I’ve never contributed to any of these threads and frankly have mixed feelings about the finale. However, I would like to add something no one else has noted. It’s been some years since I’ve read a translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead (a Buddhist text,) but it’s basically a handbook for the afterlife. The main point of the book seemed to me to be whatever someone is expecting in the afterlife, that is exactly what they will find. The soul goes there until it is ready to move on to the next level, the next lesson. Given that the Dharma Initiative (Dharma being a Buddhist concept) plays such a large role in the plot of the show I can not help but think that the book influenced the story and the ending at least somewhat.
Just popped in to say what a lame ass I am. I fell asleep well before the end, and now have to watch it again tonight. :smack: Last I remember, Hugo was going to be the real Jacob. Or something.
Was there any logic to what sort of alternate reality each Lostie got? For example, why did Hurley go from being the unluckiest lottery winner to the luckiest, while Charlie remained a drug addict?
This. I watched Lost because of the stuff that the show ISN’T about, apparently. If I wanted characterization sans the monsters and time travel, I would have watched The Good Wife.
I love this line!
I’d be okay with that, I’ve said all along that the dog knows things.
Improvisor, you just stated everything I think about the series and finale. I also feel cheated and think the writers really dropped the ball on this.
Seconding the fact that Improvisor nailed it.
What a waste of 6 seasons.
Were there stray Others on the island after Hurley became the new Jacob? Are we to assume other Others came to the island in later years? Somehow I don’t like to think of Hurley and Ben Protecting the Island for who knows how long with only a few wild beachcombers running around. I’m putting this badly, I know, but earlier in the show the Others had a civilized society going on. Weren’t most of them killed, one way or another, leaving just a handful?
Even Anthony Cooper didn’t run a con this long.
While we’re at it, what are they protecting the island from? Why are they even protecting it? Other than a cave full of glow that explodes when a drain is pulled out, we’re given no reason to care about the island’s survival.
And another huge characterization screw-up: If Smokey’s main goal was to get off the island, why’d he kill Glen Gruenburg in the pilot and try to kill LePetius two episodes back? Who did he think was going to fly that plane? This is just sloppy writing.
I thought it was a little bit too long, but as a concept the final episode was excellent. As someone else said, certain things like the history of the island were just never going to be explained. Who could explain it? They’d have to discover a cave with a history book or a previously unseen character to do it. Other stuff, like Dharma, just wasn’t important anymore. They were some guys investigating weird energy at an island. That’s it. What was the problem with pregnancies? Weird island energy.
What I loved is that absolutely nowhere have I read anyone suggest that the ATL was any form of an afterlife. Everyone, including me, was convinced that it was some kind of “once the island is fixed” timeline and somehow they would both merge. they managed to trick us all. Personally I think that is quality writing. It made sense. It wasn’t pulled out of their arses. They were just cleverer than us. I love that.
I wonder if people’s reaction to the ending doesn’t correlate directly with the baggage they bring to the viewing.
If you’re of the secular/rationalist mindbent, and/or you thought you were watching a science fiction show: you’re royally pissed off.
If you’re open-minded on the concept of the afterlife, and/or you thought you were watching fantasy: you applaud.
I’m ambivalent on the above and ambivalent on the ending. 
Gruenburg because the plane was to badly damaged to fly, and as we’ve seen, MiB kills people who have become useless to him.
Lapidus because MiB had a boat.
I thought the finale was a good end to this SEASON, but I needed a lot more information about the island in order to feel satiated for the overall show.
In trying to piece together what could have happened, I came up with this theory that at least seems plausible and thought I’d throw it out for general thoughts/discussion:
The island makes passing on to the after-life possible. The light is a physical manifestation of the “soul”. Perhaps the island is also the mechanism by which an individual’s limbo is manifested. In other words, the island is basically the server room that houses soul data and provides the ATL space which holds people in limbo until they are ready to move on. (I’m reaching on this paragraph. There’s not much to support it, but it makes some sense given the background)
Pulling the plug looked a little like opening the door to hell. As if the stopper was keeping the souls that haven’t moved on from being sucked into oblivion. If that’s right, hopefully nobody was condemned to eternal damnation while the stopper was out.
The island, for obvious reasons, needs to be protected. I think the “smoke monster” is the power given to the chosen protector to make him/her an effective weapon. It makes sense therefore, that the protector cannot leave the island, and so the smoke monster is prevented from leaving the island. Scientifically, it is contained by some electromagnetic mumbo-jumbo, which Darma was able to recreate in the form of the barriers around the camp.
I assume the pseudo-mother of Jacob/MiB was both the protector and the smoke monster as intended. The chosen person goes into the light, becomes the weapon, and is trapped to the island. For whatever reason, she did not want that fate given to the person taking over the task (perhaps she didn’t fully understand it), so she killed real mom, and lied to the kids so they would not WANT to leave. When she passed on the chore to Jacob, she lost her smokey power and was killed by MiB. Had Jacob gone into the well, he would have become a “good” version of the smoke monster who would stay willingly and protect the island with his smokey powers until he found a replacement, but he inadvertently gave the powers to MiB who wanted to leave rather than protect – leading to their epic struggle. This sort of explains why Jacob was able to leave the island at will, but MiB was stuck.
The island appears to have some tricks of its own to protect the inhabitant – healing, for one, being nearly invisible to the outside world as another. Perhaps no new births as yet another (to prevent people from settling there).
Unfortunately, this doesn’t explain why Jack was not turned into the next smoke monster when he came in contact with the well water… Can’t rectify that one.
I’ve been trying to sort out my own reaction to the finale since last night, and . . . well . . . it’s complicated.
