Lost Season 6 - RE: LA X

"I think they're in purgatory" was the sort of thing people who stopped watching at Season 2 said. It was pretty much the first thing that came into anyone's minds at the start of S1.

Amazingly this managed to be even more mawkish and drawn out than David Tennant blowing up in Dr Who. Some achievement.

Even the alt-timeline as purgatory doesn't make any sense. So they were just wandering around not being able to remember anything and then suddenly they did?

that's not odd at all, there are 2 billion fictional depictions of ghosts/people in the afterlife who don't realize they're dead and go on roaming the earth (or some version of it inside their head) until they realize what's going on and 'find peace' or 'move on' etc.

Is it really purgatory when at least Charlie leaves through that door, he's going to end up back on the main timeline as a ghost?

I bet everyone was waiting around so long for Hurley to die that they just plum forget who they were.

I think all of these are valid questions:

How did Jack get out of the cave of light?
Why would people invent unhappy versions of their lives for the sideways world?
(Why was the sideways afterlife happy for some Losties, but less-than-great for others?)
What killed Ben and Hurley?
Why were some characters at the church, but not others?
How bad do you have to be to get stuck in island whisper purgatory?
Who were the skeletons in the cave with the light?
Why was Desmond chosen to be the link?
Why did MIB turn into the Smoke Monster?
What happened to the rest of the world when the light went out?
(We saw that the island started to shake and crumble into the sea, but wasn't the entire world supposed to be deeply in trouble if the light was extinguished? Wasn't that the whole reason for Jacob spending thousands of years protecting it?)

(It's possible that I've just missed the answers to some of these.)

Also, did we ever know why Desmond had such unique abilities?

i guess the idea, stupid as it is, is that the people in the church were the people that bonded the most on the island? like maybe Ben's years of getting mixed up with the gang and occasionally being an uneasy ally outweighed the couple months Michael spent being the most uptight and alienated castaway?

holy crap this show
i'm all for the *They could have done ANYTHING with all this* argument. why was this not actually a show about time travel and alternate universes and the limits of the human mind/body? because the writers are too dumb. maybe at the beginning, some of them were smart, talented even, and they left or got too drunk and high or just plain lazy and ultimately dumb, thinking that since people just love that reality tv stuff, then why not learn a few writing lessons from it. y'know, because Characters Matter.

getting people to cry isn't hard. getting people to believe in something, way harder.
what sad suckage.

if getting thrown into the cave of light kills you and makes you a smoke monster, and we saw two or three skeletons down in the cave, then there should be two or three other smoke monsters roaming the island. maybe that's who ben and hurley had to protect the island from.

I would have actually preferred a shit ending to the maudlin clip show punctuated with ham-fisted heartstring jerks and oh so clever in jokeyness that we just got.

haven't seen much of the writers on tv interviews etc but the more I do see of them the more I think they just don't have any of the skills that would have been needed to pull off what they stupidly promised. also I hate them.

remember they were supposed to be droppin refs to shit like the third policeman LOL

i also have a feeling that the producers were sharing their stupid juice with the writers

i just wanna spread the hate around to all the right people involved

MiB turned into the smoke monster because of the special properties endowed upon them by their adopted mother? Jack was carried out of the cave by the new wave of water? Sad sideways lives because people like Sayid subconsciously or consciously didn't believe they deserved better?

whatever, really.

I will say I wasn't nearly as flustered by the Sayid/Shannon thing as others were. I can see the reasoning that he was always chasing Nadia because he felt she was the one truly redeeming thing he had ever done, while hooking up with Shannon on the island was when he was actually working towards building something new without all the torture baggage.

(not really 'hate')
xpost

holy crap this show
i'm all for the *They could have done ANYTHING with all this* argument. why was this not actually a show about time travel and alternate universes and the limits of the human mind/body? because the writers are too dumb. maybe at the beginning, some of them were smart, talented even, and they left or got too drunk and high or just plain lazy and ultimately dumb, thinking that since people just love that reality tv stuff, then why not learn a few writing lessons from it. y'know, because Characters Matter.

getting people to cry isn't hard. getting people to believe in something, way harder.
what sad suckage.

― planes/octaves/dimensions of existence (rrrobyn), Monday, May 24, 2010 9:15 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

science: dropped

Regardless, I just didn't think that Sayid's relationship with Shannon had been developed enough for me to even care that they got back together, certainly not enough for me to buy that it could have the transcendent effect that it did. (I did buy Charlie/Claire as being important parts of each other's 'new lives'.)

(xpost to Gukbe)

Maybe the alt is a smoke monster produced when Jack fell in. Smoke monsters can scan brains so inside the smoke monster, there are pockets of scanned brains that interact with each other in smoke-space. When they realize what's up, they can exit the smoke as smoke-poop. If you wanted a secular reading.

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4064/4637049715_1bd10bc7cf_o.jpg

MiB turned into the smoke monster because of the special properties endowed upon them by their adopted mother?

What were these powers though? How do they differ from the power passed on to Jack and Hurley (and Ben?)? Who was the adopted mother and why did she have these powers to pass on?

Sad sideways lives because people like Sayid subconsciously or consciously didn't believe they deserved better?

I can buy this, actually. It's still a crappy idea but it's at least logically consistent.

xposts

adopted mom said "i've made it so you can't hurt each other", presumably using that crazy island magic that doesn't come with an instruction manual. her definition of "hurt" is a little arcane, tho.

such a shame but it all seems to pointless even discussing now

it was a really bad ending

in the context of this season it was more or less what i was expecting

it was good to see jack die at the end

i guess everyone figured this out already but the wheel in the stained glass is called the Wheel of Law. the frozen donkey wheel looked like it and was used to manipulate the island's law-governing power.

i hope hurley used his magical island powers to generate all the hot pockets he could desire.

