Lost Thoughts
***SPOILER ALERT!!!*** If you watch Lost, but haven't watched the finale, yet, stop reading past this paragraph. One of my BIGGEST pet peeves is people spilling the beans & ruining surprises for others. We weren't home last night (more on the AMAZING Taylor's Finish Line Festival & tobyMac coming!) and I was so disappointed that several people posted details on FB for me to read as we rode home, before I could watch this morning. I will never do that w/o warning!
I have had a love/hate relationship with Lost. I almost let it go several times, but JB always kept watching, so he kept me in. (Plus, I am the biggest sucker for pop culture you've ever met; if "everyone is talking about it", I want to be in the know!) Of course, it's just a show, (and not even my favorite!) but it's left a lot on my mind today. I think it's inevitable when you've wondered about a set of characters for 6 years.
Nursing moms spend A LOT of time on the couch, and whenever I think of Lost, I think of Will as an infant. It started the month after he was born, and for whatever reason, I vividly remember nursing him to sleep for the night on the couch while watching Lost with JB each week. It's just a really happy, content memory. :-)
I'm actually glad the show is over. Keeping up with it was about to drive me mad! :-P That said, I was still left rather unfulfilled by the finale.
I got misty with each sweet "awakening" revelation of love, and I would have thought it was a great episode had it not been the very last. I totally appreciate their "love conquers all" point, but I'm a little irritated that all the scientific & logistical details apparently mean nothing, when we've been wracking our brains all this time trying to understand them. Yes, I get that in life, most of the details & logistics we stress over don't matter and what truly matters most is love & faith; but this is *scripted TV* and I wanted more answers, (esp. from a show which prided itself on making a big deal out of these questions!) :-P My friend Lindsay put it well: "We're just left with the fact that nothing mattered except Jack "saving" the island and everyone reconnecting in the afterlife. The rest of the story was apparently just fluff that we weren't supposed to care about. ...If it was only about the relationships, then you have to agree that the following don't matter: time travel, jacob, smokey, walt, aaron, electromagnetism, desmond as a constant, farraday as a variable, course correction, dharma, the big pendulum-in-the-church way of finding the island, why widmore wanted to go back there, where the others came from...the list goes on and on." Exactly - if it's all about the relationships, apparently all that weird stuff I was trying to wrap my brain around & hoping to understand in the finale means nothing.
Since Kate really did get off the island the 1st time with Aaron, why was he a baby in the church, since we know he lived until at least 3 or something? Why wasn't Walt in the church? Why was Vincent (an angel! now HE made me cry!) not in the church, either? What did Widmore ever want with the island?
Lindsay has some more great ones, too: "Dharma had an *ultimate* purpose, but how did they even find the island if Jacob didn't bring them there? Why were they ever hopping through time? What was the point of that? So they could end up in 1977, blow up a statue, so babies could die...etc. Also, babies/moms dying on the island after the statue of Tawaret [BTW - Sues *just* got that connection :-P] blew up - why? Was she the real god of the island and angry that her statue was gone? If she was the real god, what was the deal with Jacob? If you turned Man-in-Black's wheel, why did you end up in the Tunisian desert? If Jacob was island-bound, how did he get off the island to touch people to bring them there? And what was the point of the Temple, Dogen, and the dirty water that Sayid drowned in and then was magically resurrected from? Things just keep popping into my head the more I think about it. And I hate that. I have a headache now."
Amen.
I have had a love/hate relationship with Lost. I almost let it go several times, but JB always kept watching, so he kept me in. (Plus, I am the biggest sucker for pop culture you've ever met; if "everyone is talking about it", I want to be in the know!) Of course, it's just a show, (and not even my favorite!) but it's left a lot on my mind today. I think it's inevitable when you've wondered about a set of characters for 6 years.
Nursing moms spend A LOT of time on the couch, and whenever I think of Lost, I think of Will as an infant. It started the month after he was born, and for whatever reason, I vividly remember nursing him to sleep for the night on the couch while watching Lost with JB each week. It's just a really happy, content memory. :-)
I'm actually glad the show is over. Keeping up with it was about to drive me mad! :-P That said, I was still left rather unfulfilled by the finale.
I got misty with each sweet "awakening" revelation of love, and I would have thought it was a great episode had it not been the very last. I totally appreciate their "love conquers all" point, but I'm a little irritated that all the scientific & logistical details apparently mean nothing, when we've been wracking our brains all this time trying to understand them. Yes, I get that in life, most of the details & logistics we stress over don't matter and what truly matters most is love & faith; but this is *scripted TV* and I wanted more answers, (esp. from a show which prided itself on making a big deal out of these questions!) :-P My friend Lindsay put it well: "We're just left with the fact that nothing mattered except Jack "saving" the island and everyone reconnecting in the afterlife. The rest of the story was apparently just fluff that we weren't supposed to care about. ...If it was only about the relationships, then you have to agree that the following don't matter: time travel, jacob, smokey, walt, aaron, electromagnetism, desmond as a constant, farraday as a variable, course correction, dharma, the big pendulum-in-the-church way of finding the island, why widmore wanted to go back there, where the others came from...the list goes on and on." Exactly - if it's all about the relationships, apparently all that weird stuff I was trying to wrap my brain around & hoping to understand in the finale means nothing.
