Lost Series Finale: "The End"

[Delta1]

I was addressing the idea of mystery as mystique in a general sense, not just in Lost. The idea that every mystery in a story needs to be revealed or else be deemed a fraud for not seeing the light of day strikes me as absurd. Did you watch Star Wars, prior to the prequels, and wish for a scientific explanation for The Force?

The explanations of the Force given in Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back were sufficient for the purposes of the story. The difference between Star Wars and Lost is that Star Wars is fundamentally an adventure story or fairy tale, and Lost is fundamentally a mystery. George Lucas never depicted the Force as a mystery; it was an ordinary element of the world in which Luke, etc., lived. Neither the characters nor the viewers were given any reason to question the initial defintion of the Force or why the Force mattered. Lucas didn't reveal it piecemeal, or challenge his viewers to construct a Theory of Force other than the one presented by Obi-Wan and Yoda. It was a regular, well-understood, static feature in the Star Wars universe.

As for scientific explanations, if anyone wanted to try one, I'd consider it. I don't think it would illuminate anything, though.

Do you watch A Fistful of Dollars and wish for the backstory of Clint Eastwood's character to be spelled out? Would The Birds be a better movie if it was explained why the birds attack?

Haven't seen the former, haven't seen the latter in a very long time.

So that goes to the question as a general principle. In terms of Lost, I don't think the actions and choices made in the sideways universe were random at all.

Maybe they weren't truly random, but they were not growth. Jack didn't grow into a workaday, loving father; by the end of his life he was practically suicidal, and definitely homicidal. Daniel didn't grow into a pianist, even if he wanted to be one. Desmond didn't grow into a confident, suave corporate lackey. Christian didn't grow into a preternaturally calm and reassuring expert in Lost metaphysics; everything he knew about the afterlife was magicked into his head. Kate didn't grow into a fugitive, she always was a fugitive; she reverted. Charlie reverted back to his junkie/drug-smuggling ways. Sayid, the self-sacrificing easily-suggestible zombie, reverted to his unrequited lover/man-of-barely-repressed-ultraviolence persona. Claire reverted to the uncertain pregnant girl trying to give her baby up; nothing of the savage woman who built a baby out of bones and wanted to kill Kate for taking Aaron. Sawyer didn't grow into a cop, he grew out of being a cop when Juliet died, and his quest to kill Anthony Cooper was a reversion. Ana Lucia was even worse; she went from being a hardbitten, pragmatic, tried-by-fire leader to a corrupt cop. Rose and Bernard reverted from Jack-hating hermits to 815 buddies. Sun and Jin reverted from an increasingly free married couple to a couple meeting in secret for fear of Paik finding them out. Aaron and Ji-Yeon reverted to fetuses.

When I speak of character growth, I mean the change in characters that logically results from their histories and personalities. The lives they lived in the FSU and their personalities were not the logical consequence of the history of their lives. They might have been the realization of certain wishes the characters had at one time, karmic justice, or the natural consequence of an entire lifetime lived in the FSU. They were not the product of natural character growth.

 

[startrekwatcher]

I was addressing the idea of mystery as mystique in a general sense, not just in Lost. The idea that every mystery in a story needs to be revealed or else be deemed a fraud for not seeing the light of day strikes me as absurd. Did you watch Star Wars, prior to the prequels, and wish for a scientific explanation for The Force?

My take it is this--Star Wars was more fantasy than science fiction in my eyes. So in things like LOTR, The Legend of the Seeker, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Merlin I can buy a lot of the hocus pocus. But in science fiction like Star Trek or LOST I prefer a bit more grounded reality where they attemp to explain things in pseudo scientific ways.

