Lost: Saying Goodbye to the Passengers of Oceanic 815

I gotta say, I wasn’t a Lost fan from the very start because I just didn’t think that my preconceived idea of the show was very appealing. Do I really want to spend an hour of my life every week with a fictionalized version of Survivor, or a TV Show grown-up edition of Lord of the Flies? Even when they reported that the first episode would be the most expensive pilot in television history, I didn’t think that there’s enough there for me to stick with it. The first Lost I saw was during a gathering at a friend’s house: he was watching a season 2 episode and he was singing its praises so hard that it’s difficult not to be intrigued by it. The episode itself was so absorbing—there’s a black horse in a remote island somehow, some guy has to enter numbers every two minutes otherwise something will happen according to an orientation video, another guy was chatting with someone on MS-Dos and turns out to be his kidnapped son—that I was hooked instantly.


However, if I was going to engulf myself into the world of Lost, I made a conscious decision that I was going to start from the very beginning. Knowing that watching the show before I take off for the Philippines would induce aviophobia, I started my venture with the show during the first week of my Philippines experiment, while I had all the time in the world. As predicted, I loved it right away. I can’t forget my first “holy shit” moment, when they discovered that some dude named Ethan was not on the flight manifest. I refused to leave my house after that episode, just so I can find out what the fuck was going on.

It was 2007 when I ran my Lost marathon, so, at the time, there were only three seasons obtainable. It was so cruel that after watching all these episodes consecutively, waiting for me at the finish line was the Season 3 finale “Through the Looking Glass”. After 70 episodes containing flashbacks, writers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof dropped this massive bomb on their viewers: a final scene where Jack is talking to Kate OFF THE ISLAND. Not only that, Jack was desolate and screaming on the top of his lungs that “they have to go back”. This episode iseasily the show’s highest pinnacle. In fact, if I had to elect a Greatest Television Episode of All Time, I would probably align myself with this one. I know that I tend to speak in hyperbole, but you read that superlative correctly: Greatest Television Episode of All Time!

After six seasons of spellbinding enigma, captivating drama, superb writing and terrific acting, Lost decided to permanently go off the air last Sunday. After six full sleeps and three viewings of the finale, I’m still struggling to spell out my viewpoint on it. On one hand, it’s a fitting conclusion for the passengers of Oceanic 815 (or, at least, for the important ones). After six season of unfortunate circumstances happening to these guys, you end up being fond of them—some (Desmond, Ben, and Sawyer) more than others (Jack and Lapidus). As a fan of the show, I suspect that you wanted to see Sawyer and Juliet rekindle their 70’s love, or Ben (*) absolved of his sins, or Kate look hot in a cocktail dress. Lost’s last episode graciously gave you a chock-full of reunions (even if it ended up happening in purgatory), farewells, and general niceness. If you’re a fan of the show and you didn’t feel emotional whatsoever, then you are carrying in your chest a heart made out of darkness.

(*) Benjamin Linus is third in the (t5!) top 5 TV characters of all time, just above (5) Bodie from The Wire and (4) Seth Cohen and just below (2) George Costanza and (1) Homer Simpson.

Of course, what drew me into Lost in the first place are the mysteries on the supernatural island: polar bears, smoke monsters, a ghost Walt, the fertility problem, lottery winning numbers, four-toed massive statues, a time-travelling Scotsman, Widmore’s aspirations for the island, magic lighthouses, guys that look like John Lennon and Tina Fey, mythological twins playing eternal chess, and a mixture of light and water that can do some next-level shit. Even when we were told before season six started that not every question will be answered, we ended Lost with plenty of issues still unclear, with the majority of the story reliant on the golden cavern we were acquainted with only two weeks ago, and with the alternate universe revealed to have no correlation to the plot of the series, except in the sense that every story concludes in death. As someone who devoted part of the last six years lingering over these mysteries (**), I can’t help but feel a little disappointed about the closure for the season and the series.

(**) (t5!) Unanswered Questions of Lost: (5) when the Oceanic Six were returning to the island, why did they have to recreate the circumstances of their first arrival? (4) how was Desmond able to travel back and forth between real world and purgatory? (3) two-parter: why is Jacob allowed to leave the island but MIB can’t, and when Jacob is out recruiting candidates, who’s looking out for MIB? (2) if MIB was the one impersonating all the dead people in the island, who was the off-the-island Jack’s dad, Charlie, and other dead people? and (1) why are these people chosen as the candidates?

After watching Lost, The Wire kept popping up in my head for some reason. Here’s a show where all the plot and characters are relevant, and everything that was brought to the table paid off eventually. If I suffer from temporary memory loss someday, one of the tasks I would want to accomplish is to watch five seasons of The Wire all over again (obviously, I probably won’t remember this either so someone would have to remind me). Would I say the same thing about Lost? Would I put myself through the agony of being perplexed about all these unanswered questions if I know now that most wound up not mattering at all? No, thanks.

To be fair, however, David Simon of The Wire was aware that he was getting five seasons from the very start, while Cuse and Lindelof didn’t know when their show would end. A lot of the stories of seasons two and three were constructed to stall until they know for sure when the finale will be. With that said, they could’ve spent the last couple of seasons addressing these mysteries as opposed to giving us 16 episodes of sideways that elaborately set up a pointless—albeit, very entertaining and melodramatic—purgatory denouement. I recall watching the sixth or seventh episode of season six frustrated that for every mystery they expose, ten more mysteries are introduced.

Despite that, I also remembered that there was a point midway through the season when I decided to just have faith in the show that consistently entertained me for six years (a parallel to Jack having faith on the mystical powers of the island, isn’t it?) Lost gave us tons of powerful moments, whether it be Claire giving birth to Aaron, Charlie dying underwater to save everyone else, or Desmond finally getting in touch with Penny. Lost at its best supplied us with moments so compelling that the larger questions become unimportant. “The End” lived up to that standard and I would feel disloyal to a show I love so much if I bitch too much. The only problem we should be complaining about is that there are no more Lost episodes to look forward to.