Endings are hard. It’s the only episode where you’re competing directly against the audience members’ vaguely imagined perfect prototype episode. You can’t worry about making anyone happy, you just have to stay true to your story and follow your characters to the end.
Lost didn’t really do that. It was a classic cop-out ending. I think I know why they did it, but first let me complain.
It was a perfectly good ending, just not for this particular TV show. The biggest problem is that the ending they chose could really be the ending to any TV show. Pick a show and you could have the characters meet in heaven for the last episode to reminisce about their lives. It had nothing to do with the mythology of the island. It was arbitrary. All the characters meet in heaven and have sentimental slow motion hugs. THE END. This would perhaps have been tolerable had we only wasted one episode in this heaven reality instead of half an entire season.
Ultimately the writers never put their money where their mouths were. They plodded along as if they were giving us clues to a very very specific place, yet there was no place after all. Other than a hot tub in an underground cave I guess. But the clues were SO specific. They were always telling us not to worry, we’d be rewarded in the end. But instead we got a sentimental clip show suitable for a Lifetime original movie. They were all bark for 6 years and never had the guts to bite.
I didn’t need detailed explanations. I’m not angry about answers, we certainly got a lot of them over the course of 6 seasons. But they left some pretty large and important details up in the air. Specifically the mechanics of the Source and the Smoke Monster were clumsy. You could almost hear Lindelof and Cuse whispering in the background, “Please just go with us on this, we’ve got nothing.”
The other problem dramatically speaking was that the threat of Smokey leaving the island was never very compelling. We were simply told this would be bad. I guess we were meant to just believe them. Instead of, you know, showing us what happens when he leaves the island. Sort of a cornerstone of good drama, that “showing” part. There were plenty of ways they could have done that without actually destroying the world.
The last season should have been all about Jacob, developing his character into something interesting instead of just being this stoic dude who gravely whispers vague generalities.
Ultimately I think the producers were so worried about delivering an unsatisfactory ending that they subverted the entire idea of an ending by throwing this heaven crap at us.
Weak and uninspired. A sentimental greeting card ending. More concerned about making us cry than resolving the story.
Imagine watching your favorite Lost episodes from seasons 1 and 2 and then being shown this ending. You probably wouldn’t have stuck it out.