Since Kate really did get off the island the 1st time with Aaron, why was he a baby in the church, since we know he lived until at least 3 or something? Why wasn't Walt in the church? Why was Vincent (an angel! now HE made me cry!) not in the church, either? What did Widmore ever want with the island?
Lindsay has some more great ones, too: "Dharma had an *ultimate* purpose, but how did they even find the island if Jacob didn't bring them there? Why were they ever hopping through time? What was the point of that? So they could end up in 1977, blow up a statue, so babies could die...etc. Also, babies/moms dying on the island after the statue of Tawaret [BTW - Sues *just* got that connection :-P] blew up - why? Was she the real god of the island and angry that her statue was gone? If she was the real god, what was the deal with Jacob? If you turned Man-in-Black's wheel, why did you end up in the Tunisian desert? If Jacob was island-bound, how did he get off the island to touch people to bring them there? And what was the point of the Temple, Dogen, and the dirty water that Sayid drowned in and then was magically resurrected from? Things just keep popping into my head the more I think about it. And I hate that. I have a headache now."
Amen.
i got pulled in during season 3 - because clay watched it and if i wanted to talk on the phone with him on wednesdays - it had to be during lost... so, i started watching and he filled me in as we went along. i wasn't pleased either; they left so many questions unanswered. clay liked the ending - he said it was a good story start to finish and left it at that. i'm saying they left alot of holes unfilled!
ReplyDeleteOMIGOSH!!! JB & Clay have the exact same opinion and so do you & I!!! I wonder if it's a gender thing? Even though JB understood all the scientific stuff that stretched my mind, he doesn't care that it doesn't matter in the end; but it drives me NUTS! :-P
ReplyDeletemy sister in australia is an avid lost fan - i'll send you an article she sent me.. a christian take on the ending. it doesn't go into the unanswered questions but it pulled alot of symbolism i honestly missed while watching it. it was a good article.. i'll email it shortly!
ReplyDeleteWOW!!! That article actually left me feeling SO MUCH BETTER!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteI don't mean to plagiarize, and I don't know whom to give the credit for this article to, but I wanted to share it:
"Lost" went out in a manner that was refreshingly not like that of so many dramas, which tend to become more dramatic, serious, and bleak in an effort to prove their ultimate profundity. Instead, the long "Lost" last night was a combination of a greatest-hits album and a lively Sunday-school lesson. Everyone was forgiven; everyone smiled. If "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" hadn’t done it first, I suspect that the "Lost" producers would have had every member assembled in the final scene gather in a group hug.
(By the way, by “final Lost review,” I don’t mean the final one on this website, of course. Rest assured Jeff Jensen will be along with his full, definitive Doc Jensen exegesis later today.)
If there was any big surprise last night, it was how overtly Christian in its imagery and message the series proved to be. Its heavily underscored lesson was that everyone was forgiven — that word was used over and over. And the water at the Magic Glowing Source was used for the purposes of transubstantiation: “Drink this,” Jack was told upon being handed water, a phrase later repeated when Jack gave water to Hugo. Given the liquid’s effect particularly on Jack, the dialogue might just as well have quoted directly from a Communion service: “Drink this, for this is my body which is given unto you. Do this, in remembrance of me.”
For if there was one thing we can probably all agree upon, in the end, Jack Shephard was a Christ figure whose sacrifice saved many other people. The imagery could not have been more specific: Jack’s questioning and obeying of his father; his leadership of a small group of disciples; his final ascension (in TV terms, in a glowing white light). Even the piercing of his side by Locke/Man In Black was in the part of his body where Christ was speared while in agony on the crucifying cross.
But for most of its long but rarely boring length, the final "Lost" did not huff and puff and labor toward a heavy metaphorical conclusion. Instead, it was, well, pretty delightful, full of reunions that were both emotional and funny (how about that re-meet-cute between Sawyer and Juliet at the vending machine?). There were sweet little jokes, such as when, 90 minutes into a two-and-a-half-hour show, someone said, “It sure don’t feel like it’s over.” I don’t know how it’ll play with hardcore Losties, but I was glad to see a fan favorite such as Hurley not only avoid great suffering, but become the most important assistant in Jack’s glorification. Hurley was always the most lovable character in Lost, and it turned out that if he represented anything, it was Love itself.
The metaphor that had been used weeks earlier, about the cork in a wine bottle that kept evil from escaping — that was dramatized well, when Desmond first uncorked the island and it did indeed look as though Evil had been loosed upon the island world. Then it had to be, er, re-corked by Jack, to refute Evil’s pronouncement that “you died for nothing.” Quite the opposite: Jack died so that everyone could gather in the Church of the Sideways and have a splendid wrap-party of the soul.
Putting it in a TV-critic’s historical context: Was this an all-time great finale? I wouldn’t say so. The endings for "Newhart", the aforementioned "Mary Tyler Moore Show", perhaps "M*A*S*H", "St. Elsewhere", and "The Fugitive" all ended more decisively, with a more precise snap. But it was a better finale than an awful lot of other, more contemporary Highly Esteemed Dramas and Sitcoms. And as a way to bring this vast fantasy to an end, "Lost" had a finale that suited our troubled times: It was comforting, reassuring. It even had a dog that made me, for one, wipe away a tear.