Last of the LOST

Just a fair warning before I go into this post: If you live in a small grass hut out in the woods of Montana with no phone or electricity and have yet to see the final episode of LOST, you'll not want to read this post because it is just busting at the seems with spoilers just waiting to crawl up your open cavities and lay eggs.

Also, if you've never watched even one episode, this post will make no sense to you whatsoever.

So away we go...

It's almost been a week since the final episode of the penultimate mystery-fest that was the TV series LOST aired it's final episode. Within its 6 season run it's changed its focal point a few times. It started out with a number of survivors of a plane crash stuck on a tropical island that had a few oddities about it. (Polar bears? A smoke monster?), then it switched gears into a war between the survivors and the mysterious "Others", then it was about time travel and finally it was revealed to be about one man's entrance into the afterlife.

That is a lot to shove into the minds of the million plus viewers, such as myself, who invested a heck of a lot of time into the series. But, the series succeeded in the same way crack-cocaine can hook you. It gives you a little taste of greatness then after a while it throws you for a complete loop, but you're hooked and don't want to stop.

LOST started with great character development, excellent story telling and just enough sense of mystery that it snagged a huge viewership and following.

The characters were all intriguing. Jack, the surgeon who's just trying to get home. Kate, the beauty with a mysterious past. Lock, the oddball with a strange spiritual sense about him. Hurley, the lovable guy with some pretty bad luck. Sayid, the mysterious assassin. Sawyer, the wise cracking con man. We learned about them through their interactions on the island as well as flash backs to their pre crash lives. The ensemble cast was phenomenal!

The plot itself started as a survival story, then moved on to be a fantastical mystery, then moved on to be...well.....pretty out there. The 5th season brought tales of time travel between the here and now and the '70's. Then things became even more frustratingly weirder! To say the final season of LOST was heavily driven by existentialism as well as other philosophical ideas and nods to spirituality as well as religion would be an understatement.

Many of us fans were ready to give up. It was starting to become apparent that there was not going to be any kind of brilliant M. Night Shyamaian type twist that would explain everything at the end. Too many questions were being thrown at us with very few answers being given out. Drat!

In the end, was it worth it? Well, I was glad that I stuck through to the end, but many questions still are quite unanswered. I wouldn't call it a lackluster ending to the series (like the last episode of "24" was), but the head scratching continues for me, even though the show and story are now "complete".

After having time to mull it over and discuss it with other fans here's my conclusion to how it all ended.....

Most of the series took place in our own reality. The plane crash on through to the rescue on through to the return to the island on up until the flash-sideways which is the pre-afterlife.

The pre-afterlife (purgatory?) was portrayed as modern day times with most of the main characters taking on persona's and side stories as if they'd never been in the plane crash and had never met each other before. This seemed to be a second chance world where people can redeem themselves before moving onto the last destination. With only slight hints that something may have come before, the island was never experienced by any of them in this realm.

This pre-afterlife takes place far in the future, well after the time spent on the island. Whether the characters died on the island or at some point after the events on the island, in this particular time and place all of them have died at some point. (by old age, natural causes or fates never revealed in the series) Their souls have all come here.

In the end we learn that though the TV show had an ensemble cast, the main story revolved around Jack and it is about his moving from the pre-afterlife on to his spirit's final destination.

WTF?

Though the series ended on an intellectual note (a far cry from the seemingly Sci-Fi mystery we were all introduced to at the beginning) I do have to acknowledge the thing about the show I liked the most. During their time on the island there would be flashbacks to their lives on the mainland. Each episode the flashbacks would revolve around one of the characters. Some of these story lines where written so well and with such heart there were times that I would have a lump in my throat. They helped me understand and care for the characters.

I'm still not convinced the "pay off" was fully worth the build up.

The writers of the show have said that they're going to wait for 2 years, at which point they'll have a reunion show which will reveal all the answers we fans are looking for. It has also been said that they came up with the ending of the show first and wrote the story backwards. Which poses the question, how many Amazonian toads did they lick to come up with this story?

In any case, my head now hurts and I've tapped out my amount of intellectualism for the week, if not the year.

So I'll let you dear readers try and figure it all out on your own.

Before I leave you I want to remind you that at some point this weekend we all need to remember what our past and present men and women in uniform have done for this country to allow us to blog, play video games, watch TV shows that blow our minds and just plain enjoy what freedoms we do have. Happy Memorial Day folks!

Zangz.