S3-5 were finally pulling together stuff that had been just sprinkled in over the course of the series and making headway on numerous fronts. I foolishly believed that they were poised to do the same in Season six and take everything they had laid the groundwork on and developed the final mile. Instead, they changed gears and wanted to just drop the mysteries pretty much, slow down the pacing and try to be more character-oriented. Well I know the new "it" phrase is "it was always about the characters" but it really wasn't. It was about the mythology and the plotlines and the twists and the cliffhangers and the interesting bits of exposition and the teasers and timelines and so forth. S1 was about the characters but since then much like on season one of Heroes the characters were thrown into this big epic action adventure as a backdrop and they were being moved about. You'd get the occasional quiet character moment before launching into more plot. Sun's big character arc was tagging along with Ilana and bumpingher head and speaking only Korean. Dogen and Lennon two of the most boring characters ever conceived. Kate stupidly tags along with "Locke:-why everyone kept referring to him as Locke was baffling since they all knew he wasn't.

The characters were likeable but not that deep. Big ambitious high concept serialized series like LOST, Heroes, V, Flash Forward etc aren't really geared for the kind of depth a traditional drama offered. There isn't a modest ensemble and one or two stories to follow. The scenes aren protracted and don't offer a lot of depth--LOST was extremely dense in its plotting covering numerous threads in an hour so there was a lot of frenzied jumping around in S4 and 5. In S3 the flashbacks of these characters were boring for the most part. A lot of the characters brought in were nothing more than a plot device to advance the story. Deaths were often treated like plot points and nothing more. Characters were relegated to the sidelines for entire seasons.

Okay you want to talk about characters then we'll talk about characters--Claire flip flopping crazy woman who all of a sudden with a pep talk from Kate was her old self? Sayid was bloodthirsty and then he blows up--according to C/L his arc amounted to tell him he is good and he is?!?, Hurley was an idiot all season, LOcke was dead, MIB was set up as pure evil in S5 and the start of season Six then by the end he was a garden variety moustache twirler with an ill-defined plan who is killed in an anticlimatic showdown with Jack. Heck most of the season they were running from one camp to another hardly deep character work. Ilana was a plot device that was just blown up for the sake of spectacle--I kept waiting for it to be much more to it. I never gave a crap about Kate or Kate/Jack. Juliet/Sawyer was more effective but they killed her off. So in the end if this is the character work I'll pass. I'd rather have had more of my plot and mythology developed.

Now all of a sudden there is the revisionist history about LOST was always about the characters. You ask most people and they'll tell you it is the mythology. Yes the final scene was nice and had the right idea *but* I didn't buy the idea that this was a "family"--the characters had rarely interacted since S1 or S2. Most of the time they were all spread out all over the place. Even though most worked on the same show I would suggest most never worked with each other beyond the core cast which had been years since then. This wasn't like TNG where you had a group of characters together week in and week out that you could buy that they had this deep bond.

 

[flobo]

I liked the finale, up until the last ten minutes.
The wasn't any answers, but at least i thought it would end well with nice characters moments in the sideway.

When Desmond "unplugged" the island, i really thought they would simply let it die so that it can't mess up with more people, and because the island is "out of time", they would have been transported to the sideway in which the island had always been sunk.

Then they replugged it, and Ugo/Ben decided to protect the island, even if this still had no purpose. Weird, but i could have been ok with that.

There was the really nice scene with the plane taking off and I was still happy with the sideway until the big reveal.
They're all dead.
All of stuff happening in the sideway really had me thinking we were going toward happy ending, then the bomb was dropped at the end.
While i was watching, i really felt like the show was telling me "You didn't have a single answer about the island, but you were still hoping to at least have a good ending for the cast ? Guess what, you won't even have that, it was a lie and they're all dead".

 

[Trippy]

It is not revisionist to say Lost was about the characters. We cared about them. We had an emotional connection. The whole flashbacks, flashfowards and even the flashsideways were all about characters.

It was also about the mythology-it's what kept us debating and theorizing in between episodes and seasons.

And it still does-that's the magic that is LOST

 

[Trippy]

"You didn't have a single answer about the island, but you were still hoping to at least have a good ending for the cast ? Guess what, you won't even have that, it was a lie and they're all dead".

It wasn't all a lie. The flashsideways ONLY was their way station to be released together in the afterlife. There was no set timeline. The only one we saw die in the finale was Jack.

