By Jeff Jensen May 24, 2010
And in the end, they all died and went to heaven. The series finale of Lost brought us both back to the beginning and to the threshold of eternity. In one world, Armageddon was averted. In another world, we got the Rapture. The closing moments aspired to a twist ending: Sidewaysabad, a flawed matrix of good-enough contentment, wasn't an alternate reality at all but a psycho-spiritual virtual reality, a vast active living intelligence system (to borrow a phrase from Philip K. Dick's VALIS) created by the collective yearning of the castaways, an ethereal transfer station located at an unspecified junction between life and afterlife. All along, the Sideways characters have been shells, waiting for someone to ignite their soul's pilot light. And on the Pentecost Sunday, it was total ''FLAME ON!'' I thought ''The End'' was a fantastic though not flawless fantasy that stirred more of my emotions than my mind, and I was satisfied with that. The Jin-Sun awakening. The Sawyer-Juliet reunion. The John Locke resurrection. The preservation of The Island and the promise that it lives in our imaginations under the stewardship of big-hearted Hurley and his humble Number 2, Benjamin Linus. Under their regime, a new era of the soul awaits mankind, which I think was one of the big points of it all: Let us rediscover and reinvent spirituality for a new generation that finds it's both too easy to fall for dubious ideas and too hard to believe in anything. I loved the opening montage, the crosscutting between the Island and Sideways characters as they awaited destiny. And I thought the final 10 minutes — which toggled between Island Jack's last moments of life with Sideways Jack's launch into the afterlife aboard The Ark of the Castaway Covenant — were pretty close to perfect. The final episode was a very personal work of its writers, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. I am grateful for the story they chose to give us.
In a way, this really was the zombie season of Lost after all, wasn't? The Sideways world was a Bardo, a kind of Tibetan Book of the Dead intermediate state. It was... Purgatory theory come true! All pause for laughter — and all pause to appreciate the point Lost hammered home all episode long. The Island world was real. Everything that happened on that damn rock mattered. We worried at the beginning of the season that five years of investment would be squandered by a time reboot. Nope. We worried the messy redemption struggles of each soul would be cheapened by Jughead's clean and easy atomic whiteout. Nope. ''Whatever happened, happened,'' Jack told Desmond, admonishing the idealistic Scot for his wanting cheap, painless shortcuts to salvation. Still, what did the Sideways world mean? And was it truly dramatically necessary to Lost? Some thoughts to come.
us that cryptic credits sequence of airplane wreckage scattered on the beach. (Did the Ajira 316 escapees crash and perish? Are the castaways stuck in a loop that won't stop until each and every one of the passengers is fully redeemed and totally willing to share that flight into the afterlife? Or was that mere melancholy mood imagery?) (And you caught that, right? How the castaway seating arrangement in the church evoked an airplane cabin? How Christian throwing open the doors in the rear of the sanctuary, allowing the warm white vacuum of God space suck the castaway souls out the back = Oceanic 815 ripping in half via The Island's electromagnetic tractor beam?) I was under the influence of great emotion in the immediate aftermath of Lost's ending, and I remain so now: I was affected and moved; I am mentally activated and inspired. I am uncertain if you felt/feel the same. Opinions seem to be all over the map. Opinions also seem to be changing as emotion fades and brains take over. Was the finale profound or mawkish? What was more important: the journey or the destination? Did it the Greater Point To It All effectively render all the unanswered questions of the series moot, or does an ironic allegory for ''letting go'' and ''life is filled with loose ends and dangling plot threads'' not absolve a story from, you know, actually resolving all its gosh darn storylines?
I think fans and haters — and fans and fans-until-last-night — will be debating this for a while. NEWSFLASH! The argument will never be settled. I expect in the days to come, as I find myself in conversations with people who were disappointed, I will be asked to mount a defense of the series. I will be put on the spot to show them why it all ''made sense,'' and failing that, prove them that the show really did have a ''Greater Point To It All.'' But what is certain is that I will convince them of nothing. I also think it would be wrong and even disrespectful of me to try. Your experience of Lost is your experience of Lost, and it is valid. I presume you are intelligent people who are not blinded by personal bias. I am sorry you feel let down. But I do not share your perspective. Does that mean we can't ride the same church bus to heaven together? I hope not.
