TV COLUMN: 'LOST' - SEASON 6, EPISODE 16

"The End" - Farewell to a Fantastic Island Rife with Fate and Deep Mystery

By: Josh Moorhead

May 26, 2010

First of all, I write this recap based on the dictates of timeliness and not necessarily the comforts of readiness. If I seem a little wobbly on my word-feet, well, I am. I’m still trying to absorb that finale, and I’m sensing that this time, when it comes to Lost yappery and conjecture, I’m not my Spongebob best (happily bright and yellow/absorbent/porous). I’m more like Vincent. I just want to crawl up beside Lost as it takes its last breaths and cuddle close as it fades to black.

Emerging from my self-imposed quarantined finale hatch, I saw a lot of you just outside pulling a John Locke, season one, furiously pounding on my window: “Why? Why would you do this to me?! I’VE DONE EVERYTHING YOU ASKED ME TO DO! SO WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?!” and I’ve had to turn my light on to come and see what the fuss is about. I feel many of you have a feeling that in Lost‘s last breath betrayed you, whispering it was leaving all its estate to something shiny, like say a bright light, and not to you. The riches of answers you felt were yours are never to be inherited; instead, you receive a blinding light that seems like illumination but really isn’t at all.  

I keep saying all this “you” stuff as if I disagree and as if I think “you” are taking it a little too personally. No. Not necessarily. I think many of us, myself included at some point, maybe as early as the pilot episode, decided we were watching a show about an island and that the characters that ran around on it would serve as tools to fill in mythological blanks via their island experiences. The trouble or genius of it is that Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse, et al never seemed to agree with us. And fair to them, they’ve been prepping us for this character-centric show end for many, many weeks this season, saying flat out that their show is about characters.

But a lot of us felt at least a little cheated by our two-and-a-half-hour epic that was a much more intimate affair than we’d expected. Notice my invocations of “us” and “we” — I’m not totally ditching you, naysayer. I was thinking about how the Lost finale compared to other TV send-offs, and I think, for us true island believers, it was tantamount to what it would have been like if the last episode of Seinfeld was just a static shot of an empty Monk’s Diner. “Location?!” Our 1998 selves are yelling. “Where are the characters?! SERENITY NOW!”

And yet this finale did offer a lot of that, even as it demanded the audience view the entirety of the show in a slightly broader or different way. In short and in frank, would I have enjoyed to see a bit more island mystery focus? Sure.

But this finale did not disappoint me, and it surprised me for reasons I didn’t think it would. The emotional assault this finale waged on the audience should have landed it in jail. My heart, already feeling vulnerable going into the end, was not nursed through the finale — it was pummeled. By the time Jack closed his eye, it was stomped to a pulp, ready to be bottled up like jelly to be spread on gold-encrusted PB & J sandwiches that Damon and Carlton will gorge on unsympathetically off into the sunset. The guys have promised to disappear after the finale for some unspecified amount of time, and I wish I was important enough to do the same.

Whether I’m wholly satisfied with it or not, it seems I was mostly right in my estimations of the last few weeks: that the Jacob/MIB-centric “Across the Sea” would be about all the answers we get; that the only definitive knowledge the finale would grant us would be character-based; that Lost would conclude in an open enough way so that we could each own it in our own way and play with it in our onesie jam-jams like happy tykes on Christmas morning. It just seems like some of us unwrapped the thing and said, “What?! Socks?!”

I think what I got out of the finale was pretty cool, and it being new and everything, I’m still trying to put it together, and I’m not totally sure I’m ready to share. But, you know, I guess in the spirit of Christmas…

Last week, I said mainly what I wanted from this finale was for it to be honest, sincere. It most certainly was. And in that character-based way, it was conclusive.

Lost was always about the power of relationships and the power of love. In two years, if it was audacious enough to do so, The Office could end much in the same way. Michael Scott suffers a fatal injury from a George Foreman Grill accident and wakes up in a slightly different Dunder Mifflin. Ricky Gervaise meets him in the boardroom to tell Michael he’s in a kind of purgatory and that these people in this office are the most important folks he’d ever met or hung with in all his days. Mike Scott died at his own time, but eventually so did the rest of them, and now that they’re all ready, they can proceed to the greatest blank sheet of paper of them all.

