This week we said goodbye to the survivors of Oceanic 815 and all the other lost souls of “Lost.” I was a big fan. I see there has been a lot of discussion on the net about the finale, much of it very wrong-headed in my opinion. So here are my thoughts on what we saw.
Most importantly, the survivors were not dead all this time. My evidence for this is a) the producers said so a couple of seasons back and b) otherwise the story doesn’t make sense. There were characters like Ben, Desmond and Juliet who were not on the flight and had their own histories. They were not only seen through the eyes of the survivors. The last shot of wreckage on the beach was the plane carrying Kate, Sawyer & Co.
The sideways alternate universe was some sort of afterlife or more precisely, the anteroom to it. Jack was the last one to realize it, but then he was usually the last one to realize a lot of things. And since it was the afterlife it was outside of time which is why there was no “now” there and people like Hurley who presumably died long after Jack were there.
The polar bear: the Dharma Initiative did animal experiments. You’ll remember the comment when Sawyer and Kate were locked in cages about how much faster the bear figured out how to get food from the machine. The Dharma Initiative was just what it said it was, an organization trying to tap into and exploit the energy at the heart of the island. This is why Jacob (we can assume) had them all killed when they got too close, to protect the island.
It was a great series about grand themes: sin and redemption, the power of love, the overarching need and supreme difficulty of letting go. None of the characters was untainted. Even Hurley told a lie toward the end. But all at the end rose above their flaws to achieve something magnificent – which can also be said of this series. How wonderful it was to have a show that didn’t insult our intelligence. I suspect it will be a long time before we have that again.
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