I’ll say that originally the whole Sayid/Shannon thing didn’t work for me, but I really like this explanation quite a bit. Ties in perfectly with the Sayid character. Nicely done.
I’m overally satisfied with the ending. Yeah, I wish they’d have explained a bit more but I kind of like it when you never see the whole picture. Partially it stems from structural/story concerns. You really can never give an entire description without some sort of encyclopedia (especially on a show like this) and those always feel fake whether it’s a character that knows everything or some sort of computer. It just tends not to work. Now we can all sit back and fan wank to our hearts content over what this was and what that was.
Character wise, it all worked for me. Locke couldn’t move on until he got over that little “paralyzed from the waste down” thing. Wuss. Kate couldn’t move on until she’d given turniphead to Clare. Sayid couldn’t move on 'till he stopped brooding for five minutes (waah waah I tortured people repeatedly including the woman I loved. Quit whinging ya nancy boy) and made out with Shannon, who couldn’t move on with the rest of them till she got a couple of days off from the starbucks she was working at and could rejoin the cast for filming. Sawyer and Juliet couldn’t move on until… um…Hey look a smoke monster over there ------>. Hurley couldn’t move on until he owned a fried chicken franchise. Boone couldn’t move on until he was inside of a plane that actually landed successfully. And Jack couldn’t move on until he brought his father home and saw that everyone was happy.
As this was a primarily character driven show, that was the one thing they really had to nail and I think they did a good job with it, with the exception of Sawyer/Juliet. Their relationship never really worked for me. It felt more like the writers knew Sawyer would’ve been in the past for so long and would’ve fallen in love with someone. Why not just do what we did before and have him take Jack’s flirty relationship. That’s probably another reason that Locke knew that Jack didn’t have kid. Doc starts a good game but lacks finish. Point is, why was that tacked on relationship the one thing that those two characters needed to move on? Sawyer especially was one of the biggest characters on the show and his emotional resolution just kinda fizzled.
Yeah, but after thinking about it for a while, I think the whole AWL bit was Jack’s personal space. Only those people who were important to Jack were there: the people he knew best on the island. He didn’t know Eko well and didn’t care about him to any great extent. He barely knew Alex aside from her assistance when he got off the smaller island. He never knew Nadia but he knew Shannon.
If it had been told from the standpoint of someone else, say Hurley, the final waiting-room attendees would have been different.
By the way, the wheel on the stained glass window is a Dharma Wheel - snicker and the character is “Om,” which Wikipedia tells me is a sacred syllable of Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains.
(Oh, and MsWhatsit, I was thinking the same thing as you during Claire’s labor. Artifacts of our epidural culture, I guess. Although in the end, it doesn’t matter since it was all pretend.)
Just realized something: having the finale unfold in the way that it did actually makes me respect “Across the Sea” a whole lot more, and see why it was a full-on episode instead of just a flashback or an exposition monologue from Jacob. (I still think it was kind of clunkily written.)
Mystery-wise and mythology-wise, the creators of “Lost” actually ended up playing fair. They didn’t give us answers about the origins of the island, and obviously that’s going to piss off the people who watched for that reason, but they came about that approach fairly because by the end of the show last night all of us knew exactly as much about the island’s history as any other character throughout the entirety of the series. There was no grand mystic with all the answers withholding them from us; there were only people involved in a continuous cycle that was older than them.
For that approach to work (and I do think it did), the creators had to show us that Jacob and the Man in Black (and Mother) were just other links in the chain; they didn’t know where it all started, either. They only knew that they had to protect the Glow Cave. So, “Across the Sea” told that story, and removed the expectation that Jacob would pull an Illustrated History of the Island down off a shelf or something.
Nobody had the answers. (Possibly including the creators of the show.) And if that’s going to bother you, then it’s going to bother you, and it’s perfectly fine that it does, but most folks involved with the show have maintained from the beginning that it was a show about the characters, and so it makes sense that we only get the information about the island that is necessary to them, and their journeys. (Luke never needed to know about midichlorians, and it was all so much better when he didn’t.)
(Note: I’m not talking about all the little mysteries and the red herrings and all that; they can still be puzzled out, or not, based on clues peppered through the series as a whole. Obviously there’ll be stuff that doesn’t shake out, as with any serialized drama. I’m talking about the big, “Who did this/what is the light?” questions.)
I think the one thing that lends credence to the idea that it was “all about Jack” and that the purgatory was Jack’s alone is the Sayid/Shannon reunion. Jack never met Nadia (correct me if I’m wrong), so Sayid ending up with Shannon is Jack’s interpretation of what would make Sayid happy and give Jack closure on that front.
There were three ‘endings’. All of which had varying degrees of suck-assitude.
