Jeff “Doc” Jensen is back! He wrote a new LOST column yesterday which revealed that he was actually sitting in a pew in the church when the final scene of LOST was being filmed:
I was in the church when Christian Shephard (John Terry) threw open the doors and the entire castaway soul cluster … vanished into the afterlife in a flood of white light. In EW’s Best of 2010 issue, on sale now, I share a little more about the visit, including the misdirection that was employed to fool the spoiler stalkers lurking outside the church and how Fox and Terry were the only actors that knew the big secret of the Sideways world during the filming of the sequence.
Jensen has also been rethinking his original conclusions about the meaning of the finale:
I declared that the Sideways world was a legit spiritual purgatory in my first responses to the finale. With the passage of time, I now see other possibilities, and more, I wonder if I missed some of the points Lost was trying to make about religion, spirituality, and the afterlife by becoming so locked into purgatory theory. More to come in the next week or so; my long-promised, long-delayed last Lost column will post before the end of the year.
Still catching up on the LOST news … a couple of weeks ago, Damon Lindelof wrote in The Daily Beast:
The most awesome part about being one of the primary storytellers of a popular television show is hearing how much its most loyal fans hate it.
Oh. Wait. It’s actually not awesome. It hurts like hell.
I know—boo hoo for me. That’s the price of doing business, isn’t it? If I’m asking you to invest your time and attention in a story I’m telling, it’s your right to tell me that you hate that story.
You just don’t get to call yourself a “fan.”
At least that is what I had always believed.
He changed his mind after watching the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, which he hated, despite being a Harry Potter fan. When he left the theater, his brain was churning:
As I staggered out into the parking lot, my brain was deftly trying to resolve a deep and complicated paradox: If I loved the book, and the movie was an incredibly loyal adaptation of that book…
How could I possibly hate the movie? And even more distressing…
Based on the careful emotional logic I’d been using to insulate myself from the slings and arrows of “Why didn’t you people answer any goddamn questions?” and “A golden light in the middle of the island? SERIOUSLY?!?”, if I hated the movie…
Did that mean I was no longer a fan?
He turned it over in his mind, in the parking lot, and came to a conclusion:
I still love Harry Potter. Deeply and profoundly… I’m still a fan. A huge fan. Huge.
And so I sincerely and genuinely apologize to all those whom I have stripped of their Lost fandom just for complaining about the stuff you didn’t like. It doesn’t make you any less a fan. In fact…
It just makes you honest.
I respect that. And I’m genuinely sorry for ever feeling otherwise.
In this interview conducted a few days ago (looks like it’s at a pre-Emmy event), LOST writer Damon Lindelof talks about the Finale. Unfortunately, he doesn’t say anything that would give us new insights. He’s responding to a question about whether he feels frustrated when people misinterpret the ending to mean that the LOST-ies were dead all along, and he gives a generic answer about how different people will interpret the show in different ways.
He says he wished that fans who didn’t have the money to buy things at the auction could have had a chance to get a piece of the show, which was a nice thing to say. He himself was outbid on some auction items.
He’s working on the Star Trek sequel and “kicking around” some ideas about what to do next.
Almost two months ago, I got a question (actually more like a comment) on the Ask a Question page from Mark Stouffer. I’d been feeling so traumatized by the finale that after my initial flurry of posts, I didn’t want to think about it any more.
Time heals all wounded expectations, and now I’m ready to talk about it again. Here’s what Mark wrote:
Is this blog about the reason of LOST?
I thought the show was about reason, rational thought. The light was identity, expressed by the identity principal a=a, the primary example of which is existence exists. The narative is the continuity of the rational mind. The source is identity and the river is the river of individuals who have preserved the human race and rational thought. The island is reality. Everyone arrives there ‘by accident’ from ‘accross the sea’. False Locke is mysticism and collectivism.
Am I way off base? Why is no one talking about the reasons? The rational view that ‘everything that happens here happens for a reason’ and that we needed ‘everything that happened’ to get where we are, talking about LOST.
