Tuesday 25 May 2010
R.I.P. Lost
(Sorry about the Radiohead song)
*SPOILERS*
Okay, so the last ever Lost was an emotional experience.
I don’t care what some critics or disgruntled fans say…
It was brilliant!
To my mind the people who didn't like it just didn't understand it and hadn't really been paying as close attention to the show all these years as they probably thought they had. So, for all you pissed off knuckleheads, here’s a wakeup call…
Ladies and gentlemen...Lost was NOT a show about plot.
Like all the best meaningful storytelling, Lost was about something more. It wasn't really about twists and turns and polar bears and smoke monsters and hatches. All of that was just surface mechanics designed to keep the real story powering along in order to get the characters where they needed to be and to help play out the ideas and themes underpinning everything. No, Lost was a show about a core group of interesting, compelling characters who had all become lost in life somehow. It was a show about meaningful and timeless themes with the likes of faith, destiny, redemption, finding ones place in the world and finding a purpose in life being amongst the strongest. And to my mind it all paid off handsomely. The Island and the Light were, in the end, just macguffins to get that particular group of people to where they all finally needed to be. Together. I admit it. I was tearing up at the end. It was sad yet also incredibly joyful to watch this series boiled down to its most basic idea, an idea brought to such a beautifully told conclusion.
Ultimately Lost was a very human and a very spiritual (not religious) show that tried to give its viewers a taste of something a little bigger and a little more hopeful without ever being overly sentimental or obvious. It was always exciting, always challenging, always ridiculously compelling and always, always utterly unmissable. And in the end, it gave us something else too. It gave us sight of something more: an end and a beginning together with those who mean the most to us. Something I wish with all my heart to be true.
For a great summary of what Lost and its finale was all about, click the following link written by an alleged writer on the show. Even if he/she wasn't really a writer on the show, it is still insightful stuff.
http://designwoop.com/2010/05/lost-finale-explained-well/
So long Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley, Libby, Locke, Jin, Sun, Sayid, Claire, Charlie, Desmond, Juliet, Ben, Boone, Shannon, Rose, Bernard. It’s been a privilege knowing you all.
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Yeah, a great end to a great series.
ReplyDeleteGiven that the opening shot of loads and loads off episodes was of a close up of an eye opening, I always suspected that the final shot would be of one closing. But the fact it was Jack's, in the very same place brought the series beautifully full circle.
It'a also great to see certain characters finding purpose it their lives, especially Hurley and Ben.
I'm in agreement with the designwoop theory, although it took me a full day to come to that conclusion (I could quite grasp it at the time). But I've seen other suggestions which also make sense to me...in which the Island wasn't real.
It's fitting for the series that they closed the story on most of the characters, kept some open (Ben has a different destiny) while keeping the Island mysteries at arms length, but within the grasp of making sense.
Stunning.