I finally saw the Lost finale

I can see why a lot of people would hate it.  But then, again, there are certainly arguments for what they did end up doing.

Me, I teared up during the episode, had a bit of a WTF when Christian opened up his mouth at the end, and spent a good long time afterward thinking that was so weak.  Originally, I was going to write a blog post about how I would have ended the whole thing better. . .  And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wasn’t giving the show and the writers enough credit.  This ending was telegraphed from the start.  After all, with the constant visitations by the dead, one of the commonest theories about the island the first few seasons was that it was some portal to the afterlife.  The sfnal trappings only really appeared in the middle seasons— the first season, like the last, was much more supernatural in feel.  It’s also obvious in the motifs they used; remember Locke staring down into the light in the first season?  As well as the faith vs. reason battle that began with Jack and Locke (which became more and more faith vs. nihilism) which was repeated throughout the series with Ben vs. Whitmore, Dharma vs. the Others, Jacob vs. Smokey, and ended with Jack and pseudo-Locke in mirrored roles.  The last season mirrored the first even by reversing the original fan theory by making the Island the “real world” and “flash-sideways” the afterlife.

Love or hate the ending, this is where Lost was going from the start.  And, while I may have some issues with how they ended, I don’t think I could do a better one.  Not without re-writing most of the whole last season.

And the more I think of it, the more I think they did a pretty good job with what might have been an impossible task.  (I mean, when some of the more strident complaints are “Sayid and Shannon?  You’re kidding me.  They ruined it.” methinks there’s not a lot of deep thinking going on.)  It probably would have been a first magnitude error to whip the curtain completely away, because whatever explicit reveal you did on the nature of the island would never have lived up to the mystery in everyone’s head.  In fact, if there was a fault, it was probably going into the light cave.  After thinking about it, the one change I might do now would be to rewrite things so that we never see exactly what’s going on down there.  Just have Desmond describe it when they pull him back up.

That, and I’d rewrite Christian’s speech.  I still think it was kind of lame.