Lost Laziness

Rather than write my own rambling thoughts on the Lost finale and Lost as a whole, I'm just going to post comments I stumble upon on other websites that somewhat resemble my own thinking.

Most of these will by the startlingly intelligent posters at The AV Club.

From Snugglesaurus Rex:

I meant "pigfuckers" in the most diplomatic and affectionate of ways. This is an internet debate. It will go on for the next four hundred centuries after we are all cyborgs.

The line seems to be drawn between the people that want it to be possibly real, and the people that know what stories are. I'm not trying to be condescending, but lost was a story. Like most soft science fiction, from Dune to Star Trek to Blade Runner; it isn't about literal interpretations and plot. It shouldn't be. Leave plot to CSI and Scooby Doo. Plot is terribly simple. There's only two possible plots ever.

As Americans we've been poisoned by literal interpretations of our cultural stories. Literalists are forced to believe in the flood and Noah's Arc, and Adam and Eve and all that patently ridiculous crap as if it actually happened. Of course it never did. You need a large number of individuals to create a viable gene pool. And 2 of every animal would create a shit load of animals dumb enough to take the Bible literally until they died of inbreeding.

Lost, while maybe not as influential as the bible is about stories. The mysteries exist to put the characters into places where they can be tested, where who we are, and who we think we should be is explored. The mysteries are my favorite part of the show, and the weirder Lost got, the more I liked it, but the mysteries were story telling tools, and never meant to be realistic or rational despite the fact that they used the vocabulary of science to describe them.

Stories are important because you can bend reality in them when you can't in life. It's a way for people to explore the possibilities of existence outside of the hard world of reality.

If you were waiting for an explanation as to why Walt was special, then you got it. You really did. You didn't need to see Walt to get that explanation. The light at the heart of the island was stronger in him than it was in Ben or Michael or the rest of us.

The mythology was absolutely essential to making the story interesting, to compressing it into a story that people could watch, and it applied to the lives of the characters in a very real and solid sense, and it was wells served throughout the series despite the fact that it was merely a means to an end.

It's not a perfect work by any means, but Lost is a consistent work. No one has been strung along or conned. All of you reacting with a supposed checklist of unanswered questions should take a step back and analyse why you think you've been disappointed. Many of your questions have been answered, and the story has been very consistent from beginning to end.

Dude, they were building a runway for the Ajira flight that the Losties escaped in, in the beginning of season three. This wasn't a haphazard operation, people.

This also comes from someone that hates the finale of Battlestar Galactica with the firey passion of a billion exploding stars because it wasn't consistent with the context of the show.

From Jacob I Have Loved, on why what happened on the Island "matters":

Does no one think it was important that our Castaways SAVED THE WORLD? They sealed a freaking Hellmouth and defeated the creature who had dedicated himself to opening it and destroying the world?

Everything that happened in the last few episodes was designed to confirm several things:

1. The island light at the center of the island is a legitimate, important thing
2. The smoke monster was the greatest threat to this light for very real reasons - he'd been shown its location and was gifted in a way that would cause him to tinker with it
3. The only way to kill the smoke monster was to temporarily disable the light
4. The smoke monster was created because of a cycle of hateful and angry people acting as watcher.
5. The title of watcher does grant significant (if ill-defined) powers

Now imagine, just for a moment, that the light of the fountain was somehow connected to all good in the world, including the afterlife. If the gang hadn't worked together in the way they did to kill Locke and fix the island they wouldn't have gotten their happy reunion.

I didn't take the flash-meetup to mean that all their struggles on the island were useless because the afterlife would happen no matter what., but rather that the sacrifices they all made toward the cause of saving the world from the smoke monster were worth it.

