WOW. I... wow. Well, just when you thought a finale wouldn’t polarize audiences more than The Sopranos did, along comes Lost!! For the record, I LOVED it. I loved it because I didn’t want everything answered, and not only did they not answer everything, they even left some REALLY big things unanswered. Upsetting? Now that I’ve thought about it, no. I talked earlier today about how the great thing about the fandom of Lost was that it attracted demographics from so many diverse communities. But as a result, when you’re looking to create Big Answers in your themes, you have to leave things open to interpretation, so that someone with a Christian background might interpret a faith-based show one way, while a Muslim would look at it a different way, and an atheist an even different way. And with faith being such a huge component of the show and that finale, they left it open for interpretation for all of us.
So... what exactly happened in the final 15 minutes, you might be asking? Well, I had the unenviable position of having to jump directly into a live chat when I was still reeling from it (quite literally... at 11:30 I was sitting on the couch with paper and pen both having dropped to the floor, my face in my hands and sobbing... sobbing and sobbing, shoulders shaking and possibly even screaming at times). I was shattered (in a good way) by that finale, it was so beautiful, so moving, so uplifting. And then I had to stand up, wipe my tears, and move over to my computer to start talking to people in a live chat, where, rather than the questions I was used to in the Globe chat, I face a bunch of “WTF WAS THAT???” questions being thrown so fast and furious they were just scrolling up the screen faster than you could read it (the hosts were actually commenting at one point that the chat was becoming useless because we couldn’t actually read any questions). I hope I was able to answer some of the stuff you guys asked if you were there.
But anyway, here is what I think happened in the end: It all hinges on that scene with Jack and his father. So first, let’s look at what they say to each other:
Christian: Hello Jack.
Jack: I don’t understand. You died.
C: Yeah. Yes I did.
J: Then how are you here right now?
C: How are YOU here?
J: [realization hits] I died, too.
C: That’s OK. It’s OK, son [hugs]. I love you son
J: I love you, too, Dad. Are you real?
C: I sure hope so. Yeah, I’m real. You’re real, everything that’s ever happened to you is real. All those people in the church. They’re all real, too.
J: They’re all dead?
C: Everyone dies some time, kiddo. Some have been before you, some long after you.
J: Why are they all here now?
C: There is no now, here.
J: Where are we, Dad?
C: This is a place that you’ve all made together so that you could find one another. The most important part of your life was the time that you spent with these people. That’s why all of you are here. Nobody dies alone, Jack. You needed all of them, and they needed you.
J: For what?
C: To remember, and to... let go.
J: Kate... she said we were leaving.
C: Not leaving, no. Moving on.
J: Where are we going?
C: Let’s go find out.
I believe that the sideways world was purgatory, seen through Jack's lens, and that all of those people needed to come together in some way in that world for Jack to “move on.” I think that the key line that Christian says is “There is no now, here.” There is no time in the sideways world. The island was very much in time, even when it was jumping it was jumping through real time, but that was simply shown to us in the past seasons to prepare us for this place, this purgatory-type sideways world, that was not located in time. Ben and Hurley refer to each other as Number 1 and Number 2, positions they may have held for centuries, for all we know, but here they are in this moment of death, all coming together. This world, this place they’re stopping over in before moving on, this is a place that exists outside of time, and that’s why some of those people will die long after Jack does, and some, as we know, die before that. They’re all here now to move over.
So while that ending was shown through Jack’s lens, it was still a collective experience. Each one of them had to come to a realization. Each one of those people was remembering his own existence and that was the only way he or she could break on through to the other side, so to speak. Locke had to remember his own death, and so did Charlie, Jin, Sun, and Juliet. They had to find the people they belonged to. They had to be with them once again (that’s why, as you’ll see below, my ONLY major regret was that Sayid ended up with Shannon... he was Nadia’s soulmate, and, well... ugh, but anyway). Christian says to Jack that these people existed in the most important period of his life. The things that happened on the island, that was all real. The sideways world was the purgatory that Jack had to go through, and he is the last one to finally SEE.
So why were certain people missing? Eko wasn’t in the church, or Ana Lucia. Ben didn’t go in, Michael wasn’t there. No Richard Alpert. Perhaps the suggestion is that the people in the church are all going to Heaven, and those who aren’t there are doomed to go to Hell. Richard isn’t going to get the absolution he so badly wanted. Ben knows that he doesn’t belong with that group for all the things he’s done. Interesting that Sayid does get to go, though.
(UPDATE: I wrote these comments very early in the morning after having the finale still fresh like a gaping wound in my heart, and I've changed my mind on this last part. I'll be putting up a new post on it soon...)
And the big unanswered question: What was the island? By not answering this one, they leave it up to us to determine. I think that was a pretty big thing to leave out, but then again, they’ve given us the tools to work with all season – the mythology, key components of it, the light/dark metaphors, the wars breaking out all over it. The island was the place of redemption, the chessboard where the characters had to become self-conscious chess pieces, moving themselves around the board (and in many cases along the way in the game, being moved by larger forces playing the game). This was the place where they came to be redeemed or to be damned for eternity. The light in the cave represented both the capacity for good AND evil within each one of us. When the people approached the light with greed, it did harm. When they approached it with goodness, it did good. This is still the major thing up in the air for me, the thing that I think will require the most discussion among all of you and me to help me through this one. So I think I’ll leave it to further discussion below in the comments and in my further posts tomorrow. (Which, looking at the time, is today.)
I have a lot more to say, but it’s 1:30 and I have to start doing interviews at 9 tomorrow morning. And I doubt I’ll sleep much tonight after that. I’ll be online posting all day tomorrow. (I apologize that I didn’t do a video podcast after all. I didn’t have any time between the finale and the live chat, and honestly, I was sobbing through the first 5 minutes of the chat while I was typing, and there’s no way I could have been able to speak at all in a video podcast. You would have just seen me breaking down like Hurley on the beach after Jin and Sun died.) I really can’t wait to see what you guys have to say about it. So... here we go:
Most important quotations:
Usually I list in bold at the top of every ep guide the most thematically relevant quotes, but I figured there’d be so many for this one you’d never make it to this part, so I’ll list them here:
• “No one can tell you why you’re here, Kate.”
• “Nothing is irreversible.”
• “We’re all going to the same place... then it ends.”
• “If I can fix you, Mr. Locke, that’s all the peace I’ll need.”
• “You’re not John Locke. You disrespect his memory by wearing his face but you’re nothing like him. Turns out he was right about most everything. I just wish I could have told him that while he was alive.” GO JACK!!!!
• “I want you to know, Jack... you died for nothing.”
• “Did you see that?”
• “I hope that somebody does for you what you just did for me.”
• “It needs to be you, Hugo.”
Highlights:
• Sawyer referring to Jack becoming Jacob as his “inauguration.” Ha!
• “He’s worse than Yoda.” “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” TWO Star Wars references in the opening!!
• Sawyer calling Desmond The Magic Leprechaun!!! BEST NICKNAME EVER. (Especially because he’s Scottish, not Irish!)
• Hurley staring at Charlie at the motel and just grinning.
• VINCENT!!! ROSE!!! GRIZZLY BERNARD!!!
• Richard Alpert!! I believed! I believed! I KNEW he wasn’t dead! :)
• JULIET!!!!!!! (I originally jotted down, “So I guess this means she isn’t Jack’s wife!”)
• “For the record, you two speak English just fine.” Ha!
• Lapidus!! Now HE was one I was wrong about (I was convinced he was dead despite everyone saying we didn’t SEE him die). But a giant iron door flying with all the force of the ocean at his head and not killing him? O...kay.
• “That’s a hell of a long con, Doc.” Ha!
• Loved Hurley saying, “I believe in you, dude,” and you could hear Jorge’s voice catch because it was probably one of the last scenes he filmed with Matthew Fox.
• Jack saying there are no shortcuts, no do-overs, whatever happened, happened, and all of this matters. I loved that line.
• Jack and Locke looking down into the cave of light the same way they looked into the hatch at the end of season 2. What a perfect end to the first hour!!
• “I was shot by a fat man.” HAHA!!!
• Daniel looking at Charlotte. ♥♥♥
• The entire scene of Desmond removing that rock from the light. That was epic.
• Kate shooting Locke!! Holy crap.
• Jack saying, “Just find me some thread and I can count to 5.” HAHA!!
• Frank: “DON’T BOTHER ME!!” Ben: “Sounds like they’re making progress.”
• Miles: “I don’t believe in a lot of things but I do believe in duct tape.” HAHA! He’d get along well with my Grandpa.
• LOVED that Kate didn’t even hesitate and just jumped into the water.
• “Kiss me, James.” “You got it, Blondie.” WAAAAAH....
• “You were right, Jack.” “There’s a first time for everything.”
• Ben and Locke knowing each other at the church (notice Ben isn’t wearing his glasses anymore, and seems to know that wearing his hair up like he does on the island is less dweebie) and Ben apologizing to John.
• Ben to Hurley: “You do what you do best: take care of people.”
• PENNY!!!!
The Tears
• My first tears came when Sun, and then Jin, saw their lives on the island. I was crying because we were seeing a montage of their lives, the first we’d seen since they died... and then cried harder because they actually saw their own deaths. What was THAT like?
• Charlie’s memories of Claire. Oh MAN I was a mess at that point... It made me wonder if he saw his death...
• “Tell me I’m gonna see you again.” WAAAAAAH...
• Juliet and Sawyer... the moment she said, “We could go Dutch” and he said, “I got you” I was shaking with sobs. SHAKING.
• Kate saying to Jack, “I’ve missed you so much.”
• Jack to Desmond: “I’ll see you in another life, brother.” TEARS.
• “Goodbye, Ben.” When Locke said that, I just LOST it... it was like it was finally coming to an end, I knew that’s the last time we’d see Ben and Locke together.
• “I’d be honoured.” “Cool.” SOB. (OK, at this point I think the tears just flowed and there weren’t any real start and stop points anymore).
• The entire last five minutes of everyone hugging in the church. It felt less like the characters and more like peeking in on the wrap party of the cast. I was wracked with sobs.
• Vincent lying down next to Jack. If you were able to hold back the tears for everything else, I'll bet you lost it here. Jack didn't die alone.
Did You Notice?:
• Charlie’s staying at the Flightline Motel. This is the motel where Kate is staying when she dyes her hair and gets the letter from the desk clerk; where Anthony Cooper was staying when Locke went to him and then Helen followed and he tried to propose to her; and where the safehouse was where Sayid and Hurley went.
• Sawyer walks away from Locke and says, “I’ll be seeing ya.” Prisoner reference!!
• Rose and Bernard have rules, too. They DO belong on the island.
• When Locke said calmly, “I’ll make it hurt,” I actually groaned. How horrible. It’s one thing to quickly slit their throats, but to promise pain and torture... och.
• Richard says he needs to finish what he started: Those are the same words Smokey used right after the sub blew up.
• Sawyer refers to Miles as Enos (a Dukes of Hazzard reference) which is what he called him when they were in the DI together in 1977.
• There’s the expedition music! With a cool rumba flair added in.
• Jack tells Locke that he’s very confident that it will be just fine... that’s what he said to Boone, and Sun on the beach earlier this season... and when he dropped the bomb...
• Jack says to Locke, “I’ll see you on the other side” and it’s never had more resonance than right now.
• I LOVED Locke saying to Jack, “You’re sort of the obvious choice.” Fan service!! Hahaha...
• Sawyer passes Juliet getting off the elevator like he doesn’t even know her. Sadness...
• Really. Do they HAVE to keep commenting on what a big storm is coming? Kind of obvious.
• There are the red flowers around the cave!
• Desmond and Hurley are following rules similar to what Jacob has made on the island, needing people to come to their own realizations and not actually directing them.
• I’m sure many of you saw my reaction coming, but I was NOT happy with Sayid’s flash happening through Shannon. Nothing against Shannon, but I thought his love of Nadia was epic, and that Shannon was just something on the island because Nadia wasn’t there, but making it look like Shan was his one true love TOTALLY waters down the thing with Nadia. I really disliked that reveal of the other world. REALLY. I literally sat there wincing on the couch as he and Shannon were kissing. Ew. Boone said, “Should we stop them?” And I was yelling, YES!
