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Lost Finale Thoughts: Artificiality at its best (and worst)

Lost Finale Thoughts: Artificiality at its best (and worst)

One word can describe the Lost series finale: Artificiality.
Don’t get me wrong, it was not easy to be Darlton while writing the series finale of, arguably, the most-talked about TV series since the creation of the Internet. But summarizing that the show would be satisfying only for “believers”, a.k.a. viewers that wouldn’t obsess over mythological answers given in the finale, is ultimately a very cynical way of saying “if you don’t like that your version of the show living in your head is not the story we want to tell, that’s YOUR problem”.

I’d like to point out that however, it wouldn’t be fair stomping on the series finale for the lack of answers or mythology galore. It is a point that has been stressed by Darlton ever since the beginning of Season 6, that it would be all about the characters. I accept it as such, and will focus my criticism for what it is: essentially a character-driven series finale.

With its final twist, “Lost” has once again pulled the rug from under the feet of its devoted fans, except maybe those who were paralyzed by the emotion of characters they followed during six years leaving their screens forever. What Darlton didn’t realize is that there’s nothing wrong with being a little predictable, even more so during your endgame.
In fact, this is the second time viewers are proven completely wrong. After Season 4, everything pointed to a war between Benjamin Linus and Charles Widmore for control of the Island as the endgame of the show. It was rooted in characters, and the mythological knowledge of both those men would prove fertile territory for a decent endgame, as far as answers were concerned. There’s little doubt sacrifices would be made, Monsters would be used, alliances would be forged. Not unlike what we’ve seen in season 6. Except that both were made irrelevant by the introduction of Jacob and what we now know as the Man In Black, divine incarnations of the protector of the Island, and the Evil who’s trying to escape and be unleashed upon the World — or so we’re led to believe.

This was the endgame of “Lost”, and I’m ready to accept it. However, the big mystery of the season was the nature of the “flash-sideways”, where it appeared that all the survivors and characters live in a world where the Island sunk many years ago. They also remember little by little the events of their life on the Island, and they’re all led to meet each other. The emotional impact of the final scene left some viewers wrecked, and it would have been powerful…

…had it not been the Purgatory created by them after they died to come to grips with their issues, in a perpetual happy ending.

The “alternative timeline” was, to me, the more satisfying resolution, that would have implied they all died on the Island and were “projected” in Flight 815 by Jacob, who would give them back their free will, and a better set of choices for some characters. So, seeing all the cast fading into the white light to Heaven while Jack closed his eyes on the Island, with Vincent next to him, felt corny instead of powerful.

Yes, I actually laughed at the reveal made by the ultimate deus ex machina: Christian Shepard. Having this kind of sentimentality kicking off was just a cheap way of ignoring the fact that it could have gone another way. Having all these characters, almost, uniting at the Driveshaft concert, would have been as satisfying and emotional as what we got instead. Having them “projected” as a reward for preventing MIB from being unleashed upon the world was great, it also made them all heroes in the most noble sense. It reminds us of another HBO show I won’t name for those who don’t know how it ends, but that dealt with them better. Revealing that half of the final season was actually the characters evolving in a Disneyworld afterlife timeline, where everything would turn out “fine” in the end, far from the hassles of Craphole Island, was really more artificial, and also the worst way to end the show right behind “it was all a dream”. It’s also kind of sacrilegious to think that Darlton devoted a season showing characters in a Purgatory where they got what they were looking for, after debunking the Purgatory theories for the Island during the ENTIRE run. But it would have been predictable, and therefore the showrunners would feel like hacks just following the direction the fans thought they would go into.

Another amazing fact, not to be overlooked, is that we witnessed the Island losing its “specialness” during the finale. It actually should have relieved Ben and Hurley to know that they now have a desert island all to themselves, with no dangerous electromagnetism, Others, or angry deities to take care of. Really, having some characters escaping Craphole Island in the plane that was there all along without the potentiality of finding themselves in an electromagnetic cloud of danger was….convenient. This is also why Jack smiles while seeing a plane passing by: never will other people live what the survivors lived again. Pretty definitive ending for a show that’s supposed to be like “Star Trek” for ABC Studios.

