"I went to a place to eat. It said 'breakfast at any time.' So I ordered french toast during the Renaissance". --Steven Wright ... If you are a devotee of time travel, check out this song...

Monday, May 24, 2010

The End of Lost 2: Further Thoughts: Missed Opportunities

Well, here I am the day after, still thinking a lot about Lost, and talking about it with my family, and that says something about the staying power of the show, including its ending.

But to be more specific -

As I wrote last night, there was great joy in seeing all the people whose lives we have followed finding happiness at last in better-LA.    And I was glad, too, to see Lapidus and Richard alive and pretty well on the island.

But the ending also took away a lot of the joy that the rest of the finale provided, by making this story - better LA - a purgatory, after all.    So many better ways, in my view, that Lost could have gone.   The finale made no use of Faraday, as I mentioned last night, and, if you think about it, no real use of Desmond, either.   Time travel is my favorite kind of story telling, and Lost went in a direction that abandoned both Faraday's hard science fiction time travel work, and Desmond's more mystical kind.

The story was already moving sharply away from some of the fine scientific gambits of earlier seasons.   Dharma was a great retro-science (by our standards) 1970s operation.   What Dharma wanted to learn about and harness on the island - the power of the wheel, for example, which could teleport people to Tunisia and jolt the island through time - was left largely unexplored and unexplained in the end.   Even the source of Jacob and MIB's powers - I liked their story far less than Dharma's - was not really explained, and, like everything else in the six years of Lost, became at best an interesting footnote to the purgatory story.

And even within the purgatory framework, there are holes, gaps, issues raised in the series but forgotten in the finale.   I mentioned Walt last night.  But what about the recuperative powers of the island, that cured Rose, and maybe Mikhail?

The irony about the ending of Lost is that it left off-stage so many of the building blocks and great materials it had rolled out before our bedazzled and eager eyes during the past six years.   Alternate-LA could have had the same satisfying ending, the coming together of our beloved characters which the harsh insanities of life on and off the island had pulled apart, and it could have done this without resort to purgatory, or the dead reuniting.   Lost could done this in life, by applying some of the same science fiction and magic it had used so well throughout the series.

That's the way I would have liked the series to end.    And it's a measure of how great I thought the series was that I regret so deeply that it went a different way.


10-min podcast review of Lost finale: Preliminary & Further Thoughts

See The End of Lost: Preliminary Thoughts: Jack's Story

See also  Lost Season Six Double Premiere ... Three Questions Arising from the Lost Season Six Premiere: Linkage Between Two Realities,  Dead Bodies Inhabited, Who/What Survived H-Blast? ... Lost 6.3:  Kate and Claire, Tenacious Details, and Dr. Arzt's Arse at the Airport ... Lost 6.4:  Better LA, Wilder Island, Some Partial Answers at Last ... Lost 6.5: Jack's Family and Prester John's Speculum ... Lost 6.6: Sayid the Assassin in Both Realities ... Lost 6.7: A Better Ben in Both Realities ... Lost 6.8: The Third Team ... Lost 6.9: Richard's Story ... Lost 6.10: Cloudy Sun ... Lost 6.11: Reunion of Two Realities Begins ... Lost 6.12: Libby and Hurley and Cross-Reality Communication ... Lost 6.13: Make-Up, Break-Up, Everything is Shake-Up ... Lost 6.14: Jack's Tears ... Lost 6.15: Jacob and Esau/MIB ... Penultimate Lost:  Coincidence for Fate

and Preliminary Predictions for Lost Finale

More Lost - see : The Richard-Locke Compass Time Travel Loop ...

and Lost Returns in 5 Dimensions and 5.3: The Loops, The Bomb ... 5.4: A Saving Skip Back in Time ... 5.5 Two Time Loops and Mind Benders ... 5.6 A Lot of Questions ... 5.7 Bentham and Ben ... 5.8 True Love Ways ... 5.9 Two Times and a Baby ... 5.10 The Impossible Cannot Happen ... 5.11 Clockwork Perfect Time Travel ... 5.12: Ben v. Charles, and Locke' Slave ... 5.13: Lost Meets Star Wars and the Sixth Sense ... The Problem with Baby Aaron and the Return of the Oceanic Six ... 5.14: Eloise, Daniel, and Obsession Trumping Paradox ... 5.15: Moral Compasses in Motion ... Lost Season 5 Finale: Jacob and Locke



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15 comments:

TheLooper said...