 

[startrekwatcher]

It is not revisionist to say Lost was about the characters. We cared about them. We had an emotional connection. The whole flashbacks, flashfowards and even the flashsideways were all about characters.

I never cared about the bulk of these characters the way I have say Scully/Mulder on TXF or all of the TNG cast. Those characters were like family to me. The LOST characters were serviceable and likeable but I never connected with them on that level. Like the island they were mostly a means to an end in servicing the story hence why I always saw it more as objective storytelling as JJ Abrams likes to call it.

Yes there were some I really liked-Sun especially ruthless Sun when she didn't take crap off anybody, Sayid, Sawyer, Eloise(but like Heroes' Angela she was criminally underused Finnola rocks) and Juliet and to some degree Jack but that was about it. Walt, Michael, Jin, Kate, Hurley, Claire, Charlotte, Frank, Desmond, Ana Lucia, Eko, Libby, Arntz, Boone(Ian Somerhalder is so much better on VD), Shannon I could take or leave. What I was the most invested in was the plot and mythology. That was the most compelling part of LOST for me as a viewer.

 

[Trippy]

Well, to each their own-Lost is a show you can get out of it what you want I guess.

I WAS connected to these characters (Sawyer especially )

 

[flobo]

"You didn't have a single answer about the island, but you were still hoping to at least have a good ending for the cast ? Guess what, you won't even have that, it was a lie and they're all dead".

It wasn't all a lie. The flashsideways ONLY was their way station to be released together in the afterlife. There was no set timeline. The only one we saw die in the finale was Jack.

I didn't mean a lie as in it didn't happen.
I meant it felt like a lie to me that they would be living a better (perfect?) life in the alternate timeline, while the truth is they were dead.

The perfect exemple is Sun&Jin, i wasn't pissed off when they died in the sub because i knew they would be "reawakened" in the sideway.
But in the end, they really DID die in the sub, so it went from "They'll live happily ever after with their daughter" to "Their daughter is an orphan" in the last 10 minutes.

Not the happy ending i expected, everyone being dead.

 

[Out Of My Vulcan Mind]

Do you watch A Fistful of Dollars and wish for the backstory of Clint Eastwood's character to be spelled out? Would The Birds be a better movie if it was explained why the birds attack?

Haven't seen the former, haven't seen the latter in a very long time.

Fair enough with your thoughts on The Force. If you ever see A Fistful of Dollars or reacquaint yourself with The Birds then you can get back to me on those.

Maybe they weren't truly random, but they were not growth. Jack didn't grow into a workaday, loving father; by the end of his life he was practically suicidal, and definitely homicidal. Daniel didn't grow into a pianist, even if he wanted to be one. Desmond didn't grow into a confident, suave corporate lackey. Christian didn't grow into a preternaturally calm and reassuring expert in Lost metaphysics; everything he knew about the afterlife was magicked into his head. Kate didn't grow into a fugitive, she always was a fugitive; she reverted. Charlie reverted back to his junkie/drug-smuggling ways. Sayid, the self-sacrificing easily-suggestible zombie, reverted to his unrequited lover/man-of-barely-repressed-ultraviolence persona. Claire reverted to the uncertain pregnant girl trying to give her baby up; nothing of the savage woman who built a baby out of bones and wanted to kill Kate for taking Aaron. Sawyer didn't grow into a cop, and his quest to kill Anthony Cooper was a reversion. Ana Lucia was even worse; she went from being a hardbitten, pragmatic, tried-by-fire leader to a corrupt cop. Rose and Bernard reverted from Jack-hating hermits to 815 buddies. Sun and Jin reverted from an increasingly free married couple to a couple meeting in secret for fear of Paik finding them out. Aaron and Ji-Yeon reverted to fetuses.

When I speak of character growth, I mean the change in characters that logically results from their histories and personalities. The lives they lived in the FSU and their personalities were not the logical consequence of the history of their lives. They might have been the realization of certain wishes the characters had at one time, karmic justice, or the natural consequence of an entire lifetime lived in the FSU. They were not the product of natural character growth.

