The season finale was 'a cop-out' and 'a turn for the worse,' says author and 'Lost' guru Chris Seay. But he suggests 4 important lessons we can learn from the series anyway:
1) We are all lost
2) Fictional friends matter
3) Like Jack, I have a calling
4) The Bible's heaven beats Lost's
Michael Patton hated the finale with all the vitriol of a jilted fan, but Tyler Charles at CT’s Books and Culture liked it.
Hank Stuever drew the same conclusion I did: The whole series (not just the “flash sideways” plot device of Season Six) was about a purgatory-ish place:
People in "Lost" died multiple times in a lot of ways. Jack's exit in the final minutes of "Lost" was the death that got him to heaven, but the 815 crash was the death that got him busy on what he was meant to do. That's why the finale takes Jack back to that same bamboo field -- where he snapped awake in 2004 (dead, but not technically) and where, now that he is fully cognizant of all that has happened (and un-happened), he lays down and experiences a final peace. His work is done.
I know some hardcore fans don't want to believe it was purgatory all along, perhaps because they worked so hard to decipher "Lost's" layers of pointless mythology and whatnot. This is not an "it was all a dream" ending. It was about another realm that is like a dream, which explains why everything had to be so frustrating, complicated -- like a dream where you can't solve a problem.
But not a dream. An actual place -- a purgatory. Or for people who hate that word, an in-between. You don't go there simply because your soul is stuck. You go there because you're needed.
Mind you: The theology is disappointing, but I think this is what the authors were trying to say. Terry Mattingly, who linked to the Stuever piece, called it “Purgatory Lite”
Megan Basham says it was a “squandered opportunity.”
Al Hsu explains what 'Lost' taught us about dying well: “At the end of the day, and at the end of our lives, we're not going to care if we understood how the Dharma Initiative fit into the epic confrontation between Jacob and the Man in Black. But we're going to want assurance that we will see our loved ones again, and that our eternal destiny is secure.”
Joe Carter regarded it as “lazy storytelling.” He has a point:
The creators had no idea what they were doing—at all. They kept piling up plot points that made the show intriguing yet they knew something we didn’t: that there would not be a payoff to any of them because the creators themselves didn’t create them with a purpose.
What is really frustrating—and reinforces just how not-smart Cuse and Lindelof are—is that they didn’t even have to know where the story went. The fans had created the necessary theories to tie it all together. All they had to do was read the internet, pick out the best theory, and then make that the way Lost ends. They would have looked like geniuses. Now, they have simply revealed themselves as posers.
For “Exhibit #3,754 in the Case of the Clueless Creators,” Carter presents: “Sayid. The entire series they showed him, from childhood to the flash sideways, motivated to act because of his one-true-love, Nadia. Yet what happens in The End? He spends eternity in heaven with his summer fling Shannon.”
The “33 Things” feature at the Evangelical Outpost linked to “A heapin’ helpin’ of Lost’s loose ends” and “How Lost should have ended.”
Yes, don’t miss that: You should check out “How Lost should have ended.”
I’ve enjoyed The Late Greats’ weekly “One Song Lost” recap while Lost was running. Here’s the last, from Chanticleer.
Film and Theology at The Resurgence had some good insights. Watch it here:
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