It Only Ends Once: Thoughts on the Lost Finale

It was September 2004. I was living in a small apartment outside Baltimore, and working HR for a spice company. (Yes, I really did that.) The television gods had summarily booted Joss Whedon from their airwaves, canning Angel in May of that year. I had nothing new to watch, so I decided to take a chance on this show about a plane crash on an island.

The pilot of Lost had me almost immediately, and when the castaways discovered a transmission that had been repeating for 16 years, with no answer, I said to myself, “I will watch this show until it ends.”

On Sunday, May 23, it did. Lost is the first major network television show to have planned out its own demise, years in advance. In the middle of season three, showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse negotiated an end date for their opus – the final episode of the sixth season would be the last. Despite the fact that British television has been doing it this way for decades, and HBO has had success with the self-contained show, I never thought a major network would go for this idea. There’s too much milk in the cash cow.

But they did. Lost, a mystery show from the word go, told us in no uncertain terms when that mystery would wrap up. The writers have said that figuring out their end date freed them to tell their story, and I believe them. The second and third seasons have slow patches that can only be chalked up to padding, to stretching out a story with no definitive finish line. They are still compelling, but when the showrunners announced their end date, the show magically got really good, and the third-season finale remains a favorite among fans.

It’s been an incredible ride, for a number of reasons. First, I have never seen a television show with the capacity to surprise me that this one has. I never knew where this train was headed, and even down to the final episode, I had no clue what they were going to pull out of their hats. (How’s that for a mixed metaphor?) Lost moved slowly at first, charting our characters and their backstories for almost the entirety of the first two seasons. (Hard to believe we hadn’t even ventured into the hatch at the end of season one.) But they were still surprising, and in the later, shorter seasons, the shocks came without warning, and without letup.

Here are just a few of the things Lost asked prime-time network viewers to roll with: a monster made of black smoke who can look like dead people; a magical island that can heal cancer and make the lame walk; a button that, when pressed every 108 minutes, keeps the world from ending; people who can talk to the dead; a series of numbers that bring bad luck; a frozen wheel that, when turned, can move the magic island through space; time travel; resurrection, either by force of will or by immersion in glowing water; a man who can see the future; and a glowing cave by a stream that imparts mystical powers. Oh, and let’s not forget the seemingly fate-bound destinies of all our main characters, who wove around each other, on the island and off, for the entire run of the show.

But of all those things, perhaps the hardest to accept was the season six conceit of the Sideways World. For the entire season, the writers toggled between the world we’d come to know on the island and a seemingly parallel world, presumably created by the detonation of a hydrogen bomb at the end of season five, in which Oceanic Flight 815 never crashed. This was immensely frustrating viewing, particularly week to week, since the producers steadfastly refused to give us a reason to care about the Sideways World. It played as a what-if, a curious writerly device, and as it took up half of each episode in the final season, it was tough to swallow. It felt like a waste of time.

They paid it off brilliantly in the series finale, but it was a slow slog getting there. What saved it, and all of season six, were the other things the Lost writers did very well: character and theme. In fact, the entire final season centered on these two things, and some complained it was light on plot and answers, which I think misses the point. For a mystery show, Lost was rarely about getting the answers, and never more so than in its final season.

Instead of a long list of ticked boxes, Lost allowed us to revel in the wonderful characters we’d come to know over six years. I think John Locke belongs on any tally of iconic characters from the last decade – the tortured man of faith is one of the most complex and memorable people ever on television. Right behind him is compulsive liar and master manipulator Ben Linus, and both actors (Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson) deserve Emmys. (O’Quinn especially, because the sixth season required him to play both John Locke and the shape-shifting monster who wore his face, and he made it look easy.)

But there are so many others. James Ford, who calls himself Sawyer, the con man who found love in the least likely place. Jin and Sun Kwon, the star-crossed lovers who would not be kept apart, by anyone or anything. Kate Austin (yes, Kate), who killed her stepfather and went on the run, but found a life and community among the 815ers. Hugo Reyes, the large man with an even larger heart, who was truly the luckiest man in the world. Sayid Jarrah, a former torturer who never believed, until right at the end, that he could change and be a good person.

And then there is Jack Shephard, around whom the Lost saga pivoted. (Although we really didn’t know that until the end.) Shephard was played by matinee idol Matthew Fox, and it would have been easy to make him the stalwart hero. Instead, the writers made Shephard as perfectly flawed as the show he was in. He suffered a god complex, and put his faith in science and the works of man, to the point of blindness. When he failed, tragically and epically, at the end of season five, it was crushing. But Jack’s journey to man of faith in season six was earned, and powerful.

