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After hemming and hawing over it a bit – and rewatching it with the benefit of not also being responsible for running commercials in it – I’ve come to the conclusion that Lost’s series finale was at least as satisfying as Battlestar Galactica’s, which was actually very<\/em> satisfying, thank you. It was a good farewell to the characters, and thankfully, wasn’t<\/em> a 150-minute info-dump about every mystery the show had ever thrown at us. A lot of the first and second string mysteries had gotten their exposure anyway, in episodes such as the one a few weeks back focusing on the origin story of Jacob and his brother – a fine episode which, coincidentally, tons of fans bitched and moaned about because it didn’t focus on the main characters. That situation reminded me of a similar one, years back, when complaining Babylon 5 fans aroused the internet ire of series creator J. Michael Straczynski by missing vital points of the story arc because they were too impatient about the fact that spaceships didn’t explode spectacularly in every episode.<\/p>\nSo perhaps it’s not too surprising that some Lost fans missed the point of the finale and, indeed, the entire series too. But ABC played a part in muddying the waters by pulling a real bonehead maneuver.<\/p>\n
Over the end credits, they showed a shot of the plane wreckage on the beach, as seen in the pilot episode.<\/p>\n
Never in the history of moaning and complaining have you heard so much moaning and complaining. I’ve been observing the discussions on quite a few internet forums, in which many viewers complained bitterly that they’d just invested 6 years of their lives on a complex story that “never happened.”<\/p>\n
Now, let’s step aside real quick for a definition here. It’s a given that nothing in Lost ever happened, because it’s fiction. But no, what I’m talking about here is the widespread misconception that the entire series, within its own fictional confines<\/em>, “never happened.”<\/p>\n Never mind that, in the last ten or fifteen minutes of the final episode, the writers got as close as they dared to an info-dump by having Jack’s father explain that everything really happened for the story’s purposes.<\/em> The crash, the Others, escaping the island then returning, time travel, the Dharma Initiative: all “really” happened. Jack’s father also makes it just as clear that the sixth season’s “WTF?” “alternate universe” was a holding tank for the souls of the Oceanic survivors before passing into the afterlife; hence the alternate universe didn’t really happen, except on the astral plane if you want to read it that way. I mean, this wasn’t<\/em> the open-to-interpretation ending of The Prisoner or the completely-bereft-of-making-any-narrative-sense blackout of The Sopranos. Lost’s finale nailed down more stuff than Galactica’s finale did – to the point that it was all spelled out very<\/em> neatly. Even on first viewing, I was surprised that so little<\/em> was being left to the imagination.<\/p>\n