Many people are talking right now about the overt spirituality of the finale. EW's Ken Tucker saw the finale as a Christian allegory. Many others saw the finale as ambiguously and cheesily mystic. The spiritual themes of Lost have always been there. And if you didn't like them, they were easy to ignore because the show had so many other entertaining things going on. But ''The End'' seemed to be all about the spiritual stuff, and seemed to announce the whole series had been about the spiritual stuff. If you never connected with the spiritual stuff, wither your investment of time and interest in the show you thought Lost was but apparently wasn't? (As Ben said to Jacob last season: ''What about me?'' Maybe that's why you find it easy to angrily jab a knife into the heart of the show this morning.)
us that cryptic credits sequence of airplane wreckage scattered on the beach. (Did the Ajira 316 escapees crash and perish? Are the castaways stuck in a loop that won't stop until each and every one of the passengers is fully redeemed and totally willing to share that flight into the afterlife? Or was that mere melancholy mood imagery?) (And you caught that, right? How the castaway seating arrangement in the church evoked an airplane cabin? How Christian throwing open the doors in the rear of the sanctuary, allowing the warm white vacuum of God space suck the castaway souls out the back = Oceanic 815 ripping in half via The Island's electromagnetic tractor beam?) I was under the influence of great emotion in the immediate aftermath of Lost's ending, and I remain so now: I was affected and moved; I am mentally activated and inspired. I am uncertain if you felt/feel the same. Opinions seem to be all over the map. Opinions also seem to be changing as emotion fades and brains take over. Was the finale profound or mawkish? What was more important: the journey or the destination? Did it the Greater Point To It All effectively render all the unanswered questions of the series moot, or does an ironic allegory for ''letting go'' and ''life is filled with loose ends and dangling plot threads'' not absolve a story from, you know, actually resolving all its gosh darn storylines?
I think fans and haters — and fans and fans-until-last-night — will be debating this for a while. NEWSFLASH! The argument will never be settled. I expect in the days to come, as I find myself in conversations with people who were disappointed, I will be asked to mount a defense of the series. I will be put on the spot to show them why it all ''made sense,'' and failing that, prove them that the show really did have a ''Greater Point To It All.'' But what is certain is that I will convince them of nothing. I also think it would be wrong and even disrespectful of me to try. Your experience of Lost is your experience of Lost, and it is valid. I presume you are intelligent people who are not blinded by personal bias. I am sorry you feel let down. But I do not share your perspective. Does that mean we can't ride the same church bus to heaven together? I hope not.
Many people are talking right now about the overt spirituality of the finale. EW's Ken Tucker saw the finale as a Christian allegory. Many others saw the finale as ambiguously and cheesily mystic. The spiritual themes of Lost have always been there. And if you didn't like them, they were easy to ignore because the show had so many other entertaining things going on. But ''The End'' seemed to be all about the spiritual stuff, and seemed to announce the whole series had been about the spiritual stuff. If you never connected with the spiritual stuff, wither your investment of time and interest in the show you thought Lost was but apparently wasn't? (As Ben said to Jacob last season: ''What about me?'' Maybe that's why you find it easy to angrily jab a knife into the heart of the show this morning.)
is that for all of its spirituality and mysticism and supernatural hoo-ha, Lost was all about human beings — really screwed-up human beings who do really screwed-up things. Even the Gods (read: Jacob) and Monsters (read: Smokey) and mythic heroes (read: Richard Alpert) revealed themselves to be just like you or me, give or take some smoke and some superpowers. It's funny that so many people cynically bitch about Lost not having ''a master plan'' — the Lost story is all about the folly of ''master plans.'' Anyone who has ever had a master plan on this show has failed catastrophically. Mother. Jacob. The Man In Black. Ben. Charles Widmore. Jack. Sawyer. The best we can do is live our lives with enlightened improvisation — to be so self-aware and fearless that we can live fully in the present and redeem our every moment and every human connection. Last night, Sawyer asked Jack if becoming island guardian made him feel any different. Jack thought about it and laughed and said, ''No. Not really.'' He was right. Jack was still every bit the fixer junkie he used to be before he took holy communion from Jacob. But as he moved into the final conflict of his life, Jack was able to apply the best parts of him to the crisis at hand, and minimize the influence of his worst parts. Which isn't to say he couldn't make mistakes — and didn't have more to learn. If there was something he had gained, it was this: grace for his own uniquely imperfect mess.
