The Plunge Blog

-Jeff Wilser

Since way back when in Season 1, Jack and Locke have fought this battle: Man of Science vs. Man of Faith.  Open the hatch? Press the button? Return to the island? Detonate the bomb?

So it's only fitting, I suppose, that I'm struggling with my own internal battle: Jack vs. Locke. Science vs. Faith. Head vs. Gut. Did the show make sense? Does any of this junk hang together? Was I misled for the last six years?

On an emotional level I want to love the finale--it feels right--but my inner-Jack recoils.

Inner-Jack says:

Wait a second. You call those answers?!? Okay, Mr. Jacob or Smoke Monster or Christian Shephard or whoever, maybe I missed an episode (I didn't), but did you ever tell us, oh, I dunno:

• Were they dead the whole time? If so, it's the most spineless cop-out since Pam's dream in Dallas. 
• What ever happened to something we spent, like, 189 episodes on, the golden child, Walt? Wasn't he the key to the galaxy?
• Or was that Aaron?
• What's the deal with that four-toed statue, just some toe fungus?
• Egyptian temple?
• Why was Dharma food still being dropped, years after Dharma closed shop?
• Yeah, so those Hurley-lottery numbers. WTF, dude?
• Jacob has the power to see the future (he must, or else why would he "touch" Kate and Sawyer when they were little kids, assuming he's not a pedophile?), but he can't figure out that Ben will stab him?
• Why did Christian Shephard know every frickin' character on the show, off-island?  At one point in Season 2, I was convinced I would learn that Christian Shephard was, in fact, my real father.

Oh, and I have other nitpicks. Lots of them. Here's just a small one. Remember how in the beginning, Jack was so concerned with the health and welfare of all "the survivors?" Cut to today. Besides our top-billed characters, who else actually, you know, survived? There were 48(ish) survivors of the original plane crash. After all the drama in Season 1 about foraging for water, building huts, making a village, all that shit, now, almost everyone's dead. Jack--and the writers--never bother to acknowledge this.  When Jack said "Live together, or die alone," he neglected to mention a Secret Option C: almost everyone will end up dying together.

And on and on and on.

Happily, I also have an inner-Locke.

This part of me has swallowed the kool-aid. Damn near choked on it. The past few weeks I've been a little Lost-obsessed. I rewatched key episodes. I reread synopses. I'm not proud to admit that I even bought a soundtrack. This part of me wanted to love the finale.

And I think, somehow, I do.

Here's why.

First, the whole "Were they dead the whole time?" question. If the writers pulled that little stunt, I'd be the first to pluck their eyeballs with a Dharma-dropped fork. But that's not the case. Can't be.

The flash-sideways--okay, the afterlife--featured characters like Ben, Desmond, Miles et al. It's pretty simple. The original passengers on Oceanic Flight 815 had never met these dudes, pre-crash. Then the writers make it even clearer. Christian tells Jack (paraphrasing), "Some died before you, some died after you." In other words: they didn't all die together on the plane. Hurley tells Ben, "You were a great #2!" suggesting they spent plenty of time together as an unlikely Island-Guardian-Buddy-Duo.

The crash happened. The island happened. Everything actually happened, even the important shit like Hurley starting a bus and Sawyer playing ping-pong. The hatch, Dharma, the freighter, all of this was real. No way to read it otherwise.

The flash-sideways, on the other hand, exist only in a world where time has no meaning. Maybe Kate lived another 50 years after leaving the island, but here she is in the afterlife. 

Inner-Jack cuts in...  

Wait! But that's a cheat, right? The flash-sideways weren't even introduced until Season 6, so it's not really a "mystery" that we've given a damn about until now, and it doesn't do squat to explain the island. It has nothing to do with the bomb working or not working, it's unrelated to the action on the island, and it was all misdirection.

Maybe. I can see that argument. It has merit. The big reveal of the afterlife, if I'm reading all this correctly, doesn't really explain anything except the flash-sideways, which are purely a Season 6 construct. It's true. One man's "sleight of hand" is another man's cheat.

But here's the great thing. And here's where my inner-Locke gets a gleam in his eye and creepily sticks an orange in his mouth.

We have all the answers we need. Really. We do.

If I can take a stab at this, here's the nuts and bolts of how the island works, put as simply as possible:

An ancient force keeps in check good and evil. This force resides on an island. It must be guarded. The island works in many mysterious, subtle, omniscient ways to influence or "pull" people toward it, using its tendrils to find new guardians. These tendrils are sometimes explicit (i.e. Jacob touching the candidates), sometimes oblique (i.e. Hurley's numbers, the way Christian Shephard keeps bumping into everyone). 

This force, while obviously supernatural, manifests itself with electromagnetic energy. This energy is power. And this power can be measured, and manipulated, by men. This started over 2,000 years ago (in Jacob/MiB episode), and eventually spawns the Dharma Initiative.

And you know what? I can buy that framework. When you accept that as a premise, most (not all) of the last six seasons hang together. The long-running themes of free-will vs. destiny, science vs. faith, understanding our true purpose... it all fits in the fold. Dharma makes sense. All of the off-island coincidences make sense. The plane crash makes sense. The whole "Kate, we have to go back!!!" makes sense--this is the island exerting its will, subtly, tugging its guardians.

What's more, I'm not sure I'd want the writers to peg down anything more specific. Think of the island's powers like The Force. With any more scientific explanation, we'd be stuck with Midichlorians. No thanks.

In short, people who say that Lost "has not been answering questions" have not been paying attention.  They've been answering questions for years. For every dangling "what about Walt" nitpick is a big, meaty, satisfying conclusion.

The hatch? Check. The Others? Check. The button? Check, and then some: the explanation for the button (causing the plane crash) is flat-out brilliant. Smoke monster? Well, kinda. Still not thrilled with the "And theeennnnn the Man in Black became Smokey!!!!" explanation, but whatever, at least they furnished an answer. Richard's immortality? Check. Dharma? It's easy to forget that, at one point, the Dharma Initiative was this big hoary mystery that people accused the writers of "making up as they go along." Nope. Not only did they explain Dharma, but we lived and breathed it for a full season.

So here's where I stand. 

Yes, ideally, I'd like a finale that answers every nagging question, that blows my mind, that makes me cry (figuratively--let's not get carried away), that provides closure, that gives me goosebumps. 

This came damn close. No, I didn't cry, and no, it didn't stitch together every loose thread, but on an emotional level, this was note-perfect. The afterlife reunions. The redemption of Jack. The closure with Christian Shephard, who played such a key role early on. The handshake between Jack and Locke. The mirror image of the pilot's opening shot. The promotion of Hurley from comic relief to Guardian.

That all worked.

With the exception of The Wire, no show has ever managed long-form narrative as skillfully as Lost. No show has ever made the supernatural feel so grounded. No show has ever blended so many elements of sci-fi, action, and geekdom, all without losing its emotional core.

And the ending? It will take days and weeks and months to digest, but it's possible that this will go down, in time, as the greatest capstone to a show, ever.

Jack vs. Locke. Man of Science vs. Man of Faith. It took six years, but when all the chips were counted, Locke won.  

I still need more time. I'm not quite ready to push the button, unthinking, forever.

But I'm almost there. Locke is winning.  He's drowning out my inner-Jack, and I'm almost--almost--ready to embrace this show for what it is, to accept, to believe, to let go.

_____

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