You could feel that Darlton didn’t know when or how to make the characters die. In a way, I expected everyone to be dead, since they would be alive on “the other side” (which turned out to be just that). Maybe it was that two disappointing seasons made it feel easier to let go, for me at least. But faking the Jack death in the cave of Light so that he could die where he woke up, and thus obtain the iconic shot to close the series with, was laughable at best, ridiculous at worst.
Seeing the Jack/Locke scenes in the last few episodes also made me realize how much making Locke die in the season 4 finale was wrong, especially since that was to make way for the Man In Black, who turned out to be the least interesting baddie/foe on the show. (Unite the three baddies of the show in “What They Died For”, see who steals the spotlight.) There should have been a way to keep this iconic character as is for the remainder of the series, since the long con of MIB as John Locke for the latter part of Season 5 wasn’t very convincing to me. (It did provide humorous moments with Ben Linus, former most intriguing character on the show who is dumbfounded by the resurrected Locke, that gets him to do whatever he wants.) But if you replaced John Locke by Titus Welliver in those episodes, I don’t think the shock and mystery would have been that different.

This post is getting long, so I’ll get to my point. There’s nothing wrong, for a show that has been very unpredictable for the last six years, to be predictable with its finale. Giving a sense of alternate reality as opposed to an alternate afterlife would have worked. And I strongly feel that the sense of “letting go”, “moving on” with their issues, didn’t have to be translated through death. Especially since this alternate world gives them the keys to move on to every character, with largely better circumstances. So, stopping the sideways at the Driveshaft concert as opposed to the church would have felt satisfying to me. Same with everybody dying on the Island, at the same time, so that MIB dies with them and can’t escape. This is the time where the “version of the ending living in my head” makes more sense, and is more satisfying, since it basically boils down to the same thing. Since these characters’ most important moments are on the Island, projecting their bodies would have given them the unique opportunity to live a life with their loved ones outside of the Island, without all the trauma and death. That would have been as powerful an ending. But, like I said, that ending would have been predictable. I guess Darlton couldn’t accept to get away with that.

Hindsight: Quotes from Lost’s Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindelof

Hindsight: Quotes from Lost’s Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindelof

Many, and I mean many, mysteries have been left unsolved on Lost.
Even worse, there has been over the years a lot of double-talk from the series’ showrunners, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.
Let’s take a look at six seasons of misguided attempts at trying to convince the fans that, don’t worry, answers are coming.

Time Travel
Starting strong.
As you probably know, Season Five was a big long paradox-season filled with time-travel.
Such heavy fantasy-fiction (no other words can describe the show now) was not always present on Lost.
I’ll let Damon Lindelof comment on that:

We’re still trying to be … firmly ensconced in the world of science fact. I don’t think we’ve shown anything on the show yet … that has no rational explanation in the real world that we all function within. We certainly hint at psychic phenomena, happenstance and … things being in a place where they probably shouldn’t be. But nothing is flat-out impossible. There are no spaceships. There isn’t any time travel.

But about four years later, we have:

[Time travel] has been in the DNA of the show since the very beginning.

I guess it was well-hidden from everyone.

Adam & Eve
Another big piece of Lost is undoubtebly the two skeletons Jack found in the fourth episode of the series (later dubbed ‘Adam & Eve’). It was used as proof by Darlton that they knew all along where they were going towards.
As Lindelof puts it:

There were certain things we knew from the very beginning. Independent of ever knowing when the end was going to be, we knew what it was going to be, and we wanted to start setting it up as early as season 1, or else people would think that we were making it up as we were going along. So the skeletons are the living — or, I guess, slowly decomposing — proof of that. When all is said and done, people are going to point to the skeletons and say, ”That is proof that from the very beginning, they always knew that they were going to do this.”

It is stated in the same Season One episode that the clothes are about 50 years old.
What is sad about this is that, as revealed in the (almost) second-to-last episode of the series, Adam & Eve are actually the Man in Black and her adoptive Mother. And they died about two thousand years ago.
Woops.

Ben
The last couple of seasons have made totally irrelevant the central rivalry between Ben and Widmore, the latter appearing to be the main villain of the story.
Yet about 19 episodes before the end of the series, we were introduced to a brand new character, the Man in Black who is now basically the real “big bad”.
Not only that, but Ben was revealed to be both a pawn of Jacob (and the Man in Black), but more importantly had ultimately no knowledge at all of anything that’s happening on the Island, or why.
Despite this, here’s what Carlton Cuse had to say on the subject in 2007:

Ben is such a formative character, he is the biggest bad guy we know on the show. To get to know him is a signal that we’ve become an answer-mode kind of show.