This blog was about the reason that the LOST-ies were brought to the Island, something I believed we would find out at the end. Instead, I believe, the show dodged the question.
We got two answers, both highly unsatisfactory.
The first answer was that the LOST-ies were brought to the Island to meet each other, to find the (literally) undying friendship and love they hadn’t been able to find in their previous lives. This had the unfortunate effect of reducing the whole amazing Island experience to the equivalent of a college mixer. If it was all about finding each other, there was no need for the Dharma Initiative, or the Island’s healing powers, or the dying pregnant women, or the Others, or Ben, or Jacob, or Widmore or any of it. They could have all just gone on match.com.
Also, even if it were true, as many fans of the ending say, that the show was “all about the characters,” the characters were so badly misrepresented at the end that it negated much of the emotional impact of what had happened before during the previous six years. Pairing Sayid with Shannon, in Heaven’s waiting room, rather than with Nadia, could only have been done by a writer tone-deaf to the emotional truths of the show.
The same thing about making the ending so Jack-centric. While the image of Jack closing his eyes was beautiful in its symmetry, in its mirror imaging of the opening, it was the wrong ending for the way the show had evolved over the years. After the pilot, Jack was never again credible as a hero or a leader, and his character quickly became less interesting than many of the others.
Sawyer, in a way perhaps unexpected by the writers when the show first started, showed himself to be both a better leader of the LOST-ies and a more credible romantic leading man than Jack. The extraordinary acting of Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson made their characters far more surprising and interesting than Fox’s. Most of all, the show was an ensemble effort, and turning the finale into Jack’s story missed the essential aspect of what the “character story” was all about.
The second unsatisfactory answer the show gave us was that the LOST-ies were brought to the Island by Jacob to keep the light going. But this doesn’t even make sense. If Jack was destined to save the world by putting the butt-plug in the light socket, then what were all the rest of the LOST-ies there for? Were they all just substitutes in case Jack got sick? And why these particular individuals?
Remember, Locke was always saying that they were ALL brought there for a reason. EACH OF THEM was brought there for a reason. It was their DESTINY.
In the end, though, it was all about Jack’s destiny, and the rest were reduced to supporting players, hanging out in church waiting for Jack to show up.
Mark wrote, “I thought the show was about reason, rational thought.”
I thought the show (up until, but not including, the ending) was about the tension between rational thought and faith.
“The light was identity, expressed by the identity principal a=a, the primary example of which is existence exists.”
Sorry, that’s over my head.
“The narrative is the continuity of the rational mind. The source is identity and the river is the river of individuals who have preserved the human race and rational thought. The island is reality. Everyone arrives there ‘by accident’ from ‘across the sea’. False Locke is mysticism and collectivism.”
I thought that Real Locke was the one who represented mysticism and faith. I don’t really know what False Locke was supposed to represent. The Devil? Non-denominational evil?
I don’t think the show was saying that collectivism is bad — in fact, just the opposite. The LOST-ies went from unhappy lonely individuals at the beginning to a happy group, all together at Heaven’s gate, at the end.
The source could be identity, but I think it was supposed to be something larger than that — I think it was meant to be whatever force breathes life into us. It might have been more convincing had it not looked so cheesy.
Anyway, at this point, I’ve only seen the finale once, on the night it was aired. I turned on the rerun for about 10 seconds just to see if they had put on the “pop-up hints,” which they had, and then I turned it off.
But who knows, now that I can talk about it again, maybe I’ll be able to rewatch it some time soon-ish.
Is there anyone reading this who still cares about any of this? Do you still think about the finale, or have you put it behind you and let it go, as Christian Shephard urged us (via his speech to Jack) to do? Or maybe Christian’s advice was only meant for people who are already dead.
Screenshot from lost-media.com. Click on picture for original, then click through that for larger shot.
Just a heads up, that tonight’s (Saturday, May 29, 2010) rebroadcast of the LOST finale (6×17-18 “The End”), which just started a few minutes ago on the East Coast, is one of those “enhanced” episodes with the pop-up hints.