I disagree with pretty much everything you've said here. The sideways universe reflects what they're trying to deal with in karmic terms, issues that stem from the lives they led in the real world, including on the island. They resemble their earlier selves because it's some of those earlier issues and mistakes they're still clinging to and trying to atone for, until they're awakened, remember the growth they experienced in their lives and let go. In some cases the changes they went through in life bleed through into the sideways universe.

I won't go through all of them, but some examples:

Sawyer started out as a con man looking out only for himself, obsessed with revenge and pulling the same kind of con that led to his parents' deaths. Eventually he finds love, settles into a life with Juliette and becomes a man whom the community respects, a cop of sorts (he was head of security after all). So in the sideways world he's a cop as he's progressed to a point where he sees himself as a protector. He's come to peace with the aspect of his past where he took advantage of people. He's left that behind him. But his soul hasn't let go of the obsession with revenge, and so he's still alone and lonely - until he's awakened with Juliette, lets go and is ready to move on.

Kate is still a fugitive because she's still carrying that karmic burden, but here she returns to Claire and helps her rather than leave her behind - just as she eventually did in real life.

Jack in the sideways universe is still trying to fix and control everything, still trying to save everyone, and he's working through his issues with his father by the manifestation of being a father himself. Real world Jack died doing that which he most wanted to do - save people - and he was able to do that by letting go and having faith. So, too, did Jack in the sideways world come to have faith and let go, and then he was ready to move on.

 

[Delta1]

It is not revisionist to say Lost was about the characters. We cared about them. We had an emotional connection.

For certain definitions of we.

All the care and emotional connections didn't keep Eko, Libby, Michael, Walt, Daniel, Charlotte, or poor Dr. Arzt around. When there were problems with the actor, when it came time to ratchet up the tension, or when the mythology was just going a different way, Darlton never hesitated to offer up the blood of the character on the altar of the plot. Did your character have an unresolved story arc? Too bad, see ya in another life, brotha.

 

[Out Of My Vulcan Mind]

All the care and emotional connections didn't keep Eko, Libby, Michael, Walt, Daniel, Charlotte, or poor Dr. Arzt around. When there were problems with the actor, when it came time to ratchet up the tension, or when the mythology was just going a different way, Darlton never hesitated to offer up the blood of the character on the altar of the plot. Did your character have an unresolved story arc? Too bad, see ya in another life, brotha.

In a big sprawling show with tons of characters it goes without saying that some characters play a more important part than others, some have roles that last a long time, others have much briefer roles, and various characters will reach the conclusion of their story arcs at different times. That's natural. It's also unavoidable that off screen problems might lead to an actor leaving a show, meaning that their character arc is cut short. That doesn't mean that many audience members didn't connect emotionally with the characters - especially the core characters. I certainly did.

 

[Trippy]

It is not revisionist to say Lost was about the characters. We cared about them. We had an emotional connection.

For certain definitions of we.

All the care and emotional connections didn't keep Eko, Libby, Michael, Walt, Daniel, Charlotte, or poor Dr. Arzt around. When there were problems with the actor, when it came time to ratchet up the tension, or when the mythology was just going a different way, Darlton never hesitated to offer up the blood of the character on the altar of the plot. Did your character have an unresolved story arc? Too bad, see ya in another life, brotha.

We as in the viewers, or at least the subset of viewers that feel the way I do about Lost (as in, loved the journey from begining to end)

Who's character was left unresolved? Eko faced down his sins unrepentent, and died via Smokey. Libby was in the church with Hurley, but other than that, she was killed on the island, and only gets resolution in the sideways universe. Micheal is still paying for his sins on the island. Walt is growing up in New York with his grandmother. Daniel is in the flash sideways still with his mother, with her atoning for the sin of killing him by staying with him in the afterlife. Charlotte died by the electromagnitism and time travel this island was stuck in after Ben turned the donkey wheel, and was a vehicle for Sawyer to resolve his guilt for her death (he was the leader at the time) and then she met up with Daniel, who loved her. Dr. Artz was a boob to begin with, and blew up because he was a boob.