• Maybe it’s because I’m reading Paradise Lost right now, but when the light went out and then the red light suddenly swirled up, it was like the fires of hell were coming up out of that pit.
• Despite everything, I really was moved by Eloise not wanting Desmond to take her son from her. It makes me wonder if her move to have him fulfill his destiny in S5 really was the most painful thing she’d ever done.
• The birth scene was almost exactly the same as the one in S1, right down to Charlie getting the blankets. Only thing missing was Jin standing there.
• Jack flying through the air at Locke when they were on the flat elicited my first “HOLY SHIT!!” of the night... oh my GOD it was like Island Mortal Kombat!! I swore the bird that flew over them at that moment said, “FINISH HIM!” in a deep voice.
• So... after what we know to be true about the Man in Black, did anyone else kind of feel bad as his dead body lay on the flats? All he ever wanted was to leave the island and destroy the place that made his life a living hell (literally) and the moment he becomes corporeal again he dies.
• Locke moves the same foot as he did on the island for the first time. Jack throws the sheet back and looks at it with the same shock as he did when he saw Sarah move her foot for the first time.
• The moment Locke and Jack caught a glimpse of the other world, they immediately started bickering. Haha!! Nice touch!
• When Sawyer walks into Jin and Sun’s room, he walks into the room of the two people who he feels responsible for killing.
• Jack didn’t say the incantation when he passed the legacy over to Hugo.
• Jack re-corks the bottle.... and then looks like he’s gonna melt like Vader.
• They played the music from “Exodus” (where the raft left) as the flight goes... beautiful. I kept thinking, “Poor Richard Alpert! He’s never been in an autogyro before!” Heehee...
• Ben is separated from everyone in both worlds.
• I loved the line when Ben said that Jacob ran things so you couldn’t leave... the rules were specific to the person protecting the island, so if Hurley changes them, things change!
• Ben becoming Hurley’s Number 2 and Hurley being Number 1 (Prisoner reference!!) It’s like Ben’s going to be his Richard Alpert.
• The church had several stone angels as they were walking up to it, signifying what was waiting inside.
• All of the flashes that make Jack see the other side are scenes where he was a hero.
Hurley’s Numbers:
SW Miles says Sayid killed 4 people; Desmond’s group is sitting at table 23 at the benefit; on the hatch under the Ajira plane you can see 840; the Apollo bar is selection G23 in the vending machine;
Teeny Questions!
• What was Charlie drinking? Did anyone see the label? It looked Gaelic.
• How exactly did Ben walk away from a freakin’ TREE landing on him? I’m assuming it was mostly braced by the rock? But he was pretty stuck, which means a lot of the tree’s weight had to have been on him...
More:
My season 6 book is now available for preorder!
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1550229516?tag=nikatnite-20&camp=213381&creative=390973&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=1550229516&adid=0TG587A7YYP59KR607DD&
I’m on Facebook! Come join me to commiserate:
http://www.facebook.com/nikkistafford108
I’m also on Twitter. I’m bad at tweeting, though. I twit infrequently. ;)
http://twitter.com/nikki_stafford
Tomorrow listen in to Marshall and Forbes on The Ocean 98.5 in Victoria, BC at 7:10 a.m. local time, 10:10 a.m. EST. Go here and click on the Listen Now button if you’re out of the listening area. http://www.ocean985.com/
And WEDNESDAY at noon I will once again be participating in the Globe and Mail Lost chat from noon to 1pm EST. Go here to ask questions and comment. See you there!
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
And finally, listen to KEX 1190 at 6:20 p.m. PST, 9:20 p.m. EST where I’ll be on the Mark & Dave show (and they’re big Lost fans so it’s always fun). Go here and click the Listen Now button:
http://www.1190kex.com/main.html
Next week:
There... is no next week. :(
288 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 288 of 288I'm way behind on comments, and I feel a need to apologize, although it's not my fault. Our cable company is catching hell today! It's hard to stay on-line!
Something else I forgot: I've never been so happy to see a dog in my entire life!!!
Humanebean did a post way back at 5/24/2010 8:10:52 AM. Near the end of that post, this is said:
"I hope that I haven't come across as more negative about the show than I intended to be. I enjoyed the ride and ultimately felt fulfilled (largely by the wonderful ending and fine performances by all in the most moving moments) but - as with some other episodes before it, the finale was uneven and it felt to me as if certain pieces of it were shoehorned into the show out of necessity. That said - I had a blast throughout the event and couldn't have asked for a better conclusion to the storylines of these characters I have loved so well for so long."
Humanebean makes a lot of excellent points in that post. Although I am unfamiliar with The Years of Salt and Rice, I have to say I agree with everything else you've said, including your apparently comfortable but "uneven" feelings about the finale.
Eric said: "To answer some questions about the people in the church, the people who were there are the ones who's lives were most profoundly effected by their time on the island and by each other. We could make the argument for anyone who wasn't there that possibly other events/people in their lives were more important."
While I'm not sure I disagree with this, wasn't the ending about the people who were dead and had most profoundly affected Jack? In memory, going through who was there, I think they all had a very profound affect on him.
Ali Bags said: "However, I LOVED the island ending. I am so made up that Ben gets to help out Hurley - it is fitting for a show where the lines between good and evil were blurred (I hate using the past tense)"
Ben and Hurley. Could that be perceived as the worst of the evil, and the best of good?
Rufus said: "Now Sayid. Nadia was the ideal that Sayid had thought he had to live up to and never could. He couldn't ever keep her in the island reality or the sideways one. I think that Shannon and Sayid needed each other and were better people because of their time together."
I agree with this 100%. It's like Jacob said they needed the island as much as the island needed them. Sayid needed to find Shannon as much as Shannon needed to find Sayid. I don't find this works out as well when you think Nadia needed Sayid. (?) I never doubted that Nadia loved Sayid; I thought she loved him a great deal, but she didn't need him in the same way that Shannon did, or in the same way that Sayid needed to be loved. IMHO.
Rufus also said: "They did say the job wasn't forever."
Can someone please remind me who said this and when? I don't remember this at all for whatever reason. I do remember Jacob telling Jack that he was to do the job for as long as he possibly could.
Steve asked: "How did Jack go from being in the bottom of the cave - near the white light - to on ground-level, next to a pond, where he would eventually die?"
I wondered that, too. Him waking up, face down, on the rocks, reminded me of when the Man in Black's body was deposited nearly the same place, same way by the Smoke Monster. Oh, and that's how Kate landed back on the island from the Ajira plane. Splayed out on the rocks, by the waterfall.
Don't think Hurley and Ben would've climbed down there to retrieve his body and bring it out. Hmmm...guess we'll never know.
This was written by Rich Heldenfels, who is the entertainment writer for our local paper:
"And, finally, there was the show itself. I feel cheated. I wanted grandeur; instead, we had rock slides that looked as if they were from a 1960s "Star Trek" and a skeleton trail to the cavern of light which made me think it's going to be turned into a Disney ride. A show that has so often been magnificent went flat.
And what does this tell us about everything we have been watching so far this year: Did Jack's restarting the light make Sawyer a cop? Or was that part of Sawyer's dream of heaven? How much of what happened on the island really happened? Argh. (And even if the finale left some things muddled, even as much as I stayed away from spoilers, I can't think of a single moment tonight that didn't feel utterly predictable and unremarkable, no matter how much the music swelled."
I'm not sure I know what I think about this. Does anyone have a comment on this? I hate when my thoughts get confused by other peoples versions of facts. LOL
Re-watched the whole episode again this afternoon. The tears were flowing freely, during all the emotional scenes, even MORE than they were last night.
Amazing that a TV show can affect a person that way!
Don't think there will ever be another one quite the same caliber as Lost.
So I've been thinking about LOST (what a surprise!) and the sideways world, and came up with a theory. Starting in LAX, we've been assuming the sideways world people are who the characters would have been if the plane had never crashed and if Jacob had never interfered. However, after the infamous church scene, I've thought about that.
As we've inferred, all the people in that church went through the rest of their lives post-island, and that some died far after or before Jack. Think about the people who died after Jack in the island world - Kate, Sawyer, Hurley and Desmond (did I miss some?). Save Kate, who is still a fugitive, all of the sideways mentalities of these people are different. Sawyer's a cop, Hurley's an optimist, and Desmond's a friend (among other things). Now, what if the personalities of these people in the sideways world aren't the personalities they would have had if Jacob hadn't interfered. What if these people are the people when they died?
Sawyer is going to remain my prime example, since I haven't rewatched Happily Ever After and I wince at the thought of What Kate Does. After Sawyer left the island, he left a person who has learned how to connect to people, and has gone through experiences that force him to trust and respect. A conman doesn't suit this changed man, but a cop does.
I haven't had time to read all of the comments so I don't know if this has been said before, and I don't know if it's the general idea now that the finale has past.
Gracie: Thank you for the kind words. I first learned of The Years of Rice and Salt while visiting the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, Washington. It was part of an exhibit about 'alternate histories' in which the course of events we are most familiar did not happen in the same way. This wonderful book, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is briefly set up by Wikipedia as follows:
"The book is set between about A.D. 1405 (783 solar years since the Hegira, by the Islamic calendar used in the book), and A.D. 2002 (1423 after Hegira). In the eighth Islamic century, almost 99% of the population of Medieval Europe is wiped out by the Black Death (rather than the approximately 30-60% that died in reality). This sets the stage for a world without Christianity as a major influence."
As such it explores a small group of characters who, over the course of several incarnations, experience many different interrelated lives, separated by brief interludes in the Bardo, a Buddhist concept of the afterlife described by wiki as: "an 'intermediate state' - also translated as "transitional state" or "in-between state" or "liminal state". In Sanskrit the concept has the name antarabhāva.
Fremantle (2001) states that there are six traditional bardo states known as the Six Bardos: the Bardo of This Life (p.55); the Bardo of Meditation (p.58); the Bardo of Dream (p.62); the Bardo of Dying (p.64); the Bardo of Dharmata (p.65); and the Bardo of Existence (p.66)."
Very interesting read and provocative in its evocation of a world order much different than the one we read about in our history books ... and yet, of course, very familiar in its depiction of human weakness, selfishness, greed, courage and redemption.
COME ON, people!!! I'm trying to reconcile how these devoted Lost fans, who have spent years posting on Nikki's website, can now say the ending was satisfying? I've read Nikki's blog and a handful of other Lost blogs for years, and no one was asking each week whether, if the Losties were killed off, they would find their loved ones in the next life. Each week people were asking questions about the significance of the numbers, and time travel, and the Others, and who was trapped in the cabin, and what the Dharma Initiative was doing, and what talking to dead people meant, etc., etc., etc. THOSE QUESTIONS WERE WHAT KEPT PEOPLE WATCHING LOST AND KEPT THE LOST BOARDS LIT UP EACH WEEK. Look at some of the previous posts on this blog! Hardly anyone was talking about relationships, and who was the true love for Jack/Kate/Juliet/Sawyer. Relationship issues were understood by the majority of posters on this blog as not being of that much interest. It was the mythology that kept us hooked in, and last night we were told the mythology wasn't important.
I've read everyone's comments for a long time, and different people had different issues they wanted answered. The numbers. What is the source of the Island's powers. The Frozen Donkey Wheel. Aaron. Elinor Hawking. They weren't niggling questions. They were the Big Questions. Core to what kept the viewers entertained and enthralled, and kept us coming back week after week. Nikki, you were one of those who said you had faith Darlton would answer the big questions. They didn't. Instead they advised us that those storylines, which were the very things which made Lost so interesting to an intelligent viewer, Didn't Matter. How is creating storylines that were the very things that kept Lost viewers so invested, and then saying those storylines 'weren't what the show was all about' not a lame ending?
