Like this:

Well. That happened.

It was what it was, and some of us feel that it wasn’t what it used to be.

Let’s not fight! If you loved it, I’m not going to be able to convince you that you shouldn’t have, and trust me, you’re not going to be able to convince me to love it as the end to the series I’ve been watching (though standing on its own, you could maybe suck me in — I mean, Vincent lying down with Jack was like a punch in the gut; I’m not made of stone). There’s no point in having that conversation and it just turning into a hate fest.

And, of course, there’s the question of what really happened there: was the flash-sideways what happened to everyone in some kind of purgatory? Or was it Jack’s fantasy, his own personal purgatory, of what would have happened in the perfect world, and it only resolved with everyone being able to move on once he became willing to let go of those attempts to fix everything, all of his regrets? There’s some wiggle room there, and what actually happened isn’t completely clear, so we can agree to disagree — and even change our minds with time.

But.

There’s definitely one thing I think needs to be said about this as our destination, and that is this: it is basically impossible to think of any story you’ve ever read, or watched, or heard, that couldn’t have ended this way. It would certainly be easier, less wrenching, less challenging, if at the end of Casablanca we knew that this was not “goodbye,” but “see you later”; if Hamlet got to sit down with his father, apologize for taking so long to act, and work it all out; if Gatsby and Daisy had a single afterlife to look forward to sharing after their separate lives; if it didn’t really matter whether Westley saved Buttercup, since there’s always the post-purgatory reunion to count on.

There are very few exceptions, I think, to that line of argument, and most of those exceptions either actually did end this way, or ended in some other “tricky,” it-was-all-a-dream kind of way (St. Elsewhere, for instance). That is, if you accept this trope as an option, you can always have the ending you want, and the ending can always be the same. Sometimes, however, there is beauty in the imperfect. Sometimes, we can say that this is why we have literature, a culture, a set of shared traditions and memes: because that is what we have to work with. Do-overs for everyone? Definitely appealing, for myriad reasons, reasons I don’t need to explain to you. If you liked this ending because it reminded you of something else, that’s great, but there are clear reasons for that: it’s an old, old, old story.

Given that, I’m not sure that the question really is, “Was this cool, or was it completely ridiculous and unrelated to the series as a whole?” That’s where we’ll disagree, and stand divided on opposite sides of this line, no matter what. But I think there is a larger question here: if there is a cultural option that exists, an ending to trump all endings (and all beginnings, and all middles), and this ending can be invoked even casually to put a tale back on a happy path after death and digressions have taken it elsewhere, what happens to our storytelling if we use that ending? How drastic is it to invoke that silver bullet? What, then, is the function of our storytelling? Do we want Daisy to leave Tom and run off with Jay Gatsby, simply because that’s not as sad? Why don’t all stories end this way? What does it mean when one does?

There has been a lot of chatter about how people who loved the characters would like this finale, and that you’d only be disappointed if you thought this show was about the plot. And that, I think, is a pretty reductionist argument and a completely false dichotomy. It ignores all nuance, all other options, all questions of whether there is a point to telling a story that ends with “Nevermind! All this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.” I cared a lot about these characters! I just happen to think that there is more than one goal for character development, and that there are far more options for what constitutes a happy ending than what seemed allowable here. If you grow, and change, and process your daddy issues and your torturing people issues and your Jacob issues, a noble death is not the only worthy redemption. There is something to be said for actually applying your growth, your positive changes, to your actual life, to the people who are around you and who care about you, who need, and in not waiting for some ultimate ending where suddenly none of those mistakes matter. There’s something to be said for the work of a person in changing her life, and there’s something to be said for the work of a writer in getting us there.

It is easy to find redemption in a world with a guaranteed ‘happy’ ending. It is difficult when you live on an Island where monsters are trying to kill you, starve you, psychologically torture you, tear you apart.

