Monthly Archives: May 2010

I wonder …

Could the ending be a long con by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, something they dreamed up in order to see if they could get away with it?

Think about it. Six years of dazzlingly smart, complex story-telling, raising questions of free will versus destiny, science versus faith, and good versus evil, weaving themes about the betrayal of children by their parents, creating characters with “special” powers, building a world with a system of mysterious rules that keeps even the most powerful in check, seeding easter eggs and cross-references so complex that thousands of blogs and websites and the amazing Lostpedia had to be created to keep track of them all … and then it all boils down, in the words of my blog-pal Val, to “they died happily ever after”?

No way.

Sawyer, a man who knew a lot about how to run a long con

Yes, I’m being tongue-in-cheek. But I really can’t imagine how they came up with such an ending. It was so jarring, so disconnected from anything that had come before.

What do you think? Do you agree? Disagree? Do you think the ending fit in with what had come before? If so, why? If not, did it bother you or did you enjoy it the way it was?

Editing to add: Demonstrating once again that there are no new ideas, after posting this, I did a vanity search on Twitter for “LOST long con,” and I found that a whole lot of people had already been tossing that idea around long before I thought of it. That search, though, fortuitously led me to an article which is the best I’ve read so far on the finale: Lost was the ultimate long con by Charlie Jane Anders.

The more I think about the ending, the less sense it makes.

That is not a good sign.

Here’s what I don’t understand:

According to Christian Shepherd, “This is the place that you all made together, so that you could find one another.”

But when the dead LOST-ies made “this place,” why did they construct it in such a way that it blocked their own awareness that they were dead? Why did they create a convincing alt-world for themselves where they all had new lives, with no awareness of their past? Didn’t they come to “this place” specifically to acknowledge and let go of that past?

They were the ones who created “this place.” They could have made it anything they wanted. So why did they make it a place that blocked their own memories, when the reason they were there was to process those memories?

Why did it take Desmond to wake them up so they could begin to remember? As matter of fact, why did Desmond even want to wake them up? What was it to him?

Even more puzzling, since they were all initially unaware that they were dead, and thus unaware that they were creating “this place” out of their imaginations, then how did they all synchronize their imaginations to create the SAME place for all of them? Did they attend some sort of Second Life workshop right after dying and before heading out to the alt world, where they hammered out their new world before stepping into it?

It just doesn’t make sense.

I could go on. And I will. But the vastness of the things that don’t make sense is overwhelming, and I must retreat to an alternate reality for a moment. 😉

Spoilers … spoilers … spoilers … Go away if you haven’t seen the finale yet …

I was enjoying it well enough, until Christian told Jack that they were all dead.

No, no, no, no, no! That’s not the ending I wanted. It doesn’t even make any sense. If they are were in heaven or wherever, why did they all have the same shared experience — or maybe I should say seemed to have the same shared experience — of being on Flight 815, landing in L.A., and having these alternate lives?

And they never did explain the Island light — and I had been sure that they would. Okay, I can live with that — thinking of it as just something that has to be in place to keep the Island afloat. Maybe that stone that Desmond removed was the Island equivalent of duct tape, holding it all together (great line from Miles, btw) — but I had really been hoping, and expecting, a coherent explanation of the sideways world.

I can see where the Island stories presented unsolvable problems for the writers. But why would they actually introduce the whole idea of the sideways worlds unless they had somewhere specific they were going with it?

Am I perhaps missing something? These are just my first thoughts — it’s less than 20 minutes now since the show ended.

I mean, it’s nice that they all love each other, and that they all got together in the end. There will several spots in the finale where I did cry. But does it really come down to they will all meet in heaven? That’s almost as bad an ending as saying it was all a dream.

I guess it’s not heaven, exactly. Or at least not the angels and harps in the clouds version. Christian said it was the space they carved out to meet each other again.

And what’s with the light at the end? And all their talk of leaving, and then Christian said they weren’t leaving, but moving on? Were they in limbo? Sigh.

Well, one thing’s for sure — there will be millions of words poured out, in pixels and in print, on the ending. If I did, in fact, miss something, I’ll find out soon enough.

Great show, LOST — up until the last ten minutes. Well six good years, ten disappointing minutes — balanced on the scale, the white stone weighs much more than the black.