Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, the writer-producers in charge of Lost, did the right thing with the big finale. To repeat a line uttered by John Locke during last night’s episode, a line spoken earlier this season by the character Juliet Burke: “It worked.”

To be sure, Lindelof and Cuse gave their fans a puzzling, ambiguous ending in the form of the elegiac, 20-minute sequence that punctuated the six-season series; but they also came up with a fitting last chapter that makes enough sense not to be considered a cheat or an evasion.


The reaction was split in my household. My younger son, a diehard fan, age 12, stormed off the couch at 11:30 p.m., further expressing his displeasure by slamming his bedroom door. He returned to say, in so many words, that he was disappointed that the show hadn’t tied up its wild plot strands; maybe he was hoping for a more rousing and settled conclusion; furthermore, I think, he was saddened by the sight of Dr. Jack Shephard’s breathing his last in the bamboo, with the dog Vincent lying beside him as he died. It’s always a killer, when they bring out the dog, and I wasn’t sure if that move was a cheap shot or not. On the other hand, a dog’s opinion of someone’s death (sad but accepting) seems like a worthwhile thing to think about. My 12-year-old son also may have been transforming his sadness over Jack’s death into anger and frustration with the show’s writers, in the same way that fans of Sherlock Holmes were pissed at Arthur Conan Doyle when he killed off his most famous character.

Although she didn’t storm away from the TV in a huff, my wife was also not so thrilled with the ending. She felt the writers had copped out. My older son, age 15, watched the finale at a friend’s house among those of his kind (fellow teenagers). When he got back, we asked him what he thought, and he said he didn’t want to talk about it. My wife looked at me and said, “Who’s he—you?” This was a reference to the fact that, on our first real date, back in 1984, I had refused to discuss the movie we had just seen together (Paris, Texas), telling her, self-importantly, that I didn’t want to ruin it by analyzing it, or some such sophomoric crapola (I was 20), which I probably threw out there as a way of trying to seem deep and mysterious. It didn’t work; I still haven’t heard the end of it.

Anyway, as dumb a kid as I might have been back in 1984, I still understood my older son’s mute reaction: the final minutes of Lost had taken us into irrational territory; and talking about that stuff, as I’m doing now, does indeed detract from the experience somewhat. It’s like new peanut butter. When you twist off the lid the first time, the surface looks so pretty and perfect; if you want to eat it, however, you have to stick the knife in, thereby destroying what’s pretty about it. So, yeah, talking about the ending of Lost, like I’m doing now, will inevitably ruin it, to some degree, but it’s the only way we’ll get to eat it.

So what happened? In a nutshell, this: At the end of last season, the main characters set off a hydrogen bomb on the island, which seemingly blasted them out of the 1970s and back to the year 2007. All during the final season, I had been under the false impression that the bomb-detonation had created the alternate universe the show’s minders have labeled the “flash-sideways” world. In this strange realm, the plane crash that had brought the show’s characters together had never occurred; and in this “flash-sideways” place, they kept running into one another while going about their slightly more humdrum lives in Los Angeles.


The Lost finale’s biggest reveal was that the “flash-sideways” world was a collective dream; it was a false reality whose purpose was to reassemble the show’s characters and then wake them up to what had been the most important part of their lives: the time they had spent on the island, when they had all found true love, discovered their purposes in life, and worked on rising above their personal flaws. Jack, for instance, went from being a too-skeptical, busybody-ish man of science to a more accepting and more loving man of faith; Ben Linus little by little morphed from a cruel, murderous, and power-mad dictator into someone worthy of redemption; Hugo “Hurley” Reyes made the trip from a young man beaten about by bad circumstances and an accompanying low sense of self-worth to someone whose lovable qualities finally had an outlet. And so on. (The show’s female characters, sad to say, pretty much found, via their island experiences, that they could have babies or find the right man.) What happened on the magical island was indeed real; the “flash-sideways” world was but a dreamlike, purgatory-like zone the characters had to pass through in order to realize what the island and its tests had meant to them.

