LOST 6x17/18: "Perfectly perfect in every way"

The finale of LOST was one of the most highly anticipated television events ever -or at least hyped as such. The ratings seemed to support this, as they remained fairly steady for the duration of the episode – an unprecedented occurrence for a single event that lasted two and a half hours. If you’re reading this blog, you undoubtedly watched the episode, and you’ve probably been debating it for the last couple of days anyway. So rather than recap the full episode, I’d rather share with you my reaction to it and a couple of parallels I drew.

I loved it. I haven’t been uniformly positive about every episode of the series, but this was an amazing finale. Yes, it was sentimental. No, we didn’t see Walt or get the answer to what the numbers really meant or get the Man In Black’s name. (It was Samuel, by the way, according to a video clip on E!'s site.) And yes, it got pretty dusty in the room numerous times on Sunday night. But I feel great about “The End”.


Lost 6x17/18: The End


Top moments from the finale:

• The Jack vs. UnLocke Crouching Tiger-like fight scene on the cliff. Epic in the storytelling, this was an epic moment in cinematography, as well.
  

• Jack hands the keys to the island to Hurley. Hurley was always a fan favorite, and probably the most innocent among them. He was also a very simple, but that also made him pure and a very similar choice to Jacob.
  

• Locke and Ben's conversation outside the church. It was good to see Ben's redemption continue and that he wanted to continue his life with Alex and perhaps Rousseau to repent for his on-island denial of her. To see John Locke kick away that wheelchair and embrace the island was a great moment.
  

• Juliet and Sawyer finally go Dutch. The moment in LA X when Juliet is dying in Sawyer's arms is paid off finally as they meet at the candy machine over, of course, an Apollo Bar. To see their recognition was perhaps better than any other "awawkening" on the finale. (Though I'm sure some Sawyer/Kate "Skaters" felt otherwise.)
  

• The callbacks to earlier episodes. From Jack and Locke looking down the golden cave waterfall toward Desmond reminding us of looking down the Swan hatch at him, to Juliet giving Sun a sonogram again, to Vincent and Jack in the bamboo forest, to the literal cork in the island that was keeping good in and evil out...
  

• The score. Michael Giacchino's score was at least as important as any other element of LOST, and perhaps even more important than most. Thankfully, they made the decision for the series to use Giacchino and a live orchestra to score the series. In case the ending of LOST didn't get you somewhere between teary and sobbing, Giacchino's score undoubtedly did. Or else you have no heart.
  

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Some of my thoughts on the episode generally...

One theory of the Big Bang is that the Universe will eventually attain a critical density after many billions more years of expansion. It will reach its maximum size and then begin to contract, pulling in on itself and eventually ending with a dense mass of hot matter – known as the Big Crunch – resuming to a state similar to that in which the Universe started. As this happens, at least as I imagine it, the closer the matter returns to the Big Crunch state, the faster it moves.

This is how I interpreted the last season of LOST. We saw the Universe of the Losties begin to contract into the Big Crunch (or the big church?). And as we neared the end of the season, the action began occurring faster – Jin and Sun got a quick goodbye, Widmore no more, Sayid see you later…

The series ended much the way it began, with Vincent finding Jack on the beach and a close up on his eye. Except now, as the Big Crunch completes its contraction, we see Jack die, content as he sees a plane fly overhead that the next Big Bang will take a different path.

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One other thought I’ve been stuck with since yesterday… The final scene in the apparently non-denomonational church (on the stained glass window were a Christian Cross, a Jewish Star of David, a Hindu Om, a Muslim Star and Crescent Moon, a Buddhist Dharma Wheel, and a Tao Yin & Yang) felt to me a lot like the final scene in the 1984 film, Places in the Heart, a movie I saw as a kid. The film, set in the 1930s South, ends in an idealistic scene of redemption where all the characters are celebrating communion together at a church – black and white, killer and victim, alive and dead, etc. Regardless of their places or their actions in life or even when they died, they were all together spiritually. In the final battle of science vs. faith on LOST, the writers make the statement that the winner is faith.

