Lost in Lost – yet another finale review
Spoiler alert – if you haven’t already watched the finale of Lost you probably shouldn’t read the following…
No, I didn’t get up at 5AM to watch the Lost finale, clever piece of marketing though that scheduling was by Sky. If I had hauled myself out of my pit at that unlikely hour I’d have been mighty annoyed when, after the ‘previously on Lost’ preamble, up popped a ‘TEMPORARY FAULT’ card. A few moments of sound sync problems followed. Early risers must have been choking on their Bran Flakes.
Instead I watched it on Sky+ in the evening. It still felt like a proper TV event – the end of an era and all that. Because, whether or not you enjoyed it, Lost was an important TV show, a network offering that threw away the rulebook, playing free and loose with genres, narrative structures, and pretty much all the conventions that are used in making stuff that appears on that box in the corner of your room.
Lost wasn’t afraid to kill off lead characters, introduce a myriad of new ones, switch and ditch plot strands, play with polar bears, ghosts, time travel and mysticism, use flashbacks, flashforwards and, erm, flashsidewayses… they even made an entire episode in Korean for God’s sake. An entire hour of primetime US network television in the Korean language with English subtitles. Astonishing.
Not that it has all been great. I briefly gave up on watching Lost regularly somewhere around the middle of season three when it got bogged down in its own nonsense, but, like Jack and co, I ended up being drawn back to the island.
It has been pretty daft, and relentlessly introduced new twists and turns, often without properly exploring the plot strand that were already underway. Most frustratingly, entire storylines were regularly dismissed by subsequent twists, rendering entire strings of episodes that the viewer had spent hours sitting through completely pointless.
But, despite that, Lost produced more than enough excellent episodes and memorable moments to have made it worthwhile. Off the top of my head I’m remembering Charlie’s death scene, the first appearance of the Others, the introduction of Desmond in the hatch to the strains of Mama Cass, the reveal that Jack and Kate would escape the island, Ben allowing his daughter to be murdered…
As for the finale itself, personally I could have done without season six’s sideways flashes in which the now-deceased characters are in a sort of purgatory trying to ‘let go’ and head into the light. My attention always wavered when the show headed off into spiritual territory.
And, let’s face it, the whole thing with the light and the plug was pretty dumb. This was a device that had only been introduced a few episodes earlier, so it didn’t feel like the mysteries of the island that had built up over the previous six years were properly addressed.
As for the claim that the creators knew from the beginning how the show would pan out, I am simply not having it. The show headed down far too many blind alleys along the way for that to have been the case.
That said, the final scenes on the island, where Jack sacrificed himself to save the island and his friends were pretty good. The final shot of his closing eye, echoing the opening shot from the pilot, was fitting and memorable.
There were loads of questions left unanswered of course. Did Desmond make it off the island? Why didn’t the likes of Michael, Walt and Ecko appear in the ‘purgatory’? And what about all of the non-speaking Oceanic 815 passengers who died on the island?
But while we didn’t get all the answers, we did get a resolution, and one that is left open to debate – perfect for blog writers with too much time on their hands. So goodbye Jack, Locke, Kate, Sawyer and co. It was interesting, occasionally annoying, but ultimately a lot of fun.
Previously by me: The mystery of flight 574: In 2007, a Boeing 737 carrying 102 people vanished off the coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia. No distress signal was received and no wreckage could be found. Read more about the ‘real Lost’ here.
