It all began with an eye opening. Anyway, let me say this right now so you aren't trying to figure it out for yourself based on what I write: I LOVED "The End." I certainly have questions that I wish had been answered (I'll get to them in a bit) but I think that LOST ended in a very emotionally satisfying way, and I feel like the six years I spent watching it (at 24, that's a quarter of my life) were enriched because of it.
The show has always been a science fiction show (you can't watch the pilot, learn about monsters and tropical polar bears and not think something is up), but it has also always been a science fiction show that is about human relationships. Over the past six years (three for the characters), we've watched the characters confront larger-than-life situations, but it has always been about how they collectively react to these situations. They are stronger as a group, but they couldn't help but fracture themselves. Sawyer was bound by feelings of ownership, which kept him an outcast in the group. Kate couldn't let herself get close to anyone due to fear of a past that didn't matter on an Island. And Jack and Locke, who could have been best friends in another life, were always at odds because they couldn't just listen to the other (or take the time to explain themselves). Even though the series pretty definitively came down on the side of faith, Locke still wasn't just "right" because he, like the Man in Black, tried to force his views and beliefs on others, especially those who didn't believe his ideas when he couldn't give a reason for them. Maybe Jack should have had faith, but Jack had to realize it himself.
So what was left for everyone to do in these final two and a half hours? Band together. Every single character worked together to defeat the Man in Black. Ben tricked the Man in Black into trusting him, and relayed information back to Miles, Richard, and an alive-and-well Lapidus, who went to Hydra Island to repair Ajira 316. Rose and Bernard saved Desmond, and Jack, Hurley, Kate, and Sawyer went to meet and destroy the Man in Black. When their group converged with the Man in Black, Ben, and Desmond, Jack and Desmond decided to "help" the Man in Black in his plans in order to turn them on him and destroy him. I think the only other time the entire cast was working for a common goal was the Season 1 finale (though here, Locke was against them and Claire wasn't doing much of anything, but still). Watching everyone work together was amazing, because they finally learned that they had to live together, otherwise they would be dying side by side very quickly.
Oh, and it turns out that my "Ben and Hurley: The Series" wouldn't have been such a bad idea after all.While the Island storyline was very action-packed, the alternaverse story was all about slowly getting everyone together, both physically and mentally. Desmond and Hurley slowly caused everyone to "wake up" and remember their on-Island lives... and their entire lives. Each time someone woke up, we got a quick flash of moments from the show featuring the character, reminding us of some of their greatest hits (to steal from the series). I think it would have been cool to see the lives of those who survived the series, but that would have revealed the truth of the alternaverse too quickly. It's funny, you see. I think that, after seeing 2 episodes all the way back in Season 1, my dad announced that all the characters were dead and that the Island was purgatory. I disagreed, stating that such a twist is now a cliche and the writers were smart enough to know not to do something like "they were dead all along" or "it was just a dream." For something like that to work, it has to mean something (for example, in Neil Gaiman's Sandman, even if something was a dream, it wasn't just a dream, it had real-world consequences). And I was right, the Island was real. They all survived the crash of Oceanic 815. It was the alternaverse that was death. And somehow, the writers made it work. The characters were all lost souls before they came to the Island, and they helped save each other. The alternaverse was a kind of waystation for the souls of the castaways to find each other again in the afterlife. Lovers were reunited, friends got to see each other again, and people were able to apologize to those whom they had wronged. The last 10 minutes or so, featuring about 75% of everyone who has ever been a regular on the show in the church, interspersed with Jack's final moments on the Island, was absolutely incredible.
As for the message of the show, as I said, faith clearly won out over reason. Had I known that would happen at the beginning of the season, I would have been slightly upset. I am a man of reason, and I have always favored Jack over Locke, even though both have made some very poor decisions over the course of the show. But I ended up enjoying the way the show dealt with faith. It didn't tell us what to believe, just to believe something (the church has a stained glass window with symbols relating to various major religions; by the way, does the wheel represent Hinduism because of the cycle of reincarnation, or was it supposed to be the frozen wheel that Ben turned?). Jacob had his way of running things that still caused people to follow him, but that doesn't mean that Hurley couldn't do things differently. And there will always be things beyond our comprehension, and although I think that we should always try to understand as much as possible, sometimes it's better to take a chance.
Speaking of things beyond our comprehension, I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't slightly disappointed to not learn the answers to a few questions. I really liked that the writers gave us just enough information about certain things to draw our own conclusions and make our own interpretations for various aspects of the show, but there were a couple things I feel needed to be definitively answered (although I have theories on them). I came into the finale with four questions that I wanted answered. The first was really the only one that truly mattered: Why couldn't women give birth on the Island if the baby was conceived there? The whole crux of the Others' storyline in the first three seasons was that they were taking children and people like Juliet because they couldn't repopulate. The second and third didn't really matter in the grand scheme of things: Who shot at Locke, Juliet, Sawyer, Miles, Daniel, and Charlotte while they were on the outriggers in Season 5 and why didn't Sun go back in time to the 1970s in Season 5? Finally, my last question wouldn't have been answered because it was the product of factors beyond the writers' control: What would have happened with Mr. Eko if he hadn't died (read: if Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje hadn't wanted to leave the show)? There is a great video on College Humor in which Jeff Rubin lists every single lingering question. Some of them I would actually have liked to learn, some are trivial, and some are the results of the television-making process, similar to my Mr. Eko question. Like I said, I have some theories about some of the questions based on the evidence we are given, though more of the answers I've come up with than I'd like to admit are "Jacob is magic and did it" (the big one is I think that because Jacob didn't like Ben, he punished the Others for putting him in charge by making it so that women couldn't give birth; we know that Jacob can "make" things happen, such as immortality, so why not inability to give birth?).
So this is "The End." Like I always say, it wasn't perfect, but then again nothing is (except Mad Men). But we got to look into the hearts and minds of these characters, and what we saw was beautiful.
Up next: Hopefully starting Rome before moving on to The Wire, and then a twin series on Band of Brothers and The Pacific...
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