LOST is like a lap dance

For the last six years, I’ve watched the show LOST on ABC. It was always one of my favorite shows, mainly because it was so out there content-wise, and partially because the actors in the roles were really top notch. It entertained me, which is what TV shows are supposed to do. So I’m thankful for that, but for me, the ending didn’t do enough, and the season as a whole seemed really rushed to me.

I liken it to getting a lap dance from a stripper. It’s entertaining while it lasts, but ultimately it’s unfullfilling. I’ll explain why I didn’t like the ending in a bit, and it contains spoilers, so if you don’t want to know yet, then stop reading now.

Okay, so here’s the deal. From what I understand the gist of the finale is this. The losties sideways universe was a holding place for them to reside until they all were dead. A limbo for them to live in until they all died and were able to move on together. They collectively created this place by finding each other to be the most important things in each others lives, so thus, they wanted an afterlife where they could be together. There was no time in this sideways universe, they all resided there until they were awakened to the fact that they were living in a limbo world. Some people died before Jack, and some many years later, but they all had to be dead to collectively move on like they wanted to.

So they make it seem like the island was real, and they really lived and died on the island, and many of them got off the island while others did not. But now, here they are, they all finally ‘let go’ and realized that they were in the sideways universe and it was time to move on.

For the most part, I’m really okay with this aspect. Now as an atheist, I don’t believe in the afterlife, but for the show I think it makes sense and wraps some things up nicely. Still, I think the wound in Jack’s side was a little too Jesus-esque, but whatever, I get it. If they want to wrap up a happy-go-lucky ending for such a good cast, that’s okay by me. That’s only one part however, the island and all of it’s mysteries were never really explained at all, or in-depth enough to satisfy me.

I’m not saying that every polar bear has to be accounted for and each oddity needs to be wrapped up in a little bow, but I’m thoroughly convinced that the writers had no fucking clue how they wanted to do things, and then when they HAD to wrap up, they did so too quickly and concentrated solely on the characters to deflect the obvious continuity flaws in the island. So in no particular order, here are some issues I have with the show, if you have answers, I’d like to see them.

• How is it that Jacob could get on and off the island at will, but the man in black couldn’t?
• How is it that Ben could get on and off the island and had money stashed everywhere, but people like Whidmore couldn’t find the island
• How is it that Dharma found the island and could get back and forth with no issues, yet when Whidmore was banished, he couldn’t find his way back?
• When the six found their way back with Ben and Locke’s corpse, they went through Eloise Hawking, who had a device to locate the island. How come Whidmore, with all of his resources, couldn’t find that?
• Walt was so important as being “special” in season one, yet nothing ever came of him.
• The island had the cork that kept the bad stuff out. So I guess that cork was like a stopper preventing Hell from invading the world. When the cork was removed, why didn’t worse things happen?
• In sideways world, the island was underwater, so the cork was gone. Wouldn’t sideways world have gone to hell?
• If the electromagnetism was so bad that only Desmond could survive it, How did Jack survive it? You could say that once the cork was removed, the electromagnetism went away, but then he put the cork back. At that point wouldn’t it have killed him? Or at least made him a smoke monster like it did the man in black? Instead he was just back in the river later?
• Why would Sayid choose Shannon, a girl he knew briefly, over Nadia, the love of his life?
• Faraday helped Desmond discover the sideways world and the awakening, so why didn’t he end up with the group at the end?
• Why was Sayid allowed to die and then come back in the pool, and how were he and Claire considered “infected?”
• If they were both infected, how did they overcome such a thing? Why weren’t more people infected by Locke?
• With Sayid being a ruthless killer, torturer and everything, how did he find redemption? Was it simply taking the bomb on the sub that took care of it all? Does that really erase all the evil crap he had done?
• Why was Aaron still a baby before moving on from sideways land? If he had lived, and died and was wanting to move on, wouldn’t he have been in a more adult form? In fact, he wouldn’t remember most of them FROM the island, so why would he choose to move on WITH them? What about Sun and Jin’s kid?
• The original others were destroyed by the Mom of Jacob and the MIB’s, so where did the new others come from?
• Where in the hell did Mom even come from? And why if you were the protector of the universe and good and light, would you be such a merciless killer? Killing the real birth mother, destroying the original others, trying to kill MIB.
• If Richard was on the island for hundreds of years, what was waiting for him once he got off the island on the plane? He was no longer immortal supposedly, so he would just be thrust into modern life and then NOT move on with everyone in the sideways world?
• The time travel. Why did some travel and some not? Even when returning to the island?
• Why didn’t the nuclear bomb kill them all? Were they immortal as candidates? Certain folks were not candidates that still were on the island, they would have at least had radiation poisoning.
• Why did they time jump to present time after the nuclear bomb blast?
• What was with the ashes and towers set up to protect from Smokey? Why did that work?
• In that same vein, when Ben went with Locke to talk to Jacob at the cabin in the woods, the cabin was surrounded by ashes, but they briefly showed Christian IN the cabin. Well the MIB was masquerading as Christian at some point, so was the guy in the cabin really MIB and not Jacob? And wouldn’t he be trapped by the ashes?
• Why couldn’t women have babies on the island? And why was there the Egyptian statue of the goddess of fertility and Motherhood?
• What WAS the tie in to Egypt mythology? Hieroglyphics were everywhere, and there were temples, the statue, etc. No real relevance?
• Flashing back a bit (so to speak,) if you had the technology to prevent a massive amount of energy from being released, and you built a hatch to take care of that, wouldn’t you come up with a better mechanism than simply typing in numbers every 108 minutes? I’m SURE they could automate that somehow. Declan could whip up some LotusScript in 5 minutes.
• What was with the numerology? We know the numbers were of the candidates, so WHY then were they integrated so much in Dharma?

Now all of the above were things that I contemplated off the top of my head without working up a sweat. I’m sure I could come up with more. In addition Television Without Pity had these burning questions. Can any of them be answered?

I guess that’s my major problem here. None of that stuff was ever resolved, so it seems like the writers just threw whatever crap they felt like into the series whenever they felt like it. I enjoyed the series thinking that somehow, some of this stuff would tie together in the end, but it didn’t. There was no resolution on many of the things that made LOST so talked about.

Now it just seems that the writers threw down whatever they thought of after hits from the bong, without ever really contemplating how any of it could ever be explained. It annoys me and disappoints me a little. I think the ending had potential to be so much more, and by leaving SO many questions, it just diluted it and made a majority of it seem completely pointless.

So I enjoyed the lap dance, but I’m still looking for the happy ending that’s never going to come.