After watching this final episode, I did the one thing I sometimes do after watching Lost...I called my dad.

We love talking about the unknown possibilities of existence and to me and him that's what Lost has always been about.

I knew after last week that all the questions still out there would not be answered. I would have liked to have believed we would have found out what the island truly is, but again in typical Lost style that question was not answered.

But, so much more came from it in the end. I would like to post a link to my own blog about the finale of Lost that I wrote weeks ago that pretty much sums up my feelings for the ending of the show. I think it spells everything out like I would like and amazingly I wrote it with everything in mind that we have discussed here.

Merging realities? Transcendence to a higher plane of existence (hey, you guys that have been watching these posts do realize I suggested this possibility weeks ago right? As a third reality? In a manner of speaking, that's exactly what happened)? They all were dead (turned out to be true)? It was all a dream? Jack was just in the shower? It was purgatory (quick note, I don't think I can refer to Alt-LA [Alt-04 to me] reality as purgatory because it only became a purgatory once everyone realized they were dead; that only lasted for about 5 minutes on the show last night; I like to call it a weigh station where all of them sat briefly and then moved on)? Some kids just made it all up (kudos to mom for that one)?

Whatever any of us believed the ending might be, nothing could prepare us for what it truly came to be. It was about life, one life in particular in Jack, but Jack represented all our lives. My blog best sums up these feelings so I will post the blog now.

But I'll leave you with this final quote from a series and film I loved when I was in high school that I also hated to see come to an end:

"Someone once told me that time is like a predator that stalks us all our lives. But I like to think of time as a companion that accompanies us on a journey and reminds us to cherish each moment because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived. After all, Number One, we're only mortal."

"Speak for yourself, sir. I plan to live forever."

Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Commander William T. Riker, Star Trek: Generations (1994)

http://thelooper-loopingaround.blogspot.com/2010/05/loopholes-jacob-islandoh-my-who-else-is.html

Carrin Mahmood said...

Paul,
You have summed up my discontent! I have spent all day listening to rave reviews and wanting to have liked the ending more!

If everything is real, it's intriguing, and scientific and a challenge to try and think like a quantum physicist. You never know what is going to happen, and when it does you can't quite explain it, because the reality is just a tiny bit out of your intellectual grasp. Every week I felt like...'I've almost got it!'

I've said before with time travel, if I squint my eyes and just observe it on the periphery, I can see it better than when I bring it under a microscope and try to dissect how it works. And that's what I loved about ost.

If it's a dream, hell, or heaven, purgatory or a holding cell, or somewhere in between, then all rules are suspended so nothing is remarkable.

Of course crippled guys can walk, cancer is cured, and Kate's horse from her childhood show up. Now it's like my 4 year old telling a story and saying..."and the dogs can talk, and the horses can fly, and...."

I feel tricked a little bit, like someone has told me a fantastic story and then just as I'm holding my breath, waiting motionless for the big ending, they say..."Just kidding, it wasn't real"

Looper,
I did say I was contemplating a rabbit hole scenario! But I was so hoping I was wrong

Sylvia said...

The ending couldn't possibly have been any different, now that we see it was the basis of the story from the very beginning. I had almost given up on Lost in recent seasons because I didn't know if it was going anywhere or if the writers were just making up stuff as they went along to provide interesting action. So I hadn't been following it closely. Now I will go back and watch all the DVDs.

I suspect nothing was arbitrary, that that all the various imagery stood for various concepts -- of course it was ALL metaphor, none of it was supposed to be taken as literally as some people are interpreting it. Metaphor, which is the basis of all myth, is by definition a different thought process from logic. How much of it emerged from such a process, and how much did the writers purposely plan and insert? We may never figure that out, but we have now been told that at least some of them were intentional.

Purgatory is, of course, a metaphor in the first place, so we are dealing with a metaphor for a metaphor, the island as a metaphor for what the concept of purgatory connotes. Some people are tossing the word around without knowing what that metaphor specifically refers to in the Catholic tradition. Purgatory symbolizes the state in which good people exist as preparation for heaven; it's assumed that since nobody has led a perfect life, no one is ready for heaven, i.e. for a form of existence completely beyond human conception, at the time they die. Everybody not sent to hell is thought to go to purgatory immediately following death.