I'm confident that, had we all known that those questions were never going to be answered, and instead the only answers we would be given was who was the next Candidate and whether the Losties would find their loved ones after they died, the viewership would have been significantly less. It certainly would have stopped me watching and spending my time reading people's theories - theories which will for the most part never be proven or disproven - each week. It turns out all of the mythology of Lost was just a big red herring.
I stumbled upon here after looking at some reviews on the news sites and this might be a good place to post my thoughts about the last episode.
for me, it was excellent. I never felt this emotional while watching anything on TV.
Yes, they have left so many things unexplained, but when I look at the show in general, I see it as the story of these people who crashed on the island back in 2004; and not the story of Others, Dharma Initiative or even Widmore. They were introduced along the show to make it more interesting of course but in the end, the show wasn't about them.
In the end, most of the original cast died on the island. Few that survived continued their life on the island (Ben and Hurley) and off the island (Kate, Sawyer etc)...
Main confusing bit was to see that everyone was dead at the end. But Jack's dad explained that it's not a "specific time" (or whatever he said). It's hard to grasp the concept I guess when you are thinking logically, but it's a TV show. Have some imagination :D
I just read Nikki's comment about her not having the end scene of the 815 wreckage on the beach during the credits. Wow! When I saw that footage, it looked as if they were showing the wreckage as if nobody had ever survived the crash. And, I guess that's what made me so cynical in my earlier, first post. I felt as if they were saying that none of the island adventures had ever really happened. Like everyone had been dead all this time. (sigh!)
Nik - would love to see a thread related to the impoverishment of sacrament and ritual in modern times.
In Dionysian ritual, a wild animal was imbued with the godstuff and frenzied worshippers would enthusiastically drink its blood. The word enthusiastic actually derives from "en theos" the heightened state brought on my the communion ritual.
Christ blessed the wine and passed the cup and asked that this be done in remembrance of him. The Church complied.
Grape juice is now passed with a hand wave of blessing.
"Fake Mother" probably drank the actual blood of her predecessor in her inaugural draught accompanied by highly ritualized incantation, while Jacob got at least some Latin and wine to initiate him into the club, and poor Jack got a couple mumbled words and some clean, cool running water.
Hurley was given a brief scolding and dysenteric puddle muck.
I'll bet Hurley told Ben, "Dude, open your mouth. I'm gonna spit into it and then you'll be like me, Number 2!"
I think that nothing in the Sideways World actually ever happened, NOR was it really any sort of “afterlife.” The Sideways World was entirely Jack’s imagination during his final moments of life, Owl Creek Bridge style.
Losing blood and weak from his terminal injuries after re-plugging the Island’s Lingam, Jack contemplated the End. He fantasized about what life would have been like if only the island had sunk to the ocean floor prior to Oceanic 815’s doomed flight overhead. Because Jack was such a good guy, he imagined a world where his Island friends (and himself) landed in LAX and lived their lives as basically the same but happier, people.
This was always Jack’s hope. He imagined a lucky Hurley, a cop version of Sawyer, an innocent Kate, etc. He even imagined that Locke, Sun, Jin, Shannon, Boone, Sayid, Charlie and others had not died. He accounted for his feelings for Juliet by imagining a world where he had fallen in love and married her, had a wonderful son together, but then mutually decided on an extremely amiable divorce so that he could eventually reunite with his one true love Kate. He imagined that his father was not only still alive, but suddenly very uncharacteristically loving and fatherly, welcoming him and his friends “home.”
None of this was real, it was Jack’s hopeful but final delusional daydream.
Just as many near death experiences are said to involve the experience of a bright light as we lose consciousness, Jack’s dream ended the same way when he finally succumbed to his injuries and passed away in the spot where the Pilot episode began. As he died, the dream eventually came to be about death itself, even though most of the Sideways World clearly was not. To Jack, it was all about the people and their relationships, the Community, the faith they had in each other. The Sideways World was what he wanted, what he worked for on the Island, what he hoped for.
Of course many viewers think an actual life-after-death scenario is more reasonable, and that my interpretation is wrong. They prefer to think of the Sideways World as the continued lives of dead souls on their way to “heaven”. But that is one of the beauties of the way LOST was written. There are many plausible interpretations. I am pleased that the writers didn’t explicitly rule naturalistic scenarios out, even though I suspect they themselves preferred the supernatural scenario.
Anyway, great episode. One of the best. Thanks Nikki for all your writing on the series. I wish I had found your blog sooner.
Cheers,
Bryan R
@Donna S: Have you now changed your opinion about seeing the wreckage? I think it was really just a tribute to the scene of the crash. To what had taken place there. To the actual scenery and production value. It had nothing to do with the narative.
Christian Shephard told Jack that he WAS dead, but he was real and all those people were real and all of his experiences on the island had been real. Some had died before him (either in the crash or on the island itself...Sayid, Boone, Shannon, etc,) and others had died after him (Hurley, Ben, Sawayer, Kate, etc). But the island experience and the relationships formed there was the most important in their lives, so their souls had come together in this place (church) so that they could move on together.
Kiki said: "I thought that the church was more about those that were on the airplane -- Juliet was the only "odd" one for me -- if I remember correctly, I do need to rewatch. Ben said he still needed to work some things out. We never saw Richard in the SW. I guess they could have filled the church with characters from throughout the series but I think they wanted to zero in on those that they felt were most important to each other--and to the viewers."
I thought the writer's wanted us to see them as the people most important to Jack.
Voices_In_Your_Head said: "I mean, sure, it was nice, in that it gave us a rosy ending for all the characters we love that the real world didn't"
I had the most overwhelming thought when I read this. It gave me the creepy crawlies, and chills down my spine. How many airplanes could Jacob fill up and then crash with the people the "real world didn't" love?
Voices_In_Your_Head goes on to ask some interesting questions about the sideways world which I wouldn't mind knowing the answers to myself, as well as what it was that was special about the island that healed people like John and Rose? I think I'm supposed to just believe because the island was special, and it could just do these things. But I was hoping for a little more than that in a couple places. I agree that there should have been something said about what the light was so that we could enjoy it's specialness too along with the cast.
I'm finding as the day goes on that although I'm a believer that the writer's knew where they were going a long, time ago, and I believed that they DID because I listened to what they said, and I wanted to believe them, I keep frowning at some of these unhappy posts. I still consider myself to be a believer, but when I read a post by someone like Voices_In_Your_Head, I am seeing that an argument can be made legitimately in the other direction. While I DID enjoy the show and the ending, I can also empathize with the people who thought it could've been more, or that Season Six was a waste of time since half of it wasn't real. When I think of how people anticipated that a lot of other people weren't going to be happy, I know that I didn't (and don't) want to be among them. I want to believe Whatever Happened, Happened, and that's what the writer's wanted us to see. I believe some people are complaining simply because they can. But I also think we are all being very short-sighted if we cannot agree that some of these people have a very valid point. From an overall standpoint I am personally happy with the show, but when I read some of the comments from the people that I know have been here a very long time, I wonder what happened to everyone's lists of questions they wanted answered, and how those who are always so curious can suddenly be so accepting, and appear to have completely lost their curiosity?
I don't want to sound like a cry-baby, but I am trying to see both sides of the fence here. Would Nikki or any of the bloggers from the beginning of Lost like to comment? (If this has been addressed already, I'll find it eventually. I'm trying to stay rational here with our Internet/cable connection going haywire. So far I've spent over 30 minutes waiting to post this in reply to a post from 9:10 this morning. The TV came on this morning, but shortly thereafter went back out. It still hasn't come back on. It's beyond frustrating.
@Anonymous (and we've had several so I'm responding here to the, shall we say, HIGHLY dissatisfied commenter a few posts back): a careful survey of the comments here so far shows quite a few folks who felt unfulfilled by elements of last night's finale. Certainly, many of the things we all had enjoyed speculating about over the life of the show were minimized in this last act, with an increased emphasis on the personal progress of the characters, including their connections to one another and ability to serve higher goals than their own needs.
As much as I might have liked the show to go on for another year or two, giving me answers AND doling out more questions, it was clear that the showrunners had a vision in mind as to what was paramount in the story and wanted to bring the focus (which had widened out considerably over time) back to those character-centric elements.
This is why some of us find the ending satisfying: in the FST, they were all working on their issues, their flaws, the things that held them back and had created so much misery in the backstories that we had witnessed (on the Island as well) - and kept them from forming meaningful connections with others. Now, this emphasis on a spiritual outcome is not everyone's cup of tea - but it is one way of addressing the profound questions that we all, just like our Lostaways, face. And the fact that billions around the world turn to such spiritual concerns as a way of understanding the context for meaning in their lives is a testament (you should pardon the pun) to the ubiquity of this need.
I didn't read the ending as just a way for them to 'find their true loves' so much as gaining understanding, the getting of wisdom, acceptance, redemption in their OWN eyes and in the eyes of those who mattered to them, and the ability to let go of the things that hold us back from potentially advancing to a higher state of being. Again, this is not everyone's cup of tea - but it strikes a universal chord for many and as such felt richly satisfying as an endpoint for characters whose misery and self-deception had blindfolded them to the potential for forgiveness and enlightenment.
P.S. On one of shows in the beginning of Six that had the ABC scroll at the bottom of the screen? (I know you guys know what I'm talking about.) It said that the flash side-ways is what would have happened if the plane had not crashed. It did not say that this is Jack's version of what would have happened. That's very misleading with respect to how it ended.
(I'm sorry to say I kept all the original episodes that didn't have those at the bottom! I didn't keep any repeats. Does anyone have that? Although I suppose it doesn't really matter.)
"It said that the flash side-ways is what would have happened if the plane had not crashed. It did not say that this is Jack's version of what would have happened."
Yes, I remember that, and it also matches what I remember Damon saying at the NYTimes presentation, that the sideways world is not affected by the submerged island.
@Nik, @redeem: Hm... quick question... by comparing the end of a certain BBC show... I'm so sorry. I think that's my fault. I didn't remember you ever mentioning watching it. I feel like crap. :(
Shit. It wasn't just you, redeem, it was me too. I'm SO sorry, Nik. I feel like crap too. SO sorry.
@ Bryan R: I think that nothing in the Sideways World actually ever happened, NOR was it really any sort of “afterlife.” The Sideways World was entirely Jack’s imagination during his final moments of life, “Owl Creek Bridge”-style.
ZMOG! Bryan! Brilliant!!!
Your reference to Ambrose Bierce reminded me of his poem:
Another Way
by Ambrose Bierce
I lay in silence, dead. A woman came
And laid a rose upon my breast and said:
"May God be merciful." She spoke my name,
And added: "It is strange to think him dead.
"He loved me well enough, but 'twas his way
To speak it lightly." Then, beneath her breath:
"Besides" -- I knew what further she would say
But then a footfall broke my dream of death.
To-day the words are mine. I lay the rose
Upon her breast, and speak her name, and deem
It strange indeed that she is dead. God knows
I had more pleasure in the other dream.
All in all, I loved it. As others have said, it was very emotionally satisfying. Perhaps not as satisfying in terms of explaining things as fully as I would have liked.
A couple thoughts/questions
1) The plane wreckage at the end during the credits- what plane was that?
2) When Locke told Jack he didn't have a son- what was that all about?
3) This is a really small issue- but it really bugged me! Vincent was a totally different dog and looked nothing like the original Vincent. I can understand they didn't use the same dog, but they could have found another yellow lab that looked more similar to the original.
4) I've always been a 'Skater', but I was totally happy with Kate ending up with Jack and Sawyer with Juliette. Not sure how that change came about for me, but it worked.
ooh, Zari that is a wonderful Ambrose Bierce poem, and apropos.
Re: the plane wreckage footage...
My take on it was that, since there was no "next week" *sob* they simply showed shots from the set. I appreciated them doing that rather than just blasting us with some show that they wanted to try to snag Losties into watching. The quiet and the ocean made a beautiful way to run the credits to me. I don't believe it had any kind of significance or anything to do with the story.