From SonofSonofSpock:

Given what everybody is saying about mysteries versus characaters, i thought I should post myu interpretation because it was very different. The finale wasn't great; it wasn't terrible. It definetly seemed like they could have tried something a bit more ambitious, and based on heights reached before, the bar was set very high, and was not reached. That said, I have to give them credit for pursuing their vision. It would have been fairly easy to do an apocalyptic-battle style finale that probably would have made most people happy, and wrap things up in a neat package. They went for the more literary ending. It seemed like they were going that way from the "Across the Sea" episode, where it turned out Jacob and his brother weren't the all knowing beings they seemed, but were players in some cycle they didn't understand. The ending kept it ambiguous, which was very true to the themes of the show. It wasn't clear that the light going out, and Locke with a real body escaping, would have actually lead to anything particularly bad happening. It's up to the viewer to decide; did all this have a purpose or not? Was it just a series of random, senseless events, or did it matter somehow? It's clear from the ending that Jack thought that it did, and that he had fulfilled his "purpose." I actually thought the scene with Jack dying was very well done. He was a well written tragic character. At first he seems like a too good to be true hero, then subtly he's revealed to have major character flaws (like blaming his dad for everything, including the failure of his marriage). As time goes on, he makes more and more wrong decisions, till he eventually gets to to the point of suicidal junkie. I think the implication was, that had the plane crashed, this was where he was heading. Or maybe not (Jacob did "touch" all the people he chose). He eventually finds his purpose, which is apparently to kill Jacob's brother and then die saving the island. It's a sad arc, eventually since maybe it all didn't matter. The final shot with Vincent (the dog) laying next to him as he sees the people he saved and he closes his eyes was immensely sad. Of course, he's been "flashing" to some world/purgatory/alternate dimension where the people aren't as flawed (or maybe weren't tocuhed by Jacob, or whatever), so there is some closure, but it's a sad sort of closure, and that world seems less real, and more of just an "occurrence at owl creek" type of a deal. Which is something that I'm not sure really worked. Did the alternate reality really add anything? Was it necessary to spend half the season there? The ending would have been slightly different and sadder, but still satisying, without that, and there could have been some other reason desmond was motivated to unplug the hole. It did seem like an odd choice, and probably the most disappointing aspect of the finale. I guess I can understand that the writers wanted it as a sort of epilogue to give all the character arcs resolution. The writers said they were influenced by the dark tower series, and this did remind me alot of the final book, which was brilliant at times but ultimately frustrating. This wasn't as bad as that, but I guess i would have liked to see some other approach to ending it. As far as the questions not being answered, i don't think they weren't. Most of the mysteries were solved by the end, except for the "ultimate" mysteries, did all this have a purpose, where did the island come from, what is the energy "really", etc. But how lame would it have been to have the answer be that the island wanted you to accept jesus christ as your personal savior. There were motifs that were never completely explained, but I saw that as part of the cyclical mystery (the fertility/pregnancy stuff comes to mind.) The basic questions, like who was this guy, why was this, what was going on here, etc. were all answered, although you may have to go back and think about the narrative for a second. As I mentioned, it seemed sort of clear from the Jaco origin story that they weren't going to give an "ultimate" explanation for the island. I really liked Locke, inhabited by Jacob's brother, being the one saying it was all meaningless and fighting Jack, who had done a complete role reversal from his earlier interaction with Locke as the man of reason. If you recall, Locke visited Jack, who told him he was crazy thinking that it all had a purpose, before he was about to attempt suicide. But Jack desperately needed his own life to have a purpose, and "killed" Locke again, representing the other perspective. Here's an example of questions I'm glad they didn't answer. Did Ben execute "the purge" on his own initiative, or was he orderd to by Jacob? Jacob was not a great guy in some respects. He was willing to ruin lives, and create situations that he knew would get people killed to "win" his game. His adopted mother slaughtered the men who were trying to build the wheel to "protect" the island. Did he do the same thing? What was up with the life restoring water? Did it really turn people evil? Sayid was still capable of sacrifice, and Ben ultimately became a slightly better guy. On the other hand, what accounts for what happened to Danielle's team? That kind of stuff, which is left open to interpretation made it a more interesting and thoughtful show then had those answers been spelled out explicitly.

Yeah, I loved The End. It's a testament to the quality of this show that it dealt with some form of an afterlife, and I didn't hate it with flamma infinitus.