That is not — I refuse to believe — an issue of me “not understanding” that Lost is about characters. Loving characters, like loving actual people, is about the actual thread of relationships, not the immateriality and inconsequentiality of the details of those threads. Trust me: I’m not enraged because I “didn’t get answers” or some other issue of “not getting what the writers were going for.” I get it. But it wasn’t where they started, and it wasn’t where they took us, and there is a line between “The ultimate questions on this show aren’t about science fiction” and “Most of what you watched had no bearing on the ultimate questions.” And there is a line between “a show about characters developing and growing” and “a show where the happy ending comes before characters apply the lessons they’ve learned.”

There’s also, of course, no way to separate plot and characters, so to say that those of us who were interested in the mystery were “missing the point” is to, well, miss a large part of our point. Mysteries are fascinating because they have effects on character, and because there’s something terrifying or confusing or amazing or beautiful about forces you can’t explain which nevertheless act upon you. What happened on the Island was, yes, quite often very sci-fi in its elements, but there’s a reason that sci-fi has its own tropes: these questions of Why can’t women on the Island become mothers? and Why was Walt considered so very special? and How does Jacob protect you? and Was Ben ever following orders, or was he a homicidal egomaniac the entire time? are, of course, about “character” as much as they are about “plot.”

More succinctly, the issue isn’t not getting answers. I didn’t want “an explanation” of the Island, because how could that ever have been satisfying? I’m not, for example, complaining about not knowing what happened next to Kate, Sawyer, Claire, Lapidus, Miles, and Richard — that’s how life works, after all: people don’t have nice, neat little endings after something television-worthy happens to them. What they did with the Island, leaving it a bit open, was cool, and like real life where you don’t actually get cut-and-dried meanings all the time — why didn’t they also do that with the idea of redemption? Why make it so open-and-shut, you-must-believe-this-or-the-show-has-been-a-waste? The issue is being handed (and I use that word deliberately, because it’s so easy to tell your audience that this is how your fictional universe works rather than to show us consistently over a number of years) one ultimate answer to end all answers. Lack of answers? Not the same as directly contradictory answers.

The issue I take is with being told, directly and indirectly, that the picky details matter — that you need to see the Dharma label on the shark, that you need to play the audio backwards to hear Ghost Walt say “Don’t push the button, the button’s bad,” that you need to participate in the summer internet game and buy a copy of Bad Twin in order to have the full story and understand the Hanso foundation, that you need to know that a bird shouted Hurley’s name in the jungle one time — for six years, and then having the answer literally be “You shouldn’t care about those answers, just THIS answer.”

Melissa McEwan says all of this very, very well:

The emphasis on explaining the sideways timeline seemed disproportionate…? It was presented almost like a resolution to the whole show, but it was really just some tangential plot arc that ultimately doesn’t matter to the main story, unless you’re someone who wants to know what happened to all the characters after they died.

We could have had a happy ending without having — and you know what I mean here — The Ultimate Happy Ending. And we could have had this ending at any point; you can make the ending to any story, “And then they died, but went to an afterlife and lived happily ever after,” and it doesn’t matter at all what came before. When you’ve written a beginning and a middle that don’t lead to your end, and an ending that could be written in precisely the same way regardless of what you wrote before it, you have not written a tale, you have placed your characters in a circumstance.

The “everyone gets a do-over” happy ending is, to me, totally cheesy. You can disagree! But I also am not particularly sure that I can get on board that this was a happy ending for everyone. The actual, real Aaron, who is a person, doesn’t get the same agency as Claire? Boone, because his character was never paired off in the time before the writers wrote out his character, has to hang out in heaven all alone but Sayid and Shannon who went out for, what, two weeks, are apparently the greatest love story ever told? If I ever conquer a smoke monster and discover that my reward is an eternity with someone I may have had a crush on for a few weeks back in the late 90s, I’m going to be an unhappy camper.

At some point, the entire internet decided not to even think about Purgatory as an option. Thinking that something purgative was going on became the joke you made about noobs. And so it never occurred to me that the flash sideways was some kind of The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe Sixth Sense Titanic What Dreams May Come Purgatory Star Wars Matrix deus ex machina. It simply didn’t come up! Nobody was going to say the purgatory word.