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A Brief Summary Of Destroying The Monster, Saving The Island, And Dying With a Smile On Your Face
We begin in the world we know best, the one world that will always and forever be Lost for us. The Island. The Island! And it lives! The sunken tragedy that was glimpsed in the season premiere was a lie — a clue to the unreality of the Sideways necropolis, the dead heart of a lame limbo. The real Island was saved... but only after the castaways imperiled the place in order to slay Fake Locke. Here's how you kill the unkillable smoke monster, kids: You take the literal cork out of Jacob's metaphorical bottle of malevolence. Desmond willingly entered into a compact with Island guardian Jack and Island devil Fake Locke and agreed to descend into the Source, the engine room of life, death and rebirth for the whole world. Each of them thought it would accomplish something different, though none of them exactly knew the how or why of it. It was a leap of faith, a throw-Desmond-down-a-well-and-make-a-wish Hail Mary pass. Fake Locke thought Desmond's descent would destroy The Island. Jack thought Desmond would allow him to kill Fake Locke. Desmond thought his underworld ordeal would trigger his spiritual transmigration from Islandverse to Sidewaysabad. (In a twist that goes to my Everyone's Flawed/Master Plans Are Crap ruminations earlier, Lost revealed that super-buddha Island Desmond was actually somewhat wrong or at least misguided in his idealism. The lesson: No one can ever be completely correct about anything — especially when that something is ''The Meaning Of All Existence.'')
was like a Lost-fan beer bet over some aspect of the show's arcane mythology. They each had a crazy theory. May the best one win.
Brother Buttonpusher was lowered into the mythic bowels (The Golden Bough-els?) of The Island. He found skeletons of the Source-seeking sojourners who had come before him — one of several moments Lost gave us in the finale that suggested rich pockets of untold story that we will never, ever be told. (Also see: The Secret Case Files Of Island Honcho Hurley And Sidekick Ben. I see spin-off!) He found a carrot-shaped obelisk jammed into a hole at the bottom of a reflecting pool. Radiant energy emanating from below the Earth (or just existing naturally in the cave? I couldn't tell) filled the cavern and formed a cone around the plug. The light should have ripped the smokey soul out of his body. But Desmond, uniquely immune to fantasy story mystical hoo-ha, remained intact as an integrated spiritual/material unit. He yanked on the stone. The warm and buttery radiance faded. The unsealed chasm glowed with wine-red anger. Desmond's face went uh-oh. It was as if Father Failsafe had turned off heaven and unleashed hell; it was as if he had shut down the spiritual operating system of reality. As a consequence, an old curse lost its power. The Man In Black, bonded to The Island since childhood and robbed of his body by his brother's coil-stripping blunder some 2,000 years earlier, was finally unchained from his tropical ball and got his humanity back. But in the process, MIB also turned into something that Jack could murder; the angry old man became exclusively and perilously human, wholly flesh and blood. In that protracted moment in which evil was allowed to hold sway, I think everyone — the castaways; possibly all life in the world — lost their souls. In ''The End,'' the struggle wasn't just between life and death — it was a struggle to preserve the promise of eternity from a new modality of total annihilation.
out in the finale. We've been told for many episodes that if the Monster left The Island, the castaways and their loved ones would cease to exist. I took this to mean that if Fake Locke got away, reality would go POOF! Instead, this is how I add it up:
1. In the Lost world, people are an inextricable blend of matter and spirit.
2. Fake Locke was all spirit — an unnatural state of being. But it made him invulnerable, because spirit is indestructible.
3. To kill Fake Locke, you had to either restore him to his natural state of matter and spirit... or convert him from all spirit to all matter, which is to say, a completely mechanical animal, and thus killable.
4. The rub is that to the procedure renders everyone into mechanical animals, which is to say, devoid of a soul.
5.Without the soul, we cannot pass into the next life or into the afterlife without our community of redemption partners — the people we love.
