As the final two and a half hours of “Lost” unspooled on Sunday night, Desmond and Jack walked into a cave for the final showdown with evil, and Desmond said, “This doesn’t matter, him destroying the island, you destroying him.” Jack, serious to the end, replied, “All of this matters.”
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It was the sort of thesis-antithesis, drama-of-ideas moment that the show had always specialized in. The problem was that several hours later, after the show’s mystical, walk-into-the-white-light ending, it was Desmond who would be proved more right. The battle Jack was about to engage in with the monster inhabiting the body of John Locke mattered in the way that the proper placement of X’s and Y’s matters in an equation — meaning on “Lost” always having been largely abstract, as if it were a product of flow charts rather than imagination.
But when the entire island story line we had been following for six seasons turned out not to matter very much within the internal organization of the show’s narrative — to be largely disconnected from that final quasi-religious resolution of the plot — it was deflating, despite the warm feelings the finale otherwise inspired.
Most of the post-mortem discussion of the finale will involve parsing and grading that final 10-minute sequence. Before conducting our own analysis, however, let’s talk about the previous 140 minutes of “The End.”
It’s not uncommon — in fact, it’s probably the norm — for successful television shows to soften up as the seasons pass and viewers (and creators) get more attached to characters and more personally invested in how stories play out. It happened this season with “Lost,” and it reached its apogee on Sunday night in an episode that was largely a pleasant, nostalgic wallow for the show’s fans.
Tonally, the episode was dominated by the sentimental machinations of the sideways story line, where Desmond continued to act as a sort of spiritual mother hen or reunion organizer: gathering his flock of characters and leading them to reclaim their memories of the island, one after another, like nonbelievers seeing the light at a tent meeting.
Some of those moments were expertly orchestrated and very moving. Sun and Jin, whose memories were unlocked when they saw an ultrasound image of their baby, Ji-yeon, suddenly were able to speak English again, a plot trick that has always worked. Sawyer and Juliet touched fingers over a candy bar and jumped back as if from an electric shock. Jack’s final memory montage, when he saw all the moments in which he had raced to save others, was lovely.
Meanwhile, the island story, in keeping with a season-long trend, was eventful but strangely thrill-free.
The production crew was never able to make the cave holding the all-important, island-binding golden light look more impressive than a water ride at a cheap amusement park, and it was a major problem that the scenes of Desmond and Jack lugging various stones around the sacred pool inspired giggles rather than awe.
“The End” exemplified how pedestrian the action in “Lost” became over the years, a falloff that began even in Season 1. There was nothing to make you tense up in the scenes of Jack and Locke fighting on the cliff or of boulders rolling around as the island threatened to disintegrate. (One exception: Kate telling Sawyer “I’ll see you at the boat” and leaping off the cliff into the ocean. But that’s a hard scene to mess up.)
Now let’s get back to the ending of “The End,” in which the big reveal was that Jack Shephard, to all appearances a divorced father and successful surgeon in the sideways universe, was in fact dead. So were all the other Losties who had gathered in the church. The scenario was cleverly constructed to remove the possibility that they had been dead all along (a possibility I erroneously considered, and blogged about, before rewatching the scene), or that any of the events on the island or in the off-island lives of the Oceanic 6 had been other than real.
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