They all had resolution!

 

[startrekwatcher]

The bulk of characters didn't have much in the way of satisfying arc resolutions beyond Sawyer, Locke or Jack. The rest were pretty "meh"

 

[Trippy]

The bulk of characters didn't have much in the way of satisfying arc resolutions beyond Sawyer, Locke or Jack. The rest were pretty "meh"

They satisified me

 

[Hunter X]

I think some of the flash-sideways stories worked in terms of characters' souls working through unresolved issues in their own lives, or echoing their "real life" experiences. Problems is, some of them don't.

Jack's story works, kind of, in regards to him coming to terms with his daddy issues through having an imaginary son.

Kate's story works in that she goes back for Claire, but it doesn't necessarily get much deeper than that. More on her later.

Ben's story really works as he makes the choice to save Alex over taking/protecting his power, reversing his great regret during his Island life.

I can see how Sawyer's story works, in regards to his need for vengeance and loneliness, though I may not have gotten it before the other post in this thread analyzing him.

Desmond's story works in that he finally gets the approval of Widmore and becomes a man of confidence, but then he lets go of this in the name of his love for Penny, a lesson the universe is constantly trying to teach him in his flashbacks.

What doesn't make sense is:

Sun and Jin's story. Why aren't they married? What's the point in them getting beaten up? This one is particularly baffling to me.

Sayid's story. He's a killer, no matter what he does, and...that's really about it. Then Hurley tells him in the finale that he's actually a good guy and he saves Shannon, something he couldn't do before, but that's it? Seems a little bit simplistic for Sayid's whole story. In the end it seems like he could've been killed off back in season two and it wouldn't have made a difference to his character.

Hurley's story...unless all he really needs to do is finally get the girl, remember the blankets and the wine, and take her on that picnic. I guess it works for Hurley, since he's a simple dude and this was probably his main regret with his Island experiences.

My points is that sometimes the flash sideways worked as a sort of karmic healing ground for the characters. Sometimes it just seemed random (Sun and Jin). Sometimes it just seemed really shallow (Sayid, Kate). But I don't think that's a problem with the concept, so much as a problem with the writing.

The writers always had trouble with Kate, for instance. They always tried to make her hardcore, a criminal who was really a criminal, but they never wanted us to lose sympathy for her. So they make her crime be killing her Dad. But why did she kill him? Was it because he abused her? Maybe, but this isn't stated explicitly, probably because the writers don't want to have to write Kate as a child abuse victim. They keep it vague because they want her to be the cool action hero criminal female lead. She's really awesome, but she's really vulnerable, but she's hardcore enough to head-up a bank robbery, but soft enough to do the whole robbery to get a toy plane that was left by her childhood friend who she accidentally got killed.

Kate's big problem as a character, for me, was that she had no realistic motivation for her actions. She was both hard enough to be a murderer, but not so hard that she'd become a bad guy. She was a victim of the writers trying to make her too many things, without properly motivating her to be any of them. There wasn't enough in-story consistency due to the writers trying to have their cake and eat it too. And that's a problem, I think, they also had in writing the flash sideways.

 

[Delta1]

Fair enough with your thoughts on The Force. If you ever see A Fistful of Dollars or reacquaint yourself with The Birds then you can get back to me on those.

Added to the Netflix queue.

I disagree with pretty much everything you've said here. The sideways universe reflects what they're trying to deal with in karmic terms, issues that stem from the lives they led in the real world, including on the island. They resemble their earlier selves because it's some of those earlier issues and mistakes they're still clinging to and trying to atone for, until they're awakened, remember the growth they experienced in their lives and let go.

They're trying to deal with issues they had in the real world, but they can't because they don't remember the growth they experienced in the real world ... even though through that growth they dealt with the issues and mistakes they made in the real world, and no longer had any issues with which to deal. Most viewers saw the island as a place of redemption, but now we are to believe that they didn't accomplish any redemption on the island, they had to go do it all over again, karmically, in some ill-defined afterlife. And then their redemptive work is made irrelevant by the discovery that simply reliving key experiences from the island--drowning, having a baby, getting beat up by Desmond--is sufficient to achieve gnosis and swan off into the light.

