So a Priest, a Rabbi, a Muslim Cleric and a Pagan walk into an island…

I watched every episode of LOST.  I came in late,  I had to watch season one and two on DVD,  and since then I have watched it real time.  If I missed an episode I watched it the next day online.  Last night I watched the last 105 minutes of the show.  For those wondering, those 105 minutes were surrounded by 45 minutes of commercials.  I did like the Target commercial.. the first time,  the second time I wanted to cock punch it.

I thought it weird that they announced the extra time a few months back.  I think I read that the producers were happy that ABC gave them an extra 30 minutes to wrap things up.  By my count a normal one hour drama runs for about 43 minutes,  meaning 17 minutes of commercial breaks per hour long show.  So the producers got some extra time,  but under 20 minutes,  in return, we got excessive commercials.

What did that extra time buy for me?  Not much.

LOST started out as a mystery,  and most people think it is fine that it ended a mystery.  Those people cried at the end,  with every sweet little moment that revealed dead characters connections to each other in their past life.  Yeah,  sounds douchey to me too.  I keep reading and hearing comments such as “If you did not cry you did not get it”  or “It is what life is really about.”

Fucktards you all!  This is not life,  this is a TV show.  I came closer to crying when BA got shot on the A-Team then I did last night watching LOST.  I have no problem with someone telling me they liked the show,  it was well acted, the dialogue was good and it had some nice moments.  The problem lay in the overall storytelling and the comments made by the shows creators.

LOST started out as a great Sci-fi mystery.  While not quite reality it was grounded in reality it allowed for speculation as to what was happening.  I was one of the people that said “It is purgatory,  they are dead and they are making their choices for the afterlife.”  The writers and creators discounted that theory.   When they said it was not purgatory I shifted to watching it with the belief that while there was a religious and spiritual element,  the story itself was more straightforward.

Last night the writers farted in my general direction by bending this little comment and making the  flash sideways purgatory.  Jesus.. err Christian Shepard, told us all about it.  That the people in the church were all dead, some of them died before Jack,  some of them after.  They all met there though,   to move on together, because what happened on the island was meaningful to them,  the island was the only thing that mattered.

So how did the creators lie?  The island was not purgatory,   the island was a real place,  what happened there was the reality of the characters,  the flash sideways was purgatory and not a literal world. From the LOST website on ABC:

A flash sideways is not a flashback, flash-forward or an alternate timeline. It posits what would have happened if Oceanic flight 815 didn’t crash on the island but instead landed in Los Angeles.

Interesting.  They said it is what would happen if the flight did not crash.  So this spiritual world was somehow effected by the bomb going off?

In this article we find out that season six  is:

…about the implications, the aftermath, and the causality of trying to change the past. But the idea of continuing to do paradoxical storytelling is not what we’re interested in this year.

This means the bomb went off and season 6 is about the consequence of setting off that bomb.  If the bomb went off everyone on the island died at that moment,  which would explain the landing in LA storyline.  It does not explain anything else.

Let’s say seasons one through five show what  really happened on the island.  Time travel,  hatches, and smoke monsters.  Season six’s island does not exist.  Those characters are dead from the “real world”.  The season six island is as much of a purgatory as the safe landing world.  This means that early on,  when the creators said it was not purgatory they were being honest, but the only way for them to get to the place they wanted to be was to turn it into one.

If I had watched the show with never having seen or read an interview with the creative talent behind the show I would have had a different outlook on the show,   however I did see and read interviews.  There was a LOST mania and you could not escape it if you were mildly interested in the show.

The final season dumped it’s sci-fi world and took on a philosophical and religious one.  I cannot view this season as anything other than two different takes on life after death.  One of them about resurrection and redemption and one of them about good verses evil.

The island in the spiritual world appears to have been the Garden of Eden in some form.  While the story of Cain and Abel is there in Smokey and Jacob,  they twisted it and simplified it.  Smokey was not doomed to wander the Earth for eternity,  but instead to only wander the island, the one place he despised.  He wanted to leave,  but was not able to,  his punishment for killing his mother.  There is a failure here,  in that he was released from the island in the end.  His death was a release from his prison,  which is why in the Bible the whole “visited upon them seven times” thing came in to effect.  Congrats Jack and crew,  you released the monster from his prison.

Anyways,  they are all dead.  The show is over.  Fade to black.  Shake the snow globe.  Have BJ Hunnicutt spell out “goodbye”.