Thanks everyone for all of your thoughts and emotion :) I really couldn't have gotten the closure I needed without the online LOSTosphere...I needed you all in order to move on :)
My pet theory about Jack/Juliet's son David: It was Jack & Juliet's combined actions in the OT that made the FST happen. Jack & Juliet together "created" (or, if you prefer, "nuked a hole through the fabric of spacetime, thereby accessing") the FST pocket universe. Therefore David is a representation of the FST itself: a not-fully-grown "island" of Being in its adolescence, unsure of its place and purpose but subject to strong emotion. I believe it's possible that "David" the kid wouldn't be found anywhere once the collective understanding started to really cascade. I think it's also interesting that the pocket universe owes its existence to Daniel Faraday's ideas (in addition to Jack & Juliet's actions), and David's hidden talent is to play piano like no one else but Daniel.
(I searched the above comments and I didn't see this theory raised yet, but I apologize if I'm just slow on the uptake.)
@Gillian Whitfield – me too! I cried harder the second time around. Maybe because I knew more about what was going on. Actually, I started choking up when Desmond says he’s Kate’s friend. I think that may have been the first speaking scene. I had less dry eye time then crying time.
@Anonymous – I was wondering if Desmond was stuck on the island, but upon re-watching remembered the conversation Ben had with Hurley. Hurley can change the rules and get Desmond back to his wife and child.
@Nikki @3:11 PM EST – re: wreckage at the end during credits – that was the confusing thing. It had nothing to do with the story told during the episode. And the fact that it was devoid of human existence made it even more confusing. It was just a credits roll, and online, they do not include it as part of the credits for the episode.
@humanebean – you may need to pitch your ideas to ABC. I love them.
I can't stop crying... I totally loved it
Nikki: I just had a chance to jump over to the Washington Post where Nikki and Paulo beat out Frogurt for Most Irritating Character.
They have a whole section devoted to "Lost Superlatives". Some of them are suprising, some not at all.
@JS:
Hope Your Day yesterday was great. If you haven't already, please pop over to the Haiku posts for your Haiku Birthday greeting -- a bit lame I admit, but heartfelt all the same. ;)
I only realized that CTV totally screwed us over in Canada for not showing the crash scene at the end from this board. Someone really needs to make heads roll over there!!! I feel like they took away part of the finale for me. I've always hated CTV for simulcasting and giving us terrible trailers and now this. Sigh...
asiancolossus said....."I only realized that CTV totally screwed us over in Canada for not showing the crash scene at the end from this board. Someone really needs to make heads roll over there!!! I feel like they took away part of the finale for me. I've always hated CTV for simulcasting and giving us terrible trailers and now this. Sigh..."
asiancolossus: I was just refreshing when your comment popped up at the bottom here.
Be grateful you had a good show. The whole broadcast was completely ruined the first time around by ABC and the cable company with their jumping pictures. THAT was horrible. I don't think anybody in Northern Ohio was able to see it as it was meant to be seen the first time.
I've called and pitched a fit twice today, and I'm in the minority for calling so few times.
I shared some of these thoughts with my old pal Mark Askwith over e-mail today. After I e-mailed them I thought I should also share them here.
I could accept a more "spiritual" ending to Lost than with Battlestar Galactica only because Lost has always been one very long extended metaphor on the nature of man and the meaning of life.
Anyone who thought it was a mystery/thriller that needed to be explained like a "Murder She Wrote" episode was kind of missing the point. The point being that the journey is required before you can reach the destination.
I felt that BSG's "mythical" ending really robbed the characters of the choices they made along they way. The "this has all happened before and it will happen again" mantra just said they were chess pieces playing a role and that they had no control over their destinies.
Lost always proclaimed that every character had the power of choice and that their fates were tied up in the choices they made.
I did feel on some levels that this final season "lost" the more ethereal tone of the first season and got a bit "Star Trekky" in their story telling process. Too much character development sacrificed to move along plot and some clunky and not well delivered bits of business that could have been handle with a bit more maturity and sophistication. But whatcha gonna do.
The ending is flawed, but it was a show that would always have been problematic to end in a way to truly give fans and all the characters journeys closure.
If I had been one of the Producers of the show (IF ONLY!) I believe I would have structured the final season a bit different. Less Dogen and temple stuff and more resolution of the threads and characters we have been following for six years. I think Charles Widmore is a prime example of a real lost opportunity. The poor actor on Jimmy Kimmel said he never even knew if his character was good or evil. (sigh)
Not sure if the flash sideways stuff quite delivered the dramatic punch it should have. I think saying that the atom bomb exploding in 1977 made a rip in the space/time continuum that caused an alternate reality to be created would have been a bit more satisfying than a spiritual holding pen for all the LOSTIES to putter in until they were enlightened. It would have again demonstrated the power of choice vs. fate and how we can't escape who we are.
The almost cult like way that each LOSTIE had their epiphanies seemed to be counter productive to the message of Lost which cautioned against clinging on to absolute truths or beliefs. Desmond was on a crazy messianic quest in the end. Running down characters and beating them because he knew the "truth" and needed to show it to them. Didn't Locke's journey prove that those kind of beliefs are very self destructive and damaging!?!?
I am liking some of the fans explanations as to why we don't see Eko in the finale. He finished his journey long ago and did not require the same after life construct to go on to his next level of existence. He didn't need enlightenment. He had already found it.
@A frustrated writer – for Kate, the main difference was that she was innocent. Desmond was a financially successful business man, a fixer, and Charles Widmore’s number 2. Both of these are fantasies (I think) of the character, a sort of what if that were true, the way I felt about my life would have been entirely different. It was what they thought they needed to feel OK.
@TM Lawrence – hilarious deterioration of the ritual that makes “you like me now.”
I think this is the right conversation. I may be in the wrong place. Oh well
A couple of smaller moments that were poignant to me
When Locke sees paw prints, I immediately thought Rose and Bernard must have gotten him out, imagining the exchange to be – “What’s that, Vincent? Desmond fell in a well, you say?”
I love how FLocke takes his knife out to make a statement – it should just be the three of us from here on – then puts it back in when they are agreeable.
Hurley says I believe in you, like Jack said to him earlier in the season. Of course Jack says it back to him.
At the mouth of the cave, the stream converges
Wow! My family and I just rewatched it, sans the horrible broadcast experience from last night, on Hulu. It was incredible, and I am so pleased to have had a second chance to see it. The character arcs and relationships satisfied me 100%. I will always wish that the powers the be hadn't felt the need to leave so many loose strings in relation to the mysteries, but since the characters were what hooked me in the first season, I am content with an emotionally satifsying ending.
Suzanne said: "Wow! My family and I just rewatched it, sans the horrible broadcast experience from last night, on Hulu. It was incredible, and I am so pleased to have had a second chance to see it."
Suzanne: I'm also in Ohio, and I've been waiting to see if you would comment that you had been able to see it again.
You did the same thing I did, sounds like exactly. Our experience with the TV and cable was so bad, that it made the show HORRIBLE on first viewing. None of the three of us liked it at all.
I have now seen it three times, and the second time I loved it and cried like a newborn baby. The third time around it makes you think of all the things you like about it (the ending), but all the other things that you know you'll never know and will miss the answers to.
Glad to hear you got to see it again!! I was secretly pulling for ya!! :)
@Teebore @humanbean @TM Lawrence: Thank you for your explanations of purgatory. Raised Lutheran I never knew the word from anything else but Dante's work. When I originally posted after the show I used words from a Buddist priest I knew online a few years ago because it spoke to me on why people get stuck emotionally and the misery it can cause. Online I've seen purgatory used in a few different ways but here people have been pretty consistant. I think the writers didn't use a particular way to be more inclusive of different religious thought and left us to make our own conclusions.
@gracie I used Jacobs words and the fact that Jack wasn't the protector for very long to conclude that the job wasn't forever.
Rainier said: "@Gracie: You can catch Kimmel on abc.com online. I don't know if last night's episode is up yet (I didn't get to see it either!) But if not, it will be soon. No worries."
Hey Rain: Did you get to see Lost? The cable has been so bad today that when it comes back on, I might have enough time to actually post something if it's already typed up and ready to go. I haven't even had a chance to go to ABC.com. If you say it's there, that's good enough for me! I hope you got to see Lost!
Rufus said: "@Gracie I think Hurley needed to become the protector as he doubted himsself so much."
Thank you Rufus, but I think this hit me smack in the face very late Saturday night/Sunday morning. I didn't want him to have to do it; to be put in a position where he has to recruit in order to get people to replace himself. I didn't want the goodness which is Hurley to ever be tarnished, but what I realized was that this will be his island, and his rules. He can actually make it better for all the people who come after him. I can dream, right?
redeem147 said: "Gracie, we all miss things that go by too fast, or that don't click for us, or we forget and those we'll correct for each other. But if you're talking about your interpretations - they're yours. No right or wrong."
Yeah, don't I know it, redeem. No need to get it all perfectly correct anymore. How sad! I'm still trying to hit rock bottom that it's not coming back next week or next season. I'm having more trouble with it than anticipated, well, because I imagined I'd have some help today from blogger friends here. I never considered ABC/TWC would not be up-to-par on Lost Finale Night, and the whole next day too. There's rumors going around where Spouse works that some idiot (I'm being nice!) did this on purpose, and took out most of northern Ohio on a lark! I guess he said he was bored. HA!
Anyway,when I posted that I was referring to anything I might be trying to figure out based on faulty information that someone would see and correct me on. We still had some old questions that never quite came together for us that we just left alone thinking we'd find those all out in the end, but didn't. One of these days, I'll have to get back to those. Example: When "Alex" told Ben to do whatever Locke told him to do OR ELSE, who was "Alex"? I thought I had that one all figured out but Spouse asked me something very specific about that episode, and it confused me all over again! LOL
@Nikki: Thanks for phone call clarification! :)
SO glad to hear they didn't put that plane crash imagery over the end credits on CTV. I'd assumed that was just ABC's doing, and was surprised when I found people theorizing about it online. I don't think that was supposed to be a part of the narrative in any way.
And NOW, I have a whole ton of comments to catch up on. I'll leave you with an excerpt from my blog as I catch up...
The Island Unleashed:
So if Desmond was Jacob's failsafe, Jacob must have had a hunch that un-corking the Island might be the only way to stop the Man In Black once and for all. The Man In Black, having failed to prevent the Candidate-process, chose the exact same failsafe, hoping to bring the Island down with Jack on it - all while escaping aboard the good ol' Elizabeth. So while detail-seekers might be frustrated that we don't know every last ramification of uncorking the Island (or who built the cork, or whose skeletons those were down there, et cetera), they ought to take a bit of solace in the fact that this was the whole point: neither did Jack, the Man In Black, or even Desmond. Each expected and hoped for different results in pulling the plug, and thus LOST cements itself as a story of mankind struggling to deal with the unknown. At least this wasn't the first time we've seen an Island drain -- Ben's method of "summoning" smokey was eerily similar in nature. So, as with most mysteries on the show, things don't become clear with explanation, but they at least become clearER with repetition: if this spot was the birthplace of Smokey, it makes sense he might be connected to similar spots around the Island.
But, again, like most aspects of LOST, what's of key importance here is not the what or the how, but the who and the why. If Jack, the ultimate man of science, can take this kind of leap of faith, and just TRUST that this is what he's supposed to do, even if he doesn't understand all of it, then so must the viewers: that's just the nature of the story being told. Desmond, on the other hand -- who we thought was the man with the plan -- turns out to have it all wrong. And here the Altered Universe makes its single major impact on the events of the Original Timeline. For Desmond is confident that when he reaches the source of the Island's energy, he's going to be transported to the AU (Just as he was when Widmore blasted him with electromagnetic energy), and now we know why he was suddenly okay with Widmore asking him to get blasted again: he thought (like much of the audience, this viewer included) that the AU was meant to be his "happily ever after" -- and by making his sacrifice, he'd be headed to a place where he could be happy. He descends with the confidence of a man who knows what he has to do ONLY because the AU's existence convinced him to do it. But this time -- instead of the light surging his consciousness into another place -- the light fizzles out, and the Island begins to sink into the sea, as the Man In Black predicted.
