Having had a couple of days to mull it over, I am still ambivalent about the Lost series finale. A truly satisfying and involving forty-five minutes of television (padded out to 2 1/2 hours by the most shamelessly voluminous run of advertising breaks I’ve ever seen), the finale was not everything I’d hoped, but it was about as good as I’d expected.
Look, ending a beloved series is hard work, and particularly so in the case of Lost, which was basically a six-year-long riddle. I liked the finale. I thought it was moving and the acting was great, and I liked that it was character based (although I take issue with Sayid/Shannon being made out to be long-lost loves, because they just weren’t), but I mostly agree with this review:
. . . when the entire island story line we had been following for six seasons turned out not to matter very much within the internal organization of the show’s narrative — to be largely disconnected from that final quasi-religious resolution of the plot — it was deflating, despite the warm feelings the finale otherwise inspired.
That’s it exactly: what was unsatisfying about it was that the show’s beginning and end fit, obviously, but all that wonderful, fascinating sandwich meat in the middle could have been anything at all. It was filler, and in the end, was unessential to the story.
. . . the show pulled the most grievous of mystery genre crimes: it introduced new clues at the end of the story. The Jacob/MiB relationship was explained at the end of season 5; the “light at the heart of the island” was introduced two episodes before the finale(!). This is the cinematic equivalent of whodunit in which the murderer turns out to be some hithertofore unmentioned character who appears in the last chapter only. Agatha Christie would have been de-damed if she had pulled this shit.
Probably, there was no perfect way to end Lost. The cool thing about all the enthusiasm for and investment in the show was that it was just as much about seeing how the writers would pull the thing off than it was about the actual story. It was always a sort of meta-enjoyment – even more so than any other show I can think of. I felt gypped by the mystical interpretation, particularly the indication that they were all more or less going to heaven or whatever, but that’s because that sort of thing is not personally interesting to me. I would have been most interested in a completely rational explanation for everything, but that was pretty obviously not going to happen, and anyway, I wouldn’t want the show to be another X-Files. I loved all of Lost, but its earliest seasons were strongest, and there was probably no way to fully follow up on the promise of all of the intriguing storylines introduced. As it was, the finale was pretty good; at any rate, it could have been a whole lot worse.
Thinking back over the series finales of long-running, much-beloved shows, I give first prize to Six Feet Under. That ending episode was absolutely perfect*, but then, the show was more or less about endings, all the way through. The ending of The Wire was as perfect as every other episode, fully living up to The Wire‘s generally agreed on title of best television show ever made. The ending of Buffy wasn’t great, but everyone knows Buffy was supposed to end with the finale of Season Five, which, while upsetting, would have been better, except that nobody gave a shit about Dawn at all. Also, I didn’t think the Season 7 ending of Buffy was as bad as everybody else seems to think – it was a little abrupt, and the show certainly got away from itself in the final two seasons, but the end was true to the show’s characters and theme.