The Man In Black/Escape From Craphole Island finale. Well done largely, (I liked Jack going all Batman on Fake Locke’s ass) but we never got a coherent motivation for Smokey (was he trying to leave? sink the island? both? Why?) or a sense of threat–who cares if the island is sunk? More importantly why should we care? (They coulda fixed this by showing the real world having riots and stuff when the bathtub plug was pulled).
The (presumably intentional) ending of the Alt Timeline where it’s a mishmash of the last few chapters of The Last Battle from NARNIA and the unspeakably crappy book/movie What Dreams May Come. Including the stupid “COEXIST” bumpersticker stained glass window. Totally unsatisfying since some of the characters hadn’t changed or grown in the slightest and still got to go to white-light heaven. (Sayid for one: He started out as a brutal thug/torturer, stayed a thug throughout much of his stay on the island, left the island and became an assassin, went back to Dharma, where he was incredibly violent (shooting L’il Ben) and even in the Alt-Timeline, he was still incredibly violent. Don’t get me wrong, I love the character, but if he’s gonna get to heaven, he needs (from a storytelling pov) to do something to earn it. If the Alt-Timeline is purgatory or limbo, shouldn’t Sayid have to grow to get out?)
The possible (I didn’t get this but others have suggested it) fake-out where the final scene of Jack closing his eyes in the bamboo field apparently mirrors him opening his eyes after the crash. Then following that with the shots of the wreckage have implied to some people (I choose not to be one) that the whole 6 years was a split-second hallucination of Jack’s. That’s such a cheeseball-copout that I choose not to accept it.
Plus, there was just too fucking much that was unanswered. Let’s set aside fascinating (to me) mysteries like “Why did Miles’ dad use all those aliases in those Dharma films when he was right there working with the Dharma guys and everyone knew him?”–those are great but ultimately won’t make or break the series.
But…
What is the Island? What are the consequences of it sinking?
What is Smokey’s motivation?
Why were the Losties brought there? It seems like if Jacob had just left them alone, at least some of them would have been way better off (Sayid who was meeting Nadia, Hurley who had made the first steps to getting past the numbers curse thing). What was Jacob trying to accomplish by bringing them there?
What did Jacob hope that only Desmond could do? (Pull the cork? Why couldn’t anyone else?)
What was Whidmore up to? What was his motivation?
What were the rules and why did they change?
What are the criteria for getting into Heaven in that universe? Being a good person? Then why is Shannon there? She was a useless, selfish, spoiled twit her entire life. Coming to terms with who you are? Leave Sayid out: he never reconciled himself to his violent nature. Etc.
These aren’t minor trivia questions, they’re fundamental questions about the characters and their world and they’re important to understanding the story…such as it was.
Overall, I say…bah. As far as I’m concerned, the story ended at the end of S5. The bomb worked, they landed in LA without ever being on the island and everyone (except poor Penny and Desmond–who never got a reunion, dammit!!) lived happily ever after. Except Kate who went to jail and was eventually put in the electric chair for her murderous crime-spree. Last scene we should see of her is that stupid toy airplane melting as she fries
I give it an A.
Lost messed with our heads for six years, and it may as well mess with our heads on its way out the door.
My interpretation ?
Everything on the island happened, the alt timeline though was never real, and perhaps was created by Hurley.
Christian told Jack “Some of them died before you, some long after”. They just stopped off in the ATL whenever they died, the ATL was not a specific point in time (Again Christian : “There is no “now” here”).
Hurley said “How does anyone get off the island”, and Ben said something like “Those were Jacob’s rules, but you can make your own”. So Hurley did just that.
One flaw in that argument of course is that Hurley at first didn’t know what was happening in the alt timeline, only Desmond (and maybe Mrs Hawking) seemed to know. I would have made Desmond become the new Jacob, that would fit my plan better, he was the logical choice to create the new timeline.
I was entirely satisfied by the conclusion. Part of this was because of where I set my expectations for it. I figured (correctly, it turns out) that we were done with Dharma, done with the Others, done with Widmore, done with the Temple, the Statue, etc., etc… Whatever explantions we got for all that stuff prior to the finale were all we were going to get.
Some of those previous explanations were satisfying, some not; but for last night I let them all go, and just let the rest of the story unfold. And from that point of view, I thought it was terrific.
I predicted plenty of negativity here on SDMB (though there’s actually a bit less than I expected). I think many of those who were not happy with it were still trying to shoehorn their own expectations into the story. It was really much more straightforward than a lot of folks are making it here, and the entire chronolgy of the series becomes clear once you know the truth about the ATL.
Though I would have like to have seen Michael and Walt at the end too, and perhaps Ana Lucia and Eko, It’s easy enough to accept the idea that anybody who wasn’t at the church simply found his or her own way to move on, and those at the church found their way together. An elegant, simple, and fulfilling finish.