As I see it, the people on Oceanic 815 died in the crash. (When Jack is told at the end that some of the people in the church died before him and some later, that means the characters who weren't on that flight.) This is borne out by the fact that Jack was seen to die in the end at the same place where we first saw him at the beginning, and the last shot was of the plane wreckage. It's also shown by the fact that on the island Locke could walk and Rose was healed; all metaphors of the afterlife assume physical wholeness will be restored.

The flashbacks we saw in the early seasons were the real lives of the characters before they died. When some of them went back temporarily and others tried desperately to get off the island, that represented an attempt to return and cling to life in the form we know it, which of course was doomed because once you are dead, you stay dead. Jack knew that underneath and so realized he had to go back to the island (purgatory) -- he wanted to, in fact, even before he did go. "Alternate LA" in the last season represented not purgatory, but "If I had my life to live over, how do I wish it had turned out?"

What happened on the island did not follow logic and time was not stable there because according to many theorists of mythology, all myths take place outside linear time entirely, in what’s called “mythic time” or “sacred time” (see the section "Myth In and Outside of Time" in my Space Age Mythology lectures, Paul -- www.sylviaengdahl.com/space/myth08.htm#15). I don't think Lost was intended to be about literal time travel. But neither was it intended to be random like a dream; metaphors are meaningful, not random. And in this case they were drawn from many different traditions, not just a particular one, so they weren't meant to be consistent.

The Dharma Initiative was not about science. It was about the futility of trying to make progress through regimentation and control of people -- particularly, through making them believe that the way to salvation lies in pushing buttons on schedule. This particular metaphor was rather obvious -- many well-meaning people do believe this, and they are right that if they stop following orders to push the specified buttons, unexpected and frightening things are likely to happen; but as long as they keep pushing them they are nowhere near ready to confront the incomprehensible.

Carrin Mahmood said...

Some of the things I loved:
1. I loved the stain glassed window in the casket room. It had icons of all the major Religions and philosophies...AND the donkey wheel

2. I am a hopeless romantic and loved that everyone seemed to have found true love

3. I loved Jack's return to a leadership role (all season...it was good to have him back)

Still a liuttle fuzzy on:

1. If everyone died in the crash are we to assume, Walt, Michael, Aaron etc...Didn't make it to heaven/ the church (or maybe just not yet)

2. Really? the best way to get there is slamming Locke...even evil Locke in the head with a stone.


Sylvia you make some excellent points about it being metaphorical while I was longing for literal!

So much of what you say makes sense...
But if Dharma was metaphorical, then I assume the A-bomb was a symbol of destroying it and the island. Why did Juliette exist in the church and not Ben,was she real and Ben wasn't?

Did I see Desmond and Penny in church?

I get why Lapidus and Miles could then leave because they weren't dead in the original crash, but how could they leave with Kate and Sawyer?

Why would innocent unborn Aaron be with Charlie and Claire, But Joon (?) not be with Sun and Jin?

dawn said...

I loved the ending and from what i took what happened on the Island happened . People died at various times. Walt was saved and as far as I can tell the only one not to return from the Island. Remember they kept saying whatever happened happened. I think it was a brillant ending to a great show and Paul you know me the sap I love a happy ending!!!

Paul Levinson said...

Great comments here, folks.

Let me just comment on a few points -

1. Sylvia, that's a good point about Dharma not being about science, but in effect about the misconception and/or misuse of science. That's probably what I was getting at with my shorthand about Dharma being about science.

2. Sylvia and Sophie - the question of whether the Losties all died on the plane crash could be answered by what we saw in the last shot, under the credits, on the beach. It's not 100% clear if that's the beach, now, with the wreckage after our characters had been there in reality, of if that's the beach with the wreckage of a crash in which everyone died. At very least, we didn't see any bodies of our characters - though I suppose the bodies would be gone 6 years later.

3. Dawn - I'm a sap for happy endings, too. But, call me old-fashioned, but for me, everyone dead is not very happy :)

4. Looper - just wanted to thank you for continuing great comments here, and recommend to everyone that they read Looper's novel. And, while I'm at it, Sylvia has a bunch of wonderful novels, too.

Paul Levinson said...

One other point about whether they all died in the crash: what were Desmond, Penny, and Juliet doing in the church? How would Jack have known about them, if all of this stems from all the Losties dying in the 815 crash? (Thanks to my daughter for raising that point.)

