About Last Night: Lost Hits You Because It Loves You

Butler provides his two cents as the former battered lover of Lost.  It should go without saying: after the jump, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

So, I don't know if any of you have heard of this Lost business.  I hear it's a show you should check out.  And if it hadn't ended tonight, I'd tell you the channel and airtime.  Unlike a lot of people that are currently watching Lost, though, I only had the benefit of watching the first season of the show in DVD form.  Every other episode was patiently waited for in spite of writer chicanery, scheduling bullshit, and the whole, godawful shitshow that was season 3 and most of 4.  I stuck with this show long after everyone else I knew (including my own family) stopped watching in order to just wait for the DVD releases so that they wouldn't have to deal with the week to week futzing around.  And as the show progressed from the end of season 4 on, I began to consistently enjoy and even look forward to each episode, rather than look at it as some obligation; a task I must complete so that my brain may one day rest easy FINALLY knowing where that fucking polar bear came from and why it was a goddamn polar bear of all things.

And you know DAMN well that saying "from the Dharma guys"

is NOT what I mean.

My point is, it would be a vast understatement of fact to say that I came in to this finale with my hopes higher than Keith Richards in Amsterdam on 4/20.  This is probably why I was also doomed to be let down.  Remember how last week I mentioned that I figured that the island story itself would have a kickass and explosive conclusion, but didn't really see where the whole point of the flash sideways sequences?  Well, that is pretty much exactly what my assessment of the finale is.  I was thrilled that Jack's role as Jacob's replacement was short lived, as even Locke/the Man in Black called it as being "too obvious".  The fact that Richard was given a fitting conclusion, freed from his life of servitude, and able to "let go" perhaps the most out of anyone (as his burdens had been haunting him for literal centuries) brought a smile to my face in addition to warming both the cockles and subcockles of my tiny, shriveled, blackened heart.  I thought that the time spent developing Ben last week, however, was rendered almost meaningless with the backseat he took to all of the main island action.  He is simply dismissively cast aside by Locke and the remaining survivors welcome him back into the fold.  Harm, but no foul, for some reason seems to be their outlook.

"What are you doing? Come back here with my character development!"

But my biggest gripe, and the issue that will have me furious with Abrams and co. about the show until the day my corpse rots away to dust (I've been known to hold grudges) is the ultimate use of the flash sideways sequences, which turned out to mean (as I feared) absolutely fuck-all.  At first, it seemed to demonstrate a very Cat's Cradle-like idea of the Karass, which is neat in theory, but in application only seems to demonstrate that these people would have found each other with or without the Island and that their lives would have been just as turbulent, but turned out for the best.  Oh wait, except they WOULDN'T HAVE if Desmond and Hurley hadn't been playing the puppet master roles for the last quarter of the goddamn season. There seemed to be some insinuation that the flash sideways-es-es-es (I never know how to pluralize this stupid, made-up term) were heaven, or some kind of afterlife at least, which would kind of make sense given that they ultimately seemed to serve no purpose other than as deus ex machinae that allowed the writers to write themselves out of every sad situation they created.  Sun and Jin? Together, happy, with a child, and able to speak English.  Saayid?  Back with Shannon (who the hell still cared about Shannon, anyway?).  Hell, the metaphor became so fucking oblique that we actually had to watch Claire give birth while Kate delivered and Charlie cared for her TWICE, because apparently the first time it must not have sunk in.  

Maybe I'm too much of a crotchety bastard.  I've admitted on multiple occasions that, as someone who has been studying Russian literature pretty intensively for the last 4 years, I am almost unable to accept genuinely happy endings.  And the sappy, bullshit, pseudo-philosophical note that the show ended on left me with such a saccharine taste in my mouth that I almost vomited up the fistful of pills I swallowed to make me stop caring about how much this show had let me down.  The refusal of the writers to accept the genuine tragedies that they had purveyed (at least in their portrayal of the show to us as viewers) just removed all testicular fortitude from the show that I once respected.  Lost, you get the ranking of "hot chick in the elevator who farted right as she stepped off".  Fun to look at for a while, but in retrospect, you just want to deliver a good ol' fashioned gut punch to the bastards responsible for the odor in the room.