory. Now I KNOW that the island is not Purgatory. I know that because the producers went out of their way to tell us, again and again, that the island was not Purgatory, or some Autistic kid’s dream or anything like that. Why did they do that? Because those types of endings are trite, cheap, and manipulative, and they wanted to assert LOST as above that type of silliness. LOST was something new to television. It was a fully-realized serial fantasy sci-fi drama on Primetime network television. Nothing like it had ever been made. The island is not Purgatory, but we did just spend the last season flashing sideways to a spiritual waiting room where people who died go to work some stuff out before they move on to the non-denominational afterlife. That IS Purgatory. Why, oh why, would you want the final reveal of your entire series to be so closely associated with the oldest joke about the dumbest, most casual LOST viewers? What do you gain by pulling a cop-out of that magnitude?
I have two main problems with the way they handled the end to the flash-sideways. The first is that the whole episode was emotionally manipulative in a way that LOST has never really had to rely on before. It’s full of scene after scene of characters coming in contact with their Constants, followed by a montage of on-island scenes, and what amounts to a tearful reunion when they realize that they (and we as viewers) had such history together. By the third time this happened, I had become pretty jaded to it. I watched the finale with my girlfriend (http://twitter.com/danismi) and she’s cried at every LOST finale since “Through the Looking Glass,” and a bunch of just regular episodes, but she was able to contain herself until the fucking dog showed up. I’ve already read several posts on the internet that say basically that same thing. Why did that scene, where Vincent shows up and lies down next to a dying Jack, make so many people emotional? Several people (Danielle included) have already said that all they could think during that scene was “Good boy…good doggy.” The source of the emotion came from their pre-existing emotional attachment to dogs. I mean, it’s not like Vincent really had anything to do with the story for the last four years, and he definitely never had any sort of meaningful relationship with Jack. It was a really good visual callback to the first scene in the series, but that’s it. The finale was full of callbacks with little or no substance.
My main, HUGE, UNDERLINE-WITH-ARROWS-POINTING-TO-IT problem with the Purgatory ending was that itliterally had nothing to do with anything. This dawned on me slowly about fifteen minutes after I finished watching. The fact that the flash sideways take place after everyone is already dead (or rather, that they seem to tap into it at the moment of their death) means that it has literally no connection to everything else that happens on the show. Devin Faraci at CHUD.com put it this way: “any ending for a show like Lost that feels like it could more or less be used to end any other TV show in history is probably an oversimplified ending.” And that’s what happened here. Some of these people died during the course of the show, and some of them lived way longer (I think the part that captures my imagination most is the thought of Hurley and Ben’s thousand-year reign as masters of the island. More on that later), but when they die they go to LA X and find redemption…somehow…only not. It doesn’t matter how many toes the statue has because we’re all fucking dead in the end. Maybe that’s what they were trying to tell us. Just leave your fucking room and quit worrying about TV for a day and enjoy the fact that you’re alive. Maybe I will.
One of the best nicknames I’ve heard for the alt-timeline universe is, of course, the Hurleyverse; so named because Hurley was basically a huge pimp in this universe and had his finger in many pies. It was a benevolent universe where Hurley was a captain of industry, a generous philanthropist, and the most decent human being you’re likely to meet. When Jack opened the coffin and nobody was in it, and then he had a long chat with his dead father, I had a flash where I thought I knew the ending. It was already apparent that this whole thing was a flash-forward of a kind (although it turned out to be an omni-directional flash really when you think about it), so when Christian says “Where do you think we are?” the first thing I thought was “They’re on the fucking island!” Only it’s Hurley’s island, complete with his 21stcentury ideals and philosophies. It’d been established before that the island is a place where dead souls just sort of hover around, whispering to people in freaky ways that don’t make sense. It’s not unfathomable to think that in the thousands of years in which I choose to believe Hurley oversaw the island, he was able to use the power of the Source to become a focal point of souls where he can place them in lives that make sense to them, where they are completely free of Jacob’s influence, and where they are free to find the good in themselves without the horrors of the island. In other words, it’s the type of world that Hurley would create.
But no, it was Purgatory and they’re all dead, but now they get to go into the vague light and end their vague show in the most meaningless way possible. It’s been over 24 hours since I saw it and I’m starting to come to grips with the fact that it’s really over. I watched this show for three and a half years and it hasn’t left my head since the day I saw Jack’s eye open in that bamboo field. I understand that Television is an inherently different medium from literature and film, and it’s fundamentally unfair to compare a 120 hour story to a five hundred page one in terms of cohesion, but that only explains the problems with the writing; it doesn’t make them go away. The truth is, there has never been anything like this on television, on this scale at least. The fact that they made it to the point where some doofus on the internet can rip it to shreds is the greatest triumph in the industry’s history. I love this show so god damn much, and I will never forget cuddling up on my couch in my first apartment with my Constant and tearing the finale a new asshole. Or, rather, weird stone cork hole.