TheLooper said...

I think Christian made it clear that they didn't die in the crash, as dawn pointed out. What happened happened.

I think some are suspecting that they all died in the crash simply because we've all pondered the outside possibility that the show might be headed in that direction, just because of the fantastical nature of the island.

The difficulty people are having with the "purgatory" aspect of the ending of the show is exactly why I'm refraining from calling anything about the show purgatory. To me, the Alt-LA reality was never purgatory at all. Notice Christian never called it that either (which the writers never would have let him). For me it was simply a way for the rational human mind to understand that it was now dead. They were never waiting or truly attempting to get ready for a transcendence and honestly if Desmond had never realized anything was odd, they might have all just continued on living out their lives in Alt-LA reality as if nothing was unusual. That was the one thing about Alt-LA that always got me, it's complete disconnect from the Lost reality. The coincidences we saw ended up simply being just that. Only at the moment that each of them realized that they had another life somewhere did this reality seem different to any of them.

Remember, Desmond saw a glimpse of this reality and thought he could cross over to it himself, only to find out he couldn't go there. The reason he couldn't go there was because he wasn't dead yet.

Now, about the part I'm sure you're all chewing on, Juliet and the fact she told Miles, from the dead, that the bomb had in fact worked and the crash never happened. Maybe this was only because she was seeing a plausible reality because her mind was having to deal with the fact she had in fact died? Miles misinterpreted this as her saying the bomb did work, when in fact she had already moved on?

I know it seems like a "cheat" of sorts that the Alt-LA reality in essence meant nothing, but it showed us a world where good things happen and the possibility that had none of them ever realized what had happened, they could have gone on living out their lives there. Perhaps if Jack had chosen not to save the island. Again, one reality had to be destroyed over the other. The Lost reality continued on, while Alt-LA, which was too good to be true, ended.

The writers just simply took it one step further by having a congregation of the Losties together one last time, happy and moving on to something much, much better. After all, despite them being dead, these people deserved a happy ending in some form or fashion and it was obvious it was never going to happen on the island.

Thanks for the plug Paul, but I think this will be far from the last posting I make here or even about Lost!

Eric said...

I'm a little late to this, but here goes:

1) I'm pretty sure the finale did not suggest that the entire show took place in purgatory, or some other afterlife. Most of what we saw was real. Only the "flash sideways" were scenes from the afterlife.

2) We do find out what the island really is: it is the source of human goodness. It's a little cheesy and maybe not as complicated as people expected, but I think it fits perfectly with the rest of the story. The final scene showed us that despite all the crazy shit that went down on the island which made the show so exciting, finding the island was a blessing for (almost) all of our characters.

A common theme throughout the show is whether the characters should leave the island. There is always one character who assumes leaving is the only reasonable thing to do, and another that questions whether life off the island will be any better than on it (Jack and Sawyer have this argument a few times, I think). After watching the show, it's obvious: when our characters found the island, they were deeply flawed and had serious emotional, mental, and in Locke's case physical wounds. The island healed them, and in the end it brought out the best in them.

It is interesting that none of the Dharma people were in the Church. This is because the Dharma group wanted to study the island and harness its power, which is absolutely the wrong approach to understanding the island. Despite all the drama, all the main characters ever really cared about was protecting each other, and that is the true power of the island.

Sylvia said...

Paul, I agree Dharma was about misconception or misuse of science, but given the context of the story I think it was even more about religious dogma. All religions, going way back to those of ancient times, include a faction that holds that you must perform certain arbitrary actions (say particular prayers at particular times, perform specified ceremonies, etc.) in order to be "saved" (i.e. go to heaven or its counterpart) and that if people don't do this as instructed, the proper order of things will be disturbed: metaphorically, that if you don't push the buttons you're told to push, the world will be destroyed. Some of what passes for science in our world is as dogmatic as that form of religion; also the writers were careful not to show the Dharma Initiative as a religious cult because that might have been too blatant a criticism of religious fundamentalism -- though they neverthess named it Dharma, which is the name of a prominent symbol of Buddhism (the one shown in the stained glass window in the church) and is also a principle of Hinduism defined by the dictionary as "an individual's duty fulfilled by observance of custom or law."

