As satisfying as last night was on the level of emotion and character, I don't think one can dispute that it failed to solve some of the significant mysteries which animated the series. Not all of them mattered -- the identity of the others involved in the outrigger chase likely wouldn't help bring added meaning to what happened, but just fill in the answer to a trivia question. But a few questions, I think did need to be answered and weren't. Here's a few:
- What made Walt special? What made Desmond special?
- What were Widmore's motivations this whole time? Were there actual "rules" governing Linus and Widmore, or were they just a fiction they both chose to believe?
- So what did Jughead do? Did it open a portal to SidewaysWorld for these people, or something else?
Below the fold, the alternate endings revealed on Kimmel last night:
Also, the rebooted "Head of the Class" starring Mr. - excuse me, Dr. - Linus as a history teacher and Mr. Locke, gym teacher. Walt and Alex are both there, of course, and Robin Givens returns as a guidance counselor after a rough divorce. You can really just have a thread about LOST spin-off shows, actually.
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing Jughead just moved the island from 1977 to 2007 one last time. I think Juliet died in that moment and when she had her "awakening" in the sideways-purgatory world, she remembered those last words with Sawyer (and how great was the "I only have one dollar - let's go dutch" delivery between Holloway & Mitchell?). I don't get the feeling the "it worked" really meant a whole lot of anything, though I know I've heard people mention that it allowed her to "see" the purgatory, but that doesn't really ring true to me. Maybe "it worked" was just thats she was able to trigger the bomb ... ?
There are so many narrative dead ends, that it's tough to find meaning, or lack-there-of, in any. What about the DHARMA drops? How did Jacob get off the island, seemingly at will? They spent season 5 building up the Ben-Widmore "war", and then it just kind of disappeared.
All in all, I really enjoyed the finale, and the series in overall. Like a lot of long-running series, I think they lacked any true cohesive idea of what they were doing and just tried to work it out as they go. That's okay when you have a character drama and things change and you move on, but fails with a "big mystery" show (and it's even become a problem for a show like "How I Met Your Mother"). I also liked BSG, so there ya go.
Okay - now everyone go watch Justified. Seriously, you'll thank me (plus, Mr. Friendly is on it).
Jughead <span>was</span> the Incident.
ReplyDeleteI'm repeating my comment from the other thread here, because it's more relevant to this discussion:
ReplyDelete<span> I certainly enjoyedthe finale , and it's a fitting end for the characters. But it wasn't a fitting end for the show. Darlton can say all they like that they were telling a character story, but they weren't JUST doing that. They told a mystery story and a sci fi story, and no story that introduces all the massive plotlines they did with no payoff can be considered well-finished. Only some of the characters got their stories finished, anyway.
I think as a big fan of the show, I'm left feeling like much of the material in the middle of the show was somewhere between red herrings and bad planning. Ultimately, Dharma, Widmore and the Others, which were such a huge part of the first five seasons, turn out to be utterly irrelevant. The children stealing/fertility stuff can be explained merely as the Others needing to replenish their ranks to keep "protecting" the island, but nothing they did seems to have had any effect on protecting the Island at all. They found a way to keep the smoke monster away from them, but otherwise, what else did they do? They didn't bring the Oceanic candidates to the Island, they didn't help or hurt Jacob or the Man in Black that I can see.
Ben himself was the only thing that turned out to be relevant - he put in motion the events that led to Smockey dying, and he killed off Dharma which arguably was putting the island in danger with their digging and their experiments. But in the end the Dharma stuff/Jughead/all of the time travel stuff didn't have anything to do with the final plot line nor the sideways world.
I'm fine with the send off the characters got, and I enjoyed the episode a great deal, but I'm highly disappointed that so much of what we watched for so long was a meandering tangent.</span>
<span>
ReplyDelete<p>Given what seems to be the message that the relationships you create and connections you make are what you take away, maybe all the energy and creativity and thought and conversation fans have put into those mysteries is our sideways universe, and the thing that matters more than the literal facts. I've read some fantastic writing about Lost over the seasons, figuring out all these mysteries in amazingly and amusingly well-thought-out ways. There have been philosophical debates and artistic interpretations and just pure pop-culture fun. Giving one straight answer pulls the plug on all of that. Instead, we're left to keep imagining and connecting.
