Thoughts on “The End”
LOST spoilers ahead. Beware.
I don’t understand the people who went to watch the finale of this fantastic, six season-spanning programme, expecting every tiny question to be conveniently filled in within the two hours. Imagine if they did. It would have been dreadful, stop-start, choppy television with no sense of direction, structure, or scope for actual enjoyment of the episode and a satisfying ending. Oh so THAT’s where the polar bear came from!
“The End” was, instead, a poignant reminder of why we fell in love with the show in the first place — the fantastic characters and their relationships. The mythology may have sucked me in deeper, but I wouldn’t have given a shit about the numbers if it hadn’t been Hurley who was affected by them. It’s only because I had grown an attachment to him and his back story that I wanted to find out more.
And so the fact that there remain some questions about, I don’t know, “Who built the statue?”, “Who were the shooters on the outrigger?”, “What are Walt’s such special abilities?”;— this doesn’t bother me. If it was important to the story we would know. Besides, I bet the answers would only be underwhelming. For a series that has had fans crying out for answers for so long, actually receiving them felt somewhat disappointing; I for one absolutely adored being in the dark about so much for so long. It was exciting. You could lie awake all night theorising crazy potential storylines and subplots knowing you were miles off but enjoying it all the same. We saw from the completely divided reaction to “Across the Sea”, the third-from-last episode centred on Jacob and his brother, that the feeling of getting answers was disappointing. Now I know some will point to the fact that it wasn’t down to receiving answers alone, but the fact that the answers were ‘wishy-washy’ or cop-outs. But the fact is, settling for the fact that Jacob was protecting a bright light, a little of which is in all of us humans, at the Heart of the Island, was one of “the answers” we fans so desperately seeked, and when we got it we were disappointed. That is because the mystery is gone; there is no longer anything to ponder over, to stay up all night thinking about.
So that’s me looked at what wasn’t in the episode, now let’s have a look at what was. We found out that this “alternative reality” which we had been flashing ‘across’ to all season, and seemed to be a “what if” scenario where Oceanic 815 had landed at LAX because in 1977 the Hydrogen bomb detonated and sunk the island to the bottom of the ocean. But there was a twist to it. Everyone was different. They led different versions of their previous lives — Jack married to Juliet and fathering a son, David. Sawyer a Police Officer instead of a conman. Ben an endearing History teacher rather than, well, anything but. And none of them knew each other, of course, because they hadn’t gone through the experience of the island together.
But as things went on in that ‘alternative reality’, characters who knew each other in their “other life” (as Desmond would have put it) started to remember their time on the island (even though they hadn’t lived it, right?) when they mirrored powerful emotional moments that had happened to them on the island, such as holding their loved one. There were some absolutely beautiful scenes between many of the classic island couples, Charlie & Claire and Juliet & Sawyer in particular. So, everything was not as it seemed.
It turned out, as we learned at the very climax, that the alternative reality was in fact one in which the characters were dead, and were waiting to “move on” up to what was clearly a Heaven-type destination, led by the aptly named Christian Shephard, Jack’s father. It was an uncomplicated ending that left me feeling very content with how the series played out, and that ultimately tied up the many themes of religion, life and death which have been strewn throughout the series. But, by its very nature of being open to interpretation, the ending still left me somewhat confused and with a pile of semi-considered thoughts that are running through my head.
Was everyone in the church waiting for Jack? Were they only there because they were people special to Jack, important in his life? At the very end, I thought the way we cut between the island and the off-island scenes they were sort of happening at the same time, i.e. when Jack was spat out of the Heart he was sort of in that between-stage before ‘moving on’ in the off-island timeline — not alive, but not fully ‘dead’ yet. But they can’t be at the same time, can they? Because at the “same time” (as I’d thought) that off-island Jack was dead, hugging dead Kate and dead Sawyer, Kate and Sawyer were alive on the Ajira plane, flying off the island. I’m not particularly bothered about learning as to how they died, but how come they were all essentially ‘dead’ a the same time in the off-island timeline? Do you enter that timeline at some stage or are you always there, and only ‘move on’ once you die in the ‘real’ word?
To be honest, it is exactly within the spirit of the show to leave me with questions that cannot be given an exact answer, and still leave me pondering. I don’t think any number of rewatches will settle my thoughts and theories on so many things in LOST. And that’s exactly why I love it.
