ALIENS!
Yeah, if everyone ever asks me what LOST is about after tonight, I’m just going to say an alien did it.
Okay, call me a cynic, but I don’t think the “alt” timeline was purgatory or anything along the line. As I see it, the entire Alt timeline was Jack’s hallucinations as he staggered back to the bamboo grove to die.
IOW, all the island stuff was real, and at the end, the situation was that those who left on the plane, genuinely flew off. (Did they successfully reach an airport? Who knows?) Rose and Bernard are still living in their shack, a possible handful of Others from the temple are scattered about the island. Jack is dead.
I think the inescapable clue to the Alt timeline being solely Jack’s hallucination was the repeated reappearance of Jack’s neck wound. This is the wound Flocke gave him in the final fight, and the fact that Jack had it as early as before the fake Flight 815 landed in LA means that ALL of those scenes happened after that fight.
The fact that everyone’s life in the ALT scenes were improved you have to put down to Jack’s generally nice nature. Nobody died, everyone gets back together with their loved one, etc. Hugo was a good Jacob, even Ben was mostly redeemed. Jack doesn’t hold grudges.
All in all, I think it was a pretty good way to end the series, even if it does have a bit of St Elsewhere-ish “it was all in his mind.”
Yep. It was overseen by a nubile, androgynous alien who commanded Ancient-Egyptian slave peoples from a galaxy far far away, brought to this “special place” by means of a “Stargate”
and, yes, I agree. I don’t know why they can’t give substantive answers to the practical things. It would even suffice if Lindelof just shows up on Kimmel and explained it all (of course, they don’t have any answers)
To elaborate on my earlier thoughts - I think the annoying thing about the “everyone’s in heaven” conceit is that it means nothing they did in the Alternaverse had any consequences. Sayid’s decision to confront those gangsters, and abandon his hopes of going straight. Ben’s realization that he could be something like a father to what’s-her-face. And so on.
It was not just during the finale, but throughout all 6 seasons of the entire show, that, whenever 2 characters started getting all kissy-kissy and lovey-dovey, I immediately looked at the clock and thought, “they’re wasting valuable screen time.”
So the whole thing was about Jack’s life/death. Mathew Fox said he knew the ending from day one involved him closing his eyes.
ok. (Michael sorry). thanks for confusing me more.
he basically said if you’re a bad person, you don’t get to purgatory. you get stuck on the Island.
hmm…
i think the point of this is that people don’t find “salvation” in their deeds - all that matters is who you take the journey of life with. or some crap.
I don’t think that means that at all. The flight 815 that landed safely was in the “Afterlife” alternate timeline, none of it really happened. That doesn’t mean it was all in Jack’s mind.
The relevance of the neck injury may be that Jack had that injury when he died.
And that it makes you smile in a hypno-trance way when you remember them after your death.
I’m still thinking they all died in the Pilot episode plane crash and it was necessary to create the island (or the action on the island) as a communal mind together, perhaps at a subconscious level, to untangle their souls that got entangled because they all died at the same time. Perhaps other groups of casualties from the Oceanic Airlines flight 815 plane created their own post-crash purgatory scenarios because their souls got entangled in other clumps. By this theory, everyone encountered in the series besides the main Oceanic 815 survivors/casualties and Christian Shepard was a philosophical zombie created by those who died in the 815 crash. Some of them, like Ben and Juliet that were in the church at the end were loved or were important enough to the main characters in their progression and disentanglement in purgatory that they were made real a la the Velveteen Rabbit.
Add me to the WTH list. I tried to watch the program over the years but it was like watching a movie with plot twists that just wouldn’t end. It got to the point that I was actually angry at the level of confusion generated from missing 5 seconds of the show. IMO they broke the unwritten rule that you wrap stuff up from time to time and THEN introduce new plots.
The constant catch-up episodes were a testament to the level of confusion the program generated.
Meh. I’m not upset about it, but I do feel ripped off. I liked the characters, but there’s no reason why they couldn’t have delivered on BOTH the mysteries and the characters. I got roped into watching it thinking there was a sci-fi story in there, but as it turns out I was watching six seasons of a Lifetime movie.
The alternate endings are better than the series.
now, what i am feeling ripped off about are these alternate endings.
Nikki and Paulo are spending their afterlife with spiders. 
I was thinking that maybe the reason Ben didn’t join the others in the church was that he wanted to continue his life with Rousseau & Alex.
Given my low expectations, this episode was a fairly decent ending. Which is a shame, because I had blocked out a full 45 minutes of my schedule for bitching about it on the Internet, and all I can really manage is this post.
Yeah, from the promos for Kimmel, I had thought they meant they were showing some real alternate endings. I should have realized it was going to be jokey ones, being on Kimmel after all.