May 24, 2010,
Ok, you asked for it. What did I think
of the LOST finale?
I personally loved it; it was a great
ending. Better than I expected when the series started, after how JJ
Abrams' other series we liked, Alias, ended. (Hint: badly.) At first
I wasn't sure if I even wanted to get into LOST, and I didn't at first,
until my wife told me how good it was, because I didn't want another
giant disappointment.
I've seen the mixed reactions across the
internet though, and they really don't surprise me. LOST in general
(not just the finale) is really a love-it-or-hate-it type of phenomenon,
its hard to have a middle of the road reaction to it. And that goes
triple for the finale.
The negative reactions seem to mostly
fall into two categories.
First, the people who were turned off
because they wanted concrete, pat answers and explanations to all their
questions. Personally, I think that anyone who was expecting this has
not been paying attention the last 6 years.
What I loved about the show was actually
that they avoided easy answers, and the answers they gave were very
open to interpretation. And yet, they still made a lot of sense. They
didn't just do this at the end, it was throughout the series.
I think a lot of people are just very
concrete thinkers and this sort of ambiguity frustrates them, makes
them crazy. (Ironically, I think there's a high correlation between
this sort of "concrete thinking" and the "geek community" and
the core of LOST fandom, the sort of people who like to try to piece
together all the wonderful little details and tidbits and puzzles,
to try to put it all together and figure out "the answer" to
LOST and what it all means.)
Secondly, there seem to be a lot of people
put off by the "religious" ending. Again, these people haven't
been paying attention. LOST has had religious themes almost since day
one. And the ending, really, isn't far off from how I imagined it would
end, six years ago. My theory at the beginning (and a lot of other
people's, too) was that maybe the plane crash had no survivors. That
is not far off from what we got, and is at least one possible interpretation
of the ending of The End.
A lot of sci-fi fans are atheists, and
any time a work of science fiction crosses over into religion, certain
people seem to get offended. The new BSG (which I haven't seen yet)
apparently got the same reaction.
(The LOST ending was a little universalist
for my tastes, but that is what you would expect, isn't it?)
The writing on LOST has always reminded
me of one of my all-time favorite science fiction writers: Phillip
K. Dick. I was totally obsessed with him in college, at least until
I burned out on him a bit. Hollywood is obsessed with him too lately,
lots of movie adaptations of his books over the last decade, as well
as other films like The Matrix that are obviously inspired or influenced
by his work in general.
His books were similar to LOST in SO many
ways. They always question the nature of life and reality. (Often with
multiple universes or timelines intermingling, and time travel.) There's
often religious themes and overtones, usually about the nature of God,
(he's definitely not a Christian or anything though). There's always
at least one major turning point in almost every book where you find
out that everything you've been told is a lie and the universe is not
what you think it is. Sometimes more than one - the book VALIS had
so many of these, every few pages, that it was almost incomprehensible.
He also never tried to explain away anything with hard science, it
was always about twilight-zone-ish weird occurrances. The focus was
more on the characters and their reactions to what was happening, and
the metaphysical, than on science or rational explanations. There were
almost never any easy answers, the books often had multiple interpretations.
For example, Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep? which inspired Blade Runner. You may have heard people say "Oh
- in the book Deckard's really a replicant" but its actually more
complex than that. We never really know for sure whether he is or not.
There's a "turning point" where you find out that he is a
replicant and his whole life was a lie, and then another where you
find out that he's really human and THAT was all a lie. (Maybe.) And
that's sort of the point of the book - that it doesn't matter if he's
a replicant or not, because its who you are that makes you human, not
what you're made of.
And the focus of the books, the way he
made it all work, was through the characters.
Most of his life, Dick was also barely
paid for his work and supposedly wrote most of it on a diet of dog
food and amphetimines, which gave his books a mad manic genius (and
was probably also partially responsible for the fact that he'd often
leave a lot of loose ends).
That has to be similar to the somewhat
frantic writing process in a weekly scripted drama, well except the
dog food maybe. :-) Sometimes his stories completely fall apart but
even when they do they're still interesting and fun, and when they
work they blow your mind.
After his death, his work has become very
important in literary sci-fi circles; but he really didn't get much
recognition for most of his life.
Anyhow, these same qualities apply to
LOST, both the good and bad, and they were what made LOST work. For
me at least. The allegory and mythology, the endless questions, never
really knowing what reality they were in, that was the whole fun of
it. One set of unambiguous, easy, pat answers for everything, in my
mind, would have ruined the show. For example, in the original Star
Wars movies, the Force was this mysterious, mystical power. The way
that it was explained (or, not explained) made it interesting and cool.
In the prequels when Lucas gave us a pat, simple, scientific technobabble "explanation" for
it - this completely destroyed the Force, because it isn't supposed
to be explainable.
I think a lot of science fiction falls
into this trap of having to "explain everything" and a lot
of sci-fi fans expect that. Star Trek (one of my other obsessions)
is particularly bad about this. Everything has to have a logical scientific
explanation - just wave a tricorder at it and spout some technobabble.
And retune the phasers or the main deflector dish or something. Don't
get me wrong, I love Star Trek, but LOST isn't that kind of show, and
this is a good thing. One of the themes of Star Trek is that everything
is understandable, every problem solvable, through science and technology.
One of the themes of LOST is that we can't figure it all out, but that's
okay - that's just life.
And of course, just like in a Phillip
Dick book, its the characters that made it all work. I think that's
why the ending worked, because it celebrated the characters, relationships,
and the bond that the characters had with each other (and the audience).
You could even cheer for Ben, at least a bit.
You may have noticed that I told you what
I thought of it, but I didn't actually try to tell you how I interpreted
everything, or share my "set of answers." A lot of people
out there have written what they think "really happened" and
argued that their interpretation is definitive. This is nothing new,
LOST fans have been doing it for years.
I actually like the ambiguity of there
being lots of possible interpretations, so I am just not going to do
that. I don't necessarily think I have to stick to thinking about one
interpretation myself, there's just too much fun to be had thinking
about all the different intricate interconnections. I am looking forward
to watching it all from the beginning again on DVD or something someday.
--Bobby
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