What you call that blank sheet of paper is what makes the finale personal. The broadness of this scenario and closing message is what makes the finale universally applicable. At the end of the day, almost any entertainment — whether it be The Office, Lost, or your third grade short story about a boy and his magic snowman — is about relationships. And so is life.

To go back to my first sitcom analogy (I think maybe I’m trying to laugh instead of cry), Seinfeld proudly touted itself as a show about nothing. It merely offered us unique, watchable and engaging characters. Lost had the same first priority but decided to be about something. The fact that we as an audience sometimes got our priorities mixed up is both our and the creators’ fault and blessing too.

The show runners of Lost are to be commended for creating a mythology so gripping that we paid so much attention, and frankly, I think they were a little surprised that we did. I think maybe, over the years, we had a greater tug-of-war with them than we realized. I’m thinking about every time we “WTF-ed” a Kate episode or an episode where Hurley drove a van around for an hour. Lost was saying “characters, characters, characters,” and we were responding with the first rule of real estate, “location, location, location (Island! Island! Island! Mystery! Mystery! Mystery!).” The fact that this is so personal is part of why Lost is so great and so unique.

But dare I say we were not duped. One of my friend’s Facebook statuses immediately post-finale was: “So why’s Walt special?”

This, as well as almost any other mystery from Lost, can be answered from inference and deduction. The island clearly had some special, mystical properties that were shared the world round, whether the island was their source or just another focal point of them. Liken it to the Force and Star Wars, and Walt’s position is easily understandable. He’s Luke Skywalker, and some people, like Sawyer, are Han Solo. At the end of Return of the Jedi it wasn’t like we all wondered how Luke could sense the force anyway, but it was also a bit more clearly illustrated. Still, there’s your answer.

Others prove a bit tougher but not totally uncrackable. Birth was a problem on the island because of the ancient violations of motherhood in the form of Jacob and MIB’s mum and their murdered faux-mom. The fact that this birth ban didn’t always take effect could be for any number of reasons. Jin and Sun? They’re candidates. Aaron Littleton? Conceived off the island. Dharmaville baby Ethan? The island works in mysterious ways — ways that decide to heal Locke of his broken back or Rose of her cancer, only to put Ben Linus in a wheelchair after a spinal tumor operation. In retrospect, this seeming fickleness of the island, or holes in the show narrative, don’t really seem arbitrary or flawed. Ben was kind of a bad dude at the time, so it seems fitting that the island might punish him. The way the show seemed to sometimes break its own “rules” was a purposeful act, I feel, to perpetuate mysteries unanswerable, because if your show is ultimately about faith and any one person’s failure to truly reach full understanding without it, you’re going to have to, purposefully, have unanswered questions.

I think that’s bold of Lost, and I get why they did it. That being said, I’m going to be doing Homer “D’oh’s!” for the rest of my life every time I think of some detail on Lost that seems unresolved. But a bit of faith paired with a bit of reason should answer almost all of them. The numbers? As I said a while back, they must be kind of like Pi in the movie Pi — a god number, if you will — a recurring piece of programming code embedded into our very existence. As a note, the fact that Hurley would ultimately win the island lotto out of a raffle of the numbers that Jacob selected — the same numbers that followed Hurley all his life — is cool and seems to say Hurley was always programmed for this role. And voila, the numbers.

