The Polarizing LOST Finale: Cop Out or Redemption Song?
After all the debating and deliberating, the faith and the science, the LOST finale has come and gone. The big finish? Everybody's dead because everybody dies. They say the creators are expecting fan backlash? Well, they're gonna get it.
The finale, even with 45 minutes of commercials, was long enough to be a motion picture. It had the promise of being the greatest ending to a series ever, and some people think it was. Many of us, maybe those of us that have taken this show a bit too seriously, were not given any of the information we wanted. Everything became illusory, and so too did this concept that "everything happens for a reason." A lot of us mistakenly thought this was the crux of the show, instead we found out we were supposed to be way more impressed with Jack Shepherd than anybody has been since season 1. The crux as you can see below is that everybody dies at some point, most notably Jack Shepherd (Can I get a who the f#$% cares?).
This was not a cathartic farewell as might have been intended. It was like your mom just straight up telling you they put your Labrador down because he was too much trouble, instead of just telling you he went to this farm where he was happier. Thanks a lot Mama Damon and Papa Carlton... you know I would have been happier if you had just told me whether or not Charles Widmore was a good guy or a bad guy? I know these characters are dead, I know that the show is over, I also know it was and will always be JUST a TV show, that doesn't change the fact that I wanted to understand why the hell Daniel Farraday needed to go back in time to get murdered by his own mother, and what in God's name was your point for turning Claire and Sayid into pseudo lunatics? Don't you dare say questions were answered, I just got Nikki and Pauloed hard, and I feel violated.
But I still have the kind of faith John Locke used to have. LOST may be over in it's current incarnation, but it will soon be in the hands of the others. A geek fanbase is not content to let their biggest obsession go without a fight. All the LOSTie need do is look to the Trekkie (Trekker? I don't know what they're calling themselves now). When geeks love something enough to pay for it, the marketing gods make sure they have ways of getting what they want. Sure, the high might not be as pure, but as pop culture religions go, LOST did something very right. They presented more unanswerable epistemological questions than the philosophers they based their characters on.
I'll just conclude by stating that once again, that ending did NOT do it for me, and it's hard not to buy the interpretation that the series itself was the ultimate "long con." While I shed only tears of frustration (did I mention how hard Team Flocke dropped the ball...?), in the end I refuse to admit defeat. I refuse to say, "Game over." I say this show is owned by all you nerds out there that have been taking it all too seriously from the get-go, so get out there and write that fan fiction!