The post from Idle Thoughts makes me sad. I loved this show (and the threads and discussions here) over the years. so well done, such good actors, so fun to watch. I do believe the last episode ruined it all for me. I bought all the other years’ DVDs. I won’t buy this last one. yeah call me immature & bitter. I don’t care.
I just got around to watching the finale a couple of days ago. And it seemed to me that the likely explanation for everything is that we just watched years of, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Island”.
If you’re not familiar with the Ambrose Bierce short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, it starts off with a man about to be hanged during the civil war. They push him off a bridge with a rope around his neck, but the rope breaks and the guy finds himself in the water. The story goes on about his attempts to swim to freedom while soldiers shoot at him. The story goes on and on about his adventures trying to get a away and find his way back home again, but in the end, in the last paragraph, he’s hit with a blinding pain and a white light, and the story ends with the body swinging from the rope. The entire story was a tale of what flashed through his mind in the last moment before death. He never escaped, the rope never broke.
The fact that Jack walked back to the exact spot where he ‘woke up’ in the first episode and died there is our clue that all the events in ‘Lost’ were a fever dream of a dying Jack Shepherd, the sole survivor of flight 815. Vincent also survived, and that’s why he came to lie down beside Jack - Jack was the only one who survived the original crash.
Going with that premise, the whole cave with the light that you must never enter was Jack’s mind fighting off death. He died when he finally agreed to go into the light.
It’s pretty much the only explanation that doesn’t leave a whole bunch of plot holes and hanging threads behind.
After writing that, I decided to search for “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge + Lost” to see if anyone else had that theory, and came up with this article at LostPedia which draws even more parallels between the two. I’m gong to have to go read the story again.
Two questions:
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Why did Jack change clothes as he lay dying?
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Where did the rather pedestrian Jack we came to know get such an amazing imagination?
That’s a workable theory although the show’s creators explicitly said at least a couple of seasons ago that everything that happened on the island was real, that it was not in somebody’s head and it was not purgatory.
Who says he did? He’s wearing different clothes, but that could just be part of his dying hallucination.
If it was all an hallucination, maybe the ‘pedestrian Jack’ is part of it.
Anyway, from the LostPedia:
I find it interesting that the book itself was intentionally shown - and in an episode called “The Long Con.” Maybe we were the ones being conned.
If the whole thing wasn’t a pre-death hallucination, at the very least it would seem that the writers knew of the parallels (or wrote them intentionally) and referenced the book to tweak the audience.
Sam, do you view this interpretation as a defense of the show? Because I’m not sure “haha suckers, 6 years of it was all a dream!” works for me.
Since this thread is still alive, I’ll say something I’ve been thinking recently: I liked the final episode when I first saw it, but the more I think about it the more I think the writers chickened out. To me, “Sundown” was the point where Lost seemed to be taking a very dark, apocalyptic turn. I really thought that somehow fake Locke was the devil incarnate, and had corrupted the souls of Sayid and Claire. And the creepy voice of Claire singing “Catch a Falling Star” to her boar skull baby as Locke and his new followers march out by torchlight to bring Armageddon to the world . . . that sent chills down my spine.
And then they pulled back. Sayid and Claire weren’t really infected with darkness. Locke was just this guy, you know? And Jacob was a bit of a dunce.
I didin’t care about the hatches and rabbits and getting answers to all that crap, but I do think Lost was going in a certain direction artistically and then didn’t have the courage to follow through.
You’re right about that episode, it was chilling in its intensity. But then it all went away.
The writers desperately needed to be writing for a show like ‘The Twilight Zone.’ They have a masterful way of setting a mood, posing a situation with lots of promise, and yes…drawing great characters. But they lack the vision, or discipline, or something, to see the first two of those through to a meaningful conclusion. A show whose whole format was just to leave you feeling like you had gotten a glimpse of some other strange place without knowing everything about it would be right down their alley.
Not at all. I’m just trying to figure out what the hell happened.
Fenris - thanks for that link. The quote you posted reflects a lot of my feelings. That last episode left a LOT of bad taste in my mouth. The breach of trust is exactly why I feel so angy about it.