It’s been 3 days since the Lost finale, I've read a ton of people's arguments on this and other forums, and I think I can see why there is such a disagreement between the finale “lovers” and the “haters”. I don’t think this reason is obvious to most of the people who are ranting from one side or the other. I am in the middle of writing an article for a website about this, and would like to post my thoughts here to get some feedback. The title of the article is, tentatively, “Never Discuss Religion, Politics, or the Lost Finale”.
Fist let me start off by saying (for those of you who haven’t read every post in this forum and haven’t seen my earlier rants) that I am a hater. To me, the ending of Lost was one of the worst finales to any show that I’ve ever seen, and I felt that I had wasted 6 years of my life watching it. While it was ongoing, it was one of my favorite shows ever, I thought the characters were amazingly well written, and the whole mystery of the Island was more interesting than just about any book, movie, or television show I’d ever experienced. After the shock of the ending wore off, I came out on the internet to see what people were saying, and I was shocked to see post after post from people who absolutely loved the ending. To me, and I’m guessing most of the other haters out there, this just did not compute. When asked why they liked the ending, for the most part the lovers said that Lost was about the characters, not the Island, and the way the characters got together at the end was beautiful. The questions about the Island didn’t matter one bit. Well, us haters didn’t like that explanation at all, and the ranting started (and after 3 days is still going strong). Each side tried to sway the other side to their point of view, to no avail; I don’t think I’ve seen one conversation where a hater was changed over to a lover, or vice versa. This is why the title of my article references the old adage “Never discuss religion or politics”. Anyway, here’s part of the article, I’d welcome some (relevant) critiques.
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It took me a couple of days to actually realize just WHY I hated the finale as much as I did. My knee jerk reaction was to automatically generalize the lovers as people who just didn’t understand the point of the show; they just weren’t smart enough to keep up with everything, so they were happy with the sob-fest of the last ten minutes. There has never been a show like Lost, with so much going on week after week, year after year. With a normal show, it’s easy to forget a couple of things that happened a couple of years back. With Lost, and the myriad of information thrown at the viewer every week, unless the viewer had a Rainman-esque memory, there was no way a normal person could possibly retain every twist and turn throughout the show. Yet there were lovers posting the same generalization about the haters, that they were not intelligent enough to understand the ending, and that they just didn’t “get it”. Viewers from each side of the fence seemed to have the same problem understanding why the other side was being so obtuse, and neither side was having any success making converts.
So I decided to stop trying to convert the lovers into haters, and to analyze just exactly what it was that I hated so much. It seemed easy, I wanted answers. First and foremost, what was the Island? What was the BIG SECRET behind it all, why did all of these weird things happen there? From there, I could go down the list, from big questions like why were the numbers important, to little questions like why did that bird say “Hurly” when it flew overhead. Lost was a cultural phenomenon because of these questions, not because of the characters. When everyone gathered around the water cooler the day after a show, they generally weren’t discussing how this character and that character got along, they were discussing sonic fences and time travel, polar bears and Jacob’s cabin. After 6 years of these discussions, to say that none of it mattered seemed to many of us to be incomprehensible. And then I realized what all of us haters were missing, and it came down to one little thing, something that I like to call the “Ah ha” moment. What is the “Ah ha” moment? Well, although I’ve seen this done poorly over the last couple of days (and mainly with Star Wars, for some reason), I think I have the perfect analogy to finally explain to the lovers exactly why I, and I think a lot of other haters, are haters. And it all comes down to The Matrix and the “Ah ha” moment.
Think back to the first time you saw "The Matrix". For about an hour, you watched a man who called himself Neo and a bunch of extraordinary characters do things that made absolutely no sense, and there was nothing that you could think of that could explain what was going on. Starting with Trinity running up a wall, beating the hell out of some cops, and disappearing in a phone booth just as a truck hits it. Then Neo gets a phone call, and the person on the other end of the line knows things that there should be no way for him to know. Things start getting stranger, Neo is taken in by the Agents and it looks like a normal interrogation, and the next thing you know, Neo's mouth seals shut and the Agent puts a bug in his stomach. More and more weird stuff keeps happening, things are making less and less sense, and then Morpheus gives Neo a pill, Neo touches a mirror, the mirror engulfs him....and suddenly, within a few minutes, all the weird, crazy stuff that was going on previously makes perfect sense. Remember the feeling you got when it hit you, when all of that craziness crystallized into perfect sense, and you smiled and nodded your head, maybe looked at your date and both of you said, “Wow” at the same time? OK, maybe it wasn’t that profound for you, but THAT was a perfect “Ah ha” moment. Those 4 or 5 minutes that started out looking like just more insanity completely changed your perspective of everything that happened before in the movie, and nothing more was needed to explain all of the incredible insanity that came after that moment in the movie, and for two more movies.
