LOST series finale reaction

So...

"Guys, where are we?" That was junkie rock star Charlie Pace's line at the end of the LOST series pilot oh so many years ago. It could easily apply to last night's series finale, which I'm still trying to make sense of... particularly the last 15 minutes of the show where (HUGE SPOILER ALERT) we find out that everyone has died and are all meeting up before "moving on" to... well, in true Lost fashion... that's open to interpretation.

The whole 2 1/2 hour finale flew by at breakneck pace and packed emotional wallop after emotional wallop... character arcs closed left and right. Jin and Sun together for good! Sayid and Shannon! Sawyer reunited with Juliet! Charlie and Claire and baby Aaron! The real John Locke back and walking again! Six years worth of journeys were coming to an end. So sad...

It was about halfway through this spiritual awakening of an episode that I began to realize that my initial theory that all the castaway's minds were jumping across time and space into the "sideways" universe post death so that there was, in fact, life after death proved only 1/2 correct. Initially, I thought that the sideways universe this season was actually the "real" universe and that the finale would show us how the surviving castaways were able to go back in time one last time; save the island by sinking it (as we saw in the season six premiere), so that no one could ever get to the light again (assuming the light didn't go out underwater) and that in sacrificing themselves and changing history so that they never even arrived on the island, the universe would "course correct" and give them back their memories of their island lives. To me, it would have been a best of both worlds scenario... where the characters die, but not really.

And then came the final 15 minutes of the show, which basically pooped on that theory and said that, instead, while everyone's memories were re-established, it wasn't in an alternate sideways universe that everyone was "awakening" with new lives, but rather in, for lack of a better word, purgatory.

At least, that's my interpretation of the final few scenes. And thank God for that. Half the fun of Lost is the debating, and this ending leaves plenty of room for various interpretations.

Now, I know the whole "purgatory," everyone is back together again ending is supposed to be a hopeful and happy one, but for whatever reason it just left me sad. I mean, no matter how you slice it, they're all dead! Jack and Kate didn't really get to LIVE happily ever after. And on top of that we get the final image of the show as Jack lying out in the jungle alone, in the same spot where the show began, this time dying, as the woman he loved - Kate - flew off on the escape plane overhead. Well, Jack wasn't totally alone... he had Vincent the dog to sit with him while he passed on. Tear.

Now that some time has passed - so glad I didn't jump on the internet last night to see what the masses were saying about this episode, but rather let it slowly digest in my brain overnight - I went from appreciating and respecting the ending, to understanding that it really is a happy one because everyone found their true loves, or, in Lost terms, their "constants," again and, really, who is to say what the next world will be like for these characters we see gathered in the church at the end. Heck, maybe they do get to live again on some other plane of existence. Such is Lost so anything is possible.

As for the mythology, yes, I wish there had been a few more answers about some oddities (just how exactly did the body of the MIB become a cloud of black smoke and why? Was it his black, corrupted soul released from the shackles of his body?), but the lack of them didn't detract from my enjoyment of the finale. Heck, for the most part, I appreciate that the writers stuck to the major character arcs and, not only in the finale but over the entire course of the series, didn't always spoon feed us the answers. Many times, we actually had to puzzle them out for ourselves.

On example of this is the iconic Lost polar bears. It boggles my mind when people still ask "why were there polar bears on the island?" It just goes to show you how challenging a show like Lost is for many viewers. It's told out of context, out of continuity and with long breaks in between seasons and sometimes even between episodes where answers to posed questions are often spread out over many different episodes and very often out of order.

Again, see the polar bears as an example, where in the pilot we saw Sawyer kill a polar bear, and then three seasons later we saw empty bear changes where they were kept, then in another episode we saw the skeleton of one in the desert (where a secret wormhole portal allowed island-dwellers to transport themselves from the island to the outside world), and yet in another we saw the entrance to the portal, which was located in an icy underground chamber suited for a... you guessed it, polar bear, before the characters eventually found and watched a leftover science video from the Dharma Initiative (the science cult that came to the island looking to study it's weird properties, like the wormhole) that told them (and us) that the Dharma scientists were using animals as test subjects... animals like polar bears. So, basically, if you are smart enough you would realize that the polar bears were being used as guinea pigs and sent through the wormhole to see if it worked before the Dharma folk sent a human being over, and at some point, some of the polar bears escaped from their cages, where, eventually, the characters encountered them.

Watching the finale you can see that, yes, the writers had the broad strokes planned out all along. Everything from episode titles like "dead is dead" and "happily ever after" to key catchphrases such as "see you in another life, brother" and "live together, die alone" to plot points like characters communicating with the non-living and the island itself being the source of life, death and rebirth, to character names like Christian Sheppard all the way to the mysterious four-toed statue: Tawaret, the Egyptian God of rebirth, as seen all the way back in the season two finale. All of these "clues" led up to this particular ending. There really was no other way to end it.

If anything, I almost feel that the writers stuck a little too close to their vision of Jack fulfilling his destiny, sacrificing himself to save the island (and the world), and arriving at a sort of staging area where he was able to meet up with his loved ones - all the people he had just saved and had ever cared about from the island - before being allowed to "move on" to the next life. By sticking so close to Jack's story, there was previous little room for other beloved characters in the finale, such as Sawyer. Even the MIB's final defeat was somewhat overshadowed by the "sideways" worlds' revelation as purgatory. At one point I actually expected the MIB to "wake up" in this "sideways" world still in Locke's body, having found yet another escape loophole.

The fact that I thought that shows both the beauty of Lost and the curse of Lost. In challenging our imaginations with so many cool ideas and story possibilities born out of constant plot twists, it's easy for the viewer to lose sight of what the writers are trying to really say... which can lead to disappointment when the viewer thinks they are watching one show, while the writer is telling a different show. But, really, I loved everything about Lost. All the divergent story paths it took, all the red herrings, all the misleads is what made Lost so special. It was the journey that made it so great and I'm just happy the final destination didn't erase 6 years worth of awesome storytelling.

The real question I now find myself with is what to watch next?

Namaste and aloha, Lost!