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maggie2It's been a long while since I cared much about LOST, but I did keep watching. Some random reflections below the cut (full spoilers).
1. They all go to heaven. First, although it's supposed to be a non-sectarian heaven, launched from a church with icons from the world's major religion, it's got heavy Christian overtones. But don't let that fool you. It's not a Christian heaven they are talking about, which is not just a place we get to bask with our loved ones, but rather a place where we share our great love for God with our loved ones. FWIW, which is not much. In a secular world, even most religious people think that the end game is still all about us -- so it's probably a fair representation of what most religious people are hoping for.
Second, I thought it was rather saccharine. The music cues and so on were just too heavy-handed for me to enjoy. Same thing happened to me with E.T., btw. Every now and then I notice how hard the music is working to manipulate emotions and it kicks me out of the story. That happened to me last night.
Third, I did think the two endings were interesting, though. In the real-life story on the island we're to be affected by all the tragedy and deaths. It's impossible to imagine story-telling wherein the question of whether there will be a happy or sad ending isn't central. Yet in actual life, everybody dies. There can be better or worse paths to that ultimate death, but as long as we think of death as ending and separation, and therefore tragic, it's a 100% guarantee that we all get bad endings. My mother died well. But she's still dead and gone and I will never get to talk to her again. So it was interesting to ponder the way Lost's happy ever-after stands in tension with an island story where there was a lot of unhappy ending. Sawyer lost Juliet and as he flew off the island he was (purgatory/heaven aside) never going to see her again. If we go with the happily ever after ending, that was just a blip on the road to what really mattered. But then, doesn't that undermine the actual drama of what happened on the island? The question of how the seriousness of the game of life can be maintained in view of an inevitable death that issues either in some sort of afterlife or sheer nothingness is an interesting one, and Lost gets serious credit for narratively exploring it.
2. I long since stopped caring about magical numbers, polar bears, and mysterious fertility problems. The show wants to tell us that none of that mattered and it's all about the characters. Ducky. But that means that a lot of the show was simply irrelevant. Better drama uses all the plot devices to actually service and reflect on what's happening ot the characters (with it being understood that character should always be the point). Not always, but mostly, the monsters and plot devices on Buffy have more complex relations to the story than simply to be obstacles the characters work around on their way to learning how to be better people. It's worth thinking about what vampires represent in a way that it's not worth thinking about what time travel represents.
3. Character development. Lots of people are very happy with this aspect of the show, and I'm trying to figure out why I'm not. A good chunk of it is because the story is mainly Jack's story, and while I finally managed to feel sympathy for him in season 6, it wasn't enough sympathy for me to want the whole Lost world to revolve around him. Ben and Locke, happily, got very interesting development in their own right. But once Jin stopped being a jerk there was no more story for him save to run around for literally years looking for Sun. We never got to explore Sun's ruthlessness, though we got to see it was happening. I love James/Juliet, but it was presented as a fait accompli, and while it was lovely to see that it led to good results for both of them it sort of obscured the fact that it's not obvious how these two very different characters connected in the first place. I missed the first hour of last night's finale, but Sayyid/Shannon as an ending just underscores how not important Sayyid's story was on it's own terms (since we've been told repeatedly that Nadia is what it's all about for him). And I so stopped caring about Kate years ago that I'm not going to even bother to figure out if her character had meaningful development in the show. She's in lurve with Jack. Swell. Not sure what the mutual attraction is, but it seems to make them happy so yay for them.
4. As Alan Sepinwell says in his review, the show did manage a lot of powerful moments, even if it's not clear that the narrative arc has any power at all, and I think that's exactly right. I'm not sorry I watched the show. It did a lot of cool things. But big-picture wise I think the only thing that will hold up for me is the interesting tension between the drama of ordinary life against the backdrop of some absolute ending (whether you think of it as eternity or nothingness).
1. They all go to heaven. First, although it's supposed to be a non-sectarian heaven, launched from a church with icons from the world's major religion, it's got heavy Christian overtones. But don't let that fool you. It's not a Christian heaven they are talking about, which is not just a place we get to bask with our loved ones, but rather a place where we share our great love for God with our loved ones. FWIW, which is not much. In a secular world, even most religious people think that the end game is still all about us -- so it's probably a fair representation of what most religious people are hoping for.
Second, I thought it was rather saccharine. The music cues and so on were just too heavy-handed for me to enjoy. Same thing happened to me with E.T., btw. Every now and then I notice how hard the music is working to manipulate emotions and it kicks me out of the story. That happened to me last night.
Third, I did think the two endings were interesting, though. In the real-life story on the island we're to be affected by all the tragedy and deaths. It's impossible to imagine story-telling wherein the question of whether there will be a happy or sad ending isn't central. Yet in actual life, everybody dies. There can be better or worse paths to that ultimate death, but as long as we think of death as ending and separation, and therefore tragic, it's a 100% guarantee that we all get bad endings. My mother died well. But she's still dead and gone and I will never get to talk to her again. So it was interesting to ponder the way Lost's happy ever-after stands in tension with an island story where there was a lot of unhappy ending. Sawyer lost Juliet and as he flew off the island he was (purgatory/heaven aside) never going to see her again. If we go with the happily ever after ending, that was just a blip on the road to what really mattered. But then, doesn't that undermine the actual drama of what happened on the island? The question of how the seriousness of the game of life can be maintained in view of an inevitable death that issues either in some sort of afterlife or sheer nothingness is an interesting one, and Lost gets serious credit for narratively exploring it.
2. I long since stopped caring about magical numbers, polar bears, and mysterious fertility problems. The show wants to tell us that none of that mattered and it's all about the characters. Ducky. But that means that a lot of the show was simply irrelevant. Better drama uses all the plot devices to actually service and reflect on what's happening ot the characters (with it being understood that character should always be the point). Not always, but mostly, the monsters and plot devices on Buffy have more complex relations to the story than simply to be obstacles the characters work around on their way to learning how to be better people. It's worth thinking about what vampires represent in a way that it's not worth thinking about what time travel represents.
3. Character development. Lots of people are very happy with this aspect of the show, and I'm trying to figure out why I'm not. A good chunk of it is because the story is mainly Jack's story, and while I finally managed to feel sympathy for him in season 6, it wasn't enough sympathy for me to want the whole Lost world to revolve around him. Ben and Locke, happily, got very interesting development in their own right. But once Jin stopped being a jerk there was no more story for him save to run around for literally years looking for Sun. We never got to explore Sun's ruthlessness, though we got to see it was happening. I love James/Juliet, but it was presented as a fait accompli, and while it was lovely to see that it led to good results for both of them it sort of obscured the fact that it's not obvious how these two very different characters connected in the first place. I missed the first hour of last night's finale, but Sayyid/Shannon as an ending just underscores how not important Sayyid's story was on it's own terms (since we've been told repeatedly that Nadia is what it's all about for him). And I so stopped caring about Kate years ago that I'm not going to even bother to figure out if her character had meaningful development in the show. She's in lurve with Jack. Swell. Not sure what the mutual attraction is, but it seems to make them happy so yay for them.
4. As Alan Sepinwell says in his review, the show did manage a lot of powerful moments, even if it's not clear that the narrative arc has any power at all, and I think that's exactly right. I'm not sorry I watched the show. It did a lot of cool things. But big-picture wise I think the only thing that will hold up for me is the interesting tension between the drama of ordinary life against the backdrop of some absolute ending (whether you think of it as eternity or nothingness).