Libby
The Season Two episode Dave ended with a huge shocker: Libby was in the same mental institute as Hurley prior to the plane crash. This reveal was actually so big, that it was the only flashback on the show to conclude an episode (and therefore be a cliffhanger). Rightfully so, a lot of people wanted to know how would that fit in the overall storyline, especially since a few episodes later, in the season two finale, Libby poped up again as a sane woman that gave to Desmond a boat (that would later bring him to the Island).
Was she part of the DHARMA Initiative? Did she know Desmond would crash on the Island?
During the third season, there was no sign of Libby, so Carlton Cuse commented:

Given everything else we have to tell, that’s going to be a mystery that’s going to have to get answered in year 4.

Damon Lindelof even added:

The question the audience wants answered is, How did she get from A to B — from Desmond to the mental institution? We know the answer to that question, but the only way to tell that story is through another character’s flashback, and that character would have to be another character on the show who is not among the beach dwellers.

A year later, in a Season Four interview, Carlton continued:

She’ll be in enough of the show for us to fill in the missing pieces of her story. We could not be more pleased. Cynthia is a smart and engaging actor, and Damon [Lindelof] and I have some very cool parts of her story left to tell.

We’re now at the end of the journey, we have seen a couple of times Libby on the show: for about five seconds in Season Four when Michael “saw” her on a boat (don’t ask), and one time this season during a Hurley flashsideway. Both times her appearance was pointless, so basically we’ve never had any conclusion to her numerous mysterious presence in other people’s flashbacks.
Here’s what Cuse had to say on the subject last year:

We feel like that story’s told, it’s done. We’ve told as much about Libby as we want to tell.

They’ve sometimes blamed her story as a casualty of the writers’ strike, but once again, Cynthia Watros appeared for a few seconds in a Season Four episode (barely post-strike), and even in a Season Six episode (way post-strike). I’m simply not believing they couldn’t resolve her mystery.

The End-date
And finally, as we’ve discussed already the other day, the announcement of an end-date was a game-changer in television storytelling. Darlton used that opportunity to show that they knew where they were going, likening this announcement with that of J.K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter book.
As Lindelof said:

One thing I think we have to get out there is this: You won’t have to wait until 2010 to get all the answers you really care about. Some of these answers are going to be coming a lot sooner than you think. The reality is, we’re not going to make you wait until the last episode to give you everything.

The problem with that is, as we’ve just seen, there hasn’t been many major mysteries solved on the show (if any).
Also, the only real answers we’ve gotten were apparently through last week’s episode, Across the Sea, which was, as Damon puts it, a “a big mythological download.”
It’s not like they had three entire seasons to plan out their mythological reveals. Oh, wait.
I also don’t have to tell you that Across the Sea was, as pointed out above, the third-to-last episode of Lost.
So, no, I guess we didn’t have to wait until the very last episode of the series for answers, just the one before it to provide us with more questions.

Obviously, we can’t really list all the contradictory quotes from the last six years, there are just too many.
If you’re dumbfounded as to why this post was written, here are three reasons.
First, kids, don’t be cocky or it will bite you where you don’t want to. Second, I wanted to show that that fans shouldn’t hang on every word of their television deity.
And, most importantly, third, the Lost mythology does not hold up.
We’ll discuss why in an upcoming post, but if you disagree, you should read in the meantime last year’s post entitled ‘Why mythological shows are often idolized‘.

Like Damon said:

At a certain point, a television show is no longer your show. […] The show no longer belongs to the people who are writing it and performing it and directing it. It belongs to the fans just as much.

Five ways Lost could continue

Five ways Lost could continue

Though the mothership ends its run next Sunday, the Lost franchise however seems to have endless possibilities.
And Disney is not too keen on letting this cash-cow die.
As Carlton Cuse puts it:

The Walt Disney Co. owns Lost. It’s a franchise that’s conservatively worth billions of dollars. It’s hard to imagine Lost will rest on the shelves and nothing will ever be made with Lost.

Here are five possible ways the ABC show could survive…

I) Lost Spin-off Show


Either the best or worst idea, depending on who you ask.
Admit it, you’ve always dreamed of a Ben & Locke spin-off.
Truth be told, that won’t really happen since Terry O’Quinn is apparently shopping around a bible for a “TNT-type show” that would pair him once more with Michael Emerson as “suburban hit men juggling family issues.”