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I can understand the confusion or even frustration of many fans. The ambiguity of elements of the final episode – and especially the final shots of the wreckage of an Oceanic flight – might appear to negate all of what we’d watched for the last 6 years…perhaps even negating anything we’d learned about the mythology of the island – from Jacob and MIB to the Dharma Initiative to the Others and the 815ers. I don’t believe that’s the case at all. Everything that happened on the island happened. After all, we know that on LOST, Whatever Happened, Happened.






In the Jimmy Kimmel reunion/recap special, Jimmy points out that in the season premiere, “LA X”, as the turbulence starts to subside, Rose tells Jack, “You can let go now. It’s ok, you can let go.” This was the first clue – in retrospect, a massive one – that the sideways was all leading to Jack letting go and crossing over. However, that off-island sideways flashes were happening in the limbo of Jack’s mind as he was stumbling through the bamboo forest. (Coincidentally, bamboo is tied to the creation myth in some Asian cultures.) He lays down there, just as we’d first found him, with Vincent escorting him again to his next phase…letting go.


As Juliet is giving Sun a sonogram, she tells Sun that her baby is "perfectly perfect in every way." LOST had its missteps, but as far as an overall television experience, it was a near-perfect experience to me.


Thank you, LOST, for six amazing years of unprecedented television.



Drop your comments, interpretations or recipes below.

- Sean Salo

The Resurrection of Christian Shephard

(Note - this is a re-post of an old entry - somehow went missing)

Like the black smoke monster in last week's episode, this season of LOST has mostly moved along like a freight train. Last night's episode, "Something Nice Back Home", was more like a leisurely double-decker bus tour of a city with the fanny-packed masses. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with straightforward storytelling and revisiting of the beach crew. It was kind of nice…quaint, even. But with a shorter than normal season, followed by a further truncated number of post-strike episodes, a storytelling episode is not what I was expecting.

Half-siblings Jack and Claire both got visits from Daddy, Jin pwned Charlotte, Kate scampered around in her skivvies, Claire leaves Aaron safely in a tree (huh?), Karl and Danielle were unequivocally taking dirt naps, Hurley plays the telephone game with Jack, Saywer's heart grew three sizes and Miles was still a douche.

On the beach:

Tight close up on Jack's eye, just like the season 1 pilot episode. Could this indicate that a new Jack woke up? (See Alice idea below…) Jack's got appendicitis and needs emergency surgery. Juliet sends Sun and Faraday to the medical station to retrieve supplies. Charlotte and Jin tag along.

When they return, Jin pulls Charlotte aside and says to her, in Korean, that he knows she speaks Korean and that she understood what he and Sun had been talking about. After some denial, Jin threatens to break Daniel's fingers one by one until she tells the truth. She answers him in Korean. While not out of the realm of possibility for an anthropologist to speak Korean, could this be a clue that she has some connection to Mr. Paik, Sun's father?

Jack's surgery was a success, despite less than sterile conditions and no anesthesia, and a surgical staff consisting of a fertility doctor, a dentist and a fugitive.

In the jungle:

Sawyer, Claire, Aaron and Miles continue their journey back to the beach. Sawyer gives Miles a restraining order against Claire. (Sawyer's become very protective of her and has evolved pretty dramatically from his "every man for himself" days.)

Frank Lapidus comes barreling through the jungle and convinces them to hide because Keamy and his team right behind him. (Why weren't they killed by the smoke monster?) Frank convinces Keamy to keep going to the helicopter, despite Aaron's whimper almost giving them up.

In a clearing, Miles has a ghostbuster moment and can hear the last moments of Rousseau and Karl. He uncovers their bodies, which are barely buried.

After continuing their journey, they set up camp and Claire gets awoken by an unexpected visitor: Christian Shephard, who's holding Aaron. (Dun dun dun…)

When Sawyer wakes in the morning, Miles calmly says that she went off with someone she called "Dad", and Sawyer follows Aaron's cries to find him safely in a tree. Claire is nowhere to be found.

