home columns Original binnallofamerica.com Audio the United States of Esoterica merchandise contact

Light and Love
(My Thoughts on the LOST finale)

Bookmark and Share

I am behind on writing my column here at BoA. I recently took a two week vacation that has left me tired and behind at work. In the meantime, I want to take this opportunity to write a quick note to express my thoughts on the "Lost" series finale.

I've been reading feedback from viewers on different websites and most of them loved it. People are pretty satisfied with the finale and polls also display positive results.

Personally, I was afraid that "Lost" would suffer the same fate as the X-Files towards the end and I am sad to realize that I was right. The Lost finale was the most unoriginal episode I have ever seen. I don't regret watching Lost at all. They developed pretty original mysteries, but I was expecting an end that would at least match the level of previous episodes.

Instead, they chose to drive it towards the ‘light and love' constant that I lately see in a lot of movies. The first thing that came to my mind was the movie "Passengers," where people didn't know they were dead and they were slowly moving on. At the end, the star of the movie remembers her life (similar to Jack's revelation) and her relationship with the people she was seeing in her alternate reality.

Similar approach was used on X-Files when they ended the mystery of Samantha (Fox Mulder's abducted sister). Samantha was the core of Mulder's motivation towards UFO investigations and, at the end, they chose to close that mystery by showing that Samantha was dead all that time. Very disappointing indeed!

I understand that maybe it is not appropriate to answer every single mystery in a show, but I think that "answering nothing at all" is also not appropriate! Unfortunately, the latter case applied to Lost.

Lets start with one little thing. In one of the episodes I saw, the UMMO sign engraved in one of the trees and I kept the hope that, at some point in future episodes, they would show how this was connected to the story in an unexpected way. Silly me! Not even the most important mysteries developed on the show were answered and some of the mysteries had a pretty pathetic origin (like Jacob, his brother and mother, and the smoke monster).

They had this abnormal electromagnetic source in the island that caused all kind of anomalies. From time travel to electrical systems failure and they did nothing to explain any of it. In the end, it was just a light that everybody was trying to study and nobody knew what it was. When Desmond went to the core of the light, the mystery of the black smoke died with it. It didn't make any sense at all!

I also found confusing that last scene (of the plane crash). I thought that the rest of the group also died trying to escape once Jack restored the island back to its normal state (causing the regular abnormal activity).

People are very excited speculating what the writers were thinking and if it meant this or that. Viewers are developing more complex stories than the same writers IMO. For me, I think Occam's razor (the simplest solution is usually the correct one). I think the writers just went for the easy way out by avoiding having to explain the countless mysteries they created throughout the years. But that's just my personal opinion.


Page Design & Layout by Marla Peña