Taylerama

“All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The “Lost” Finale did not disappoint me. In fact, it ended exactly as I thought it would, as I thought it HAD to end.

I’m not bragging. I’m not saying that I successfully decoded the show’s myriad runes into a solution confirmed by the final two-and-a-half hours. My point is that I never really tried.

I watched every single episode of “Lost,” and, like most of the show’s fans, vacillated between befuddled awe and toe-tapping on an almost weekly basis. But I was never one of the geeks who could point out something blurry in the back corner of a freeze-frame that made the adjacent corner of an episode three seasons ago a grand philosophical revelation that tied into a book on a shelf in the Hatch. I couldn’t get through one of Doc Jensen’s EW.com columns without skimming through the bits about quantum mechanics and all the college philosophy I’d forgotten. I didn’t spend six seasons agonizing over what the Island “is” (um, it’s … an Island) or “meant” (um, it means … it’s an Island). To echo something Noel Murray said in his excellent AV Club review this morning, I enjoyed “Lost’s” various mysteries more for the mood they created — the unease, the fear, the awe — than for their portents of a grand eschatology that was bound to disappoint 99% of its audience.

 
On that level, I’m selling both the show and those obsessed fans short. The genius of “Lost” — what made it unique despite its giddy cribbings from various other media — was how it teasingly invited that kind of intense, participatory scrutiny. The show’s traditional action/adventure/drama/comedy/sci-fi elements were configured like a puzzle whose pieces and rules kept shifting on the whims of the writers’ imaginations. Each new configuration presented a new puzzle somehow related, or not, to the old puzzles. And puzzles are meant to be solved, right?

As episodes adhered to, veered from, or ignored alltogether fans’ voluminous BB hypothesizing, those fans began to feel a new kind of ownership of the show. “Lost” wasn’t just TV — it was a toy to be played with, analyzed, figured out, and in some ways, influenced. When the fans didn’t like characters, they died. When fans grew tired of waiting for answers, the show announced a 3 year plan, not unlike a politician laying out policy to appease voters. When theories about “what it all means” began to codify, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof made cryptic pronouncements that cast new shadows. ABC’s ingenious multimedia marketing (the hidden ads, the webisodes, the Easter Egg hunts) only enhanced this feeling of creative input, of an unprecedented give and take between the viewer and the viewed. 

If “Lost” was the ultimate You-Tube generation TV program, that somewhat illusory viewer-creators relationship also roused the worst of our On-Demand times. We all know people who gave up on the show after Season 1 because they got tired of waiting to find out “what it all is.” And, ironically, even some of “Lost’s” staunchest fans demanded quick answers from a show that, time and time again, told us that in this life there are none. I’d say positive-negative reaction to the Finale I’ve read on Twitter and EW.com is split between people who enjoyed “Lost” on a more emotional level (talk about how teary they got when Sawyer and Juliet reunited, etc.) and those who got a little, um, lost in the puzzle (I wasted six years and never found out: insert Island mystery here). If “Lost,” its writers, and its network kept insisting (joking) that “Lost” was some kind of game, then there would always be a subset of fans determined to “win.”

Thing is, “Lost” wasn’t a puzzle. It was a TV show, and the less-inclined you were to treat it like a Rubik’s Cube, the less infuriating it was. No possible answer to a question like “What is the Island?” could ever be satisfying. For proof, look at the Jacob-Man in Black episode from a few weeks back. At the end of last season we already knew that the entire history of “Lost” was a kind of chess game between Jacob and the MIB that had gone on through the ages. How exactly and why exactly were a mystery, but you could infer they’d had a falling out, Jacob wanted to control the Island for good, and the MIB wanted to control it for evil. After seeing the Jacob-MIB episode, don’t you wish that subplot had remained mysterious? Were the answers worth it? Along the same lines, everyone hated last season’s episode in which Eloise Hawking explained how Dharma finds the Island with a giant spinning top on a string. And yet we need more answers, right now? Really?

The common argument is that if the explanations are lame or incomplete then it’s the writing’s fault. Maybe. Or maybe, just maybe, the same fan devotion that made “Lost” such a singular phenomenon also chinked it creatively. “Lost” was built to provoke, entertain, confound, inspire even. The show was at its worst when providing just the kinds of explanations some fans craved, so much so that those episodes often played like perfunctory concessions rather than organic storytelling. If “Lost” premieres just 5 years earlier, before your grandmother has a Facebook group for bitching about Nikki and Paulo, I bet right now we’d be looking back at a show with a lot more blank spaces in the margins. There’s nothing more fickle than a sci-fi fanbase — just ask NBC. Other recent geek epics like “Buffy” and “Battlestar Galactica” didn’t have to contend with the balance sheets at a major network. You don’t think part of that 3 year plan included discussions on throwing fans a bone before they got bored and moved on to something else? 

Hell, let’s be a little more cynical: the Finale left a big, gaping, 50 or 60-year hole in the “Lost” mythology. If I told you I had a movie, or a “TV Event,” about Hurley’s time as Island guardian that we could use to sell some “Lost” holo-discs 5 years down the road, is that something you might be interested in?

So the Finale left a lot of questions unanswered and posed a few more for good measure. Isn’t that what the puzzle people loved about the show in the first place? You’d really be happy if Team “Lost” had snuffed out all your precious imaginings one-by-one with contrivances and expositions? You’re done playing?

What “Lost” did instead was what I’d hoped it would do: it gave each of its characters a warm send-off, winked at the fans, and concluded with everyone hugging in a Unitarian church. OK, maybe not the last one, although that has to be the UUs’ greatest pop culture moment since Ralph Waldo Emerson. Again, less would have been more. Cut Christian’s speech by half and the whole final scene could have been … Well, maybe not quite good, exactly, but a lot better, no? Wouldn’t it have been more fun to INFER that the Sideways World was some kind of Purgatory and debate whether it was real or the Island was real or neither or both or whatever? Be careful what you wish for. Or what you CLAMOR FOR IN ALL CAPS ON ABC.COM.

Here’s a word you don’t hear often when talking about series finales: understated. “Lost” folded neatly into itself without any mind-blowing or potentially series-ruining final twist. “The End” wasn’t as conclusive as “Buffy’s” finale or “The Wire’s,” but it also wasn’t a high-concept cop-out like “The Sopranos’” infamous cut to black. It didn’t tell us what the Island “is” or “means,” but it contained dozens of the moments at which “Lost” excelled: moments of human connection, of tenderness and warmth in which people brought out the best in each other. 

Before “Lost” became a duel between Jacob and the Man in Black, it was a duel between Jack and Locke, between the head and the heart. Last night, the heart won. In art, that’s usually best.