The apparent futile nature of a Lost spinoff hasn’t stopped pretty much everyone from joking about it though.

On the other hand, what some have dubbed Lost: The Next Generation is apparently not that big of a stretch.
Mike Benson, executive VP of marketing at ABC declared a few months ago:

We’ve been talking about this for a couple of years now. We want to keep it alive but make sure we maintain the integrity of the franchise. We’re not about milking this thing for all that it is right now; it’s important to see this live for years to come. What ‘Lost’ becomes after it ends its run is up in the air. It really depends on who comes in to interpret it next. We do believe ‘Lost’ can be a ‘Star Trek’ for us.

So what would a spin-off be about? At this point, it’s really just guess-work and can be virtually anything from some DHARMA-related storyline to Egyptians, Romans, and, let’s say, magical lights inside a cave.
The mythology of the show basically spans the entire history of mankind and has created a near-endless array of characters to chose from. Perhaps one day we’ll get to see that Lost spin off.

II)Lost Alternate Reality Game

Already three of them have been made over the course of the series, and the first one was explicitly done to explain the numbers (what many consider to be a major mystery of the show).
Yes, The Lost Experience did serve a purpose. And best of all, it’s canon.
It is not totally unconceivable to think that further down the line, another ARG will be made both to entertain the fans and expand on one of the plot threads and layers of Lost (like DHARMA or something else).

The only question left would be the reason behind ABC’s willingness to do another ARG. The only answer possible is: to promote something.
Still today, ARGs are mainly made not for their narratives but for their mass and viral appeal, and a new Lost ARG would only be made if Disney had something to gain from it.

III) Lost Tie-in Novels & Comics

This one is a given.
There has already been three novels published (excluding Bad Twin) and a Lost Encyclopedia is coming out soon.
Past mythological shows have also a history of continuing their stories through the comic art-form.
Would it be that much of a shocker if you’d suddenly find a book entitled Henry Gale’s Mysterious Adventures or a comic around the construction of the Four Toed Statue? That’s what a Lost comic book could look like.
It’s the cheapest of all the options here, and an official book that is both canon and full of mythological answers would be a best-seller before it even came out.

IV) Lost Theme Park Attraction

Though at first it might seem preposterous, it is actually one of the most anticipated and, yes, most plausible idea on this list.
You just know Disney will do a ride for one of it its amusement parks.
Think about it. How does ‘Lost Island’ sound to you?
Epic, that’s what.

There’s even a petition calling for the following locations to be built inside one of the theme parks:
– The Frozen Donkey Wheel behind the Orchid Station testing chamber.
– The Swan station
– The Hatch ride
– A submarine ride to Palu Ferry.
– Dharmaville Barracks.
– Ruins
– Jacob’s Cabin
– The Egyptian Statue and Jacob’s Lair

A Harry Potter theme park about to open in a few weeks, so a Lost one can be done.
What about a ‘Roller-Smoke-Monster’ or an ‘Oceanic Six Rescue Ride’?

V) Lost Movie

I’m just kidding on that one.
I’ll let Damon Lindelof answer for me:

It’s funny, you know, we hear like 24 is going to do a movie and you always have to think like, I don’t know how they or when they do that. The reality of it is we’re shooting the show for ten months out of the year and the other two months we are spending, cumulatively recharging our batteries but also beginning to generate stories for the following season and you can’t shoot a feature film in two months even if we went right into it. So as long as the show is on the air as a TV show, logistically there could be no movie. And more importantly, it’s somewhat exploitative to kind of say to the audience who watches the show, “Hey, now you’ve got to go and pay eleven bucks and go into the theater in order to stay caught up with the show.” It’s not like 24 where we could do a self-contained movie. The movie would really have to answer definitive questions, move the plot forward, you know and we just don’t know how to do that or whether or not it needs to be done.

Yup, he did just say they don’t know how to “answer definitive questions” and “move the plot forward.” Guess there’s no movie to be made then.

Lost is indeed a franchise, perhaps dissimilar to Star Trek, but it does hold the potential for many other stories to be told. Whether it will be a disservice to the main series remains to be seen. It is highly unlikely though that either Carlton Cuse or Damon Lindelof will participate in any potential continuation of the franchise.
That’s what they’ve said anyway.