Why didn’t people remember each other ATL? Any takers?
…okay everybody, this is my opinion on what happened to Desmond.
When Widmore and co conducted their experiment on Desmond, he died. For a few seconds, a few minutes, whatever. And he moves on into the afterlife.
When he meets Penny, his constant, he is suddenly bought back to life. He wakes up with full memories of what happened in the afterlife, and because he is used to “time-hopping” into his body at different times of his life, he assumes he has done the same thing again. Desmond has a feeling of calm about him because in his mind it is all going to end well: he has seen the future and somehow it all works out for the best.
He tells Jack about this future he has seen. He talks about meeting Jack on Oceanic. But this wasn’t the future that Desmond was seeing, it was the genesis of the shared afterlife. This scene also clarifies that what we see in the sideways wasn’t just Jack’s vision: but an actual shared reality that actually “existed.”
Meanwhile, over in sideways, Desmond keeps on going because “dead is dead” and “what happens happens” and “there is no now.” He touches Penny and has his moment, when he realizes he is dead. And he remembers visiting the sideways universe while he was alive on the island, and unlike Charlie (who had a flashback but didn’t quite realize what it meant) Desmond knows that he needs to bring everyone together.
So real-world Desmond is confused. He thought that pulling the plug would pull a “reset” like Jack thought would happen with the “incident.” He has seen everybody on the plane and knows that everyone ends up in the sideways and has been convinced that everyone ends up happy. He’s a bit like the audience, really. We’ve all been watching, convinced, hoping that the sideways was an alternate reality, a second chance, because over the last six years we have grown to love these characters. Desmond thinks pulling that after pulling the plug the island will cease to be, time will rewind and they will end up back on Oceanic 815 because that is the only way his time in the afterlife would make sense.
However doing that would have been a cheat by the rules of the Lost universe. What happened happened. We have been reminded of this. There are no mulligans in real life.
These characters that we had grown to love had died and there was no coming back. When Jack admitted he was dead, I hated it. It just seemed wrong. But hours after the broadcast, my brain finally had to admit that it was the only logical way to end it, and then I just started to love it.
Writing a good finale is always a hard thing to do. Its a fine balancing act: you need to finish the story and have a proper farewell to the characters. A lot of shows don’t get the pacing right. What the sideways universe was was a long, loving farewell to the characters that many of us had grown to love. It was the happy ending that we wished could have happened but didn’t. It was a long goodbye. I know the ending didn’t work for a lot of people, but for me? It was perfect. I needed time to say goodbye to the characters and the sideways, over the course of a whole season, provided it.
The greatest thing about these characters is that you could plop them into a different scenario and I would still love them. I could easily watch the Saywer and Miles Detective show, or a High School drama starring Locke, Ben and Artz. I would have tuned into a hospital medical mystery starring Jack and Juliet, or see Kate as a fugitive action heroine with a heart of gold. And who wouldn’t want to watch international man of mystery, Desmond, with his sidekicks Charlie and Hurley?
I realized after watching the final that for me, personally at least, this show was about the characters. The island was just a setting, a backdrop, to watch these fantastic characters and these brilliant actors preform. It was just grand to have a sci-fi/fantasy programme successful on mainstream TV that lasted longer than eight episodes and had a proper ending. I loved the ending and I loved the characters and I loved the island and I loved the story of Lost, warts and all.
Eh. It kept some of us off the street.
The joy is not necessarily in the destination, but in the journey. I know some are livid that there are NO ANSWERS, but some just don’t care.
But that’s the point. These are professional writers. I expect them to do better than I would. I expect them to surprise me with a consistent, imaginative and clever story better than I could create. Otherwise, why pay attention to them at all?
I’m an engineer. I have some sense of personal accountability with respect to my profession. I wouldn’t sneer at you and ask if you could imagine a better bridge if I were to fail at my responsibilities and build one that failed to hold up under weight.
But that said, I’m not unhappy with the finale. Lost has always seemed to me to be an entertaining show that didn’t really know where it was going, and the final episode, and indeed, the final season, just confirmed that. The first seasons are not inconsistent with the last, and if you expected something more, I don’t blame you, but I do think you were optimistic.
In the interest of full disclosure, I didn’t watch the show at first, caught up on three seasons belatedly, and watched intermittently after that. My interest for the last couple of seasons has been continued for two reasons: the drama is interesting even if the underlying theme is disjointed, and I wanted know if my initial suspicion was correct: The writers of this show, after the first season, were thinking, “OMFG, we just got renewed. How the hell do we now make sense of this hash?”