</p><p>
</p><p>That's the way I'm choosing to think of it this morning, anyway.
</p></span>
And I'll repost my thoughts in response to Marsha's comment from the other thread:
ReplyDelete<span>Sorry, I just think "meandering tangent" is too harsh a view. Sure, Dharma/Others/Jughead/time travel/Widmore did not directly tie into the resolution, but each of those plotlines played a part in getting us there. As just one example, if not for time travel, the Others, and the Temple, Young Ben does not become "Ben." Sayid shoots Young Ben in 1974, and Kate insists on saving him, so they take him to the Others who bring him to the Temple and heal/revive him, with the caveat that he's going to come back "not the same." (Then this season, we get another Temple revival that illustrates one way someone comes back not the same.) And Widmore certainly has an impact on who or what Ben becomes. I think we can agree that Ben's character plays a pretty important part in how things wind up -- those events that shaped him, to me, are still relevant even if they aren't directly brought to bear in the finale.</span>
As I said, I agree with you that Ben is relevant - even crucial. But I still have no understanding of what Widmore's intent was in any of this, how Dharma was in any way relevant, etc. If all of that was to play the relatively small part in making Ben who he was, then it's an even more colossal failure than I originally said. First, that *cannot* have been part of Darlton's plan for the show, as they've said more than once that Ben/Henry Gale was supposed to be a 3 episode character.Second, talk about killing an ant with a sledgehammer - basically three full seasons of Dharma/Others/Time travel, plus half a season of Temple shenanigans just to turn Ben into Ben? Of all the things I needed to know here, Ben's motivation wasn't really all that important to me. I would have been comfortable with him just being Jacob's pawn, which would explain everything he did without any of the rest of it coming into play.
ReplyDeleteWell, Ben and the Dharmas and the Others all of to tell a story of how some other group of people dealt with the mysterious properties of the Island and the limited information passed on by Richard and Smokey.
ReplyDeleteAnd Marsha, I believe you misunderstand the Ben/Gale comments -- what they've said, I thought, was that if Michael Emerson didn't work out as a longterm character, someone else was going to be cast as the head of that group -- but there was always going to be *someone* in that kind of role.
Here are a couple of rambling thoughts on making sense of some of these dangling threads:
ReplyDeleteOn Jughead, the Incident and Time Travel:
Having Jughead's fission core at the Incident boosted the electromagnetic flux of the pocket of energy underneath the Swan station to fix the timeskips to get our Lostaways back to the original timeline. Insert Faraday providing some technobabble about the Island's energy being unbalanced when Ben turned the Donkey Wheel -- that the absence of some Lostaways knocked it out of balance and when they didn't all return together. The bomb re-fixed the Lostaways properly in time. All of the Others were on the Island, and so they didn't skip around. The Lostaways tribe (including the 815 survivors, Juliet and the science team) was scattered between the Island and the mainland and they were unstuck in time on the Island until they reunited. Sun didn't skip back in time, because she had a Constant.
On Widmore, Desmond and the Island:
While he was the leader of the Others, Widmore travelled to the outside world and engaged in it in various ways (including fathering Penny.) As a new Other, Ben became distressed that their leader wasn't really in tune with the vibe of the Island. Charles didn't respect the Island properly. Ben convinced enough of the Others of this and they all agreed to oust Widmore from his leadership and so he left the Island. Using information from Faraday's journal, Widmore became a rich and successful captain of industry who was ever vigilant in his quest to return to the Island and oust the unrightful usurper from power. I suppose by the terms of his agreement with Ben (which included some agreement that their children were not pawns in their game), he was unable to do so directly. So, when his daughter was dating this deadbead, Desmond, Widmore figured he could send Des to see if he could find the Island. Des did, Kelvin found him, and because Desmond spent years in the Swan hatch, he developed some amount of resistance to iocane powder and the Island's unique pockets of electromagnetic energy. Widmore learned about the crash of Oceanic 815 and made sure to create a cover-up in order to make sure that there weren't other official efforts to find the wreckage and keep the Island a secret. Once Widmore found more information about the Island's location, he sent mercenaries to the Island to capture and depose Ben (who had become a hypocrite in his own travels off the Island to recruit Others, arrange for Dharma resupply drops, so that Desmond would continue to manage the Swan station, which keeps the electromagnetism at bay.)
