I was never a "Lostie." I was familiar enough with the show to know what you were talking about if you said "the hatch" or "Oceanic Six" but I couldn’t tell you Hurley's lottery numbers or Sayid's military rank. But with 13.5 million others I watched the two and a half hour Lost series finale and... Maybe I’d be more impressed if I was a more passionate viewer, but I was decidedly underwhelmed.
Someone who is a more passionate viewer told me that Lost was always about the battle between science and faith. It seems that "faith" won. In the beginning the show was all about "How did we get here?" and "How do we get back home?" but it ended up "Why are we here?" and "Where are we going?" The Dharma Initiative and abandoned research stations gave way to Island protectors and ancient mystical temples. It seems that somewhere along the series' six-year journey the producers got religion.
The final season introduced the "Sideways Universe" where slightly different (but pretty consistent) versions of all the survivors existed, only vaguely aware of their doppelgangers’ lives. Meanwhile back here (or is "here" really "there", relative to the Sideways Universe?) the Smoke Monster wanted to leave the Island in order to... Well, I'm not sure why the Smoke Monster wanted to leave the Island, only that its doing so would not be a good thing. The finale interweaved between Jack vs. the Lockemonster and Jacob reuniting the survivors in the Sideways Universe. What started as "The Twilight Zone meets Gilligan’s Island" turned into "Gilligan's Island meets Touched by an Angel."
The religious overtones successfully treaded the line between poignant and cheesy but that last five minutes--okay, were they all dead from the beginning of the series and their experiences on the Island just a stopover at some sort of spiritual way station, a last chance to "get things right," or just one guy's life flashing before his eyes?
A few years ago the series finale of The Sopranos became an instant classic that you either loved or hated but it was really open to interpretation: depending on your belief system, right now Tony is either sleeping with the fishes or he's hanging out at the Bing. (Someone even suggested Tony should have climbed out of the hatch with a gun and then the screen goes blank.) The last five minutes of Lost definitely concluded things but, for me, it was with the kind of thing you get when you confuse ambiguity with profundity, the kind of insights college undergraduates who are not religion or philosophy majors have over pizza and beer.
The next night, Jack Bauer was having the last of "one of those days." Since it had been announced years ago that there would one day be a "24 movie" it was not a spoiler to know that Jack would survive. (In the course of the series, Jack has been clinically dead at least two or three times. Killing Jack doesn't kill him, it only pisses him off.)
Yet despite the fact that I was (and am) a major 24 fan, this season showed the reasons why, although I will miss the show this January, it was probably time to let the clock run out. What started out as "novelty" became "gimmicks," "twists" became "clichés" and you weren't "surprised" any more that something happened, you only wondered when it would happen. (You knew the president's advisors would conspire against him/her, that there was a mole inside CTU (just how lousy were their background checks, anyway?) and that Jack was (always!) right but despite prior experience, they weren't going to listen to him until it was too late. (Pop quiz: You probably know the street where your local police station is located, but where is the nearest FBI office? Where are the Federal Marshals? Yet everybody seemed to know exactly where the local CTU office was, they always showed up in the middle of a major crisis, and seemed to have unlimited access to the place at a time when
all long-lost relatives, ex-lovers and parole officers should be kept off-premises. There should have been a CTU Gift Shop selling souvenirs that said, Somebody tried to use a WMD and all I got was this lousy t-shirt!")
Still, you had to believe in "the Power of Bauer." (My favorite “Jacked-up” moment was when he improvised an interrogation (okay, torture) device from a lamp cord and a hotel ice bucket!) The series finale could have been last season’s final hour when Jack had made peace with his life and was ready to die, he had reconciled with his daughter and the torch had been passed to another government agent. Still, unlike the tidy ending on Lost, Jack's last day ended in a total, more satisfying, mess: world peace was in jeopardy, the president may be impeached, Jack’s lover is dead and he's an international fugitive who might never take his granddaughter to the zoo.
But at least he gets a few days off. And he has a movie deal.
Replies