LOST
****-
At the end of the third season of LOST viewers were treated to a last-minute reveal that turned the entire series on it's head. The revelation of a flash-forward brought the show into an entirely new dimension, and as far as twists go, put the show well on par with some of the greatest last minute turn-arounds in storytelling. That said, narrative devices only mainly served to compliment the characters, who we eventually started to really care about. With the needs of the characters in focus, LOST finally brought to the viewers it's greatest conclusion, and while a mind-bending reveal was attempted, it predictably fell short to the high tastes of LOST's audience.
The biggest question in the minds of most people was always, "What's the deal?" We wanted a clear understanding of what the smoke monster was, how it functioned, what the island was, how the island functioned, and what role the characters played in this.
Spoiler. We learned the smoke monster was a guy turned into an evil deity, the island was an obstruction against evil being released out into the world, and a certain select number of flight passengers were called to the island to keep the evil bottled up there.
In this revelation, LOST turned to solutions in the form of mysticism rather than to scientific deductions, even though some say the show might have hinted at the latter from the beginning. Some will note the religious parallels the show was playing with. Like with the Matrix trilogy however, you can only cram together so many religious and philosophical outlooks until the story needs to revise it's thesis. Perhaps the secrets of the island, like Richard Kelley's film The Box, can only offer themselves to be explained by Clarke's third law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
The most interesting question remaining from LOST is the notion of a first mover or a first cause. Something must have placed the island there, with all of it's maintenance obligations and problems, for a purpose. Notions from the Book of Revelations are drawn in, in which the earth will open up and release evil for the last time before it is vanquished for good. Maybe the island is such a place. But maybe. With this remaining maybe however, God is effectively placed into LOST's equations. Salvation is still depicted, although probably flawed, considering that LOST explains the "moving on" of it's characters from the mid-post-life to the eternal, for the sake of them doing good things. It does make note however that the individuals must first come to terms with their flaws and lift up or "let go" of their previous transgressions before gaining admittance to, what we can only assume to be, heaven.
There's a lot to think about. For a LOST finale it's what I expected. The presentation of a "we were dead all along" twist was perhaps given to us with a hand too heavy. It could only have been worse if they were all just imaginings of a schizophrenic mind. Thankfully, that wasn't the case. I will be daring enough to say that without the scene nearing the finale where Jack confronts his dead father, the show might have been benefited. For one, it would have been one less scene with the sole purpose of exposition. For another, and maybe this is just me, I would have been okay with some things staying a mystery. Besides, by this point I think the LOST series should have been confident enough with the intelligence of the viewers to understand on their own what was really going on. Instead now the viewers are left to speculate over the possible plot holes or contradictions left gaping open behind them. Still, this episode was all about moving on. And so with that, I'm ready to move on to the next mystery.
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