I’m also not really a big fan of the love story that doesn’t involve any work, where people are just Meant To Be Together and it doesn’t matter how they actually behave or treat each other once that has been decreed by an author, a creator. In what universe is it more important how you are placed and arranged in the world than how you treat the people with whom you share it?

Amy put it to me very well, I think: it turned out that being on an Island, an Island that attracts transport vessels of all kinds, where there is time travel and zombification and an evil syndicate of scientific researchers and a Frozen Donkey Wheel which, when turned, dumps you in Tunisia, and a temple, and two immortal beings who sometimes make their friends immortal too, and whispers and apparitions in the woods? That was the real, everyday, normal world, so the details don’t really matter — just distractions on the way to an afterlife. The supernatural part was Jack having a normal life with a kid, a career, and a decided lack of substance abuse. What are we to take from that? Is it a commentary on our need for stories, our use of science fiction, our cultural narrative in which we are all embedded? Or was it not actually a high-level commentary at all, and rather just a way out of a twisted story with no possible resolution?

I’m not saying that there wasn’t a single moment that I liked, or that I wasn’t smiling for much of the 2.5 hours, or that Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson don’t rock, or that I’m not totally in love with the explanation that Eloise is choosing to draw things out so that she can have more time with Daniel, or that everything was a waste of time. That wouldn’t be fair of me. All I ask is the same consideration in return: I’m not going to dwell, in picayune detail, on every moment that might have been cool or nice or a wonderful, long time coming, when the ultimate message I was asked to accept was that, “Don’t worry! Don’t be sad! Eventually, anything you lose comes back to you.”

And, of course, I’m not going to say that everything makes perfect sense even if you do accept this last-minute framing device — why does Desmond get to “decide” when, say, Jack is ready to move on to his own afterlife, but that Ana Lucia and Daniel aren’t? If it’s your afterlife, and you have to decide when your ready, why does Kate get to literally point you in the direction of your dead father? Beyond that, I truly and honestly think that in some cases — Kate and Jack, Juliet and Sawyer — we’re supposed to agree, “Yes, of course they were the most important people in each other’s lives, and this is a fitting companionship for a daytrip to heaven” — and in the cases where it doesn’t make sense — Shannon and Sayid (maybe – I know people might disagree), Locke and Helen, the existence of Ji Yeon and Desmond and Penny’s little Charlie, etc. — we’re seriously being asked to pretend not to notice. Is there a real, physical person named David who ever exists? If not, what a cruel joke on Jack and Juliet who now have to live in eternity without him, and if so why was he hanging out with Juliet and Jack in purgatory instead of with whoever his actual parents are? Did they really even commit to this storyline with the whole oh-seriously-it-could-be-ANY-spirituality-for-realsies-please-believe-us-and-don’t-be-offended copout (by the way, if you are with me on the anti-finale train, I highly suggest checking out the Lifetime, Wow! entry on the finale which contains a spot-on joke about Jack and a Prius)? Why was Kate’s life, Sayid’s life, in the purgatory stage so similar to their real lives, but other characters’ were so different? What is so different about what happened with Michael that leaves him “stuck” on the Island while others move on (I mean, I get that he did bad things, but are those things that different from Ben? Sayid? KEAMY? Juliet before she became one of the Losties? The only difference I can see is that Harold Perrineau left the show)? If the whole “flash-sideways” was actually an in-between world that existed only for the characters, and only for them to work things out and pass to the other side, then, um, why were we shown the Island at the bottom of the ocean in the premiere, which, first of all, had no bearing on the characters and, secondly, doesn’t really make sense in a narrative framing device where there’s no third-person omniscience? And really, honestly, the electromagnetism thing that has framed the entire show from beginning to almost-end had no significance, only somehow Desmond’s powers are related both to that and to being able to hop back and forth from the afterlife?

When I watch it again, I’ll be happy for the happy ending, because that does serve a purpose for the audience, if not (in my opinion) for the story. For my last entry, I want to end simply. Thank you for reading. This might be the best way to go out, and to capture what it is that I think just happened.

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