I didn't really care or go all gooey when they got together, but then again the show never consistently hit the emotional spots it wanted to. I remember deploring the Jack/Kate/Sawyer triangle as dull and lifeless (this might just be down to Kate being a bit crap), and was ecstatic when Saywer and Juliet made a life for themselves. But yeah, Sayid/Shannon, I always expected to watch those things happen without being emotionally invested. That's what Lost has been all along.
xposts

I get the major hate for this from people who have pulled apart and discussed all the details and whatnot, but as I've always considered it to be fun and fairly enjoyable, it was always a second tier show. Also, even though the ending was schmaltzy, it worked intercut with Jack dying because, even though we see them and they all lived fake lives in purgatory, most of these people still died. Jack's life was kind of tragic all told, and even if he found some level of acceptance it was still pretty downbeat.

I mean, I agree with bnw. It kept me entertained for 2.5h and even moved me sometimes, and so was actually better than what I was expecting from the rest of this season. However, it was pretty cheap and easy and it certainly did not live up to the expectations set by previous seasons.

xposts Ha, OK, you didn't care either.

On the list of good series closers, Star Trek: TNG had a terrific one, but that show didn't do the whole continuous plot thing either.

"For a second when I saw Ben not go into the church I thought the whole thing was going to blow up, which would have been a better ending."

That would have been kinda awesome.

what was with hurley's pep talk to sayid? you can be whatever you want to be, dude. sayid was definitely one of the more self aware characters. just seemed weird.

The TNG finale was pretty convoluted and sappy and everything in it was imaginary, too. Saved by great acting. There's a scene of Picard as an old man looking immensely pleased with himself, like he had a particularly well-formed bowel movement that just gets me every time.

#3 on the chart, I'd bet.

It seems clear to me, having read people's reactions all day today, that if you loved the show special and held it close to your maudlin wittle <3, it was the perfect finale to the series. If you thought the show was "about" spirituality from season one, you were also thrilled. (On "On Point" today was a woman who teaches a class called Heroes, Villains, and Monsters, and actually teaches the show in her class. She thought the finale was dandy. Sounds like a freshman blow-off class to me.) If you're a puzzle geek with an addictive personality, you were enraged by the finale. If you want most of all to see well-written genre TV, you probably stopped watching a couple of seasons ago, and if you watched the finale anyway, it only confirmed your worst suspicions about the writers' intentions.

Myself, I have some puzzle geek tendencies, but am by far mostly in the latter camp. I've kept one eye on the show through the last two seasons, mostly without actually actually watching it. I'm sure I'll miss NYmag.com's recaps far more than the show itself.

what was with hurley's pep talk to sayid? you can be whatever you want to be, dude. sayid was definitely one of the more self aware characters. just seemed weird.

― scott seward, Monday, May 24, 2010 9:53 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

thought that was one of the best scenes of the episode, actually, hurley just kind of knowing all this noble stuff sayid had done on the island and wanting him to know he was a good dude.

also i always thought sayid/shannon was one of the more convincing romantic relationships on the show and that dude really seemed hurt when she died -- but then they barely made reference to her for the next 4 seasons and even as recently as a few episodes sayid was all talking about how the love of his life was nadya, so it seemed like a goofy thing to suddenly come back to.

Desmond pretty much got screwed over by the ending, right?

yeah, what happened to desmond after hurley and ben pulled him up by rope? was he dead or s.thing?

I couldn't work out what they were doing with Desmond. Like, he could see everything that was happening after his death. To what purpose? Like "none of this matters, we'll all be happy when we're dead"?

Don't see much point in theorising about any of it now, given they've pretty much conclusively proven they didn't know what they were doing, but I assume the bomb blast caused the incident?

The annoying thing, more than the mawkishness, is that they had the opportunity to do so much and pissed it away with an alternate timeline that ultimately went nowhere, which meant they botched and rushed what was happening in the real timeline.

(xpost - Desmond was alive and Ben and Hurley decided to send him home)

http://www.howdidlostend.com

which meant they botched and rushed what was happening in the real timeline

Except that's not even true because the bulk of this season's real timeline was just people walking backwards and forwards across the island because somebody told them to.

they certainly botched it. i mean, jacob's lighthouse! widmore's plan!

Well yeah, just meant it wasn't rushed.

http://imgur.com/nN5DP.jpg

Disappointed there was no Eloise Hawking's Retarded Secrets of the Island Sisterhood

Like "none of this matters, we'll all be happy when we're dead"?

think that's about the size of it. he was conscious of both timelines ... glimpsed the afterlife ... like Juliet right b4 she died

I did think it was cool how they did her dialogue echoed in both timelines ("it worked" was just the candy machine)

didn't understand the scene at the end btw Des and Eloise re: Daniel

Daniel and Charlotte weren't in the church at the end, right? Ah who cares.

Thought Charlotte looked kind of hot though.

Thought Charlotte looked kind of hot though.

damn skippy

what was the deal with her rifling thru sawyer's stuff in the afterlife tho? oh right: it was a total red herring

nah they werent

that's kinda what I'm talking abt, Eloise was like "you're leaving? you're not taking my son are you?" and Desmond sez "not with us ..." like all meaningful but I dunno what it meant

xp

do people in the afterlife who *don't* meet the people they loved (but have forgotten) from their real life -- do those people just, like die and not go into heaven? or do they go into a second afterlife where they may or may not re-hook-up with the people from the first?

one minor thing that pissed me off was flocke's death. being shot and thrown halfway down a cliff is not, in lost-world, confirmation of death.