LOST

[Guest HERMIT]

Wow.

We were just taken for the long con.

But I'm not really complaining.

[Guest iEatPowder]

So who built the place where the light resides?!

There needs to be a spin-off that delves into the ancient history of the island, prior to the birth of Jacob & Co.

[Guest NanaMun]

As time passes, I find myself more and more comfortable with the finale. I was in shock with it ending and all, but it's settled in and off the bat I can say I haven't wasted a minute. Expected nothing, but got so much more. Pretty epic if you ask me. What a way to come full circle.

[Pogichinoy]

Speaking of Lost, I saw a dude in Sydney on the streets wearing a Dharma Initiative Swan station jacket.

I stared in awe and hopefully he didn't notice.

[Guest s2hurt]

i'm confuse, so is everyone dead? and where are they leaving to when they are in the church?

[Guest res0nate]

I quite enjoyed it; I didn't really have any expectations and I didn't expect them to answer every single thing.

It wasn't as frustrating as the Battlestar Galactica finale though. It's too bad they didn't have at least half a season to kind of flesh things out.

[Guest Valerie_BB]

well, I guess it was a pretty good ending. Part of me wishes that every question would have been answered, but that never happens with these finales.

Overall, it was a good show and a good way to end it I think.

[Guest Myss Blewm]

i'm confuse, so is everyone dead? and where are they leaving to when they are in the church?

From what I interpreted, this is where they all meet up again after they die. It doesn't mean they all died in Island time along with Jack when he was dying, but eventually, whether it be before Jack dies or after Jack dies, they come to this place and remember their lives and come together to see each other again happily before they fully go into the afterlife.

I cried enough tears to fill up the bright light area on the island. T__T I thought it was a very good ending. Not completely satisfying in, "I TOTALLY GET EVERYTHING NOW OMG", but I felt at peace with the show when it ended. The reverse of Jack's journey. Stumbling into the bamboos, seeing the plane fly, and then closing his eyes....so well done.

I want Terry O'Quinn and Michael Emerson to do the undercover fedora wearing buddy cop show. XD

[Guest chungmah.]

I kind of wasn't surprised. A lot of them died beforehand and there were only a few of them left. It's a lot of interpretation and it was just really nice to see them break into happy tears after seeing those flashbacks from the island.

[Guest CK92842]

I cried enough tears to fill up the bright light area on the island. T__T I thought it was a very good ending. Not completely satisfying in, "I TOTALLY GET EVERYTHING NOW OMG", but I felt at peace with the show when it ended. The reverse of Jack's journey. Stumbling into the bamboos, seeing the plane fly, and then closing his eyes....so well done.

[Guest salsacreep]

as soon as i saw shannon and sayid reunite i broke into tears!

im sad it's over but the finale was pretty good i have to say.

[Guest safelittlethoughts]

I enjoyed the finale even though there are still some answers. I did love the montages and cried a few times, especially the Sayid/Shannon moment and when Hurley cried. I'm so sensitive to him!

My teacher and I had an interesting talk about the finale this morning. If the church represents those who died, does that mean that Ben didn't die? He didn't go in the church after all, but I'm still torn with this question so I'm not even sure about the answer =/

[Guest graceyoon]

^ i think ben didn't go in the church cuz he wasn't ready to leave yet, as kate had told jack, we'll see you inside when you're ready....

so i think for ben it took him harder to realize he was in the afterworld so to speak and his time on the island was over.. i mean he fought all those years to be the leader of the island for what...?

---

man i really thought jack was going to kill locke during the surgery, and stop non locke that way on the island.. esp since jack even went 'it's a surprise' so i thought perhaps the jack in the sideways flash knew he had to kill locke to prevent everything that happened to them on the island, and bring them back to day one...

bah anyway... the dharma initiative was so intriguing.. wish they just left it at that..