If you believe Widmore and his "Jacob came to me" speech, I think his ultimate intent, on this visit to the island, was to save it from MiB. That clearly wasn't always his intent - when he sent the freighter, when he bought the ship's log from the Black Rock, etc., his intent seemed to be to take over the Island and kill Ben too.
ReplyDeleteRe: Ben, I plucked him out as an example of how those storylines mattered, but he's far from the only one - I don't suggest it was all just to turn Ben into "Ben." But look, I don't think anyone disputes that there was a fair amount of stalling going on in seasons 2 and 3, and Darlton probably played out waaaaaay more line and detail on certain plot points (Dharma, mostly) than they would have if they had known then that their wish for an end date would come true. I think you can also point a finger at the between-seasons interactive games, which really played up the Hanso/Dharma stuff, as perhaps setting expectations too high for any payoff that could match the hype.
I think what they've said about the Ben/Henry Gale role was that they conceived the part as one that COULD be only 3 episodes -- that he might or might not turn out to be the leader of the Others, depending on how well the casting worked out; they could always use it as a red herring and introduce another character later as the leader. So Emerson got a three-ep gig, but so knocked it out of the park right from the start that they decided to go forward with him.
One of the things that bugs me about the finale, is that it used one of the greatest tropes of the show, but kind of clumsily, and revealed it as a trope. That is, set up The Thing We Can't Do Or It Will Have Dire (But Vague) Consequences. Then do it, and deal with the consequences. (Go down the shaft. Stop pushing the button. Move the Island. Set off Jughead.) But we didn't get enough buildup about Going Into The Sunwell - it all got crammed into one episode, really, so it all felt kind of forced.
ReplyDeleteI'm a lot more curious about what happened next on the Island than on the Mainland. How much of The Rules was just a vestige of Jacob and the MIB's crazy Mother? What do Hurley's rules look like? Does the Guardian always go crazy? Does Hurley extend his lifespan like Jacob?
Fair enough on the Ben/Leader role.
ReplyDeleteBoth Adams, that's my point on the Dharma/Widmore/etc stuff. Widmore's intent for 5 seasons is no longer his intent in season 6. Dharma is a crucial part of the narrative, the mystery, and various characters backstories and motivations well into season 5, but completely irrelevant to anything in season 6. We see how another set of groups dealt with all the same stuff, but to what end? Are they saying there is something special about the Oceanic passengers that made them more able to pull off the ending than Dharma/Widmore/Others? If so, what the heck was it?
I just think there was way too much meandering if season 6 was the core of the story they were telling, and if you end your story this way, you make it the core.
Again, that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the finale. Having seen the finale, I'm more frustrated by the first 5 seasons.
The Last Battle! It's been bugging me since the show ended what the end reminded me of. It's the ending of The Last Battle. Sure, they're not exactly the same thing, but that made me happy.
ReplyDeleteAs for how it caps the series, I don't know. I'm going to have to re-watch everything. Basically it says that the mystery we've been so involved in doesn't really matter. I don't know how I feel about that. But it was a satisfying ending.
But I guess what I'm pushing back on, Marsha, is why does it all have to tie in to the end? Can't these plot threads just be some good storytelling elements that, for reasonably plausible storytelling reasons, are no longer in the forefront of the tale? Can't the story move forward and succeed on its merits without an overt explanation of, say, exactly what DHARMA was trying to gain/learn from the island? Isn't the important thing that, whatever DHARMA was there to do at the beginning (which was certainly an interesting plot point), they began investigating the island's electromagnetic powers, and that the island's power/light source that was the key to the conflict in this season is in some way connected to those powers?
ReplyDeleteBriefly, I fall in with the majority here and elsewhere -- really enjoyed the finale, very happy with the character payoff, annoyed that I wasted so much time with plot lines that went nowhere.
ReplyDeleteThere was a line in the church or the anteroom that I can't quite remember, but Christian said something like "these are the people who really mattered." It struck me at the time as Cuse and Lindelhof saying "Don't worry about all that other crap we didn't explain, this is what the show was really about." True enough and fair enough, but a little frustrating at the same time.
