Rational Dreaming

No doubt every fan of “Lost” who saw the finale last night has an opinion on what they saw. Some people loved it, others hated it, and many more were somewhat ambivalent about it. I am one who falls into that last category.

I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t exactly love it either, although I was greatly moved by the reuniting of lost loves with their shared memories. That was a masterful payoff for the viewers who have been so heavily invested in the lives of those who inhibited the mysterious island for the last six years.

But, in the end, I feel that the “sideways time line as purgatory” reveal was a bit of a cop out. Indeed, one can imagine concluding any number of shows the same way—a bunch of characters meeting up in the afterlife and chewing the fat over old times and shared experiences before “moving on” to their final destination. Thus, while the ending allowed for the main cast of characters to attain ultimate closure, it felt completely detached from the events that were rapidly rushing to a conclusion on the island-based half of the show.

Indeed, I felt that the emotional power of the afterlife time line (to call it what it is) overwhelmed the rest of the show, making the final battle, the final flight, and the final sacrifice all seem rather perfunctory. It certainly made it hard to appreciate the depth of Jack’s sacrifice when you have already seen him being joyously embraced by the ones he cared for. The desperate battle for survival and the constant struggle to do the right thing that made up life on the island was overshadowed by the final group orgasm of happy reunions, and that’s a shame.

And, as many other reviewers have already pointed out, we didn’t get any closure at all relating to the true nature and origin of the island. I am a great fan of ambiguous endings. There is nothing worse than a show that tries to spoon-feed its viewers a happy ending where all the threads are tied up in a neat little bow. But, come on guys, you could have given us something! I guess, given that one of the central conceits of the show was the blatant and incessant non-answering of questions revolving around the central mystery of the island, we should have expected something like this, but it’s still deeply unsatisfying all the same. It certainly leads to the suspicion that the writers really could not figure out a decent back story for the island and decided to take the easy way out.

All in all, I think it’s disappointing that they didn’t try harder to tie the ultimate ending in with the history, nature, and fate of the island. And there was at least one way they could have done that without losing the power of those moments of joint recollection.

The show had already established the power of the island to influence and alter the course of people’s lives, no matter where or when they lived. We saw how Jacob harnessed that power in a life-long effort to draw suitable candidates for his replacement to the island. So, why not have Hurley—as the new “number one’—make use of that vast power to bring about a happy ending for his friends? The alternative time line could be exactly that, an alternative reality—a parallel Earth—in which the Oceanic flight 815 did not crash, but one that Hurley can use power of the island to influence. 

The alternative-reality characters would still be the flawed, purposeless losers that Jacob had sought out, but instead of being transformed by living on the island, Hurley could have “rescued” them by using the island’s power to transfer the memories of their parallel selves into their minds. Thus their lives would be transformed for the better as their shared memories awoke, and their fate would remain coupled with the events as they had played out on the island. It is certainly something a character like Hurley would have done given the chance as protector and guardian of the island.

As a footnote, in a bizarre coincidence, “Lost” was not the only major drama on TV to conclude this weekend by revealing that the show was, at least in part, set in a kind of afterlife purgatory. The BBC drama “Ashes to Ashes,” along with it’s prequel “Life On Mars” concluded a five year arc Friday night with the revelation that all the characters in the show are dead too, and living out their daily lives in a kind of policeman’s version of purgatory, where they can work out their issues in preparation for moving on to their final destination. The ending does make more sense for the British pair of show, because the two stars involved were victims of serious head trauma and were assumed to be hovering between life and death, but it’s still a fascinating coincidence that two completely unrelated teams of writers should have plumped for exactly the same final conclusion of their show several years before they ended on the same weekend.