[Guest HERMIT]

My teacher and I had an interesting talk about the finale this morning. If the church represents those who died, does that mean that Ben didn't die? He didn't go in the church after all, but I'm still torn with this question so I'm not even sure about the answer =/

My interpretation was that the entire 'alt-timeline' was the actual purgatory, limbo - whatever you care to call it - that served as the gateway to the 'final' afterlife. It wasn't just the "church" that represented this. (I put "church" in quotations because if you noticed, the interior of the initial room that Jack entered had depictions to all kinds of religions represented in there - so depending upon one's faith, that place could be symbolic of a church, a temple, synagogue, mosque.... whatever.) With that said, this alt-timeline represented a sort of staging area that the characters' used to sort themselves out, to come to terms with what they made of their lives, before they could "move on". For most, it took a mere 'awakening' from what I'd like to refer to as their "constants" to help stabilize them on this initial stage of post-death - to realize that their respective lives were not something that they ventured through alone, but that they had one another to help each other out. Once they were able to make these connections, they would be able to move on together into the afterlife.

I guess in some weird sense, this was a sort of flip/flop of what Jack alluded to early on in the show - that they had a choice to either "live together or die alone". Only instead, it was as if they expounded upon that concept and decided that they would "die together" and move on, rather than continue to "live" alone (in this limbo/alt-reality).

Which brings me to the observation of Ben - and to a similar extent Eloise - and why they were not amongst the group inside the church. Because they were all in this alt-timeline, I interpreted it to mean that they were all also dead - it's just that they were not resolved to 'moving on' just yet. Ben alluded that he still had things to take care of - which for him meant that he probably still wanted to atone for the things he did on the Island. But it wasn't just enough to apologize to Locke when he was going inside - there was more that Ben had to do. Locke wasn't the only person Ben had wronged - there was also Danielle and her daughter Alex. They were the other 'loose ends' that Ben still had to resolve for himself and hence, his staying behind and working on them within the construct of this limbo/alt-timeline. Likewise for Eloise, she still had the issues of knowing that she killed her own son Daniel and the realization that she robbed herself (and him) of spending a life together in his adult years. We see that this was of concern to her that Desmond was also going to take her son with him. She too wasn't ready for either him or herself to move on because this was something that she still needed to deal with and atone for.

man i really thought jack was going to kill locke during the surgery, and stop non locke that way on the island.. esp since jack even went 'it's a surprise' so i thought perhaps the jack in the sideways flash knew he had to kill locke to prevent everything that happened to them on the island, and bring them back to day one...

I guess with hindsight being 20/20 we can see that this scenario could not have panned out. The Locke in the alt-reality was the real (and already dead) John Locke. It was not the Smoke monster that he was performing the surgery on. So even if Jack were to botch that surgery in any way, it would have had an effect on the actual Locke and not the Man In Black. As I had personally theorized myself, I had thought that there was going to be a 'bleed through' from the Island time into this alt-timeline - and that to achieve the means to this end, it would have to mean the destruction of the Island and ostensibly the defeat of Smokey once and for all in the process. Never did I think that the writers actually intended the alt-timeline to be the proverbial limbo/purgatory that it turned out to be - and in retrospect, something that can now be viewed upon as something practically independent of the Island sequences after all. So kudos to the writers/creators for pulling the 'long con' on this viewer for the entirety of this last season. For all that time that I thought the end product would mean some sort of 'bleed through' or merging of the Island-time into the alt-time - it was actually the Island-time just coming to its own natural and logical conclusion and the alt-timeline being simply an epilogue of all their cumulative life experiences.

[Guest Myss Blewm]

Wow Hermit. You never cease to amaze me in this thread.

[Guest SooInSmile]

I wonder if they will ever do a spin off? or something very creative like this but in a different setting. Lost surely blew me away since the first ep. I still can't believe it is finally over. But I do feel at peace seeing it end.

[boka]

I agree with Hermit's take on it. This kind of ending started making sense to me mid-way through the season, around the time the Richard Alpert back-story was shown.

I view the "unanswered questions" about the strange phenomena simply as wildly different manifestations of different characters' personal journeys.