You know, the funny thing is that LOST would probably have been a better show if it just suddenly and unexpectedly ended somewhere in season 2 or season 3. It would become an enigma - people would be convinced that it was all going somewhere really interesting and that they missed out on the chance to see it achieve greatness. Instant cult status.
I think as it is, it’ll be the punchline of jokes by late night hosts and bad comedians within a few years. Too bad, I guess.
This has been mentioned in other threads, but bears repeating as an answer to this idea: When I crack open a murder mystery, I fully know there is a pre-chosen answer to the question “Who done it?” It is such a well known story telling device that we actually call such a mystery a whodunnit! As I’m reading I know full well the author’s making the shit up - but she’s invited me to play along in finding the answer to that essential question. If I get to the end of the book and do not find out who actually done it, I’m entitled to feel cheated. With LOST we were invited to play along, to consider the possible answers to MANY questions. That’s the storytelling device they chose!
Think of all of the unanswered questions in Lord of the Rings: What exactly was the ring’s power? Who was Sauron and what were his motives beyond just being pure evil? How was the ring made and why was Mordor the only place it could be unmade, etc. I do not care about these questions because these were not essential to the story. In fact it is a mistake when some mysteries are explained (mitichlorians anyone?) Many (not all, I agree) of the LOST questions are critical to answer if we are to understand what the hell the whole thing was all about.
Thank you for this! Somehow I missed the part where Desmond told Jack about being on the plane with him. Was that in the finale? That’s the missing piece - and with that I retract my criticism of Desmond’s “I thought we would end up in a happy place.”
With a show like Star Trek, yes I agree. The five year mission never has to end - it’s the experiences along the way that provide the joy of the show. But each experience (i.e. episode) contained setup, development, and payoff. Questions were asked, explored, then answered within the episode (or across a two-parter). LOST differed in that it held the payoff as a dangling carrotf. Reflecting on the joy of the journey, a good measure of that joy was the delightful angst when the word LOST appeared with the musical thud at the end of an episode, signalling a cliff-hanger, moving the carrot further into the future. I loved that part of the show, because it made the anticipation of GETTING that carrot all the more tangible. Even right up to the last act of the finale, the hope of clasping my hands around the carrot kept me glued to the screen in fanboy delight.
The carrot is a lie.
The realization of this robs the power of all those wonderful cliffhanger moments.
All we’re left with are character studies. They were well done, engaging, and superbly acted. I will grant that. Those emotional moments getting to know our beloved characters is not something I dismiss at all. But that joy is tainted too by the unfulfilled promise of the carrot.
See, perhaps, Carnivàle.
Well, I was wrong about the finale giving more answers. But I still thought it was a great ride, and that the series as a whole was a great ride, and well worth the emotional investment.
And here’s where I think people are going to see things very differently.
In my take, those ATL stories DID matter. They mattered because they provided the Losties, whether long dead or only recently, one more chance for progress in their path towards collective character development and the ability to connect with each other. It continued their stories on from the points they had left off in an odd way: the psychological hangups, the struggles still there, but with people better able to cope with them.
Most of the ATL lives were better, more functional, more healed. But the folks still had issues, still had things they had to recognize as deeply important. And the ATL was the second-chance place to take that growth and key into it all again, move it forward one final time before moving on.
If you see the ATL as more development, the final development of the characters, then of course it mattered. Locke got to let go of his guilt over not feeling wanted or special. Jack worked out his daddy issues. Sayid realized that he just wasn’t meant to be with Nadia, but that he could still love and that his redemption didn’t lie in finding her. And everyone got to say goodbye and acknowledge each other. Kate, Claire, and Sawyer presumably led long lives after the Island, and had less to work out, but they still had long missed things they needed to find again. Sun and Jin basically had worked out their issues, and just wanted to be together. They wished they could have raised their child together, but it just wasn’t to be. And they accepted that.
But if you wanted to be goosed with some neat time-travel twist that tied it all together, then yeah, it probably all seemed pretty pointless.
In the end, the mythology was just “Island craziness:” myth that the characters and the audience only got disjointed, unreliable, half glimpses and hints about. It was backdrop to churn the characters around. And if that’s all it was, I think it still served its purpose well.