If the island is a metaphor for the traditional concept of purgatory, then Jack and the others on the plane are not limited to interacting only with each other -- they can and do interact with people (such as Desmond, Penny, Juliet and all the Others) who are there because they died some other way. This is what was meant by saying at the end that some of the people in the church died before Jack and some after him; they weren't on that plane, they got to purgatory whenever, and from wherever, they did die. Since the island exists outside time, it doesn't matter whether they were contemporaries in life -- there are people from the Roman era there too. (In principle everybody not already in heaven or hell is in the same purgatory, though a story can deal with only a few.)

You say "everyone dead" is not a happy ending -- but if not, then there are no happy endings in the universe we know, since everyone does die eventually! The happy ending lies in the idea that what people do, and what they feel for each other, leads somewhere -- that it's not all pointless, even though a lot of things (especially in this particular story) appear rather pointless while they're happening. One doesn't have to believe literally in life after death to be happy about this. The whole idea of an afterlife can be viewed as a metaphor for the concept of a meaning to life that's beyond our present comprehension. To say there is no such meaning would be nihilism, which is the least happy outlook imaginable.

Sylvia said...

Sophie, I suspect we can't rely too much on who we didn't see in the church, because the producers probably couldn't get all the past actors back at the time they filmed it. As for Walt, I've read somewhere that he was supposed to play a greater part in the story but the actor grew
up too fast. It was stated in an earlier episode (and on the Kimmel show) that Michael is stuck for now on the island, presumably because he had murdered people. So had Ben, who had worse past issues to resolve than the others and presumably was not ready to move on either. Desmond and Penny were in the church. A number of other people weren't, for no apparent reason.

I'm not sure what to think about Locke. Why was evil perceived by the characters in Locke's form, when they knew that was not the real Locke? Or did he in fact turn to the "dark side" and was redeemed, like Darth Vader, when in his final perception of life he agreed to accept healing from Jack? We assume Jack killed him on the island, but we don't actually know that -- he pushed him over a cliff, which might well have been meant to be figurative: pushed him back past the balance point between evil and good? That would appear to be the meaning of the adjacent scene of his successfully healing him in the hospital. In any case, we know that dying on the island does not mean annihilation, because Sun, Jin and Sayid (among others) died there yet appeared in the church. And if Jack had become "like Jacob" (who was evidently an angel) then Jack must have known this, too. He destroyed the evil that had taken over Locke but never intended to harm Locke himself.

If the people on Oceanic 815 died in the crash (which is still the only explanation that makes sense to me though many commentators are denying it) then neither Aaron or Sun and Jin's child ever lived, since they were not born before the crash. They existed only as metaphorical representations of the characters' feelings about what would have constituted a fulfilling life.

Paul Levinson said...

Quick responses -

Looper - I'm glad you'll keep commenting here and elsewhere about Lost and everything else!

Sylvia - I agree with you about people who die at a ripe old age, having fulfilled some of their dreams and ambitions, and having had a good impact on people and the world. But death at the age of at least some of those people in the church - Sayid and Shannon, to take just two examples - I can't see as a happy ending at all.

Eric - those are nice thoughts about the island and its recuperative powers. But it didn't do that for Danielle, Alex, Shannon, and Boone, to name just four.

Tony londra said...

Your site is good, I'm a sap for happy endings too. But call me old-fashioned but for me, everyone dead is not very happy.

TheLooper said...

I think it's hysterical that people have made so much over the crash wreckage montage at the end of the show. I figured that was just a fill in because the show was over already when Jack's eye closed. Never thought they had died in the crash. Maybe had that as a theory possibility, but certainly never presumed such from the finale.

I basically thought of it as a curveball. Everyone was thinking fastball, while Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof were thinking strike out. Just another example of their pure awesomeness!

Sylvia said...

A basic rule of writing fantasy is that you start with a single fantastic premise from which all other departures from reality as we know it will follow. You don't mix two different ones. The reader/viewer may not be intended to know the premise at the beginning, but the author has to know. (This is where many amateur authors of fantasy fall down.) Thus you could start with the premise that there is an island on which mysterious things happen and time travel exists, or you could start with the premise that there is some sort of afterlife in which significant things happen, for which an island would be a suitable metaphor; but to switch from one to the other part way through would, from the standpoint of the author, be cheating.

I think this is why some people found the ending of Lost unsatifying -- without the assumption that the ending followed from the creators' original premise, it looks as if they did cheat. But considering the writing skill they displayed in other respects, I find it hard to believe that they switched premises in midstream.

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