That One Finale

Like others, I decided to watch the final episode of Lost, a show about people on a mysterious island filled with strange phenomena and riddles uncounted. I started watching the show at the beginning of season 2, right after they found the hatch that led to a guy pressing buttons (the reason why was, at the time, a mystery). As time went on though, plot elements and questions as to the nature of pretty much everything on the show piled up. For every mystery solved, two new ones took their places. I quit in frustration. Flash-forward (or sideways, your choice really) a few years and we come to the end of things. I'm caught up and ready to watch the climax. Does it pay off?

Well, it could've been worse. All that really happens is that Locke (possessed by the Smoke Monster) and Jack "Protector of the Island" Shephard fight each other, a magic plug is removed and almost sinks the island, and then it's put back. Eventually, it finishes with a Jacob's Ladder homage, and Jack dies.

It's probably a good thing I didn't invest in the past few seasons, or I probably would've felt a lot more gypped by the ending. A lot of questions remain unanswered, an act of trolling by the writers on fervent, obsessively detailed fans who will never get to see the explanation to these riddles they've waited so long to be answered after their grand unified theory of LOST was smashed to pieces each season by some new revelation that changed everything.

Now genre-wise, the show is considered a drama, and not a mystery. So of course the focus, and the story as a whole, is about the characters and their relationships to one another. In that case, it's fairly well resolved. But it's not fair to introduce constant new plot elements, macguffins, and other twists without seeing them through to the end. It's like some giant "aborted arc" pile-up.

Taken as a whole, from beginning to end, Lost is a jigsaw puzzle half-complete, that if given maybe another season or so to piece them all togethor, could have produced a good, coherent whole. Instead, the show became some run-away train that was successfully stopped a mile before reaching the station. And even if they had the ending in mind from the beginning, the whole thing shouldn't have gone on for that long: maybe it was a victim of it's own success?

Goodbye Lost. You provided so many with joy.