All I can say is that they had to *for me*. It's not that I needed explanation of every little thing, or even most things. I needed the stories to all have a reason to be part of this narrative, and those stories barely do. Take season 1, for example. It was mostly about how all of these people didn't know each other and learned how to live on this island and grow together, and how to deal with the scary elements on the island, but had little to do with the ending, which was about a magical cave and not about being able to find enough food to survive. I have no problem with the plot evolving in that way, becasue it's the natural beginning of a character arc, even if the arc goes far, far afield from that. They start strangers and survivalists, and end up soulmates and saving the world. That's fine, because there was a progression and a connection. What I have a problem with is that these season-long (or multi-season long) arcs that are made to be such an integral part of the series, and that we're led to believe is what the show is *about* that have nothing to do with what the show ended up being about. Dharma qua Dharma ends up being entirely tangential - they are relevant only as a plot device to lead to the Incident. Why then all the stations, the Orientation films, the experiments, the war with the Others...blah blah blah. Ditto Widmore and even the Others. All of it exists just to lead to Jacob, and the progression left us thinking that everythign about the Others was so integral to what we were watching, and it turned out to be compltely irrelevant.
ReplyDeleteYMMV, of course. I just feel like when I watch re-runs, I'll want to see Seasons 1, 5, and 6, and all of 2, 3, and 4 will seem much less interesting to me now because it doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the show.
The more I read, the more I feel the need to explain (not that anyone cares) that I'm not unhappy with the finale. I actually loved the episode, and it tied up the characters in both a more interesting and a more complete way than I really had any right to expect. It's just that the finale (and all of season 6, really) make me feel that the whole 6 season endeavor was not as well constructed as I would have liked it to me. I would have preferred everything to be related and useful, and I ended up feeling that massive chunks of the show weren't - this wasn't a coherent novel, but instead a set of books all set in the same place with some of the same people in each. I was led to believe it was the former, and it was the latter Maybe that's unavoidable until you know an end date, and it's probably drastically unfair of me to expect the novel in episodic television. But I was very entertained by those stories while they were happening, and I still love these characters. I'm not at all sorry I watched the show. I just wish the through-story worked better. That's all.
ReplyDeleteSo I didn't like it much at all. Too shmoopy for me. The light is everything? A 6 year long con for that? And I was all in until about 2 weeks ago and then I started to feel the long con coming. I read Doc Jensen and tons of other recaps, plus check here. I was really hoping for closure. I didn't really need answers to every single outstanding question, but I don't really see how it all ties together at all.
ReplyDeleteHere is where I am stuck. If we are to believe that 815 crashed intially, and whoever died, died, and Jack etc lived on, that's plausible to me. They were on the island until they left as the Oceanic 6, and those who stayed lived on. The 6 came back, still alive, eventually caught up with those who stayed and then some died in the process of trying to leave again and some left, alive. So at the end, Jack died on the island, but Lapidus, Miles, Sawyer, Kate, Richard and Claire left the island alive and lived the rest of their lives off island and died at a later date. Hurley and Ben remained on the island with Rose and Bernard, and they all died whenever they died.
So here's where I am confused. By the time Jack dies, are we to assume everyone else has been dead a while and are in purgatory (or limbo or whatever you want to call it) until he's ready to go because they can't "go" without him? I get that they all appear as we know them when they meet up, but are we to assume that Kate, Charlie, Claire, etc (those at the concert), all died together? I am unclear on when they all died and what they did in the meantime and if they were dead, how could they be seen by others?
If we are to assume they all died when 815 crashed, then what were all the shenanigans on the island about and all the back and forth? I have to assume they all lived past that crash, or what was the point of the Oceanic 6?
And, at the end, what plane did we see crashed on the beach? Ajira? Oceanic? I still have more questions about Ben's purpose, Dharma's purpose, etc, etc, etc. I just needed to get this all out because I can't quite make sense of it.
I think everyone at the church died at different times. I think we are given to believe that Hurley and Ben had a longstanding partnership protecting the island for many years after Jack's death. I think we are meant to believe that linear time has no real function in sidewaysland.
ReplyDeleteEverything on the island was real. Sidewaysland was the only unreal part of the show.
IMHO, YMMV, WWJLD? (What Would John Locke Do? a fabulous T-shirt design...)
If anyone still is trying to figure out the meaning of the end credits wreckage scenes, this helps clear things up.
ReplyDelete