The emotional whirlwind of the past 20 days has begun to start to hit me. What a month. Anyway, I went through half the YuBlog.org comments for Lost‘s final episode, “The End” (we had a record number of page views during that episode by almost double; I was in complete & utter shock and then total happiness when I checked it when we got back to the hotel in the wee hours of Monday morning – THANK YOU!!!!!!). I had to stop for a second because I read an email from my dear cuz Paul aka Barenaked Hurley, who hated the episode. Jay and I were reading reviews on the plane yesterday and we just didn’t understand. Anyway, I know it’ll get lost (pun intended) in the YuBlog comments so what the hell, I need to not have a title that says “Delta is a piece of shit airline” as the top post on my blog lol.
Here’s some of my very brief thoughts through the tears from my first rewatch:
I don’t feel the Sideways was a gateway to heaven necessarily; it was just another journey to ‘move on’ to wherever you interpreted it (I admit heaven is a reasonable argument). And Kate, Sawyer, Hurley, Miles, Alpert, Lapedus, Claire, Rose & Bernard lived the rest of their lives off camera. I didn’t feel we needed to see anymore because the story was about castaways on an Island, not any other period in time.
Yes, I would’ve loved to find out some more mythology stuff (the fertility problems on the island, for instance) but Damon & Carlton are giving us like 30 extra minutes of new footage on the DVD AND they’re doing a special feature where they address smaller issues that were unresolved in the show (like taller ghost Walt, blah blah blah). We’ll get some stuff then and it’ll be a fabulous little treat and then other stuff we’ll debate like with Harry Potter. I was satisfied with the character resolution and an emotional ending to me is better than a mythological ending. I only wish that when Kate had shot Locke she had gone, “NOT MY DOCTOR YOU BITCH!”
I thought it was beautiful that they were so important to each other during life that they still strongly carried that “live together, die alone” theme even after death. In the Sideways, they were all dead and it was almost like a far-in-the-future epilogue. Sure it was arguably cheesy in premise but it wrapped up the characterization in a show that so strongly focused on the lives and deaths of its characters. Think about this – in the Sideways, they each created a life for themselves that was what they had hoped more for in life: Jack wanted a good father/son connection so he had a son who he resolved daddy issues with; Kate wanted to be innocent and she was; Locke wanted to be with Helen and he was; Sawyer got to be a ‘good guy’ with a buddy like Miles when he was previously a con man loner; Hurley finally had good luck, Desmond got to be bff with Widmore, Sun & Jin didn’t have marital problems, etc al. I felt it gave them all the acceptance and redemption that they all needed for themselves (like Sayid finally realizing he was a good guy or Ben deciding that he was staying because he had to work out how to come to terms with his behavior prior to becoming Hurley’s #2). How poetic that in the end of both timelines, Jack had to accept his destiny and learn to let go. And if you really want to take it one step further in the sentimental direction, Lost was also wrapped up so beautifully that these castaways, who were lost souls prior to Jacob bringing them to the Island – our Losties – were found as they found a way to move on together in the end of all things.