Say this for Lost: that was no Soprano’s ending. The producers had something to say, and whether or not you found it cheesy or a cop out or profound, they said it, and they spent more than a season setting us up to NOT want to let go of those characters, but then revealing that they were already gone, and that that’s all you get, and you just have to let go of it all and accept the choices you made and the consequences.
I certainly agree that the audience was tricked. I think the question of whether they were cheated, or whether the trick itself means something, is an interesting one.
I mean this entirely apart from whether the producers had any clue or sincere plan.
I think it’s an honest question. Thus:
Again: tainted if you just want the carrot. But the carrot was also a means to an end to lead you somewhere you might never have gone without it. And the fact that there is no carrot, or at least no single authoritative carrot is in some ways more fitting with the show as it always was, and with its final theme, than any whodunnit reveal.
The show basically explored what a lure shock and confusion and WTF moments can be. And then it said that, well, that’s life. Get over it. Keep asking questions, but don’t ever expect to run out of them.
So, basically, the writers just bounced a whole bunch of checks that were written simply so we could marvel in their writing.
Just watched DVR of finale. Haven’t read others opinions, so this is a pretty raw reaction. The only way I can resolve this story is that this entire series is a narrative imagined by Jack in the last nanoseconds of his life. Your life and and “what could have been” your life flashing before you. He’s an emotional but mostly rational and really smart guy dying in a plane crash in the last seconds of his life. He sees all of these faces around him and none are familiar, so he imagines what kind of people they are. Subconsciously, each face manifests itself an aspect of his personality or external force in his dying dream. The human backgammon battle here and the secret bathtub plug there are picoseconds of an imaginary reality on the island all borne out as a product of his internal struggles. These last blinks of life are being played out by the faces of the mass of humanity he sees around him in the instant of his death ala Kaiser Soze. When those faces don’t exist, he creates them in his own imagination. 3 Much like the way Walt imagination seems to create reality from what he is thinking at the moment.
There is no question in my mind that Jack died on Oceanic 815 before he even opened his eye the first time. That is the point where breaks in real logic, physics, and science began. We are following along through Jack’s last thoughts as he scribbles his dying inspirations on the back of a spiral notebook. It is a wonderful, emotional, illogical story that Jack has given us. I am glad I came along for the ride.
Very interesting and frankly the first part makes a lot of sense… at least it seems to reveal what the writers were thinking. (Whether they adequately conveyed that to the viewer is an open question.) The whole post sounds like it was written by someone on the LOST staff, especially how defensive and boastful they are about the purgatory idea. (It sounds like they are trying to convince themselves how great the ending was.)
Anyway, the theory that the Others were corrupted by MiB to kill the Dharma folks is compelling, but how come Richard who was recruited specifically by Jacob never twigged on to the fact that he had unwittingly changed sides at some point? You’d think that before mass murdering a large group of women and children, Ricardus would think to himself, hmmm, is this what Jacob wants? And frankly, they way the Purge was presented in the show, it seemed like it was Richard’s idea more than Ben’s.
Also, since the Others were controlling Jacob’s temple (Dogan and Lennon), how come they weren’t already serving the MiB, seeing as how according to this writer, the Others had become corrupted and switched sides?
Sadly, I really do believe that that post was written by someone at Bad Robot. And it shows that they really didn’t think it through, in my opinion.
P.S. I call bullshit on the assertion that they conceived the ending right after the pilot and that’s how come it’s only Season 1 people there.
Well in some regions there were credits on the bottom half of the screen and the debris on the beach on the top half. My guess is you were cruelly deprived of the spectacle 
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When Ben said that I wanted to scream “But you don’t know shit about Jacob because you never talked to him until you stabbed him. You don’t really know anything about how any of this works. And your defining characteristic is that you lie about everything.”
Well yeah, but Ben did know some things, like about the frozen wheel and the monster summoning door. And while he hadn’t met Jacob, he did receive notes from him through Richard.
Desmond only glimpsed enough of the afterlife to get the mistaken impression that it was an alternate timeline.
Possibly. Or maybe because Desmond had turned off the light, and it didn’t return to full power until Jack was already out of the cave.