To get from point A of the Lost pilot to point B of the Lost finale, the show’s writers, under the direction of Lindelof and Cuse, served up, to my mind, three seasons of mostly great TV. After that, they sputtered and wheezed from time to time; they moved in fits and starts; they concocted dud episodes and crazy complications that went nowhere. At times the series sank to the level of bad soap opera, weighed down further by the it-is-your-destiny clichés of sci-fi and fantasy; but the show-runners also managed to mix in enough cool stuff along the way that they should be given a break for flinging all that preposterous material at us. If Lost was an Olympic diver, it would deserve credit from the judges for the difficulty of the dives it attempted. This was a hugely ambitious series with great characters; it was a glorious mess that will prove to be, at the very least, an interesting artifact of the 00s decade it chronicled in crabwise fashion. And I don’t believe Lindelof and Cuse stuffed the Lost universe with too many characters and out-of-control events in an effort to misdirect the audience; they came up with all this stuff simply for the pleasure of flexing their creative muscles; they behaved more like mischievous kids given millions of dollars and access to a major television network than like cynical con artists who merely wanted to toy with their fans.

Lost has always seemed like an ensemble show, but the more you look at it, the more it’s really the story of Dr. Jack Shephard. It begins with him running around the beach, trying to save the lives of his fellow plane-crash victims, and it ends, more or less, with his death amid the green bamboo stalks. Before he collapses and smiles up at the sky like the fallen Prince Andrei Nikolayevich in War and Peace, he realizes that the thing he had finally believed was his true purpose—to inherit guardianship of the island from the demigod Jacob—was not actually his ultimate role; that responsibility should fall to the saintly Hurley. Jack was just the guy dirty enough to pull off the job of killing the Smoke Monster, the one physically daring enough to shove that big phallic rock back into the hole at the bottom of the world to keep the island’s magic from leaking away.


This morning, on the way to school, my younger son was a little less upset with the ending. He asked me what I thought, and I said, “I think the writers pulled a Jacob on us.” I was referring to the way the island’s local god always seemed to answer the human characters’ questions with still more questions; by placing the audience in confusion in those last 20 minutes of the show, Lindelof and Cuse were forcing us to play the role Jack has so often played throughout the run of the show: he comes up against something irrational, which he cannot accept, and yet he must accept it. As Hurley said about Jacob in last night’s episode, “He’s worse than Yoda, dude.”

So what about all the loose ends? Were they tied up? Did the plot, in the end, make sense? Not really. In this regard, Lost reminds me of another incomprehensible and overeventful hare-brained masterpiece, The Big Sleep, the 1946 film directed by Howard Hawks. While working on that picture, Hawks and his writers, who included William Faulkner, realized the story, ostensibly a murder mystery from a book by Raymond Chandler, had gotten so complicated and loopy that it was impossible to figure who did it. Hawks’s solution was to make each scene as entertaining as possible; whether it added up in the end didn’t make much difference to him. As he told Peter Bogdanovich in an interview, “It didn’t matter at all. All we were trying to do was to make every scene entertain. I can’t follow the story.... But the picture turned out to be very good from an audience standpoint. And it disarmed the critics because they were trying to be as smart as the fellow in the picture and they ended up being no smarter.” Hawks added, talking further about the film’s lack of resolution, “Making this picture, I realized that you don’t really have to have an explanation for things. As long as you make good scenes you have a good picture—it doesn’t matter if it isn’t much of a story.”

I kinda doubt Lindelof and Cuse had the battle between Jacob and the Man in Black in their minds when they were laying out the beats of Season One. But for all its flaws, excesses, sentimentality, and instances of over-the-top silliness and grad-student hocus-pocus, Lost was a great ride while it lasted.


RELATED “Lost in Lost” blogger Mike Ryan reacts to the final episode.