I think the poster who said it was a magnificent ending to a different show pretty much nailed it. As an emotional roller-coaster, it was fantastically well-done. All the actors did themselves proud – heck, I was even liking Jack and Kate. And Terry O’Quinn alone deserves about 16 Emmys. As Smokey, he was genuinely menacing; as John Locke, he was warm and sympathetic. Two completely different characters, both played brilliantly.
I also liked the ending sequence and the final scene. Yeah, it wasn’t exactly a big surprise – some people guessed it a long time ago. But it still worked, and it’s the one thing I actually do believe the producers had planned from the beginning.
I was somewhat “meh” about how the on-Island story ended for the other characters. Surprised but glad to see Frank, Miles, and Richard survive, even though it was totally ludicrous that they got that plane to fly. I mean seriously, after six seasons, the surviving castaways are rescued by duct tape?
Hurley as Jacob 3.0 was a nice surprise – although, as others have noted, we never really saw any indication that Jack/Hurley were “changed” by drinking the Magic Kool-Aid (or in Hurley’s case, the Magic Larvae-Infested Puddle Water). They didn’t appear to gain any special abilities or secret knowledge. I guess we’re to assume Hurley was granted the whole immortal-until-someone-stabs-you thing – in which case it would not seem to be terribly comforting to know that your second in command is Ben “Stabby McJealous” Linus. But I suppose Ben turned out okay after all, based on what Hurley said in the (oh crap, now I have to talk about The Stupid) ATL/purgatory.
Oh dear, where to begin on the ATL resolution? For the record, my own silly theory for how it related to the regular timeline (posted in the “What They Died For” thread) turned out to be both spectacularly wrong and, if I can be forgiven a bit of immodesty, better than what we actually got. In fact, I’m kind of stunned that they spent *so much time *this season on the events of the ATL, only to have almost all of it turn out to be completely irrelevant. All the stuff with Sayid and Keamy? Jin/Sun’s secret affair? Sawyer and Miles’ buddy cop show? None of it meant a damn thing, really, because none of it was real.
Even worse, it didn’t even make sense when you consider what we learned in the finale. One of the most talked about scenes in the season – possibly the whole series – was the “pan down to the sunken Island” bit in 6.1. But if that entire world was just a ghostly waiting room for the next life collectively created by the dead Losties, whose point of view were we seeing that sequence from? And why was it even included? Was it simply stuck there as a red herring, just to get us all debating how the Island sunk, whether Jughead was responsible, etc.? If so, it served no narrative purpose other than being a set up for a big “GOTCHA YA!” from the writers.
But wait! There’s more! If all the characters are having “flash memories” of their time on the Island, but many of them didn’t actually die there, why didn’t those folks “flash” through the rest of their lives as well? For all we know Sawyer, Kate and Claire lived to be old geezers. Why did they only “flash” their Island experiences? Hell, Hurley may have lived for thousands of years. But apparently kissing Libby on the Island was the highlight of his long, sad life.
So yeah, the ATL resolution didn’t work for me at all. If it hadn’t taken up huge chunks of an entire season, I might have bought it. But it just seemed like a cheap gimmick to fool us one last time.
And then, of course, there’s the dump-truck full of unresolved questions, about which Improvisor was right on the money. For six years we were all carefully following the twists and turns of a narrative in which huge portions of the story ended up being discarded as apparently irrelevant. The cabin? The “sickness”? The protective ash rings? The Egyptian statue/hieroglyphs? Eloise Hawking? Illana? Waaaaalt? Apparently it was all a great big buttload o’ red herrings. Even Dharma, since all the donkey wheel/time travel/Jughead stuff turned out to have nothing to do with the ATL, or much of anything else.
What narrative purpose is served by a team of writers crafting one mystery after another, adding questions on top of questions, if they have no intention of resolving them or even making them meaningful? I never expected answers to every little thing, but the major mysteries around which the entire series revolved? Yeah, I kinda thought maybe the writers would respect the audience, and centuries of storytelling tradition, enough to give us that.
I spoke to my Dad on the phone. He is still convinced that they all died in the original plane crash. :smack:
He’s got company in this thread, I believe.
This is probably more a question for the “unanswered mysteries” thread…but now that we know that the ATL was not a parallel universe alternate reality…what the hell exactly happened when Juliette banged the nuke with a rock? It blew them 3 years into the future, made a crater, but didn’t hurt anyone?
Jacob could not be killed by MiB. Not even his candidates could be killed by MiB (BTW I think they missed out on a great scene–they should have had MiB attempt to kill someone, like Sawyer, and fail spectactularly). He could somehow get back to the outside world, and influence it to select and “summon” his candidate successors. His touch may have kept Locke from dying or brought him back to life. No indication that Jack could do any of those things.
Or Desmond. Fake Mom said if you go down there it will be worse than death. But it didn’t kill Desmond, or have any discernible permanent effect on him. And it appears that it didn’t do anything to Jack either except transport him inexplicably to a rock (just like what happened to MiB when he became Smokey) whence he wandered to his original waking-up place to die, presumably of a nasty stab wound, or possibly anaphylactic shock caused by a dog allergy.
Even outside all the bigger “WTF”? questions, and in spite of the fact that the ending hits me right where I live and I cried my guts up, I’m still a little hazy on the reasoning being offered for why the big clue-free build up to the final gathering? What purpose was served, in any way for anyone at all, by the characters all creating lives that didn’t include memories of the island? Why lives that were so different from the lives they really lived? (Jin and Sun lovers, not married)
Has there been any speculation about this that I missed?
Desmond I’m ok with. They said that he was somehow immune to the electromagnetic energy, and ran tests to prove it. As to why he was immune? I can chalk that up to a genetic mutation.