More than anything else, though, Lost was a show About Something. It was a metaphysical allegory disguised as a sci-fi adventure show, a treatise on free will and destiny, on whether we as people can ever make our own choices, or if we are stuck in an endless loop of fate. It had all the iconic themes of redemption and sacrifice, but it also dared to ask if any of those redemptions and sacrifices meant anything, or if everything we do has been preordained by something beyond our control.

The sixth season was the ultimate examination of this. The hydrogen bomb gambit at the end of season five was our castaways’ final attempt to truly change their own fates. At the same time, we discovered that everything they’d done had been part of a game played by two seemingly mystical beings, who had been on the island for centuries. Jacob (the Man in White) had touched each of our castaways, marking them as candidates, and brought them to the island on purpose, because he believed that people are essentially good at heart. The unnamed Man in Black believed the opposite, and hoped to leave the island, destroying it in his wake.

This sounds idiotic all written out like this, but believe me, it worked. Lost was a series of widening perspectives – the first season ended with a look down the mysterious hatch, which led to the Dharma Initiative stories of the second, which then led to the Others in season three, the off-island stories in season four, and the time travel epic of season five. In each case, the story turned out to be wider and more panoramic than we’d been led to believe, and heading into season six, we got the big pullback – Jacob and the Man in Black, manipulating events from behind the curtain.

So in the sixth and final season, we got two answers to the fate vs. free will debate. On the island, our castaways continued playing Jacob’s game, and in the Sideways World, they’d broken free of it – the island was on the bottom of the ocean, and Jacob and his evil twin held no sway over their lives. This allowed the writers to delve into the key question – can we choose who we are? The answer seemed to be “perhaps.” Sideways Sayid was still a killer, Sideways Jin was still a stuck-up prick, and Sideways Sawyer still hunted high and low for the man who had conned his parents and caused their deaths.

But Sideways Jack had found a way to deal with his daddy issues, though his son David, and actually turned out to be a good father. Sideways Locke, still in a wheelchair, stopped railing at the world and started accepting help and love. Sideways Kate took the opportunity to help Claire, even though it might mean she would be captured again. And most of all, Sideways Ben passed up an opportunity to manipulate his way to more power, and became a real father to Alex. (And, at the end there, a potential love interest for Danielle Rousseau.)

On the island, Jack learned more about Jacob and his long con, and grew more and more certain of his destiny. While the Man in Black revealed himself to be the smoke monster, and dispensed with the remainder of Jacob’s acolytes, Jack began figuring out the rules, and trusting in the island – he became a less fanatical version of John Locke from season one, which as it turns out was exactly what he needed to overcome the monster wearing Locke’s face.

Still, it seemed to me, as a week-to-week viewer, that the show just wasn’t getting anywhere in its final season. It was marking time, I thought, the producers refusing to give us the answers they’d promised. As the season unfolded, a strange realization came upon me – the distance to the end of their story was much shorter in the writers’ minds than in mine. I thought they had a lot of ground to cover, especially if they were going to delve further into the Dharma Initiative, and Walt’s powers, and half a dozen other little mysteries.

The writers clearly disagreed. The whole of season six’s island storyline takes place in about a week, and involves very little actual plot. The Sideways World story involves even less. I see now that the shape of the season and the series is exactly what Lindelof and Cuse wanted – it focuses on the characters instead of the lingering mysteries. But watching every week, the momentum never picked up, at least to the degree that I expected. There were teases – Desmond’s multiple-worlds adventure “Happily Ever After,” for example, and the stunning “Ab Aeterno,” which should hopefully earn Nestor Carbonell one of those Emmys – but the story moved at its own deliberate, slow pace until the end.

Even “The Candidate,” the episode that saw Jin, Sun and Sayid meet their deaths, was underwhelming to me at first. I couldn’t believe that this was it, that the Man in Black’s plan was to simply blow up Widmore’s submarine with the candidates on it. It seemed so simple, so prosaic for a god-like being. The key to the whole plot was switching backpacks? Really? I was worried that Lost had forgotten itself, and was in danger of ending up a bloody mess.

And then came “Across the Sea,” the episode that turned many people off. Ironically, it was the one that restored my faith. With this episode, Lindelof and Cuse revealed their thematic endgame. The best review I read of it said that fans had been expecting clarity, and Lost gave them meaning instead. I will take meaning over clarity every day and twice on Sunday, so this really worked for me.

What we saw with this episode was that Jacob and the Man in Black were just like our castaways – regular people wrapped up in a web of lies and manipulations that stretched back centuries. They’re not gods, they’re wounded people, and the island’s unexplainable energy has been responding to Jacob’s fractured psyche. The rules, the strange happenings, pretty much everything that was ascribed to the island was a result of Jacob’s pain and guilt. And the rest of Lost was about breaking that cycle, and letting go.

