I’ve always been a Lost apol­o­gist, at least lik­ing the show even dur­ing its weak points. Six years of good­will very nearly went out the win­dow along with my tele­vi­sion, thanks to its extremely frus­trat­ing final run of episodes. Close to the end, I attempted to resolve myself to the likely event that the finale would not answer every lit­tle nig­gling mys­tery. I hoped to shield myself from dis­ap­point­ment, and let the cre­ators fin­ish the story how they wished. Yet “The End” still failed to tell a sim­ple story. A story is not a string of dei ex machina, and every char­ac­ter arc need not end with a sud­den, bru­tal, arbi­trary death.

Carl­ton Cuse told Wired Mag­a­zine:

The great mys­ter­ies of life fun­da­men­tally can’t be addressed. We just have to tell a good story and let the chips fall where they may. We don’t know whether the res­o­lu­tion between the two time­lines is going to make peo­ple say, “Oh, that’s cool” or “Oh, fuck those guys, they belly-flopped at the end.”

The lat­ter, pretty much. What fol­lows is just a taste of my cat­a­logue of com­plaints, with no con­cern for spoilers.

SPINNING (DONKEY) WHEELS

For a show built atop a per­pet­u­ally com­pound­ing series of mys­ter­ies and conun­drums, it failed to legit­i­mately advance or resolve much of any­thing in the run-up to the polar­iz­ing finale. With so lit­tle time left, the penul­ti­mate episodes wasted time spin­ning wheels in clas­sic Lost fash­ion. Peo­ple get­ting locked in cages, escap­ing, get­ting locked up again. Groups split­ting up, hik­ing to oppo­site ends of the island(s), split­ting up into dif­fer­ent groups and hik­ing back. Board­ing water­craft and dis­em­bark­ing again. Mean­while, the sheer num­ber of aban­doned mys­ter­ies filled its own wiki, and as usual, Col­lege­Hu­mor said it best:

BOOM!

From the very begin­ning, one of Lost’s favorite con­ceits was the sud­den death of char­ac­ters. To be gen­er­ous, death is rarely “mean­ing­ful” in real life, but these plot twists also laid bare the prac­ti­cal­i­ties of ser­ial tele­vi­sion (actors quit, get fired, or age uncon­vinc­ingly). After the tenth or twen­ti­eth fatal­ity, I became sick of char­ac­ters get­ting sud­denly and arbi­trar­ily killed off for cheap shock. Past vic­tims included Eko, Libby, and Danielle, all vio­lently exit­ing the show before their sto­ry­lines reached any kind of res­o­lu­tion. In the final episodes, it hap­pened to Ilyana, Wid­more, Zoe, and (it seemed at first) Frank and Richard. We saw just enough of Zoe that I assumed she must be sig­nif­i­cant as some­thing more than just can­non fod­der, but appar­ently not. Sayid’s season-long arc (was he mys­ti­cally rein­car­nated as a soul­less killing machine, or was he merely con­vinced that he was essen­tially evil?) is short-circuited by his abrupt choice of self-sacrifice. How did he defeat his mys­ti­cal brain­wash­ing? Just killing off a char­ac­ter isn’t any kind of a res­o­lu­tion to a storyline.

A pos­i­tive exam­ple from the show’s past would be Char­lie, a char­ac­ter whose death fig­ured into the mythol­ogy in a big way. It had ram­i­fi­ca­tions, as opposed to: BOOM! Look, some­body just sud­denly blew them­selves up with dyna­mite, isn’t that HILARIOUS? Aren’t you SHOCKED? No? Well, let’s kill another char­ac­ter the same way!

I was never so sen­ti­men­tal for Lost that I felt the need for every char­ac­ter to live hap­pily ever after. But didn’t these cre­ations deserve a lit­tle better?

ACROSS THE SEA

Lit­tle of the mythol­ogy Jacob finally revealed in the episode “Across the Sea” made any sense, and often directly con­tra­dicted my mem­o­ries of what went before. He tells Kate he scratched her off the list because she became a mother, but the job could still be hers if she wanted it. Does that mean his list is arbi­trary? It doesn’t mat­ter which of these last few sur­viv­ing can­di­dates will do it? And, for what­ever rea­son Jacob dis­qual­i­fies moms, is it related to why all women on the island die? Were all the other moth­ers also can­di­dates, for whom dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion means death? If so, why didn’t he kill Kate? Because she assumed cus­tody of Claire’s baby rather than hav­ing her own bio­log­i­cal child, I sup­pose. But if the audi­ence is asked to make too many strained sup­po­si­tions like this, based on lit­tle evi­dence in the text of the show, we’ll begin to won­der if the writ­ers have any idea themselves.

