Needless to say, open spoilers abound. If you’ve not seen the end of both series, don’t say I didn’t want you.
SPOILER SPACE
So - Battlestar Galactica ended with the remaining humans finding a new planet, naming it “Earth,” and inexplicably deciding to abandon technological civilization for lives nasty, brutish and short. Lost ended with no explanation whatsoever for most of its major mysteries, with one of the few exceptions being the revelation that the flash-sideways scenes were … well, from the afterlife.
The BSG finale was roundly panned, and I expect the Lost finale to be likewise. Question - which was worse?
Personally, I think the Lost finale was far worse than the BSG finale. The characters in BSG made a bizarre decision, but it was one that was physically possible within the BSG universe, and not inconsistent with anything we’d previously seen. We might have thought it was a stupid idea for everyone to go off and live in the woods, but there’s no reason they couldn’t, and it didn’t contradict any earlier plot points.
Lost, however, had an ending little better than “it was all a dream.” In fact, that was the ending, with the caveat that this dream takes place in the afterlife. Everything in the entire season that had indicated the events in the flash-sideways were important to the resolution of the plot was a giant red herring. This magical afterlife was introduced for the first time in the last half-hour of the series, and used as nothing more than an extended curtain-call for the cast. Which, incidentally, dialed the glurge-factor up to eleven - along with those damn “oh, hey, now I remember I love you” montages.
I’m actually netflixing my way through BSG right now, at the beginning of season 2. (I’m not concerned about spoilers obviously.) I can’t speak to BSG’s finale personally but I’m relatively satisfied with Lost’s end. It’s not what I would have wanted but we got an emotionally satisfying ending for most charactrers.
Both were awesome. I liked Lost’s better, but they were both solidly written and very intelligent. I understand that some people are pissed, but I’d suspect that most of those people had their own pet theories and would never be happy unless vindicated.
We know everything we need to about Lost, the island had this light, the light was important to the preservation of Humanity, MiB wanted to selfishly leave and in doing so he’d extinguish the light.
Everything else can be guessed from the evidence we have. Why hieroglyphics? Because the island used to be in the Mediterranean. Presumably the first people to find it and safeguard it were Egyptians. This can be guessed because Latin speakers in antiquity crashed on the island and there was already a guardian. And the MiB was the person who invented the island teleportation wheel, so before him the island stayed where it was permanently.
Why four toes? Because the sculptor thought it was cool.
Where did the island come from? Who the fuck knows?
I enjoyed them both immensely, thought they were great stories with very satisfying emotional payoffs. At the same time, I found the logic of certain things, or the lack of explaining certain things to be annoying.