How about the fact that Eloise Hawking was able to pop up and give Desmond time travel advice in season three? From then on into this year, she seemed almost supernatural. Yes and no. Un-sideways Eloise was tragically acquainted with time travel, thanks to her own son whom she shot, whose journal she was able to pick up which was blasted with Desmond’s name. As the years rolled by, Eloise surely kept her eye on the great Scot as evidenced in a picture that sat on Desmond’s mentor’s desk when he was trying to be a monk. That picture had his mentor and Eloise together. It was a passing shot then, an Easter egg, and it was exciting for sure. Today, a few days after the finale, it’s an answer where there seemingly was none. In the Sideways, aka purgatory, aka fine, you’re uncomfortable with the word “purgatory.” Okay, I don’t mean Catholic purgatory because I don’t believe in it either, but instead a purgatory concept world. But can we just agree to call it “purgatory” because it’s a lot easier to say? I’m out of breath. Okay, in this world — the one we’ve been flashing to all season — Eloise knows she’s dead but is enjoying the waiting room more than seeing the doctor, because here she has her son. We know this is possible because Ben makes the same choice.

Suddenly the loose ends of Lost seem more and more tightly bound. Even conspicuous absences in the church of the climax can be explained this way. Let’s just pick Michael. Dude isn’t there. He might not be ready to pass on, as he said himself in an island chit-chat with Hurley. We know this is a valid reason because, in last week’s episode, Ana Lucia didn’t go because, as Desmond explained, “she wasn’t ready.” How about another? Richard. Well, this church pow-wow was invitation-only. That invitation was extended to a core group of people who, with each other, shared the most important moments and events of their lives. It seems to me that, for Richard, he might be meeting up with his wife instead in Espania. What about Mr. Eko? It turns out the dude that plays that guy wouldn’t accept a lucrative offer to come back and shoot scenes on the show. Remember, this is still just a TV show.

But where that showbiz answer is disappointing, it can still be covered by the others. Maybe Eko wasn’t ready. Maybe Eko’s afterlife bus-stop is somewhere in Africa with his brother. And to do double-coverage, we even had Eloise telling Desmond to stay out of the business of ferrying these people over. He just disagreed. For anyone else we didn’t see, it’s also possible that Desmond decided, for whatever reason, it wasn’t their departure time. These answers account for everyone in the show. For what it’s worth, we got our biggest characters in these closing moments, and what might be the awkward inclusion of some others (Shannon and Boone maybe), I chalk up to logistics. Hey, at least Nikki and Paulo weren’t there.

I realize these few questions I picked leave a lot out. Where’d that statue Jacob was living in come from? I dunno. Probably some Egyptians that built it when they got stranded there and fancied Jacob a god. How come ash traps the smoke monster? Maybe because that’s a rule Jacob established. Maybe because it just does. Who was that voice in Jacob’s cabin? Smokey. He let John hear him because it played into his plan. What’s with the healing water pool in the temple? Seems to me it flowed out of the life water (small case — not licensed SoBe Life Water) that flowed from the light of the cave, island center. Makes sense, right? Fine. What about that weird torture junk they did to Sayid to see if he was “claimed” or not? Y'know, I dunno. Doesn’t make total sense to me, but I bet it does to them. Lost, being about the characters, only let us see as far as the characters did. I say that’s fair.

But hey, where’d those Stonehenge stones come from? No, I’m not talking about the show now. I’m talking about real life. You know, over there in England and junk. How’d that happen? And how’d those pyramids in Egypt get built anyway? And what’s with recorded documentation of pilots around the world seeing lights dance around their planes only to then disappear? A few years ago, I read an article about water pouring out of a tree somewhere in rural Ohio. It lasted a few days, I think and it was confirmed by the town’s water company that no water lines ran under the tree. And to those observing, no hoses or kids up in a tree-house with squirt guns were responsible. A few billion years ago, out of a vacuous nothingness, a universe burst into fantastic existence. How’d that go again?

The shocking twist of Lost was not the answers it gave but those it withheld. Not the focus we wanted it to have, but the focus it did. I’m suddenly sad because, even though I felt I wasn’t ready, and even though writing (even when it’s about one of your favorite things) can still feel like homework, I can’t believe this is the last Lost article I’m gonna write. I can’t believe this truly intellectual and philosophical, often personal pursuit of six years is up. I loved things about this finale. I loved Jin and Sun’s come-to, even Shannon and Sayid’s. I loved Jack and Smokey’s epic cliff battle. I loved Hurley’s appointment. I even loved Kate getting the last shot and the last word, like I said back when Smokey was probably a little too smug, as were the rest of us, to overlook her when we did.