However, it doesn't take Jack long to figure out that his own instinct was also right: with the Island's energy gone, the Man In Black is rendered mortal. And after a pretty spectacular brawl, he's soon rendered dead. But while the antagonist has been defeated, it took risking the very thing it has ALL been about protecting: the Island itself. And if everything we've been told about the Island is true -- that it's the source of the electromagnetically-charged energy that fuels all life and death -- then Jack's final foray down the waterfall is for the sake of all existence as we know it: just like Widmore said; just like Richard said. And that's what it has ALWAYS been about. We knew this, even back in Season 2 when all it took was entering a code and pushing a button every 108 minutes. We just didn't have the context yet to see Dharma's Swan hatch as a microcosm of what Jacob and the Others had going on with the whole Island. So to an extent, they certainly were "the good guys," just as they always told us. They were just a bunch of total douchebags as well, limited in their methods by the limitations of a leader who couldn't bring himself to personally impact the goings-on beyond getting things started by bringing people to the Island.
If you want to read more, I'm at http://www.sagaciouspenguin.blogspot.com. Nikki, I'd love to hear your take on my take (since The End was such a personal episode for everyone).
And now I only have 237 comments to read... the rest is progress...
I am… so late to the party! I started this comment this morning on a word document and came back to it this evening. Just finished catching up with reading all the comments, so here I go!
It was… GOD, it was wonderful.
These are gonna be quick hits all around, so no big underlying theme in this comment!
There’s so much I want to say, but Nikki, I think you’ve beautifully covered a lot of it!
I definitely was blubbering at so many of those scenes. Jin and Sun’s were definitely one of them. And Sawyer and Juliet’s… THAT one had me reeling. It wasn’t immediate, it was this slow opening of the floodgates and BAM, they remembered. And what put it over the top for me and I started tearing up was when Sawyer said, “I got you.”
@Shelb: RE:Stained glass window with multiple faith symbols. Totally saw that too!
RE: No mothers on the island - I’m thinking this was possibly one of Jacob’s rules RE: his awkward relationship with Other-Mother
For those who remember, do you guys think my “For the Man Who Has Everything” allusion still fit after the finale? Maybe not PERFECTLY, but I still felt Jack’s “reality” slowly being revealed to him.
RE SW Eloise: It appears that Eloise has known for some time that she has died AND doesn’t want to leave, because it seems as if she is content with what is around her, namely Daniel.
If there are any other San Diego commenters out there, didja feel the little earthquake during the finale? Nice little tidbit of reality to add to the Island’s destruction!
@Sonshine: “NinJack” oh gosh, I laughed out loud so hard!
@Teebore: When Jack was heading back into the cave, my buddy and I wondered if he was going to open the Matrix of Leadership and light their darkest hour. YOU GOT THE TOUCH, YOU GOT THE POWWAAHHHH…. YEAH!
Anyone else think that Kate’s line after shooting FLocke in the back was very… Schwarzenegger-esque? “I saved you a bullet.” Awesome in it’s own right, but after a second viewing, I laughed. I was definitely waiting for her to do a classic reloading of the gun after the line. Blam, ‘o master of the turn-a-phrase and pun-intendedness (and other commenters out there), work your magic here and gimme alternate lines that Kate could have said after she shot FLocke!
And as polarized as many Lost fans are after the series finale, I totally get it! Each and every one of us expected something out of this finale. Some of us wanted direct closure to what the island was, some wanted the full back story to the Dharma Initiative, some wanted Desmond’s clothes to be blown off again by the white EM energy (I’m lookin’ at you Nikki!), and so on and so on… I feel content with the ending even if not all of my questions were answered. But to you fans out there who feel “cheated”, I understand and hope you’ll get some sort of resolve on these discussion boards.
Nikki, I’m so glad I came across your article a couple of years back on the Wizard website. Since that fateful link to your blog, I was hooked! Thank you so much for allowing me (and everyone else here) a place to speak their minds, discuss, laugh, and emote together! Huzzah!
Discussing Lost with you guys has been such a blast! You guys are clever all around and I admire each and every one of your insights! The list of names are too long to list, but know I speak to all of you.
WV: baandled - how sheep feel after going through TSA
I haven't watched the closing credits we didn't get, but if it were to show that nobody survived, wouldn't there be bodies? I would think the site would be very messy.
I've been searching for comments on this ------
WAS DAVID THE SON OF JULIET AND SAWYER? Jack was told by Locke after leaving the hospital room to go to the concert that "he didn't have a son." And if I remember what I saw through my tears, Locke was smiling and the comment made Jack upset. David's eyes resembled Sawyer's, and it would be poetic to have Sawyer raise a son after he himself grew up without his parents...... ??
@Snowmom - WAS DAVID THE SON OF JULIET AND SAWYER
No, I think Locke meant that David wasn't 'real'. The world (the sideways world) in which Jack had a son was a weird...wish fulfillment/purgatory type place where you worked stuff out (in Jack's case it was daddy issues - which he worked out by having a son and being good to him and through that relationship being able to begin to understand his own relationship with his dad). Then you "woke up" and realized your 'real' past (as Jack did with Kate after the party) which was for Jack and them the Island World.
I was confused by the whole thing as well. I thought Locke had gone crazy and was just remembering his other life and being a werido about "reality".
I'm so sad that I only found your blog after watching "Across the Sea".
I've read every single comment about "The End", and I know I would have had a wonderful time debating and sharing with such like-minded fans of the show!
I find myself wandering aimlessly around my apartment wondering what I'm supposed to do now.
I watched Lost alone...my fiance never got into it and my friends and family didn't either. It would have been so nice to "talk" each episode out here!
I'm now a dedicated follower of your blog and I wait with anticipation to see what show you'll choose next.
Rest assured that I'll watch whatever it is right along with you...but nothing will ever replace Lost in my heart!
I've had to push it out of my mind all day today because if I allow myself to think about it, the tears just flow again.
I watched the You Tube link posted here of the last few minutes and the wreckage that we didn't get to see here in Canada, and of course, I'm still wiping away the tears from that!
I've never had a show affect me as much as Lost did. It's insane how sad I am that it's over.
The finale was brilliant and beautiful, and I'm okay with all of the unanswered questions.
I'm at peace with Lost. I have closure.
Now it's time to mourn until, like the survivors, I can let go and move on. :)
@Nurse Brian said: "do you guys think my “For the Man Who Has Everything” allusion still fit after the finale?"
Hey Nurse Brian: How's final going?
To what are you referring above? Where would a newbie like me go to see such an allusion? I'm interested.
Rufus said: "@gracie I used Jacobs words and the fact that Jack wasn't the protector for very long to conclude that the job wasn't forever."
Rufus: It certainly didn't seem like it lasted long for Jack, did it? Like a day or less? That would be something: To talk myself into doing something of this magnitude, actually drink the drink, and end up dead within a day! He seemed pleasantly "stoned" at the bottom of the cave though.
BTW: Anybody know how Jack got out of the cavern? Or is that another one of those things that we will figure out in time?
That's it for me tonight. I am offically off to see the wizard! I'm going to ask the man behind the curtain tonight for a "ReLost" that will start tomorrow!
Good Nite all.
@ Steve: Regarding Jack's son. I think he was real enough in the Altered Timeline / Sideways world until everything started fading away as Jack remembered, let go, and moved on. So much goes on in the sideways world, interconnected people, happenstances, etc. (I mean, we saw scenes with no main characters in them), that to think it was all JUST for those who we saw move on seems a bit odd to me.
My take is that the Sideways Timeline is just what we've been told all along -- a timeline created by The Incident wherein the Island was eventually sunk before Flight 815 passed over it. So everything that went on there happened, it was just always a "not meant to be" world as Farday said, not "truth" as Charlie said. It existed beyond time, so our characters were able to remember everything from the Original (true) timeline and move on from the fake existence. In that way, Jack took David with him, as a part of him. Notice David never showed up after Locke told Jack he never had a son. He certainly had a son in the Sideways, but as we know fate course corrects, and the Sideways characters were living a lie - Farday and Jack ultimately COULDN'T change time. But they were at least able to make the passing a little easier by way of the Sideways -- allowing the characters to discover themselves as "different" people, grow from that, and remember all they did in their genuine lives.
One has to wonder if folks unconnected to the 815ers can ever wake up from it... Since all of this seemed to begin when 815 passed over the sunk Island and turbulance gave Charlie his first vision. I don't think anyone is STUCK in that timeline, (afterall, they still live and die in the original timeline) but if they're able to wake up to truth in the sideways, they'll have a second chance to come to grips with their life and loved ones.
This is probably irrelevant but did anyone else notice how short Hurley's hair was at the church? When we last saw him, it was long, past his shoulders. At the church it was above his shoulders.
It means either A) They did it on purpose...as Jack's memory of Hurley (though it was wrong as Jack saw him with long hair last) or B) That they filmed the ending a lot longer ago than they said they did.
@ discontented Anonymous: You're entirely right in that most of what we all love to discussed went unaddressed, and on some levels there are a few things there that are disappointing, but I think you'll find that being told you now have ENOUGH info about any one specific thing is actually an "answer" in and of itself. It's not saying it's unimportant or a red herring, it's simply saying, you KNOW what's important about it.
The Numbers? They were a serial number on the hatch that was used as the code for pressing the button, got repeated on a loop via printouts from the Pearl and the Dharma Radio tower. People overheard them, they made their way to Hurley, he won the lotto with them, and thought they brought him bad luck. In many ways they may have. Honestly, I thought THIS was enough info on them, I mean there's no way you can say "______ CURSED THE NUMBERS" and have that be a satisfying answer. But later we got more on them (probably because everyone kept asking for it) and they turned out to be the lighthouse wheel notch degrees for the final six candidates. They're numbers of destiny - what more info do we need? The writers could keep piling on the details with them, and I'm not saying that wouldn't be enjoyable, but would we really get to a vastly different understanding than we have now? They're always going to be mysterious numbers, if we got an "oh, THAT'S what the numbers are!" moment like the whispers, I proabably would have slapped my forhead :)
But that's just one example. My point is this: all the details DID mean a lot and fed into the rich tapestry of the show, the history and importance of the Island, and what our characters were up against both through the years and in the finale itself. We debate the details precisely because they're mysterious and we collectively seek to know more about them. More details would be awesome, but they wouldn't change the narrative of the show, which has always been the survivors attempt to get away and, post S3, to save the Island.
Continued Below...
Continued from above post...
Last week I was speculating about the containers in Widmore's out-rigger, this week I'm speculating about the nature of the Sideways Timeline. But last week, when I was going on about Widmore's containers I wasn't frustrated that the containers weren't the same mysteries I was discussing in the previous episode let alone the previous season. It was all about reading previous episodes in light of the most recent installment and making guesses for what's to come, and each week, that week's installment's details "WERE THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE SHOW OMG!" and that's what made it fun.
I don't see any reason to not treat the finale in the same light. In Season 1 we weren't specualting about the Dharma Initiative, In Season 2 we weren't wondering about Juliet's motives, In Season 3 we weren't wondering about Widmore's powerplay toward the Island, In Season 4 we weren't wondering about our characters jumping through time, In Season 5 we weren't wondering about having to defeat the Smoke Monster... Do you see what I mean? It's all forward momentum and progress. The details are what make up this momentum, but you can't mistake them for being the purpose of the show themselves. The narrative has always been the purpose, and the narrative has always been the characters and they're attempts to survive (and subsequently save) the Island. And the On-Island stuff this season brought all that to (in this viewers opinion) a very good close. The Sidways Universe was icing on the cake that allowed us to get a new look at what makes our characters tick, allowed the characters to reconcile their own foibles "in another life," and ultimately gave them a chance to "move on" together. It's not the "answer" to the mystery of LOST, it's a pretty beautiful coda that Jack and Faraday made possible.
And I REAAAAAAAALLY need to get to bed now. Namaste!