[Guest graceyoon]

I guess with hindsight being 20/20 we can see that this scenario could not have panned out. The Locke in the alt-reality was the real (and already dead) John Locke. It was not the Smoke monster that he was performing the surgery on. So even if Jack were to botch that surgery in any way, it would have had an effect on the actual Locke and not the Man In Black. As I had personally theorized myself, I had thought that there was going to be a 'bleed through' from the Island time into this alt-timeline - and that to achieve the means to this end, it would have to mean the destruction of the Island and ostensibly the defeat of Smokey once and for all in the process. Never did I think that the writers actually intended the alt-timeline to be the proverbial limbo/purgatory that it turned out to be - and in retrospect, something that can now be viewed upon as something practically independent of the Island sequences after all. So kudos to the writers/creators for pulling the 'long con' on this viewer for the entirety of this last season. For all that time that I thought the end product would mean some sort of 'bleed through' or merging of the Island-time into the alt-time - it was actually the Island-time just coming to its own natural and logical conclusion and the alt-timeline being simply an epilogue of all their cumulative life experiences.

Yeah, see my thinking was that was a choice Jack would have to make. To kill the real Locke since he knew (which was what I thought) he would commit suicide anyway and that the Smoke Monster would take over his body.

What I bolded is spot on about how I felt about the finale.. That is why I thought Jack killing Locke was going to somehow tie in the seasons altogether instead of the final season just separating itself from the past. What was the point of all those episodes from Season 1 - 5, if they were just going to end it with Jack's death that had nothing to do with anything, except play on nostalgia and bring people back, big whoop.

Dah.

[Guest szunzune]

[Guest HERMIT]

What I bolded is spot on about how I felt about the finale.. That is why I thought Jack killing Locke was going to somehow tie in the seasons altogether instead of the final season just separating itself from the past. What was the point of all those episodes from Season 1 - 5, if they were just going to end it with Jack's death that had nothing to do with anything, except play on nostalgia and bring people back, big whoop.

My statement that you bolded was in reference actually to the Island sequences of season 6, not the entire series.

Overall I am extremely disappointed with the entire series. People keep talking about how the show isn't about the mysteries but about the characters, and how the ending was a perfect way to wrap up the relationships and emotional aspects of the show. That is SUCH a cop out to me.

For gracyoon and szunzune, I guess your approach to following the entire story of LOST (as opposed to how others have chosen to follow it), is ironically a mirroring of one of the central themes touched upon throughout the series: man of science vs man of faith. Unfortunately - particularly for those who sided more with the former train of thought - it ultimately was the creators' perogative to write their story how they wanted to tell it ... and that was to approach it from the latter perspective. Their story was that of character studies

With that said, the storytelling approach to the LOST series is to some certain degree allegorical in the way the Bible was also written: do you watch/read each of these things and interpret and question everything in the literal sense - or do you take the sum of its parts and take away from it lessons of a much grander scope? Mind you, I'm not equating LOST with the Bible - that would be just crazy - I'm merely underscoring the similar "storytelling approach" and the intended effect of both in being divisive to their respective audience.

Much like how graceyoon and szunzune are dissatisfied with the explanations (or lack thereof) for the myriad of mysteries in LOST, there are also a number of dissatisfied readers of the Bible who equally question specific mysteries ie, did God really 'create' the universe in a matter of days? How did Jesus turn water into wine? How was Lazarus able to rise from the dead? Who rolled the stone that covered Jesus tomb? How is the Holy Spirit a "tongue of fire"? How was Jesus "assumed" into heaven? et. al. In some oddly weird parallel, people who question the minutiae of all the various LOST mysteries would be akin to people being bogged down with these similar questions of the Bible and not really wanting to care about the true message (or in the case of LOST, the intended story) that is being conveyed.

In that regard, I'm finding it interesting how certain segments of a given audience choose to approach and interpret a story - whether it be a serialized TV show like LOST or a revered book like the Bible. But the point is that the respective writers put forth their story on their terms and with the message that they wanted to convey. And even in the end, when the story has been completely told, it's still essentially up to the audience to 'buy into' the story as it was presented. Some are going to like it and take something out of it and some are just not going to accept it at all. This has been true with the Bible for ages. And ironically enough this is proving true with LOST at a lesser level. Maybe this was what Abrams, Cuse, and Lindelof intended all along with this compelling, yet divisive, show: it's just a microcosm of how people approach life, understanding what you can of it, and coming to terms with it. It's not going to be spoon-fed for you - deal with it and figure out what's really important - or wallow in the obscurity of dissatisfaction and unfulfillment.