I loved Lapidus’s “Leave me alone!” and Jack’s assertion that Smokey “disrespected him (John Locke)” by “wearing his face.” I loved Sawyer and Juliet’s reunion. There was something so fantastically affirming and inspiring about it. I loved Christian leading Jack out the church doors like he led him to water. And I loved Jack’s green mile — his last walk in life, staring up at an escaping plane as his soul reunited with his father and friends in a gate of sorts in the church, set for another departure, but this time all together, forever. This finale was beautiful, purposeful. Even now I’m sensing — even with my personal qualms, few and perhaps selfish, that the finale will grow even better in time.

The shock of Lost was that it was about people. And about us. How we, in this life, alternatively hunger for answers or ignore the wonder that surrounds us. How we reach for only the smallest piece of the transcendent that we hope we can cobble together into a larger picture we cannot fully see. But we do this together.

I’m being quite elaborate right now, which I’m usually guilty of without really elaborating. This article is void of reference, scientific or otherwise, in part because Lost should be yours too, whatever that may mean. I’m abundant in hyperbole and maybe sap because, like I said, I’m a bit beside myself right now because we should at least understand one thing about this show before we bid it adieu. Like the truly great entertainments, whether they’re literature that can be often forgiven if without the clearest resolution, or a movie that’s precise to the smallest detail, Lost is about the human experience. In an elaborate way, this show baited us to think about how we confront the mysteries of this world and how we share it with each other. On Lost, it was a fantastic island rife with fate and deep mystery. In our lives, it could be Stonehenge, sure, but it’s just as much about that happy coincidence this morning or the advancements that even allow a plane to fly.

It’s how we approach the things we want, whether it be a job or a cheeseburger, how we fight for the things we love, how we face the things that challenge us, how we recognize ourselves, what we truly need, and about forgiveness, growth, realization. But most importantly, and this is what Lost seemed to be landing home: who. The quests of our lives, though seemingly not as grand as an island bottle-capping evil, are still important and, at their end, will still be without complete understanding but not necessarily resolution. The answers are what we find, more often than not, in each other. So whether it’s a Josh Moorhead episode or a you episode, we bump into each other over and over, revealing more and more as time marches on, until suddenly a series of life is formed that we couldn’t have predicted at the outset and couldn’t have so completed without each other. Whether that series of life is written or just kind of made up as it goes along…well, that’s for all of us to try to decide, isn’t it?

I watched the finale with some people I know in Denver, CO. We made Dharma fish biscuit cookies. We had a “Lost supper.” We listened to a Lost mix I burned. These are people that, for everything we’ve been through together — highs and lows, seasons and years worth of experiences — I was happy to be seated with and care about quite a bit. And there was something comforting in the fact that, as life expanded and spooled out, I would find myself in their apartment, on their couch, for everything good or bad that had ever come before. That maybe we were connected somehow. Spread out across these United States, I have friends and family that I wasn’t with but that I know I’ll find somewhere again because I share that bond with them too, even if my return flight traveled away from most all of them.

My friend Jessie and I pulled up to Denver International Airport while the sun set on the plains and planes took to the air. With Giacchino’s “Parting Words” playing in the background, it was fitting. I thought about going back to this strange and fantastic city, LA, and those things I leave behind when I go there. And this sense of nostalgia spurred on as I left behind something else, just a TV show, just another passing thing that meant quite a bit to quite a few of us — Lost. When those characters let go and passed on into their own unknown, they had the same thing I could never leave behind no matter where I go — the same thing we all have and share.

“The most important part of your life was the time you spent with these people. That’s why all of you are here. Nobody does it alone, Jack. You needed all of them. And they needed you. To remember. To let go,” said Christian. Amen. And then a blinding bright light called the future, only broken by a plane’s wings breaching the horizon.

ABC's 'Lost' will run forever in re-runs, ARG's, fan fiction, VOD and streaming on Netflix, Hulu and beyond...