There is a theory on several web sites that the island was originally purgatory, then Darlton repurposed it when their clever plot twist was figured out around episode 3. The island became real, and all their metaphorical hatches and monsters and skeletons were concretized and they had to come up with a story to explain them. They told their purgatory story in the FSU. The possibility that they gave some characters two redemption arcs, one on the island and one in the afterlife, adds some weight to this.

Sawyer started out as a con man looking out only for himself, obsessed with revenge and pulling the same kind of con that led to his parents' deaths. Eventually he finds love, settles into a life with Juliette and becomes a man whom the community respects, a cop of sorts (he was head of security after all). So in the sideways world he's a cop as he's progressed to a point where he sees himself as a protector. He's come to peace with the aspect of his past where he took advantage of people. He's left that behind him. But his soul hasn't let go of the obsession with revenge, and so he's still alone and lonely - until he's awakened with Juliette, lets go and is ready to move on.

But he did let go of his obsession with revenge. He accomplished it. It sickened him, and he learned from and was changed by the experience. Ignoring all that and resetting him is a pretty lousy thing to do to a character.

Kate is still a fugitive because she's still carrying that karmic burden, but here she returns to Claire and helps her rather than leave her behind - just as she eventually did in real life.

I don't know much about karmic burdens, but if she's burdened by anything, wouldn't it be Tom Brennan's death? She didn't do anything to come to terms with that. Evading justice is bad, but as far as karmic burdens go it has nothing on causing the death of your best friend. Or drugging and abandoning your husband then leaving him for Jack. Or the murder thing, although she was never really burdened by that.

Jack in the sideways universe is still trying to fix and control everything, still trying to save everyone, and he's working through his issues with his father by the manifestation of being a father himself. Real world Jack died doing that which he most wanted to do - save people - and he was able to do that by letting go and having faith. So, too, did Jack in the sideways world come to have faith and let go, and then he was ready to move on.

So sideways Jack had to repeat what real Jack had already done. That might work, dramatically, as a kind of refrain or repetition for emphasis. But it undones the character work that you saw in Jack's death. If Jack learned to let go and have faith in life, that becomes part of his character. That's character growth. If he has to do it again in the afterlife, that character growth has been reversed.

 

[pookha]

It is not revisionist to say Lost was about the characters. We cared about them. We had an emotional connection.

For certain definitions of we.

All the care and emotional connections didn't keep Eko, Libby, Michael, Walt, Daniel, Charlotte, or poor Dr. Arzt around. When there were problems with the actor, when it came time to ratchet up the tension, or when the mythology was just going a different way, Darlton never hesitated to offer up the blood of the character on the altar of the plot. Did your character have an unresolved story arc? Too bad, see ya in another life, brotha.

We as in the viewers, or at least the subset of viewers that feel the way I do about Lost (as in, loved the journey from begining to end)

Who's character was left unresolved? Eko faced down his sins unrepentent, and died via Smokey. Libby was in the church with Hurley, but other than that, she was killed on the island, and only gets resolution in the sideways universe. Micheal is still paying for his sins on the island. Walt is growing up in New York with his grandmother. Daniel is in the flash sideways still with his mother, with her atoning for the sin of killing him by staying with him in the afterlife. Charlotte died by the electromagnitism and time travel this island was stuck in after Ben turned the donkey wheel, and was a vehicle for Sawyer to resolve his guilt for her death (he was the leader at the time) and then she met up with Daniel, who loved her. Dr. Artz was a boob to begin with, and blew up because he was a boob.