Some are upset that the writers never delved into the island’s power source. They were expecting some kind of sci-fi explanation for everything they saw, some clean and clear reason for why miracles happened, and rules were set. There isn’t one. The island energy is simply what it is, and no one can ever understand it, let alone harness it. It responds to its guardian, and it responds to others who may become its guardian. But it is ineffable, magical, beyond our ken. As Allison Janney’s character in “Across the Sea” says, every question will simply lead to another question.

And I love that. Some have seen it as a cop-out, as Lindelof and Cuse admitting they never knew what they were doing. I think they knew all along they would never explain the island, and they made that lack of explanation into one of the show’s themes. They spent season five dismantling science as a way to understand the island, and they spent season six dismantling faith in the same way. The island is what it is.

This, magically, freed up the writers to spend the final hours talking about our characters – where they started six years ago, and where they ended up. In the end, that’s what Lost is all about, and it took this strange, nearly event-less final season to prove it. The final episode (cleverly entitled “The End”) has a dose of island mystery to it, but is mainly about the people we’ve come to love, in both the island and Sideways worlds.

On the island, we see Jack finally let go, and learn to trust the madness he can’t explain. He helps unplug the island, kicks the Man in Black off a cliff (reminiscent of the fall that originally put John Locke in a wheelchair), and sacrifices himself to replace the plug and reignite the light. I believe this was a rebooting process for the island – it had been so damaged by centuries of Jacob’s psychic abuse that it needed a fresh start.

So Jack passes the torch to Hurley, who recruits Ben to help him. I bet Hurley was the greatest island guardian ever, generous and kind and willing to open up its magical properties to whoever needed it, but fiercely protective as well. And the redemption of Ben Linus was one of my favorite moments of the show. Six of our characters made it off the island, and as Jack died, he watched them go. It was a fitting and perfect end to the island story, but had that been it, the Lost finale would have underwhelmed me.

Thank God for the Sideways World, which was revealed (in a lovely sequence at the end with Christian Shephard) to be a reality constructed by the 815ers so that they could all find each other before moving on to the afterlife. The awakening scenes in the finale were heartbreaking – I started sobbing at Sawyer and Juliet’s reunion, and never stopped – and the last 20 minutes, in which Jack meets his father, reunites with everyone from the island, and moves on into the Great White Light, are perhaps the most beautiful 20 minutes I’ve ever seen on television. They affected me, deeply and profoundly.

I love many things about the Sideways World, but here are just a few. First, the writers found a way to honor their characters, reunite them and give them a loving sendoff without cheapening the show or the island world. The emotional heart of the finale came from the Sideways World, and it wouldn’t have been such a stirring and moving experience without it.

But also, the Sideways allowed the writers to explore and finally comment on the debate between fate and free will. Where the island world seemed like it was based on choices, but was all Jacob’s long con (although our characters, in the end, chose to go along with it), the Sideways World felt like fate intervening with each awakening, but was all about choice. The characters built this world freely, constructed it around the people they most wanted to be with at the most important moment of their lives, and chose to move on and let go together.

In a show full to the brim with bizarre happenings, inexplicable energies, and men with godlike powers, the Sideways World was a final statement of humanity. The castaways lived together, so they wouldn’t die alone. I find that unspeakably beautiful.

Yes, Lost is corny. Some of you are rolling your eyes right now, amazed that I could be suckered in by such a cheesy plot device. But you know what? The show has a big, wide-open heart that I did not expect, and it ended by exposing that heart, boldly and beautifully. Lost as a whole is painfully flawed, and there are still some things I wish the producers had explained better. But I am content. The ending was satisfying in ways I never thought it would be, and if I think about it, I’m more pleased with the answers I got than with any theories I read, or concocted myself.

I still have to go back and watch the entire series with the new perspectives gained in the last season, but I think it will hold up. The nagging mysteries don’t kill it, and the focus on the characters in the final season puts that spotlight on them retroactively. The show is about their spiritual journey. It’s not about explaining what happens to them, but observing how those things affect them. I think those taking the plunge again will be surprised how many mysteries the writers wrapped up by the end, though. I can think of very few questions that remained unanswered.

Lost started out as a show about people on a strange island. It ended up going places no network show has ever gone. It was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing, a story so idiosyncratic and singular that it stands alone. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I don’t expect I will again. It was a knotty, twisty show that engaged my brain, but in the end, aimed for my heart. Decades from now, when every iteration of Law and Order and CSI has faded away, we will still be discussing Lost, still picking it apart and theorizing and figuring out What It All Means. And we will still be loving it, deeply and intensely.

Thanks to everyone involved in making this show as special as it was. In the words of Desmond Hume, see you in another life, brother.