Now, imagine this. You are watching the same movie, but that 4 or 5 minute scene is not there, and the viewer never gets the information needed to understand what is going on. Let’s make it worse, and delete any other scenes that explain anything about the Matrix. Things just keep getting stranger, suddenly Neo is dodging bullets and fighting with unbelievable Kung Fu. Agents get killed and suddenly come back to life in someone else's body. Neo jumps into one of the Agent’s bodies and it explodes! And in the last scene of the movie, Neo makes a phone call (to whom, we don’t know), tells that someone that he’s going to let everyone know what’s going on, and flies away. THE END! The audience never finds out why any of the incredible stuff that took place happened, they don’t know who is behind it all, but they know there are going to be two more movies. Imagine all of the forums created with guesses as to what the answers are. Now imagine that the second movie comes out, and there are still no answers, and then the third movie comes out, and ends without telling the audience anything about the matrix. Do you think that the same people who hated the finale of Lost would hate The Matrix just as much? Sure, there would be those who loved the movies for the incredible special effects, and I’m guessing there would be those who thought it was all about the characters, and the “matrix” just didn’t matter. But it just wouldn’t be the same. Without that little “Ah ha” moment, you have, well, you have Lost. Except instead of it being three movies, it was six years of questions, over a hundred hours of viewing without that “Ah ha” moment to let the viewer in on the secret.
Thinking this theory through, I realized that with Lost, there was really no way for the writers to successfully create that “Ah ha” moment in the finale. Going back to The Matrix, if the writers had tried to explain everything at the last few minutes of the third movie, I’m sure that there would be some viewers that appreciated it, but I think a majority of viewers would just roll their eyes and think it was something the writers thought up at the last minute to explain everything. The Lost “Ah ha” moment should have been revealed, in my opinion, after the second season cliffhanger, on the first show of the third season. But, it turned out that the Lost writers never even HAD an “Ah ha” moment, which leads me to the secondary reason for the haters to hate. To put it bluntly, we were duped. The viewer was the butt of a horribly long practical joke. And although most of us can take a joke at our own expense, to realize that this particular joke required so much of our own participation, so much of our time and thought, our dedication to be there for an hour every Tuesday night, year after year, that when we realized that we had egg on our faces, for a lot of us it was just too much to take. Had the writers actually come up with an ending that did explain everything, whether it was all a dream, or some scientific explanation, or some mythical/religious explanation, there would of course be plenty of lovers and haters out there, but at least we would have known the answers. We would know WHAT we were mad about. To realize that the writers were just making things up week after week, year after year, with no plans to ever give an explanation insulted the audience’s intelligence, and our trust. Throughout the years, I would be discussing the show with a friend after it was over, and think to myself that the writers were doing an incredible job, that there was no way I could ever do something like that. It turned out that I COULD have done just as good of a job. Definitely not with the character development, but the “mysteries” of the Island turned out to be just anything the writers thought up off the top of their heads, knowing that they would never have to explain anything. Sometimes they would think of a way to fit something together here and there, like the Man in Black and his mother being the skeletons that Jack and Kate found in the cave at the beginning of the series. But it seems to me that these revelations were just happenstance, something that one of the writers realized they could make look like it was all part of some great master plan from the beginning.
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Well, that’s where I’m at with that part of the article. I’d love to hear something similar from the finale lovers, something that would explain to the haters exactly WHY the way the show ended didn’t drive you guys up the wall the way it did us haters. I’m not looking to change anybody’s mind, but hopefully I’ve given the lovers out there a way for them to understand where the haters are coming from, at least the ones who agree with my perspective.
One of the jabs at the haters that I keep hearing from the lovers out there is that, “you want to be spoon fed all of the answers”. This is inaccurate, as shown in the Matrix example, where one 4 or 5 minute scene is enough information to explain everything the viewer needs to know for three full movies. Another view from the lovers that really gets to me is “the show was about the characters, the Island didn’t matter”. I think I speak for most of the haters out there when I say that this is such nonsense that it hardly seems like I should have to explain WHY it is nonsense. I have several paragraphs about this in the article, if I ever get it finished I’ll post the URL for it, if anyone is interested.
Sorry for the super long post, I know how much a lot of you hate this much writing in a forum, I hope some of you made it through.