Lost finale reaction post

[annathepiper]

Our Tivo failed in its final attempt to stab at us from Hell’s heart, despite its best efforts on Sunday evening; spazzkat purchased what we missed off of iTunes, and we were therefore able to watch the Lost finale last night!

My picoreview: um, wut?

(Needless to say, spoilers behind the fold. DO NOT LOOK if you haven’t seen the finale yet, and if you do intend to watch it.)

In short, I was pretty much right there with it, up until the big reveal at the end of “everybody’s dead, but not in any abnormal way, and the alternate universe is just this sort of Purgatory that all the Losties somehow magically made so they could all go into the afterlife together.”

To wit, um, wut? Seriously? This is the big windup of six fairly decent seasons?

solarbird nailed it for me over here when she said that the big issue here is that the final season set up some clearly cosmic stakes, but did not deliver a correspondingly cosmic payoff. Instead we get no resolution to what the Dharma Initiative was trying to do, no sense that the world has been changed or made better by ousting Jacob and his Smoke Monster brother and putting Hurley and Ben in charge of the Island instead, and ultimately no real answers to what the hell the island is.

I was really hoping that the alternate timeline was going to be a genuinely alternate timeline, one to which the Losties could somehow jump and live out happy lives after all the crap they’ve been through. That’s specifically where I thought they were taking it, what with the whole setup of Desmond-A and Desmond-B being clearly Important in both storylines, and Jack sacrificing himself so that everybody else could have good lives would have played very well into that.

And what did we get instead? A bunch of schmaltzy “everybody who ever loved anybody else in the cast gets to be reunited with them in this magical afterlife, no matter when they actually died, and then all the Losties are going to go to heaven together.” Or something.

Don’t get me wrong: it was very sweet to see the reunions of Sayid and Shannon, Claire and Charlie, and Sawyer and Juliet. But overall it wasn’t a worthy resolution for me, specifically because it didn’t actually resolve anything.

“Rocks fall, everybody dies” is a story closer if and only if you’re being snarky. It wasn’t appropriate here.

Sigh. I’m still going to miss this show and overall I’m happy to have spent time with these characters; I’ll certainly miss watching them. (Especially Sawyer, because yum, and if Josh Holloway gets another role in something, especially as a cop, I will totally check it out.)

I just wish they could have had a better sendoff.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Comments

[spunbutterfly.livejournal.com]

Like I told my sister:

The series finale is hard to actively hate cause it was a fairly happy ending to an otherwise sad/depressing show, but it was emotional blackmail. They didn't answer ANYTHING. I didn't expect answers to everything, but I expected a few answers here and there of the mysteries they started in season 1. It was a series finale to end the final two seasons of Lost and only incorporated the first season by emotionally blackmailing all of us.

[spunbutterfly.livejournal.com]

This also made me laugh.

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1936291

[annathepiper]

HA! All of these are very, very good questions!

[annathepiper]

Yeah, it was way more about the emotional reactions of seeing all these characters get happy shiny magical afterlives rather than, y'know, actual dramatic resolution or anything. Sigh!

[magnet5.livejournal.com]

You and Solarbird cover some of my problems with it that I hadn't quite worked out in my head.

[magnet5.livejournal.com]

And two more things occurs to me (as I just posted on solarbird's journal) about the alt.world:
•It doesn't really resolve any of the character arcs except to the extent "You're in heaven and reunited" counts.
•What was all the fuss about getting everyone to the concert? Wouldn't they have wound up in the church eventually anyway?

[annathepiper]

Good first point, that! Jack gets resolution, I'd say, but only really because he actually exhibited character growth in the finale and his dying brings him full circle. But everybody else? Not so much.

And ooh yeah good point about the concert, too. I guess the point there was really mostly 'we need to get everybody in the same place which happens to be near this church and once we all start cluing in then we'll be in the church' or something. I got nothin'!