@ Joan: Do you mean his hair was different only inside the church?
Maybe like Kate's sudden change of dress...
I am so far behind on reading all of these wonderful insightful comments, I'm never going to catch up! I'm just going to make my comments and I'm very sorry if I'm covering ground that's long since been examined.
Before I begin I just want to thank you Nikki so much for your wonderful blog and wonderful books. I also want to thank everyone who comes here and makes comments. It has been so much fun reading this blog, and it has made my enjoyment of Lost all the more fun. Thanks again to all and I plan on sticking around to see what comes up next!
I really loved this ending! I had thought it was really important to cover a lot of the burning questions and explain a lot of the mysteries but in the end that really didn't matter at all. The characters were what drove this story and in the end it was their relationships with one another that brought it all to a meaningful end.
One thing that I loved was Katie's ending. I never really cared about her relationship with either Sawyer or Jack, so I thought it was wonderful that it wasn't her feelings for either one of them that caused her epiphany. It was her love for Aaron and the memory of his birth -- beautiful! That scene (Aaron's birth) is one of my favorites and we got to see it 3 times; the original, Sawyer coming upon the scene during the time jumps, and last night.
I really love what they have done with Jack's character this season. Mathew Fox has really stepped up to the plate in playing the part too. I loved it when Jack defended John Locke to Flocke -- I'm really glad they gave some respect to John Locke and I'm so glad it was Jack who said it.
It was a very bittersweet scene for me to see Vincent come to be with Jack at the end. Earlier in the day my old dog, who has been declining these last few days, reached a crisis point and we had to take her to the animal emergency hospital were they had to put her down. I felt some very strong emotions during that scene!
Wow - I'm realising that it's time I watched it again. It's available on iTunes now and I'm going home now to download it.
@Brian R None of this was real, it was Jack’s hopeful but final delusional daydream.
Thanks for this - I much prefer this version of events to the 'limbo' and 'shared afterlife' one. I guess I am a woman of science rather than faith!
@pamalamb: I'm sorry to hear about your dog.
I don't think any animal lover had dry eyes with the last scene with Vincent.
I AM CHANGED.
NIK
Thank you for being the silk that held the magic together.
The ending couldn't happen any other way. It was really the ONLY organic, natural, no GE ending it had to be.
Perfect.
to ODM
Sigh... that is why I was so profoundly effected, I think. What if we never see our loved ones again... if this is all we have... now and forever?
That I might be wasting it with work and house and frivolous purchases, ANYTHING but LOVE... absolutely devastates me.
TO MIKE CARN
You are the only other person who has said that. I thought I was going nuts. The finale had this weird taint, deeply, deeply sad, but more than that... something lingering, an atmosphere, and it was strangely familiar. I don't know what it is - a resonance that has permeated my TV screen and leaked out into my house, and me?... but I'm deeply disturbed by it. It will not budge. Thoughts of LOST moments - the rememberings, that concept of the meeting place, Vincent and Jack, Jack and Dad, those thoughts crossing through my mind ignite the peculiar clinging resonance once and again, and I am LOST in the terrifying penumbra of 'what if this is it, there is no meeting place for us, no remembering' and I actually feel physically ill.
Nothing is the same now.
The thought of watching some other meaningless, empty, cliche show makes me ill too.
This impossible, beautiful, upsetting, depressing lingering 'something', it started to grow as soon as the finale began, has clung to me, whisked around me, and twisted around within me since the ending, and I cannot shake it. It is awful and life-altering at once.
I am changed.
I am SUDDENLY terrified of losing my daughter, or my dog, or my mother;or of them losing me. Or is it the forgetting that scares me? We all die alone, and maybe there is no more. I know not what awaits... but I so want to believe... and I don't want to forget... or be forgotten... over there, I mean, where ever that is... I want to be with my loved ones too, like Jack.
Thank you LOST.
I AM CHANGED.
I AM CHANGED.
NIK
Thank you for being the silk that held the magic together.
The ending couldn't happen any other way. It was really the ONLY organic, natural, no GE ending it had to be.
Perfect.
to ODM
Sigh... that is why I was so profoundly effected, I think. What if we never see our loved ones again... if this is all we have... now and forever?
That I might be wasting it with work and house and frivolous purchases, ANYTHING but LOVE... absolutely devastates me.
TO MIKE CARN
You are the only other person who has said that. I thought I was going nuts. The finale had this weird taint, deeply, deeply sad, but more than that... something lingering, an atmosphere, and it was strangely familiar. I don't know what it is - a resonance that has permeated my TV screen and leaked out into my house, and me?... but I'm deeply disturbed by it. It will not budge. Thoughts of LOST moments - the rememberings, that concept of the meeting place, Vincent and Jack, Jack and Dad, those thoughts crossing through my mind ignite the peculiar clinging resonance once and again, and I am LOST in the terrifying penumbra of 'what if this is it, there is no meeting place for us, no remembering' and I actually feel physically ill.
Nothing is the same now.
The thought of watching some other meaningless, empty, cliche show makes me ill too.
This impossible, beautiful, upsetting, depressing lingering 'something', it started to grow as soon as the finale began, has clung to me, whisked around me, and twisted around within me since the ending, and I cannot shake it. It is awful and life-altering at once.
I am changed.
I am SUDDENLY terrified of losing my daughter, or my dog, or my mother;or of them losing me. Or is it the forgetting that scares me? We all die alone, and maybe there is no more. I know not what awaits... but I so want to believe... and I don't want to forget... or be forgotten... over there, I mean, where ever that is... I want to be with my loved ones too, like Jack.
Thank you LOST.
I AM CHANGED.
Pamalamb: So sorry about your dog. I thought I was done crying while readying all these wonderful posts. I know where you're coming from and I can't believe how hard that scene must have been for you. I still have difficulty remembering our old black lab that we put down 6 years ago (December 2004...right after LOST had started). That ending scene with Jack and Vincent was truly lovely. Peace to you.
Last night I happened to be scheduled with the only 2 of my coworkers that watch Lost. Needless to say we got distracted A LOT. :D
(Also have a new convert who is going to borrow the seasons from me after everything he's heard about the finale! WHEE!)
Anyway... The one girl and I were talking about it. She loved the ending, but was as confused as I was, so she wanted my take on it. We discussed back and forth around customers and eventually came down to this statement...
Like it or not, love it or hate it, this finale - this SHOW - is going to be discussed and dissected and influencing people for years to come. So I call that a success. As a writer, if I were to come up with a piece of fiction that would cause 1/16th of the interest that Lost has raised I would be happy. The team of Lost have created something unlike anything else ever has been and I will be eternally grateful for that.
I happen to be content with the ending - some people are not, but you cannot say that you can walk away from watching it with indifference and I call that a win :)
I think all the characters look the same way in the afterlife as they did when they all last saw each other. That way they can meet each other again and remember each other the way they were in the main story.
Also, Nikki, I have a big question. CAN WE PLEASE START A PETITION OR WRITE A LETTER TO GET THE POWERS THAT BE TO MAKE A LOST SCENE-IT OR TRIVIAL PURSUIT BOARD GAME?!!!! I...I just need that.
Okay, I have had a chance to chew on this for a good 24hrs, and I think I feel better (even after the Migraine I had a work last night that I a convinced came from 2hrs straight crying). I also got a chance to read Nik's recap (awsome as always-looking forward to the new book!), and it helped finding out I wasn't the only one who was confused! Reading Jack/Christian's dialogue helped. I had missed the part where Christian says, "some before , soem after". My first thoughts were that they were telling us that they were dead all along, since the pilot, and I just couldnt accept that (I was in denial). I think seeing the credits didn't help matters, since it gave the impression that they did all die, and here is the crash site to prove it. But I just got done reading Nikki's latest post where she expained that they didn't see this part of the credits in Canada., so she wasn't as concerned.
But thinking how I am now, seeing the SW as a "crossing over" stop, it makes alot more sense, and if time means nothing there, then i wouldnt matter how long you stayed.
Nikki pretty much covered everything in her wonderful recap, but ...
@Nikki-MY first tears were peeking out as soon as it dawned on me that Juliet and Sun have already done this, and then when she starts telling her the exact same statistics, Sun noticed too what was going on. And I love as she leaves, after they are speaking to her in English, she tells tehm,"By the way your English is fine"
I've been fighting not to cry all night, since being at work makes it hard to do my job.
I thought the Jack/Locke fight on the cliffs was memory inducing back to STTOS days...kept expecting the Pohn Fahr music to start playing-ha!
I have a few questions for anyone interested in helping me out with:
Q1-I at first thought it was Jack, with his super-Jacob powers that caused him to be able to hurt Locke. But then Kate comes up from behind and shoots him and it worked. So now I'm thinking that it has soemthing to do with the island being unplugged.
Q2-My impressions thru all the "Revelations" was that was resisting, holding on to what he sees is real. This would make sense knowing he's dead, and they say some people cant let go, have to hold on to the living.
But in that last moment that we actually see him die, he has a smile on his face, like he was accepting his fate graciously.
Or, did that last few minutes of death show him a "Flashes before your Eyes" moment right before his death?
Crazyinlost - Q1 - The reason Jack unplugged the Island was so Smokey would become mortal and could be killed.
Q2- Jack smiled because he saw the plane get away.
My answers and I'm sticking to them. :)
Nikki: Let me again add my voice to the chorus of thanks for your books and especially the community you've provided here. I can imagine life without them... and it's worse. You're a gem.
I'm slowly working my way through comments. Anyone reading this who's also caught up on the comments to Nikki's later posts and wants to jump in with "Hey! If you're talking about X, go to Post Y instead because the conversation on the topic has shifted to over there!" is encouraged. I'll start reading comments from the end to check for that. 8^)
Quick thought: After MASH we got AfterMASH, if not for very long. Do you think the would-be (actually, were-not) "sideways" scenes were one long backdoor pilot for AfterLost? The characters who didn't go into the light are still around in that mutually created world and there could easily be a series in Eloise flitting around to bring closure or awareness to other people while making sure that her son never becomes content enough to move on himself...
Quick thought: After MASH we got AfterMASH, if not for very long. Do you think the would-be (actually, were-not) "sideways" scenes were one long backdoor pilot for AfterLost?
You mean they were all dead in AferMASH? Somehow that still doesn't make it easier to take. :) I guess Hawkeye had already moved on...
@Gracie: Hey Gracie! Finals went by just fine! And apparently... I know more about the female anatomy than sick kids; numbers don't lie!
But back to the matter at hand, "For the Man Who Has Everything" is a Superman comic book storyline written by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (the dynamic duo who wrote Watchmen).
A quick synopsis is this: Superman is trapped in an idealistic dream unaware of what is really going on in the real world(it was a ploy by one of his enemies to dispatch him). I won't try and ruin it for you if you're going to read it, but essentially Superman has to "let go" and face reality. If the comic doesn't suffice, don't worry, an animated adaptation exists! It holds the same title and appeared on the animated series "Justice League Unlimited".
If you did watch/read it, there is a moment that was in the story that I very much wanted in the Lost series finale! You can take your guesses as to what it is!
My allusion doesn't so much focus on the "dream world" aspect of it, but more of the "letting go" part. Fellow comic book reader Teebore can vouch for how awesome this story was.
Lastly, here is a Wikipedia link that summarizes the storyline, though I highly recommend you either reading or watching the episode!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Man_Who_Has_Everything
@Nurse Brian/Gracie Fellow comic book reader Teebore can vouch for how awesome this story was.
It is, indeed, pretty awesome.
Just a few random observations:
When asked “Are you a priest or something?” Desmond says “Or something.” Was Desmond Jack’s guardian angel?
Kate asks if Desmond is serious about the dead person’s name being Christian Shepard and he ends up being the one who leads them into the light.
Sawyer asks Jack (The New Jacob) if he feels any different and he replies “Not really”. Really?
Sawyer says Jacob didn’t really say much of anything about anything and Hurley says he’s worse than Yoda. Was Jacob actually full of baloney (to put it mildly)?
