Found: Looking back on Lost

This was the original version that I sent into Press Plus 1. Obviously I prefer my version better, but feel free to compare it to the edited version over at http://www.pressplus1.com/television/found-looking-back-on-lost.html  This may be one of my favourite posts. I put a lot into it, and I hope it shows. Enjoy!

Lost is over. If that hasn’t hit you yet, it will. More than anything, this finale left us with a large amount of intentional ambiguity. People are still debating about the ending, and will hopefully continue to do so. Unless the high creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse give us a set interpretation of what happened, they’ve left it up to us to understand the finale for ourselves. Lost was a journey of discovery, and now it’s our turn to discover what it all meant to us.

There were two main events the finale hinged on, Jack’s death and the revelation of just what the flash sideways universe was. Jack’s death and the closing of his eye were incredibly important to the show. 6 years ago the show started with his eye opening to a strange world and our own eyes opened to this strange world as well. A mysterious island with an unseen monster that could knock down trees in the jungle, and a distress message left by a woman 16 years ago who seemed to have never been rescued. Jack was our proxy and in the end, after all was said and done, Jack’s eye closed. His journey on the show was done, he had seen all that was to be seen, so had we. There will be no more Lost after this, the story of what happened to these survivors on the island is done.

The story of Lost was the story of Jack’s redemption. Jacob brought him to the island because he was flawed, and this island represented a chance to work on his flaws, to better himself, and ultimately to fix himself. His final act was to defeat the Man in Black from destroying the island and returning to the real world. The season was building to this climax of someone needing to kill the Man in Black. Jacob could never do it because he always felt responsible, so Jack needed to stop him to avenge the death of his friends and do what Jacob couldn’t. In the end Jack accomplished his mission but not without physical cost. He sacrificed himself to let his friends escape. Jack spent so much of his life focused on him, and in the end he recognized that it’s not about him, it’s about everyone else; an idea that carried itself into the flash sideways universe.

It is still tough to try and fully understand just what the sideways universe was. It might be what happens to everyone after they die. It may be only one of many planes the survivors of Oceanic 815 will visit when they pass. It may have been a creation by Hurley with his new powers, for everyone to see each other one last time before the move on. Some have theorized that they all died in the initial crash and the island was the first place they visited and those that died moved onto this flash sideways universe. Others think this flash sideways universe was created with the detonation of Jughead. Perhaps the greatest gift Lost can give us is that each and every on of these are all valid theories. Everyone has their own personal view and understanding of what happened, of what they’ve just seen. There are no wrong answers as to how the flash sideways was created - every theory is equally right.

Was this the ending we were looking for from Lost? If there’s one thing the show has taught us, it’s that we are not in control of this show. This show is not about pleasing everybody all the time. Just ask anyone who’s still waiting to know who built the statue of Tawaret or why women on the island can’t have babies or any of the other mysteries left unsolved. That was never what this show was about. Those were simply distractions or situations designed to push the characters. Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have always said that this show was about the characters. Think back to season one of the show, as much as you wanted to know what the monster was or why Jack was seeing visions of his dead father, what also drove the story was just who these people were. Every episode gave us a flashback of who these characters were, and we were desperate to learn the history of all our survivors. We wanted to know the lives they lived before this crash and how who they were in the past was a direct correlation to who they were now. Over the next five seasons the show always retained this but it started to get crowded with all the mysteries surrounding what was happening on this mysterious island. Season six was written to remind us of the characters once again. The flash sideways gave us an opportunity to look at where these characters started their journey in many cases. We got to see just how they had changed over the course of their life on the island. Hopefully by the end many of us recognized and understood that the finale wasn’t about understanding all the mysterious goings on, but to make sure these characters left the island changed.

So ultimately, looking back on the show as a whole, what is it that we all just watched? We watched a show about people who were flawed trying to redeem themselves. In the first episode, when they crashed they all had issues. They were all haunted by their pasts, each and every character. As we met new characters like Ben, Desmond, Juliet, Richard and Jacob we learned that even they had made mistakes in the past that they couldn’t let go of. For some characters they needed to confront their demons head on to pass through it. Sawyer killing Cooper in the brig or Miles getting to meet his father in the Dharma Initiative. Others had to make the journeys on their own, to dwell on who they were and consciously forge a different path. Think of Jack being completely shaken when he learned Locke had died, how he took a step back and no longer tried to be the leader, or Ben who dug his grave acknowledging all the evil he had done. He saw no hope but to continue down his path, but when he was given the chance to start to redeem himself by Ilana he took it. All those characters are ourselves. We are all haunted by our past. We have all made mistakes and we are trying to make up for them. Some of us need to let go of some things, and some of us need to own up to some things, but it is never too late for us to change. That’s what Lost wants to remind us, everyone is flawed, but everyone can also be fixed. More than anything, it’s personal; only you can make yourself feel redeemed.

So now that it’s over how will we cope? Damon Lindelof said it best last night. He summed up the entire show, and our own lives with this “Remember. Let go. Move on. I will miss it more than I can ever say.”