5/31 Editing to add: The enhanced version of “The End” is available on Hulu (scroll down — it’s underneath “Episodes” and “Clips”).
ABC is going to rerun the LOST Finale and also the Jimmy Kimmel post-LOST special (“Aloha to Lost”) on Saturday, May 29, 2010, starting at 8:00 PM (7:00 PM Central Time) in the U.S.
The running time for the finale has shrunk down from 2 hours and 30 minutes, for the original broadcast, to only 2 hours and 5 minutes for the rerun. That must mean far fewer commercials this time around.
Here’s the schedule, but you should check your local listings to make sure:
8:00 – 10:05 PM Rerun of the LOST finale 6×17-18 The End
10:05 – 11:00 PM Rerun of Aloha to Lost, the Jimmy Kimmel post-show
Thanks to Geri for the heads up!
Picture of glowing cave is from lost-media.com. Click twice for larger image.
A fast-paced, funny look at some of LOST’s unanswered question, by College Humor:
As packed with unanswered questions as that video is, there are still plenty more.
I’ll add more here, as I think of them (and feel free to chime in, if you think of more too):
1. How did Anthony Cooper get to the Island in the “magic box” (in “The Man from Tallahassee”?) Smokie couldn’t have taken over his body, because his body wasn’t on the Island.
2. Why did Jacob choose the LOST-ies, out of all the billions of flawed people in the world?
3. Why — and how — did the Island travel in time?
4. Who were the kids dragging the teddy bears?
5. Why did so many of the LOST-ies have a connection to each other, before they got on Flight 815, without knowing it? Why did we always see them criss-crossing through each other’s flashbacks?
6. Why — and how — did Hurley see dead people?
7. Why — and how — did Miles get messages from dead people?
8. What were Walt’s special powers? What about that bird?
9. Why did Flock yell out RealLocke’s signature line, “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!”?
10. How did Smokey inhabit Christian’s body, when Christian’s body was missing?
11. How did the guardians of the light live for so long? How did Jacob transfer that ability to Richard?
12. Locke got Helen. Hurley got Libby. How come Sayid didn’t get Nadia in his flash sideways?
13. If Jacob/MiB’s fake mother made the rule that the brothers couldn’t kill each other, why didn’t she extend it to say that they couldn’t kill each other by proxy either? And how do these rules get enforced, anyway?
14. How did Eloise know so much?
15. When the LOST-ies went back on Ajira 316, why did they all have to go back together, including Kate who wasn’t even a candidate? Why did Eloise tell Jack he had to bring Locke in a box? Why did they have to make the conditions as much like Flight 815 as possible?
16. How did Frank Lapidus end up being the pilot on Ajira 316?
17. Why did Jacob need to bring so many people? Why not just one person to replace him, and a couple of alternates in case the first one got sick?
18. How come Jack and Desmond didn’t turn into smoke monsters when they went into the cave?
19. After Locke asked Walt, in the Pilot, if he wanted to know a secret, did he ever tell him? And what was the secret?
20. Why did all the people in Purgatoryland Church appear to be the same age they had been in 2004? Surely some of them had lived to old age before dying. Was Limboville so Jack-centric that everyone chose to look the way they had at the time that Jack, not they themselves, had died? Or was this all being told from Jack’s point-of-view (so he would remember them the way they were when he last saw them)? But didn’t Christian said that Limboville was something they had all made together — a kind of team project — which suggests it couldn’t be just Jack’s vision?
21. When Jacob told the MiB at the end of Season 5, when they were back in the 1800s, “It only ends once. Everything else was just progress,” what was he referring to?
22. Why did we see the Island underwater at the beginning of Season 6?
23. After Jack and Kate confessed their love to each other before Jack died, they didn’t get together in the sideways world. Kate, in fact, kept on flirting with Sawyer. Is this the attraction so strong it can’t be denied, even after death? Will the triangle continue for all eternity, while they are frolicking in the bright light? I didn’t see any indication in their sideways flashes that Kate or Sawyer wanted to “let it go.” Just the opposite — it looked like they were just getting started, gearing up for another round.
