Did I mention there will be spoilers? So no moaning, OK?
Musical accompaniment to this post might include a song Sawyer listened to, one that Juliette listened to, and exactly the track you want your spinal surgeon to groove to.
From an e-mail to some friends:
I didn't love it or hate it as much as I'd hoped/expected.
I knew you'd be worried.
I am killing my tv.
By which I mean I'm keeping my tv, but only watching series on DVD, or on-demand, or, pretty soon I guess, Netflix streaming.
Lost, The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, Seinfeld. In order of the increasing awfulness of their final episodes. Is there something inherently wrong with network TV that it's impossible for a show to have a satisfying conclusion? On the other hand, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and, way earlier, The Fugitive. And there was Babylon 5 for us old-timers who still remember the '90s. (I hear the M*A*S*H finale was good; haven't seen it.)
A series doesn't need to be an arc-heavy continued story to bequeath a dreadful last episode. The very last entry of the original Star Trek was one of the worst hours committed to film this side of Ed Wood. And sometimes, regrettably, a series just doesn't get a chance: see Deadwood.
Beginnings are often easier than endings. Lost had one of the best pilots ever; same for the Galactica miniseries. I'm ransacking my literary memory to consider if it's not a problem with any long-form story. Tale of Two Cities had a great ending, IMO; David Copperfield, not so much.
Of course, the novelist, even in the days of serials, didn't have to worry about cast members quitting, or getting kicked off the show because of DUI issues. I wonder if Dickens' editor breathed down his neck the way the network probably exhaled into the shirt collars of Messrs. Abrams, Lindelof, Cuse, and company. Maybe it's got something to do with how much control the creator has over his material. Or how many sous chefs are tweaking the bouillabaise. Given the conditions under which tv is committed, it's amazing anything gets done at all, let alone that some of it's pretty good.
Maybe tv people think character is more important than plot. In fact, Lost and Galactica had the best-drawn characters of just about any American network show. To the edge of psychosis, I felt like I knew Hurley and Ben, Adama and Kara Thrace. So I'm peeved on their behalf; they deserve better stories than they're getting.
As far as the Lost finale itself goes, it could have been a lot worse. On the one hand, I kind of liked the Phildickian notion that reality was not what our characters thought it was, but that there was some underlying meaning. It tied in nicely with the copy of Valis that Locke pulls off the shelf for Ben to read. I'll bet it's got something to do with the hatch-bookshelf copy of The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien, which I have yet to read.
On the other, I wonder how I would feel if I were told that the son I'd been raising all these years didn't exist at all. That should have really bothered Jack and Juliette. In fact, the whole muzzy Hollywood redemption/afterlife undercut what I'd found rather moving about the sideways-world storyline: That these characters were growing and moving on even without the island experience. (For such was my take.) So what I liked about it was undercut by what seems like lazy Hollywood feel-good writing. Galactica was even worse.
I've always found Lost to be a better experience watching the DVDs in as few sittings as possible, rather than from week-to-week. Watching a cop show pay off a Chekovian gun-on-the-wall within 15 minutes, I remarked to my wife that this is the kind of thing Lost does ... only it happens about ten episodes apart.
I actually liked that not every question was specifically answered: some of it was not told but shown, such as the reason Ben had Kate and Sawyer work on the runway. That thing sure came in handy.
So maybe I missed something, but it wasn't clear to me at all what Jack and faux-Locke thought Desmond could accomplish that nobody else could, let alone exactly why Widmore brought Desmond back to the island in the first place. And for a semi-sentient entity, the island sure seemed awfully persnickety as to whether or not the fountain at the bottom of the well as plugged up.
The island wants this, the island wants that ... by the end of the story I wanted to say to hell with what the island wants.
At this point the viewer begins to suspect that the creators are making up a lot on the fly. Which is exactly the charge I spent six years faithfully defending it from with the detractors in my life.
And some questions still nag. How did the congruence between Hurley's lottery numbers and Jacob's numbered list happen? Those numbers seemed terribly important. In the sidways world, were the supporting players like Dr. Chang and George Minkowski and Locke's annoying boss "really" there? What happened to Sawyer's child? Which Aaron is real, the one Claire gave birth to at the concert or the one Kate raised? Why weren't Daniel and Charlotte at the cast-party-in-the-sky, or did I miss them? How come Eloise seems to know everything in both worlds? Where were Rousseau and Alex? Am I dull for not getting some of this, or am I just dumb for caring for as long as I did?
There it is, without polluting my mind with all the pundits telling me what I'm supposed to think. Bad enough that they do it with politics; spewing personal opinion about entertainment as would-be conventional wisdom just seems like something you should go to purgatory for. OK, one critic I trust (though don't always agree with) is Charlie Jane Anderson on io9. Her take is worth reading. I love the idea of Lost as the ultimate long con. That seems like a pretty good metaphor for what a novelist does. It's a spell, an illusion, a seduction, a distortion of reality willingly accepted.
Except of course the payoff has got to leave the mark feeling good, not cheated. Lately I haven't been too happy about being a mark.