Will we see Claire again in the episodes ahead? Or will she be gone for much of the rest of the season, like when Ethan kidnapped her in season one?

Flash forward:

Jack and Kate are playing house, raising Aaron together. Jack reads a newspaper article about the Yankees sweeping the Red Sox in a 3-game series with a 5-0 win. Based on actual events, that puts the paper's date as August 31, 2007.

(pic credit: Losteastereggs.blogspot.com)

Geek alert: Jack tripped on a Millennium Falcon, another ode to Star Wars.

Later, Jack is reading to Aaron from Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" – "How queer everything is

today! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle!" The passage is not unlike Jack's transformation. We see the close up of his eye at the beginning of the episode. (Is this a new Jack?)

At the hospital, Jack is doing a consultation on a patient when he sees his father walking through the lobby. His colleague, Dr. Erika Stevens, snaps him out of it and Christian's gone. She asks him to review a patient's x-rays. It's an L-4 tumor – the same vertebra where Ben had his tumor. He gets a call from the administrator at Santa Rosa Hospital to come see Hurley.

When he visits, Hurley is despondent. He's claims that the Oceanic 6 are all dead and reveals that he's been seeing Charlie. (Seems this is a regular occurrence now.) Charlie's left a message for Jack: "You're not supposed to raise him." Hurley tells Jack that he'll be visited by someone soon. (Is this a reference to Dickens and A Christmas Carol with Scrooge getting visits from the 3 ghosts? Is the hope that he will change back to that pre-appendectomy Jack?)

Jack goes home and proposes to Kate, who accepts. Jaters rejoiced. Skaters booed.

Back at the hospital the next evening, Jack's reviewing the chart again when he hears a beeping outside his office. Turns out it's a smoke detector's low battery beep. He removes the battery from the detector and sees his dad again. Christian calls out Jack's name. He's startled. But his colleague, Erika, walks in and when Jack turns back, his father is gone. He asks her to write him a prescription because he's overworked and stressed.

Geek alert: Was the fact that the smoke detector was beeping some sort of wink from the writers that Christian is a manifestation of the black smoke monster? (Though it also vaguely sounded like the button timer beeping from the now-imploded hatch.)

Geek alert 2: Why is it that Erika shows up both times Jack sees his father? Is she somehow related? Or is she protecting Jack from him? And was the connection to her patient with the L-4 tumor a coincidence, or is she connected to Ben?

Geek alert 3: On the wall behind Jack are the names of the other doctors in the practice there. Directly behind him, are the names "Gardez" and "Evenson". Gardez is French for "keep". Was this a clue that Jack should stay with or keep Aaron?

(pic credit: losteastereggs.blogspot.com)

Jack arrives home to find Kate on the phone. He's suspicious and asks her who it was. Kate gets some water from the fridge, which is covered with kids' art. However, closer inspection also shows a monster-type cutout (black smoke monster?) on the freezer door and a shark, perhaps, on the top of the fridge door.

Geek alert: The flowers, ladybugs and butterflies on the fridge were the same as those on the wall in Hurley's hospital when Matthew Abaddon visited him in the first episode of the season.

(pic credit: getlostpodcast.com)

Let's discuss:

• Why does Jack only marry people he saves? First, Sarah. Then Kate. And why does he turn on them when there's nothing left to save?
• Rose posed the question, and it was a valid one: Why did Jack get sick on the island that heals people? Is he doing something he's not supposed to be doing? Is the island trying to keep him from getting people rescued?
• Why didn't Smokey kill Keamy's crew?
• Why would Keamy and his crew have buried Rousseau and Karl at all? If they didn't, who did? And why were they buried in such shallow graves?
• Faraday asks Charlotte where all this electrical power is coming from. She says to add it to the list. Is this merely a list of the island's unanswered questions?

While I enjoy a break from the frenetic pace the show can take, I wasn't expecting a slower-moving episode just the second week after the strike-induced hiatus. Though at the end of the day, a mediocre episode of LOST is better than anything else on TV. What did you think? Were you disappointed? Or did you think the episode was killer? Comment below with your thoughts.