In the ear­lier episode “Ab Aeterno”, Jacob told the Man in Black that he brings peo­ple to the island to prove a point to him about human­ity. But now he tells Jack & co. that he sim­ply wants to find a replace­ment. Which is it? Both?

Jacob’s list of sev­eral hun­dred names even­tu­ally nar­rowed to a mere hand­ful of sur­vivors. Did he know he had to rule them all out until he got to the last name? And that the Man in Black would hap­pen to be very near escape at that point in time? If so, why didn’t he just scratch all but one name off the list? And now that Jack has vol­un­teered, does that mean that the other few have to die?

NARRATIVE CHEATING

It’s cheap to resolve a plot thread by intro­duc­ing a totally new ele­ment, like the adop­tive mother of Jacob & The Man in Black (an unnamed char­ac­ter played by Alli­son Jan­ney). Imag­ine a mur­der mys­tery, in which the mur­derer turns out to be… oh this guy right here, whom you’ve never seen before now. The answer to the mys­tery of Jacob and The Man in Black needed to already be there, in the form of shuf­fled puz­zle pieces the audi­ence hasn’t seen the solu­tion to yet. Not in a single-episode guest star.

Which brings me to the glow­ing cave. If it’s really the key moti­vat­ing force for Jacob and The Man in Black, it’s the ulti­mate MacGuf­fin of the entire series. To not even so much as men­tion it until near the very end of a six-year long series is cheat­ing to say the least.

Let me go back even fur­ther: I’m irri­tated alto­gether by the injec­tion of Jacob and the Man in Black into the story. I know that the Man in Black tech­ni­cally appeared in the very first episode (as the sound effect we would later asso­ciate with the Smoke Mon­ster), and we’ve been hear­ing the name Jacob for a few years now. But it does not feel organic at all that the core mys­tery of the show came down to a mys­ti­cal strug­gle between two char­ac­ters that have barely fea­tured on the show at all. It should be about the char­ac­ters already on the stage from the very begin­ning, not two cyphers intro­duced so late in the game.

And the final, cap­ping atroc­ity that would get any kid kicked out of high school cre­ative writ­ing class is, of course, the rev­e­la­tion that the final season’s mys­te­ri­ous “side­ways time­line” was actu­ally a kind of Limbo or Pur­ga­tory. That this is wildly unsat­is­fac­tory (the only thing worse could have been an end­ing in which it is revealed to be someone’s dream, à la St. Else­where or Newhart) is over­shad­owed by the true crime: it’s explained via expo­si­tion by a minor char­ac­ter we hadn’t seen for months (Jack’s father Chris­t­ian). Expo­si­tion! “Show don’t tell” is a clichéd rule, and rules ought to be bro­ken, but this case of telling not show­ing is evi­dence of con­tempt for the audience.

Com­pare and con­trast with the truly mind-blowing con­clu­sion to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its word­less­ness is a sub­lime virtue, and its mys­ter­ies linger to pro­voke dis­cus­sion and fas­ci­na­tion decades later.

BEN: A COMPLICATED GUY, OR LAZY WRITING?

I’m puz­zled by Ben’s appar­ent boomerang switcher from defeated and sort-of redeemed, to pure evil, and then back again. We’re left to sup­pose he real­ized some­thing in the penul­ti­mate episode that the audi­ence just didn’t know yet. We nat­u­rally expect to share his real­iza­tion in the final episode, but there doesn’t seem to be any­thing there to find. After the Man in Black is defeated, he’s not only for­given for his crimes (remem­ber, he is a mass mur­derer), but given a lead­er­ship role on the island. And, he gets to stay behind in Limbo and shag Rousseau (Mira Furlan, who, inci­den­tally, cleans up good, am I right?).

It bugs me that I had to repeat­edly ask this ques­tion at each plot turn: was it lazy writ­ing, or part of the mystery?

THE DESMOND ZAP

I’m very con­fused about how much the side­ways char­ac­ters remem­ber about their alter­nate time­lines on the island after Desmond zaps them. Locke and Ben only seem to get a vague sense of déjà vu, but Hur­ley seems to have com­plete recall (for instance, he seems to know exactly who Ana Lucia is). By the finale, char­ac­ters need only touch each other for com­plete mem­o­ries to come flood­ing back. So why didn’t Jack & Juliet spark each other’s mem­o­ries dur­ing all the years were mar­ried, and not to put to fine a point on it, had sex and con­ceived a son? Again, part of the mys­tery, or sloppy writing?

CITING SOURCES

Some of the above is derived from a morning-after rant I shared with guest Dork Reporter Snark­bait.

Must read: Jason Kottke’s Lost finale roundup

Offi­cial Lost site: abc.go.com/shows/lost

Buy the Lost Sea­son 6 DVD or Blu-ray from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.