Rose to Bernard: “Looks like you caught something”....and Locke walks out. Reminded me of when Ben said something was going to come out of the jungle he couldn’t control....and Locke walks out.
Claire calls David “kid” similar to Christian calling Jack “kiddo”.
The banner on the bandstand lists Drive Shaft to the right and Daniel (the non-Physicist) as “Fusion” to the left.
Unlike Richard, Charlie IS wearing eyeliner.
The knife wound in his side is the scar Jack notices in the mirror at the beginning of S6, not his appendix (which some argued was on the wrong side).
Kate (Sundance): What now?
Sawyer (Butch): We jump.
After asking Jack where he can get something to eat, Sawyer says “Thanks Doc” without actually knowing he was a doctor.
How did Jack get out of the cave?
Locke arrived in a Shoreline Taxi. He “died” along a shoreline.
Christian says “There is no now, here”. I think this is the most important line of the finale. Time is irrelevant, or as some propose, simply an illusion.
@paleoblues: "The knife wound in his side is the scar Jack notices in the mirror at the beginning of S6, not his appendix (which some argued was on the wrong side)."
I quibble with you here, because the appendix IS on the lower right hand side of the body. Very near to where he go stabbed. In fact, I thought Jack was going to tell Kate that he would be fine because he'd already had his appendix out.
I like your idea that Desmond might have been his guardian angel...but I think he might have been EVERYONE'S guardian angel. He really got the ball rolling after his encounter with Charlie.
@redeem147-"This is my theory, ahem, ahem"
thanks-actually I had forgotten about Jack seeing the plane go overhead.
Another question-so did Desmond think he was dead from the time he had his flashback into the sideways world, is that why he was so mellow about what he needed to do?
word verif-pokedges-edges that poke you
I was wondering if we should now have a S6 rewatch in "light" of what we now know. I just finished watching LA X with a totally new appreciation. I wasn't a big fan of the SW originally, but rewatching it now has got me excited about S6 all over again. It seems the Sideways World is actually an "After World" since Jack "reappears" on Flight 815 after he dies on the island and the flash sideways were actually flash afterwards or flash way forwards.
Nikki: I have two shows to go and I'll be done with Six, but if you want to do one "officially"?
Hell, I'm all in!!
Paleoblues - rewatch you say?? I am interested. Maybe when the DVD's come out in August.
I am also still a bit hungover from the finale. I was in a daze on Monday. Every person I haven't spoken to on Facebook feels compelled to reach out and tell me what they thought of the finale. I cannot stop reading the 5 - 13 LOST blosg I have been following all season. And Michael Giacchino's music is haunting me. I am hearing it in my head and tearing up in inappropriate situations.
I think I have PLFS - Post LOST Finale Syndrome.
Paleoblues,
Just wanted to say I loved the "flash way forwards" :-) and the catch on Shoreline Cab for John Locke whose form was misused by Flocke who had, itself, just died above the shoreline.
JS,
"PLFS"
I love it! Not just post-Lost syndrome but post-finale!
Yes, me too.
I'm still scarred by that "You have no son, Jack" and from someone who suddenly resembled Flocke calling his doc "Jack" and smiling with bad news he gave!
Aaach.
@paleoblues
since Jack "reappears" on Flight 815 after he dies on the island and the flash sideways were actually flash afterwards or flash way forwards.
You know when you wake up and you have that memory of a really long and complicated dream that is actually taking part in a split second? Well, that's how I would like to see the sideways world. That it all happens in the second that Jack dies. However Christian's conversation with Jack negates that - especially when he says 'Some died before you and some after you' (probably not exact quote)
As I finally get to post some replies (to only a small fraction of posts that gave me food for thought)...
Nikki: I kept thinking, “Poor Richard Alpert! He’s never been in an autogyro before!”
Uh... How did the plane get away, anyway? I guess the Island let it, just like it probably kept Chesty alive to fly it so that Aaron could have his mama(s) back.
Sonshine: I was honestly waiting for [Ben] to grab the bottle and drink and take on the job since all he's ever wanted his whole life is to take care of and serve the Island.
Ditto. Ben's entire history and even the expression on Emerson's face said, "What about me?" I really thought for a while that he'd be the Esau to Jack's Jacob, but trying to wrest control of the Island rather than escape it.
Lance: No, I think the events happened just as we saw them, and the sideways universe is their afterlife. This show has always played fast and loose with timelines, with flashbacks and flashforwards, so the idea that the sideways universe took place further in the future, after everyone's deaths, is not impossible.
That's my interpretation. And frankly I think it's pretty explicit, to the point where I wouldn't really consider it an "interpretation" — not 'cause Ooh, I'm so great, I know what they meant, just 'cause I think it was intended to be clear, although it does allow for not only nondenominational but even agnostic/athiestic perspectives as it could be a final hope or literal dream of Jack's, his synapses firing to bring him an experience indistinguishable from an afterlife.
Mark R.Y.: I have one other teary-eyed moment to add to the list: Vincent laying down next to the dying Jack. :(
I think I actually said "Good dog!" out loud — and I'm not even a dog person.
Voices in Your Head: The island world story stands on it's own without it, having a solid beginning, middle, and end all it's own.
I'm FINE with them not explaining how the light got there, who the first protector was, how long people have been passing down the mantle of protector, who put the stone in the hole, who MADE the pool around the hole, etc.. I'm FINE with the show simply having been the story of our castaways, and their piece of the overall island puzzle, which simply exists. But, WITHIN that framework, they SHOULD have answered OTHER questions that they didn't, which would be forgivable, except that it seems like the reason they didn't is that, in the end, they just didn't feel like doing the work.
You, Teebore, and I should form a club, except it's worth the energy.
Matt: [W]hen this season started we saw the island under water... I don't really get that part of it.
That was just a fake-out from the writers to make us think that the "afterflash" scenes had to do with the Incident.
Teebore: Once again, Blam, we find ourselves on the same page. I found the finale to be emotionally satisfying, while the island events adequately and excitingly wrapped the season's plot. The overarching narrative of the show, however, the story the show has been telling since the beginning, got very short shrift and is as frustratingly unresolved and dangling as it was before the finale.
So while it didn't add anything to the plot, I don't think the flash sideways resolution took anything away from it, either. It was simply a means to give emotional character resolution.
And it would be generous to an unprecedented degree for the producers to have spent nearly half the final season setting up that send-off if the series' outstanding plotlines had also been, or were also being, wrapped up with anywhere near the same attention.
Anonymous: So what was the significance of the numbers?
Teebore: They are the factors of the Valenzetti Equation, which can be used to determine the end of the world, which Dharma was trying to manipulate into changing.
Which is my cue to bitch again how unfair it was to reveal this in one of the ARGs or whatever. I learned about it in Nikki's first (I think) book. Had they given the mythology behind the Numbers outside the show yet quickly recapped certain points in an actual episode, that would have still been a Koosh-Ball move but, small favors, it would've clued those of us who "only" watched the show (Imagine!) to the whole deal, which if I recall also had something to do with Alvar Hanso. Then again, I don't know if that stuff ended up being canon, and what's really sad-funny is that, again from memory, I believe the extracurricular effort explained the Numbers' origins but not the reasons behind their cosmic pervasiveness — an explanation that, again, didn't have to be much more than someone with some kind of authority or cosmic awareness confirming that they were a repeating trend of the universe, but the story required at least that much.
Lisa(UFN): It always took Jack a while to get on board with things. A few times along the way he started to see but stopped himself. He wasn't ready yet. When he WAS ready, it was poignant and very true to the series.
No argument there. The afterlife/dreamscape world was pretty interesting as it happened (most of the time) as well as in retrospect, but my quibble is that it came at the expense of dealing with plot already on the table. Despite the fact that the usage of the phrase "Sideways" by the showrunners themselves strongly implied that it was an actual parallel universe, that world was introduced very late in the game for an actual cornerstone of the narrative yet ridiculously early-and-often when looked at as essentially background to the finale.
Teebore: Michael, who is still on the island
And now that we essentially know that there is a heaven in Lost's cosmology, or at least an afterlife in which you get to reunite with loved ones, this is a real schmuck thing to do on the Island's part. Michael committed murder for his son's sake. Ben committed mass murder mostly out his own self-interest.
Sonshine: I JUST passed a van at the end of my road and I SWEAR Richard was driving it! So, if anyone's wondering, he's in upstate New York... Man, I missed the license plate...
NTGYLNR
freckesnpt: why was Kate wearing something different inside the church? did anyone question that?
I did. And it was the moment when the church scene began to feel perilously like "cast reunion" to me. I thought we were one step away from [uh... Happy Days Finale Spoiler Alert!] Mr. Cunningham turning to the camera and toasting us for being loyal viewers all these years.
redeem147: "Why didn't anyone tell me it was a good show?"
Hahahahahahahahahahaha!!!
TM Lawrence: "If our friendship depends on things like space and time..."
Unless I'm mistaken, we never got a glimpse of any Richard Bach book, and that's a surprising omission. You'd have thought that early on they'd reference Illusions and prepare us for this season with One or The Bridge across Forever.
Gracie: If I've gotten anything wrong, especially if I'm completely wrong,
Well, I haven't been able to more than skim lots of these messages, but your comment about being torn up by seeing Penny told me that you might not have heard Christian say that everyone in the "Sideways" world is dead, whether their lives ended before or after Jack's; Des and Penny may have had very long lives together.
Steve: Was the church where everyone met at the end of the episode the same church where Eloise had her Dahrma station?
I think so. I assumed it to be so before the "afterflash" reveal, figuring that everybody would meet at the Lamp Post station in the basement to use it to return to or merge or at least communicate with the Island reality somehow.
Steve: How did Jack go from being in the bottom of the cave - near the white light - to on ground-level, next to a pond, where he would eventually die?
As with Man in Black's body, found in some branches by Jacob after Smokey roared out of the Cave o' Light, Jack's body was apparently spat out after the light returned, akin to the way the Island dumps people who've turned the Frozen Donkey Wheel in Tunisia.
Steve: How does he have a son in purgatory if he never had one in real life?
When an avatar of a man and an avatar of a woman love each other very, very much...
Kotoski: It seems that the bomb ONLY brought them back to 2007.
Psyche!
Teebore: He was transported out by the energy in the cave, just like MiB's body was (Jack landed in more or less the same position as MiB did, but, having not become a Smoke Monster, he was still alive and able to go off and die.
Oops... I see you've answered Steve's question(s) already. While I had the same explanation, what didn't compute about it was — well, pick one:
Jack didn't become a smoke monster.
Jack was even closer to the source of the Island light / EM energy than those in the FDW chamber are yet exposure to it only spat him out above on the Island and not halfway around the world (although the FDW does churn up the energy in such a way that the Island moves, so that's an out).
Jack was pretty much as close to the source of the light as you can get, and yet it didn't heal his fatal wounds. My reasoning for this, as I feel I need one, is that he'd served his purpose for the Island and didn't "need" to be healed, but that just takes me back to how easily, messily, and mortally Jack was wounded so soon after taking over from Jacob, which I didn't care for.
So Jack was neither healed nor did he suffer the fate worse than death that MIB did by turning into Smokey. I guess the Island doesn't care for precedent much.
Teebore: The only relationship between Jughead [and] the flash sideways is that Darlton chose to tell us the story of the flash sideways immediately after the bomb went off to manipulate (in a good way) our expectations and theories.
I'm not quite so charitable. While it was crafty, I believe that Darlton's comments in the Final Journey show point to them deciding to go the alternate-timeline route, or as it turned out to merely tease the alternate-timeline route, when writing the end of Season 5 and wondering what kind of leap to make into Season 6. Other plotlines kinda had dibs on that screen time, if you ask me.
Lisa(UFN): Anyone else having trouble with blogger?
Pretty much always...
Zari: Word Verf: saner : Seriously!?! Blam! BSL! This one’s for you! ;)
What's really strange, given that this is also an actual word in addition to my maternal surname, is how the majority of people pronunce it with a short 'a' (as if it were "sanner") instead of a long 'a'.