She had other interesting answers, some directly from the behind the scenes people, and some strong theories based on other things she had been told:
Answers:
[ul]
[li]The “help me” voice, the eye, Christian, etc in the cabin were all MIB[/li][li]There will some answers about Walt on the DVD[/li][li]108 on the lighthouse wheel - the name was not important[/li][li]MIB’s name was Samuel which means “man of God” - Kristen thinks Mother named him that because she originally thought he would be her replacement[/li][li]Rapidly changing weather - the protector of the island had the ability to control the weather, so they could for example bring ships to the island, but they could also subconsciously affect the weather with their emotional state such as the storm when Jack is fighting Locke[/li][/ul]
Theories:
[ul]
[li]Jin was the Kwon candidate (though this might be Kristen’s pet theory, she justifies it by noting that Sun would have been let off the hook for being a Mom, but she doesn’t address if she was a candidate before she became a Mom).[/li][li]Last scene with the plane crash - she thinks it’s just season one B-roll footage to have a nice image for the credits[/li][li]Numbers - she thinks that Hurley’s bad luck related to the numbers was related to what would happen if the light went out[/li][/ul]
Because they went through such great awkward pains to hide it from the audience, they made it seem like a mystery we should anticipate an answer to.
In general, the island needs to be protecting from people disabling the plugged well device. As we saw, doing so at the very least destroys the island. It’s not unreasonable to think that it might have similar effects on the rest of the planet.
It’s not really clear if MIB was actually dangerous off island, or if he was only dangerous in that escaping required him to at the very least kill off the protector, and also possibly to destroy the island in the process.
I don’t mind that it was a surprise. Just that it was the sort of plot device that they had promised never to use.
Totally agree with this. I also got the sense that Jacob and Samuel each only inherited half of the legacy of the Mother. I don’t think she could have destroyed the village and the well without the power of smokification. And it seems clear that there existed a smoky before MIB given the heiroglyphs in the temple…
Yep. All the energy was channeled into the time jump and into making the energy pocket beneath the Swan unstable (which led to the whole button scenario). It might have also fried Radinsky’s brain. He was never quite the same after that…
Hey, there’s no need for exaggeration. The writers neither left us completely answerless, nor did they fully explore every mystery. We were left somewhere in between. And they neither made it up as they went along, nor did they have every detail planned out long in advance. They had an idea of the major milestones of the series, and they came up with the answers to mysteries at the time that they showed up.
Agreed.
I’m pretty sure that the notion that the writers knew the ending was only referring to the poetic scene of Jack’s eye closing mirroring the opening shot of the first episode.
…yeah, he said that, but I can’t remember exactly where because I was teary eyed through most of the episode!
And for anyone interested, the farewell from Dr Pierre Chang. And Chang gets his happy ending too!
People always say that, but I don’t buy it.
No-one thinks a 72 hour bus ride (where you never leave the bus) is a good vacation. No-one ever takes a 5 day drive across the country to say, New Jersey, then turns around and goes back and calls it a good vacation. No-one ever takes a vacation consisting of a 17 hour flight to Tierra Del Fuego sits on the plane while it’s refueled and then flies back immediately.
The destination is critical. The journey is important too, but without a destination, it’s meaningless. The destination is the only thing that makes the journey meaningful.
Yeah–forget about the “mysteries”–I can live without knowing why the statue only had four toes.
What I can’t forgive is the character cheats/screw-ups.
Without knowing what really happened in the cabin, we don’t understand Locke. Was Locke a real threat to the MIB? Was he a pawn of the MIB? Just some deluded schnook? We don’t know. We can speculate, but that’s it.
MIB-to what degree was Smokey Jacob’s brother? Did he just take his shape? Was he Jacob’s bro’s evil side? What exactly were Smokey’s motives and why?
The sterility thing–it was a primary motivator for 3 seasons (kidnapping Walt, trying to kidnap fetal Aaron, taking all the kids from the tail section) and for two characters (Ben, Juliet)–without knowing what/why/how, we have no guidepost for how/why the characters behaved as they did.
I could go on and on—I can live with unresolved mysteries–and you’re right–some things are cooler unexplained. Wolverine loses huge amounts of cache every time we learn more about his origin. But character motives/personality aren’t the same thing.
Dharma Patrol
He most certainly does have company in this thread, me for one. Or more accurately I think it was presented to us as an option. Like I said earlier I think the writers purposefully sprinkled several ambiguous and/or contradictory little morsels into this episode to cover their arse on not really resolving anything.
Had the final image been an homage to where this show started, and if we are to accept that it was all about the characters (the DI, the statue, what the island really was…these aren’t the droid -er um - mysteries you’re looking for [waves hand around]), then that image should have been the characters that first night on the beach bathed in the warm glow of firelight getting to know each other. We never saw the wreckage empty as it was pictured there without anyone around. The wreckage was always a-buzz with people trying to figure out how they were going to survive.