So I spent the better part of a few nights watching all six seasons of LOST. I shared some of my early insights on the show here and here. I still maintain it is the best show ever created for television, largely because its about the deepest of human experiences. The entire show was about how we wrestle with our own judgments of good and evil. How can we be good, when we create so much evil?
(Some spoilers ahead)
The finale was Sunday and a few of us got together to watch it. My immediate thought was that it was satisfying. But as my friend Rich said to me, “It was emotionally rewarding but intellectually unsatisfying.” You could honestly say that much of the six seasons didn’t actually matter given the way it ended. My first thought was, “People could say this is a really big version of the movie Sixth Sense.”
The show was ultimately about wrestling with death. What happens when we die but we’re not really ready to die? That space could be described as hell or purgatory. Is there a place where we come to terms with that? Is it an island that we can’t escape from? In hindsight, all of the really weird stuff like monsters and polar bears made sense. It was all part of their imaginative construct. The island was a place to wrestle with the drama of our conflict. I remember in Season 3 wondering if I would stick with the show because there was so much of it.
In the sixth season I honestly thought Jacob was the central character of the show. And I still maintain that the show as in many ways Jacob wrestling with the angel. The similarities were just too obvious for me. Yet the war was really within Jack Shephard. I would suggest that Jacob was really wrestling himself in the tent. I appreciated how the writers used the historical references to philosophy and science. Yet none of that really made a difference in the end. Jack need six seasons to wrestle with himself.
What did you think of the finale?