6. Fake Locke wanted to leave The Island.
7. Fake Locke was bonded to The Island by Island magic.
8. The same procedure required to break that spell (i.e., destroying The Island) is the same procedure that would convert Fake Locke and everyone into soulless zombies incapable of having a happily ever after with our loved ones (i.e., your community of redemption partners) because we need our souls to move into the afterlife.
9. Hence: Fake Locke leaving The Island = Annihilation (when you die) for you and everyone you love.
This makes total sense, yes?
Desmond yanked The Island's chain. Spiritual lockout commenced. The Island suffered mightily during this cataclysm; slopes of this promised land slid into the ocean like tears down the face of that Native American guy in those old pick-up-your-litter-dammit! conservation commercials. Jack and Locke fought like beasts on the rumbling rocks near the ocean — like Nolte and De Niro in Cape Fear. Fake Locke reached for his knife and jammed it into Jack's side — a spear wound for the would-be Island Christ. Fake Locke straddled Jack. Fake Locke put the knife to Jack's throat and drew blood. (Now we know the origin of Sideways Jack's neck nick — and, I think, Sideways Jack's alleged appendix scar, which was actually a scar from Fake Locke's skewering. We now see that all season long, Jack's own body had been screaming at him: Soul Sleeper, Awaken!)
mojo (thank you uncorked malevolence!) and put the Monster down with a shotgun blast. ''I saved a bullet for you,'' she quipped. [Eff] yeah! Then Jack rose to his feet and gave Fake Locke the Anthony Cooper heave-ho and punted his sack of stolen-ass off a cliff, sending Man-Thing to his back-cracking doom. Dammit if that crunch didn't feel cathartically good. Call it: Breaking Bad, Lost style.
Then the bill came due. Because you see, when you fight true evil with necessary evil, it's still evil. And evil has a cost. This is the great lesson of our post-9/11 era — at least, per The Gospel According to Jack Bauer. The Island continued to convulse like a dying man in his death throes. It could be healed — but it needed a sacrifice. And so Jack the Island shepherd continued along the inevitable stages of his Passion journey. Jack ceded guardianship of The Island to a reluctant Hurley; they shared communion in a dirty water bottle. He descended. He put the cork back in the crack of Hell. The waterfall began to flow anew, and spiritual light returned to The Island and by extension to all mankind. Jack sat there with his sucking wound and his joyous grin The Source enveloped him in its cozy, spirit-stripping glow. Zoinks! Me To The TV: GOOD GOD JACK GET OFF UP OF YOUR GIGGLING ASS BEFORE THE HOLY WORMHOLE TURNS YOU INTO SMOKE...
What do you think happened to Jack after that? His final scenes on The Island — the final moments of Lost ever — were puzzlingly poetic. I will try to describe them without crying. We saw him twitch back to life in the jungle, near a stream. I was reminded of Jacob finding the empty shell of his brother after the Holy Wormhole burped up the black smoke of MIB's corrupted soul. Jack got his feet. He pushed through the bamboo forest. He found the spot where he had fallen from the sky some three years earlier, next to the tennis shoe dangling from a tall green stalk. He laid down. He clutched his bleeding, wounded side. He prepared for The End. Once upon a time, Jack Shephard was a man who could not believe in anyone or anything else except himself, and he was lost. But this Doubting Thomas found faith and healing by humbling himself and committing himself to a community of fellow flawed and fallen souls also yearning for redemption incapable of doing it alone. As he lay dying, he saw the airplane carrying his friends home, and he rejoiced for them. And then he saw into another world, where he was welcomed with open arms and bear hugs, and he rejoiced — for himself. Earlier in the episode, Jack told Kate he took the job of guardian because he had made a ruin of his life and that The Island ''was all [he] had.'' He was wrong, as he had been wrong about so many things in his life, but this time, he couldn't have been happier. And then Vincent trotted up and snuggled against his side. Jack's eye closed. He let go, and he was gone.
I wonder how long it will be before I can think about any of that without getting choked up?
This ends Part One of my recap of ''The End.'' Part Two will post tomorrow. I'll cover all of the Sideways world awakenings, discuss the big picture of the Sideways world plot, and offer some final thoughts on the finale.
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20313460_20387946,00.html