One silly little nitpicky thing did bother me, though. Jack, and everybody else at this point, knew that MiB in Locke form was not really Locke – “You disrespect him by wearing his face” - great line! – yet he continued to refer to him as “Locke” up to and including his death. “I’m going to kill Locke,” “Locke’s dead,” etc… That kind of talk sort of disrespects Locke’s memory too, doesn’t it?
Anyway, I’m glad I stayed awake to the end, and was not at all disappointed by how it turned out.
I liked it just fine. It was sweet, but unsatisfying. The Diet Coke of series finales. I would have really enjoyed the finale had the preceeding 5-6 episodes been better executed.
Here’s the gist of my (mild) annoyance: all season we have said that we could not get fully invested in the ATL because we didn’t have a basis to judge it. Now that I have it, it still feels like a waste of time. Sure, it is interesting. But it is not like the ATLs have been a part of the show from S1. So, in essence it feels tacked on to make the ending profound. I don’t hate it, but I was never emotionally attached enough to love it.
That said, it was cool seeing all the actors I cared about together. But maybe that is the flaw in the scene. I was very aware that they were actors in that room and not characters. It felt like the ending to Family Ties when they all come out and take a curtain call.
I keep hearing the line that it is about the characters and not the mythology, and I find that a false choice. Great television or film can be about both. It is not like you have to abandon the story to show great characterization. Have the characters react to the story.
This actually IS pretty funny!
There were some straggler Others who made it out of the Temple and then survived the missle blast at the beach. Cindy and the kids.
No Eko. No Michael. No Walt. God hates black people unless they marry white dentists!
[quote=“Monstre, post:213, topic:540459”]
Ana Lucia was there last episode. Desmond said she wasn’t ready yet (i.e. not ready to “let go”, I presume). Perhaps this means not ready to let go of one’s mortal life – you have to be ready to let go, in order to move on.
[QUOTE]
Real answer: she was a bitch and none of the main cast liked her.
Everything in the ATL for Jack happened after the fight. There is no need to link up contemperaneously. The ATL did not happen until after Jack’s death. Thus, everything that ever happened in his real life happened before the ATL.
ZING! Where the hell was Meredith Baxter Birney and Valerie Bertanelli (TWO One Day At A Time references in one Lost thread!)
I’m confused by all the confusion of where the Losties were at the end. It seemed pretty straightforward. My only WTF is Desmond’s role. Was he just confused as to his purpose in the real time line? ATL Desmond understood everything. RTL Des seemed to miss the boat.
I think that is why Jack was the last to wake up. He was fighting it. Did this remind anyone of the old Alan Moore Superman story, For The Man Who Has Everything? I could have taken a scene with Jack saying goodbye or reacting to the loss more. Locke’s moment with him in the hospital was good, but really just on the Locke end. Jack just walked away.
[quote=“jackdavinci, post:255, topic:540459”]
First off, cliff diving. I have cliff dived in Hawaii, although off a waterfall and not into the ocean. But never would I have, as a non-professional diver, dived HEAD FIRST into the ocean from a huge height into water possibly hiding rocky underwaters.
[quote]
My wife and I both said, “OUCH!”
The Duct tape line might be the best of the series. Lapidus floating to the top is the best lie the producers ever told! FRANK LIVES! Was he in the church, though?
Probably what I’ll have to live with. Sadly, the writers never realized that when the show dropped from 23 million viewers to 10 million, the 10 million remaining were predominantly people who cared about four toed statues.
I think the lowered expectations of the preceeding episodes helped me too.
Jack did. Nadia and Sayid were married post-Oceanic 6. She was at Hurley’s birthday party. I imagine Jack knew her longer than he knew Shannon. The difference is, Nadia was never a member of the principle cast!
As for the over under bets:
Number of Viewers for Finale (Relevant Data- Season six premeire was 12.6 million. Season two premeire was 23 million. Tuesday’s episode was 10.6 million)- **15 Million **
To be determined.
Number of express references to the Dharma Intiative- 1.5
ZERO. Under.
Number of Sawyer “sonofabitch!” lines- 0.5
Over. Two sassy ones and one standard.
Number of deaths by members of the principled cast(defined as actors credited whether they appear of not)- 2.5
Um…all of them…? On screen, I count only two (Jack and Locke). I guess over.
Number of appearances by former principle cast members who have died (same definition but from any season except those who died this season, e.g.- Sayid)- 5.5
From what I saw, I liked it. Time Warner in the Cleveland area decided it was a good time for technical difficulties and had sound and video problems throughout the entire broadcast. They are going to replay it this coming Saturday. Great timing!
Jack was the last to “wake up” because his (let’s call them) constant was seeing that the main cast had happy lives. He couldn’t “wake up” until everyone else had!
