At Long Lost, The End

Spoilers, thoughts, my alternative ending – after the leap…

So – I’m writing with a monster of a headache today – apologies in advance if this is less coherent than usual.

Brief Impressions

First off, I’m of a mixed mind on the finale of Lost. I thought most of the episode, as an episode, was excellent. There were some really, truly moving moments in there. I detected something quite close to tears when Sun and Jin remembered, and again when Claire and Kate delivered Aaron and Charlie walked up. Also when Sawyer and Juliette reunited at the vending machine. Lots of good stuff there. Also the scene where bad Locke and Jack lowered Desmond into the cave.

The final fight between Smokey and Jack was intense, and every bit as good as anything we’ve seen on the show so far. And Hurley taking over Jacob’s role was a wonderful twist.

That being said, I wasn’t much of a fan of the last fifteen minutes where it turns out that not only was Desmond’s role in all of this not really that important after all, but everyone is actually in some sort of Purgatory waiting to remember one another so they can move on. That just doesn’t work for me. I love the show for the characters, true, and they certainly did decide to focus heavily on the characters in this final episode, but the ending felt like a cop-out. I’ll still think of the show, over all, as a great show, one of my favorite shows of all time. But the end was weak.

Alternative Realities

So here’s my last season of Lost, working with the basic pieces we were given in the first part of season 6:

We know fairly early on that Locke can “turn” people. Claire and Sayid have both been turned by his promises and apparent powers of resurrection (in Sayid’s case). Claire is promised Aaron; Sayid, Nadya. In the sideways world we have a world where, to some degree, these things are true. In fact, we have a world where a great deal of the missing pieces in peoples’ lives are suddenly no longer missing. They are more complete. It’s as if they were granted some kind of wish.

The only one in the sideways world and the real world who seems aware of this is Desmond, and he’s busy in sideways world rounding up people and trying to wake them up – to make them ‘let go’. Meanwhile in the real world he is tranquil and confident, at least in the first part of the season.

Back to the island, we have Smokey going around and making his little offers. And let’s say we have more than just Sayid and Claire take him up on these offers. Not everyone, maybe, but enough people ‘turn’ to his side, accept his bribe.

So, to cut to the chase, basically it turns out that the sideways world is a fake world. A world created by the smoke monster to trap the people from the island – to trap the candidates maybe, or just to set all these people aside so that he can do whatever it is he’s trying to do. That’s where they are in the sideways world – trapped in Smokey’s promise. Desmond has to wake them up – get them to let go of this false reality so that they can come back and help save the island, and the world, from this evil presence that is the smoke monster. He also has to make some sacrifice himself. This turns out to be his own death, maybe, something he needs to do to get the people back to the island.

Meanwhile, we’d answer some of the many nagging mysteries and also have all these great revelatory moments where people realize that they’ve had this whole other existence, and that now they have to make the hard choice of letting it go. Giving up their loved ones – again – or dying – again – to save the world.

I don’t care that the island wasn’t entirely explained, but I think they could have tied up a number of loose ends. Using a coherent plot to do this would have been nice, and copping out entirely with some spiritualistic mumbo jumbo waiting room scene at the end is just lame. I wouldn’t have even cared if there were loose ends if the payoff had been there.

I also wish there had been continuity with the dark/light dynamic at the end. Hurley becomes Jacob – but who becomes Smokey?  Jack didn’t fit that role well, but he did find himself in the same place in the river that Jacob’s brother’s body was found. Somehow not ending things would have been more satisfying – having something evil persist at the end; the battle moving on into a new era with Hurley as the new top dog and some other villain rising up. Or some hint of that. Something.

Possibly Tied Up Plots

I know a lot of people are griping because the answer to why the island made women infertile was never answered. Could it be that Jacob wouldn’t let women give birth – that this was one of his rules – since then the mothers would no longer be able to be candidates?

One thing I’m glad they didn’t do was make the whole show unreal – as in have everyone be dead all along. Some reviewers and viewers are misreading this into the final episode, but I think Christian Shepherd made it quite clear that everything had happened, that the story had been real and not a dream or anything like that. Jack’s final resting place was symbolic, not an attempt to show that none of it had actually happened. He wasn’t wearing the same clothes, after all.

Any other plot holes that are bothering you – or ones that you think might actually have answers that other people are missing?