The End - Discuss 580

No updates, no new posters, just a place to discuss the end if you want to, be warned the no spoilers rule is rescinded for this post.

The picture is from my garden this morning shortly after the episode started when the light was the brightest and warmest it's been this year, sort of fits really.

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We have just received finale thoughts from Ben Morse and I thought I would share them with you all.

A TV series lives or dies by it’s final episodes. It’s the final images, rewarding ardent fans ideally, and swaying those that sat on the fence that actually, this show was special. Sunday night / Monday morning’s Lost finale was just that – an extraordinary grace note that consolidated six years of one of the most ambitious science fiction dramas ever committed to by a major network.

The genius of Lost lies in its flaws.......

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It is at its base, a show about being human. About connections, emotions and memories. The argument between science and faith. Live together, die alone – because as we learned at the end, whatever happened, happened.

If that seems like Lost cliché overload, it isn’t. Because these are notions that were brought up six years ago, five years ago, last week, buried amongst dense theological abstracts, quantum physics, religious symbology and that bloody electromagnetism.

For instance – take The Cork – a literal cork? A gateway to hell? An electromagnetic conduit? Lost taught us, very gently and carefully that our obsession with these details is irrelevant. It’s just there. And it needed replacing. Hell, at that point I forgave the tunnel of love from two episodes ago (I still maintain that episode was deeply flawed, and could have been handled better).

And the oh-so-cleverly mislabelled “flash sideways” that fans named, and Cuse & Lindelof happily lifted resolved successfully, quite the achievement in itself, but that it came in the form of an emotional sucker-punch so far out of left field that by all rights you should splutter in disbelief made it all the more special. I’m not ashamed to say Jack’s resolution (and consequently, all of the castaways) was the final moment I burst into tears openly. Hurley’s destiny, Ben’s apology, all found me with something in my eye.

A large part of the credit for that must fall with a cast, who really stepped up in the dying hours of the show. Jorge Garcia, Matthew Fox, Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emmerson obvious standouts in a uniformly strong ensemble. In a season that has had its mis-steps at times (I still don’t like that The Smoke Monster didn’t have a name, and that Jacob turned out to be kind of a douche – but hey! That’s what makes them fallible and human, which is what the show is about, right? RIGHT?) the commitment by the cast to the ideals of the show, and putting their trust in Jack Bender’s assured direction created a credible, moving piece of drama.

We are still left with hundreds of questions. Lost was never going to answer them. The trick was making us not care, something it managed in spades. It still played ball with it’s fans though. The two and a half hours were filled with those little moments that die-hards have loved, obsessed over and developed with the show – references to Olly Moss’ Locke’s Secret art print as Locke dies in the shape of the corpse on Hitchcock’s Vertigo poster – “Christian Shepherd. Really?” – Christian standing in front of a Unitarian stained glass window, the extraordinary closing minute wrapping the show full circle. It seems cheap to compare Christian to a God figure, and Jack to Jesus, but with his dying for our sins, and oh-so symbolic side wound, and six years of being beaten up, there’s no confusion over what was intended here. But it’s a start point, not an ending, and not finite – there were elements of the divine in Hurley, in Locke, hell – even Ben’s Judas had his transcendental moments.

A TV series lives or dies by its final episodes. It’s the final images, rewarding ardent fans, ideally. For six years, Lost fans lived together, and it doesn’t matter if you were faith or science, Jack or Locke, Jacob or Smokey. Lost was about the experience of being human. And in tapping into that (and realising the best way to hide it from it’s audience was in plain sight) Lindelof & Cuse can sit proudly as owners of a very special piece of TV.