TM Lawrence: "Fake Mother" probably drank the actual blood of her predecessor in her inaugural draught accompanied by highly ritualized incantation, while Jacob got at least some Latin and wine to initiate him into the club, and poor Jack got a couple mumbled words and some clean, cool running water. Hurley was given a brief scolding and dysenteric puddle muck.
Great observations as always, dude.
Bryan R: None of this was real, it was Jack’s hopeful but final delusional daydream.
You can surely see it that way, and I wouldn't be surprised if the producers considered such an interpretation, but as someone who has faith in an afterlife and also on the grounds that the way the series wrapped up is galling enough without considering that nearly half the final season was a split-second semiconscious reverie, to quote Fox Mulder, I choose to believe. 8^)
Nurse Brian: Anyone else think that Kate’s line after shooting FLocke in the back was very… Schwarzenegger-esque? “I saved you a bullet.” ... Blam, ‘o master of the turn-a-phrase and pun-intendedness (and other commenters out there), work your magic here and gimme alternate lines that Kate could have said after she shot FLocke!
"You've been smoked."
"Locked... and loaded!"
"Say hello to your mother for me."
"Tika-tika that, motherfrakker!"
"We're gonna live together. You're gonna die alone."
Hey guys!
I'm sorry but I'm physically unable to read all of your comments so I'll probably be repeating some of the stuff that's already been said. I just feel like I need to say this, I'm sure you understand:) Sorry for the length. I will also paste this entry to the most recent article on the blog and the original finale post because I want some of you at least to read it and maybe tell me that I'm wrong or something;)
First of all, I LOVED the finale. It was a perfect ending to the story that we’ve been told over the years. Will it satisfy everyone? Of course not. With a story like this, there was no way they were going to make everyone happy and they came as close as they possibly could.
I just rewatched a few scenes (can’t bring myself to rewatch the whole thing, I don’t think I have it in me) and I’m still crying. Dammit, I’m a 26-year-old guy and I can’t stop weeping, what’s wrong with me?
The scenes that got me the most apart from the final images of course were basically all of the realization scenes from the sideways world (most notably the Juliet/Sawyer reunion) but the scene that simply destroyed me was the Jack/Hurley scene on the island where Jack was giving Hugo the job. Hurley screaming “you’re not supposed to die” was too much for me.
As much as I loved this season, I had one problem with it – the flash-sideways! It just seemed forced to me. It just felt like after watching 7,5 months of speculation among fans whether the bomb in “The Incident” worked or not, Darlton just went “Screw it, we’ll just give you both! Let’s say it didn’t work but we’ll show you the other version just in case you’re curious.” It didn’t seem fair and I was hoping that the two timelines would somehow merge in an epic way in the finale. Boy, was I right. The bomb didn’t work the way Jack and Faraday were hoping it would. It just moved the original Losties back to present day, that’s all, and the sideways world was showing us what the in-between world was like for them after their deaths. I’m calling it “in between” and not the afterlife because the afterlife is probably where they were headed in the end.
I also felt a bit cheated when watching the Sun/Jin/Sayid deaths because I was thinking “Well, it’s super sad but they’re not REALLY dead because we have the flash-sideways where they’re quite allright.” Now we all know that were watching the death of our beloved characters and there was no other life left for them. Tears.
Also, it was quite interesting how the in-between lives looked for the characters. They weren’t just simple “let’s give you guys a few really shocking changes in their backstory” differences. It was what they all wanted their lives to be:
- Sawyer was always a good guy who just happened to be on the wrong side of the law and now he got to be legally good as well;)
- Sayid’s point in life was always to protect Nadia by letting her go and so he did
- Sun and Jin were always going to be together but the thing that messed them up as a couple was in fact getting married:) so they weren’t married here and they were happy
and so on…
end of part one (not enough room – sorry guys;) )
part two
LOVED IT! I will defend it always. I will defend it logically and rationally why it was as awesome as it was. So to all the naysayers now (wow, this is becoming REALLY long, anyone still reading it?):
What questions were unanswered do you think? Because I think I got it. You don’t know what the island was? Well Jacob said it already to Richard in “Ab Aeterno” and the mother in “Across The Sea” actually confirmed it – the island is a magical place, a real place that somehow keeps the balance between good and evil and the cave with the giant cork is its heart. Maybe it’s not the only place like it in the world. Maybe it’s not even that, but the fact that it’s real and its magic and power are undeniable. What more do people want? They gave us an explanation with room for discussion. Isn’t that part of the reason why we all loved the show so much? That we got to talk about it? Help me out here.
And I agree with Nikki – people are always going to be disappointed. Darlton said they weren’t going to give us a Neo/Architect/midichlorian type explanation scene but people said they wanted one so they wrote the Christian/Jack scene in the finale where Christian explained everything about the in-between world and guess what? People are complaining. WTF? BTW – loved the “Christian Shephard? Seriously?” line from Kate :D
I have a friend who wrote this on facebook “big pile of crap with a bigger pile of s**t on top and a little poo cherry to finish the whole Lost drama” and Nikki said that there are other “love letters” like this one out there. Now don’t get me wrong, if you watch a few episodes and say “Not my cup of tea” or even “Sucks ass” and turn off – fine, no problem. If you turn off after 3-4 seasons because you get tired of all the drama and the mysteries and the love triangle – perfect. But if you stick around for the whole run, it’s because you’re a fan. You’re a LOST fan. And if you’re a LOST fan you might be disappointed with parts of the finale but you simply cannot hate the whole goddamn thing so much. It was a very definitive end to LOST – how can you hate it all if you’re a fan?? It doesn’t make any sense to me. If I’m wrong then please explain it but don’t go with the “I was watching the last two seasons just out of curiosity” argument because it’s just wrong – plenty of other shows out there for you to watch so you don’t have to waste time on sth because you’re curious.
And how upset can people be that a show where characters got regular visits from dead people would end showing us what happened to the main characters after they died? Seriously.
I’ll say it again, I loved it! Loved seeing Bernard and Rose again, loved the kiss between Jack And Kate, loved the epic fight between MIB and Jack (even the super cheesy “flying through the air with your fist up” moment;) ), loved the reunions in the in-between – I F***ING LOVED IT ALL!!
I’m done. Sorry it took me so long but I had all those thoughts and I had to get it out there! Anyone powered through? Anybody? No? Sure, you can go 6 seasons waiting whether Kate will choose Jack or Sawyer but you can’t go through my post? ;) Still I love you guys, I love Nikki and I love LOST. Big thanks for the past years. Now I’ll have to get a life brotha!! See you all in the church;)
Cheers
Paweł Kaczmarek
P. S. How hot did Kate look in that dress? I mean, seriously…wow!!
I posted this somewhere else, but not sure it fit there, so I'm going to put it here too.
Remember back when there was news that an official LOST call sheet had been discovered in a restaurant in Hawaii? Well, I didn't want to read it then because I didn't want to be spoiled. But I went back last night and googled it. It has been authenticized, and knowing the end now and reading it...it was accurate. What was interesting was this: Describing the scene where Jack goes down to put the "cork" back in the bottle, it states that:
1. Jack finds Desmond unconscious; puts rock over hole.
2. Jack in HELL; light returns; water starts to trickle.
3. Jack in pond; nose bleeds; Desmond ascends.
4. Jack consumed by the light and water.
WHAT THE...HELL!!!???
Guess Jacob told the truth to Richard!!!
@Blam: Which is my cue to bitch again how unfair it was to reveal this in one of the ARGs or whatever.
Yeah, I certainly wouldn't have minded a nod on the show proper to the content of the ARGs.
but my quibble is that it came at the expense of dealing with plot already on the table.
Oh, I definitely share your quibble. Some of the Sideways stuff was fun, and at the end, very moving, but I would have much preferred more time be spent throughout the season on resolving the show's narrative.
I'm not quite so charitable. While it was crafty, I believe that Darlton's comments in the Final Journey show point to them deciding to go the alternate-timeline route, or as it turned out to merely tease the alternate-timeline route, when writing the end of Season 5 and wondering what kind of leap to make into Season 6. Other plotlines kinda had dibs on that screen time, if you ask me.
Ditto.
"We're gonna live together. You're gonna die alone."
KATE: ...it's just been revoked!
JACK: Um, Kate, he didn't really set you up for that line.
I cribbed that from Family Guy, but it's my favorite "mock the witty action movie one-liners" gag.
@Blam & Teebore: HAHA! You gentlemen deliver better than Domino's pizza. Those lines totally made my day! Here are some that I've been sitting on, not as clever or original, but here we go...
"Yippie kai-yay, Mother-Other Brother!"
"You call that a knife? THIS is a... oh wait this is a gun."
"Red shirt THIS."
"Do you feel corporeal? Do ya, punk?"
Hey, did anyone notice the subtle Lassie reference? All offscreen, but: Vincent found Desmond in the well, then ran back to Rose & Bernard and went "bark! bark!" and R&B said "What's that Vincent? Desmond is stuck in the bottom of a well?"
@Rad: 1) Was anyone else underwhelmed by Eloise? After her talk with Des in the AfterFlashes I thought she was some sort of Time Cop. Turns out she was dead and trying to spend some time with the son she never had;
I wasn't underwhelmed with Eloise, I felt so sorry for her. Eloise is a tragic character who sacrificed her son for what she thought at the time was the greater good. Daniel was to be a pianist, it was his true vocation. Eloise sent him back knowing it would be she that killed him. Look at her when she realized the man she shot was her son and he told her that her future self knew. She was pregnant with him at the time. Imagine carrying a child you'd do anything to protect, want the best for and love above all else. Then you take away the life he wanted for himself by directing him to science instead of the arts. Finally you send him back to a place where he becomes the sacrifice. Was she thinking that he would be the one to break that cycle? Was she aware of the purgatory/limbo life? I don't know. What I saw was that here was the mother giving her son the life he wanted without the interference he experienced while they was alive. I think they move on together when she's ready to stop punishing herself. I think if part of Daniel realizes that there's something more to his dream/limbo/purgatory life he's keeping it to himself to give her what she needs. A bonus may be the life with Charlotte he never got to have on the island.
Nikki said: "Jack and Locke looking down into the cave of light the same way they looked into the hatch at the end of season 2. What a perfect end to the first hour!!"
Hey Nikki: I know you've been busier than hell on wheels the past week or two, but shouldn't that read "at the end of season 1?" I believe the ending in Season One was down the hatch, correct?
If I remember correctly, at the end of Season Two, the hatch has exploded/imploded, Desmond turned the fail-safe key, "Henry Gale" gives Walt back to Michael, along with the boat, and Penny receives a phone call from a caller saying we've found the island.
:o) Don't forget - I want one of those books!! An autographed copy, please?
Benny: FWIW, when we first married, he couldn't beat me at Space Invaders, and I couldn't beat him at Pacman which was only played back then with a joystick. For the past 13 years, I've had nerve damage in my right hand, but now I can't beat him at Space Invaders and he can't beat me at Pacman. In between a child was born and raised. Amazing how life turns it all around. We were talking about that earlier tonight. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Frank: “DON’T BOTHER ME!!”
If only I could yell that into a phone to the Dr's and nurses who keep calling to ask when the STAT will be done! haha (just kidding)
So why were certain people missing? Eko wasn’t in the church, or Ana Lucia. Ben didn’t go in, Michael wasn’t there. No Richard Alpert. Perhaps the suggestion is that the people in the church are all going to Heaven, and those who aren’t there are doomed to go to Hell. Richard isn’t going to get the absolution he so badly wanted. Ben knows that he doesn’t belong with that group for all the things he’s done. Interesting that Sayid does get to go, though.
I find the idea that those who WERE NOT in the church, ended up in hell as very hard to believe. Why would you believe that?
Nor do I believe that moral compass had anything to do with any of the Losties ending up at that church. If that was true, Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Sayid, Sun, Jin, Bernard, Shannon and even Locke would have no business being there.
Then again, I hated the church sequence. It pissed me off.
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