I don’t watch Lost. Well, correction - I didn’t watch Lost.
More corrections: I TRIED to watch Lost, but got … lost. Like no one has said that phrase before, sheesh.
I remember the promos for the pilot, and because I’m a sucker for a good promo, I watched the first few episodes.
“Oh. Marvelous. Gilligan’s island meets Passions”
Like I was with Prison Break, I just couldn’t see how they’d make it past 3 seasons - tops. (With Prison Break, I mean.. how they got past 2 is beyond me. Dude wants brother out of prison, dude goes to prison just to get brother out, dude breaks them out of prison. The end, no? NO! They managed to do BASICALLY that same thing for FOUR seasons - and my husband managed to get through them all)
So after a little over half of the first season, my A.D.D. skills turned me elsewhere. Then, bored one night during Lost’s 3rd season, I fell into an episode. Luckily, I found a ladder and climbed out because MAN did it not make any sense. I specifically remember writing the show off after that episode. I figured it’d come out to be one of those shows that started getting semi-weird and then take a turn towards We All Need Mental Help Ville, and if I’ve learned anything it’s to not get vested in those shows because soon they will be cancelled.
I was wrong.
So season 4 rolls around and I caught another episode or 2 and I stopped and thought “not happening”. I hated the stupid thing. It made NO FREAKING SENSE. None!
Friends of mine were hooked - this was their crack and they’d all moved from smoking it to shooting it up by this point. Facebook convo’s, tweets, blogs and I’m vomiting mentally.
Fast-forward (pun!) to last night. I decide to watch the series finale for a few reasons:
1) I wanted to be all “lol your show sucked!”
2) I figured if it ended badly, I’d laugh for a good 10 minutes.
3) If it ended well, maybe some of those episodes I watched would MAKE SOME SENSE, which would be nice.
4) Because I love social media, and being in “the know” with “happenin’ things”.
I watched.
And yes, I did laundry during some parts, and finished a blog post, and GASP! TURNED AWAY A FEW TIMES FOR ARMY WIVES. ::Lost fans COLLAPSE::
HAHAHAHHA.
And then I caught the final 15 minutes. And I got it. I managed to mostly understand what Lost fans had been pining for over 6 years. It was epic, to say the least. SPOILER ALERT::
They all died. In the beginning. As in, the plane crashed and they died. The Island was their limbo, their purgatory. The Others (the natives on the island) were other lost souls. The sideplots and flashbacks and flash-forwards and OtherCrazyTermsOnlyLostFansKnow… well, all of those were just things to keep them from realizing they were gone. They needed to understand their death to move on.
Yes, Lost fans, there’s tons of other stuff in it too like “relationships with one another” and “bonding” and “special ties” and YADDAYADDAYADDA, but the meat of the whole 6 years is in the paragraph above. They were lost, but now they are found and went “into the light”.
BEAUTIFUL, IMO.
What makes this interesting to me is that I don’t like being led on. I’m the person who reads the last 5 pages of a book before starting it. I don’t like surprises. To know, now, how the whole story panned out only makes me want to watch the entire show (and I likely won’t because that’d take a LOT of time).
With exception to other shows, like The Shield and Nip/Tuck, I don’t do “have your head spun in circles for years and then have it all make sense in the last 10 minutes of the series finale” and at least THOSE shows entertained me and provided mini-stories that presented problems and, get this Lost creators, SOLVED THEM FOR ME IN LESS THAN HALF A DECADE.
So yes, I’ll eat some of my words about Lost sucking, because I couldn’t handle 6 years of my brain stuck in a bingo wheel only to be “ok” on the last episode. I’m glad it’s over, but finally get why it was so dang interesting.
**Updated: Ok, Y’all! I get it! Apparently, I’m not TOTALLY right. So as a new summary, let’s add in that at SOME POINT MOST PEOPLE died. And some season, either 5 or 6, was really their limbo? Or something? Either way I feel like the point is that no one is crazy. Yes, you felt crazy watching it, but you were not all in fact just a bunch of psych-ward patients fondling around for loose ends to this show. Something about limbo/purgatory is relevant, and all except one dude found “the light” in the end. Yay.
NOW STOP FREAKING OUT ON ME**
Monday, May 24, 2010 at 9:35PM
Reader Comments (7)
I am so glad you posted this! I was wondering what happened and haven't gotten around to googling it. So thanks. :)
Wow - all dead, huh? That's so crazy. I wanna buy all the seasons and just take a week to watch them all back to back. That would be so awesome. But now that I know how it ended, not sure if it would ruin it. lol.
(I, too, tried watching it 2 years ago, but you know how that goes....)
Same thing here! I watched it until I was too lost! ;-)
But you summed it up really well! I've tried reading recaps but they were too confusing! You put it right to the point! THANKS! :-)
What new TV shows are you eying for this summer?
Well that's sortof right. I was with you, not wanting to like LOST because it was so convoluted. But they didn't die in the original crash. This season there was an alternate timeline and that was the one they were dead in. We started last year and watched all 5 seasons in a few months to get ready for season 6. There is a lot left unexplained. I am a fan, albeit late to the party and there is still so much unknown. Anyway, just wanted to clear that up haha.
It would have been so easy if that was all it was, Amanda. But unfortunately, it wasn't quite that simple. I won't bother to explain what I know because I know you don't care, really... but it wasn't that simple. They didn't all die in the original crash and the island was purgatory.
However, I had no interest in the show in the early days. Seriously. I rolled my eyes at people and ignored the show completely for several years. And I love TV, so I do GET the obsession, etc. But I got interested 2 years ago when the conversations of my girlfriends at work started to sound interesting and so we rented the DVDs from Blockbuster online and watched them all, from the beginning back-to-back and LOVED it. It was appealing, interesting, intelligent, etc. (Honestly, I thought it was going to be sort of Survivor meets soap opera and I can't stand reality TV and the idea of watching beautiful people who haven't showered in weeks did not sound appealing to me) so we watch season 5 live and then of course had to watch season 6 live, too. And I stayed up way too late to watch the finale, but it was mostly good, so I dealt with it. :)
like everyone else said, they didn't die in the plane crash. the parallel storyline (flash sideways) was purgatory (ie when they found eachother and touched they suddenly remembered their lives on the island), but the story on the island was supposed to be real life. imo they were stuck in purgatory because they were always supposed to go "home" together.
They all died at whatever point you saw them die on show, ie Jack died in the last 5 minutes on the island from the stab wound. The Season 6 "sideways" world was one all the castaways created themselves so that they could find each other again when they had all died, so that they could "move on" together. It was very beautiful :)
Ummmm I like your version the best because all those other people confused me,
But I've never seen an episode, so whatev.
OMG I read the last page of the book too. My husband HATES IT. I can NOT sit there and wait. And you better believe I open my Christmas presents early too