(SPOILERS AHEAD. DROP ANCHORS, LADS!): I watched Lost from the beginning: the very day it premiered. My preconception was that it was just a show about a bunch of guys, you know, lost on an island after an awesome-looking plane crash. It slowly became something more than that, though, as many will surely know. The first episode gave us so many questions that it still hasn't answered for, but what would follow was best summed up by Charlie. "Guys, where are we?"
I don't know, Charlie. I just don't know.
Basically, I looooved the first season. It was amazing in how it wrote intriguing mystery into its story, how it played with its characters and how in one flashback you could go from hating one person to truly understanding and sympathizing with them. For instance, the ending to the episode "Walkabout" where we discover John had been in a wheelchair was, to me, one of the most powerful and flat-out emotional things I had ever seen in a TV show. Not only that, but it really affirmed that premise that this island was something supernatural. I bought Season 1 as soon as it came out, and remember being so excited when Season 2 rolled around.
I was never really all that excited about it again.
Like a sheep, I was towed around, taunted with answers that I would never get. Got my heartstrings tugged over characters who would later do something so out of character that it canceled out everything I had felt about them. The mysteries became so...vague and absolutely crazy that I just somehow knew that no answer they could give me could possibly work to my satisfaction. In short, I became really annoyed with the show. I knew it was a con. A clever ruse. J.J. Abrams had figured out a way to keep tons of people interested without actually trying.
People try to make the show out to be deeper than it actually is. Hell, even I was trying to figure out the significance of "the numbers" and so on, but the only thing the show ever did was be deliberately vague. Show us symbols and give us words that we could interpret this way and that. Disregarding all that bullshit, the real conflict that the show provided was a worthwhile one: Jack's argument from science, and Locke's argument from faith. It wasn't an argument that either of them were going to win. It was really up to the audience to decide who was right...but, I guess, in the end, Locke was.
I stopped watching Lost over four years ago, and I made a promise that I would tune in to the final episode and see if the show's producers had the stones to answer all the questions they had posed. Well...they didn't. They really didn't. After all the insanity, the greater questions about the true mystery of the island were left hanging in the air. It didn't surprise me. What DID surprise me was how moved I would be by the ending regardless.
I cried. I really did. Because of all the things I was expecting from the finale, I didn't expect a happy ending. And it was. The writers, once again, pulled out something that was noticeably out of their ass, but did it in true Lost form, and made me care somehow. The episode was riddled with little allusions to all the important moments in their characters' lives. Everything worked out for everyone. All the people who died came back (technically) and got the ending that we had always hoped for them. Because, throughout all the bullshit writing, it really was the characters who were the star of the show. No matter how silly the writers got with the concepts and plot points, we were suffering the annoying consequences along with the characters.
The ending was...perfect. As perfect as it could have gotten, given the quagmire the story had eventually become. I've read a few responses where people say that "All the questions were answered," and to that I call BS. Nothing was answered. The island and its working are still as ambiguous as they were when the show began. Nothing's changed. Only the characters have, and the writers brought all their greatest triumphs together into one room, and had them confidently march into the unknown together.
I really can't imagine how else they could have ended the show and still left me as satisfied for having tuned in on that first day. It had me in tears and it still has me all emotional, even many hours after it ended. It was what the Battlestar Galactica ending should have been!
As the light filled the room, as Jack closed his eyes for the last time: it truly was a happy moment.
=)
No comments:
Post a Comment