LOST: The Conclusion

I was completely speechless for a while after LOST came to an end. I wasn't sure I could completely comprehend what I had just witnessed, and I was caught up in watching viewer reactions unfold on Twitter and Facebook. But after thinking about it for the night and placing the Finale in the context of the entire show, I know how I feel about it.

LOST is the most incredible television series ever imagined.

Let me qualify that. It's probably not the best acted, best written, or best rated series ever (although at times, it probably was). But it engaged fans like nothing before it. Everyone had ideas. With so many questions and mysteries, there was no way to make sense of LOST without formulating some sort of theory to explain everything, anything to wrap your mind around. I think the creators meant for this to happen. It's what kept fans involved between episodes at a level far beyond any other show. It's why there are hundreds of LOST fan sites with thousands of theories about smoke monsters, moving cabins, and electromagnetism.

So imagine a show that has everyone formulating their own answers simply because they aren't given any to agree on. That's what LOST did to thousands of viewers who tuned in to tonight's finale searching for any number of things, and legitimately expecting to get them! After all the twists and open-ended questions, people still sat down for every episode expecting explanations and plot reveals. So when Jack's eye closed, and the word LOST flashed on the screen for the last time after absolutely nothing was answered, most fans I've heard from on Twitter or Facebook were left wholly unsatisfied. None of us wanted to hear that a group of characters to whom we'd dedicated 6 years of our lives were dead. Despite what literary critics and scholars might say, the general public is not big on full-circle conclusions. They want closure.

But I think closure came from the end of LOST, if in a different way. Some people stopped listening the minute Jack and Christian revealed the characters in the flash-sideways were dead. For me, Christian's explanation firmly cemented LOST as the most unique television show of all time, because it told viewers exactly what was important. It didn't matter that the characters were dead. It didn't matter how or when they died (keep in mind, the sideways-flashes were independent of time). It only mattered that they were together again, all of them who'd had such tremendous impact on each others' lives.

It may as well have been the entire LOST production staff giving us this explanation. Why did we spend 6 years watching a show if in the end everyone is dead and the Island forgotten? What did any of it matter?

All of it mattered. Every last second. In fact, the only thing that might not have mattered was how it all ended! As Christian said, everyone dies. The characters weren't going to live forever, so it was only a matter of time before the curtain fell on their stories anyway. Why did it need to be shown or explained? The most important thing to happen to any of them was each other.

That's why we watched LOST. We did it because of Rose's undying faith that her husband would come back to her. We did it because of Desmond's unstoppable efforts to see Penny again. We did it because of Jack's unshakable determination to do what he thought was right, even to the end. A show like LOST is too big, too important to define by its Finale. This was a six-year odyssey of triumph, loss, conflict, and redemption. It didn't matter that it ended. What mattered was that it happened.