They all had resolution!

but some of them during the serious had already had until it was later taken away for dramatic purpose.

sun and jin especially until they were ripped apart.
i dont think they resolved anything in the alt universe that they already had on the island.
actually they had came further especially jin on the island.

and yeah as others have pointed out a lot of people seem to forget the horrible live their daughter is probably in for since sun ruined her father.
we dont see her making any plans in case she died as far as i remember.

and desmond..
he had resolved so much in the real world.. i dont see any reason for his being in the alt one except as a catalyst.

and how was that thing widmore had built able to send desmond into this spiritual alt place instead of say a real alternate world.

meh i am to the point of thinking they couldnt make up their mind how to end it and in the end started throwing darts at a board with different sections labeled with different meanings.

oh i also agree that sayid is another person who through the flashbacks and being with the losties had been able to achieve some peace .
and i really didnt see him coming into anykind of karmic peace in the alt world either.

and locke in the alt world didnt really have resolution about his father.
his father just happened to die before locke found out just how horrible his father was/.

 

[Out Of My Vulcan Mind]

Think of the sideways universe as being a waystation where a soul cluster bonded together in life gather to help each resolve lingering issues and move on together. As such the sideways universe is a combination of atonement and a reflection of what is yearned for. Just because you've had growth in life doesn't mean you've atoned for it in your soul. There's a measure of penance in some of the character arcs.

As Hunter X said some arcs work better than others. I think Kate being a fugitive in the sideways universe reflects the guilt she feels at killing a man (she keeps saying she's innocent, as if to convince herself as much as anyone else), but they should have dealt with that more head on and brought it to closure. It ended up getting shoved aside by the focus on Kate and Claire.

 

[Delta1]

Desmond's story works in that he finally gets the approval of Widmore and becomes a man of confidence, but then he lets go of this in the name of his love for Penny, a lesson the universe is constantly trying to teach him in his flashbacks.

So now the flash-sideways universe and the material universe are trying to teach people lessons? Yikes!

Sun and Jin's story. Why aren't they married? What's the point in them getting beaten up? This one is particularly baffling to me.

Sun stood up to her father and became very powerful after she was rescued, but Jin never got the chance. So in the afterlife, Sun is the seductress and Jin is terrified of him. I'm not sure how this works in any didactic or redemptive sense, but I can see it as a consequence of how they lived. Maybe they were supposed to improve each other.

Sayid's story. He's a killer, no matter what he does, and...that's really about it. Then Hurley tells him in the finale that he's actually a good guy <snip>

The real violence to Sayid's character is that he doesn't get to realize that himself. In the physical universe, he was usually pushed into committing violence. Torturing at the behest of the Republican Guard or the CIA or the lostaways, attacked by the Others, ordered around by Ben, etc. He was always told he was a violent, cruel man. After his baptismal regeneration, he was free to make choices. He chose not to kill Desmond, and he chose to sacrifice himself on the submarine. But in the flash-sideways universe, he seems to lose that. He needs Hurley to tell him what kind of a person he is. Once again, someone is telling Sayid who and what he is, and he sits there meekly listening.

Hurley's story...unless all he really needs to do is finally get the girl, remember the blankets and the wine, and take her on that picnic. I guess it works for Hurley, since he's a simple dude and this was probably his main regret with his Island experiences.

Being an immortal who can irresistably lure people to the island, he probably made it with lots of ladies. Entire yachts of them. Probably lots of lonely ghosts on the island, too. I have no idea how Isabella got there, but with Richard out of the way....

My points is that sometimes the flash sideways worked as a sort of karmic healing ground for the characters. Sometimes it just seemed random (Sun and Jin). Sometimes it just seemed really shallow (Sayid, Kate). But I don't think that's a problem with the concept, so much as a problem with the writing.

Unfortunately, all we can learn about the concept comes from the writing. If what is written is inconsistent with the concept, the concept has to go and we have to come up with a better one. Or we can just say the writing sucked and ignore it in favor of a poorly-communicated concept, but where's the fun in that?

 

[Delta1]

Think of the sideways universe as being a waystation where a soul cluster bonded together in life gather to help each resolve lingering issues and move on together.

What if I just want to think of it as a place the Losties created so they could find each other? All this atonement and reflection stuff evaporates like a mirage when Charlie drives you off a dock or Desmond smashes you repeatedly into the hood of his car, doesn't it?