Distractions: The Last Transmission

In which I spent a night trying to let go



Lost was the first television show I ever watched from beginning to end, week to week. It's been a week now, shuttled across Rhode Island with Zaidee, spending blessed hours way from my computer. For the past season and a half I had taken to reading a set of blogs everyday after the airing of the latest episode, seeing what people had noticed, what their theories were and their reactions. I found the finale of Lost, when it arrived in fits and starts between Target commercials that sold smoke detectors with the Smoke Monster, to be nearly impossible to process. At times I came as close to crying as when lovable Charlie was strung up a banyon tree for dead in season one, other times frustrated by the same device they had been employing all season which seemed to stall the action on island, still other times awed or embarrassed. 

At the end I was faced with something less than satisfactory. The reveal had been something akin to standing, swaying atop a 12 foot latter before the inevitable but still shocking fall to earth. The end finally veered deep into a territory that the show had long skirted around, ending on a note of pure, high cheese. It didn't help that Zaidee's HD television had the motion-smoothing feature enabled, so that the entire proceeding had the gloss of a telenovela, or the 700 Club. Tati stated best our shared dissatisfaction with the ending with a single word: "Narnia".

Hopefully all of you read the Chronicles of Narnia. Of anything of the last book, The Last Battle, I remember my utter frustration with it. Everything from Tash to fake Aslan frustrated me. What annoyed me the most however was that the four kids we had come to know over those seven books were reunited in a brand new Narnia only after their train had taken a turn to quickly. They were still young, having spent most of their lives in Narnia, were little able to use their knowledge in life, in the world, where things mattered. They were stripped of their opportunities and potentialities to embark instead on a journey "onwards and upwards" through an endless fractal Heaven of Narnia.

Likewise, the friendlier, more balanced versions of the characters we had come to know and love over the past six years didn't exist. This was a peculiar vision of the afterlife, and here nice Jack and teacher Ben embark on a journey onwards and upwards though they are not fully aware of the situation. I commend the writers on this aspect of the end though, that at no point anyone that had died (on screen) came back to life in any fashion (with two notable exceptions, now that I think on it). Anyway, my point is that there were no second chances for anyone in life, that they had their moments of balance and peace beyond the mortal realm.

Thus irritated I went to bed, and encountered the singular pain of having what distracted you from your worries suddenly become your worry. The Life and Death theme spinning on a loop through my head, accompanied by every appearance of Christian Shepard, alive, dead, ghost, Monster, and the unanswerable question of what represented was real or not. I had to do breathing exercises to clear my head long enough so I could sleep.
Now a week on, I cannot recall the song. Already the mechanism that blocks things that distress me is working its voodoo upon Lost.

I wanted to keep from reading Lost blogs for as long as possible so I could form my own opinion, but after that night I broke down and read Maureen Ryan's reaction to the finale. Ryan, unlike me, found the resolution to be very satisfying, and it helped my state greatly to read it. While the afterlife angle still rankled, her interpretation allowed me to appreciate it more. Zaidee pointed out during the finale that the survivors had finally stopped being fractious, and were working towards a common and seemingly insurmountable goal. The Sideways worked because it was formed by a community, a community brought together under canopy of the island that could not find its ground while it lived, but whose members finally realized its value. It's never too late, spirits and the living said to each other, we still have time to help each other, especially the ones that slipped away before us. While I value action in life more than waiting until the last possible moment, Ryan's post allowed me to see the care that went into creating this "waiting room" for the survivors. At that point I was stricken with a loop of the deplorable old Keen song "Somewhere Only We Know".

Things I Unabashedly Enjoyed:

Kate saying I love you to Jack. This was a satisfyingly heart-breaking scene. I hated both Jack and Kate for most of seasons 3-6. Props to the writers for making me care in a big way. Kate losing Jack at last to the island brought a tear to my eye.

Jack fighting Not Locke on the cliff, and its Lord of the Flies ending.
Corollary: Jack telling Not Locke off for pilfering Locke's memories.

Desmond being wrong about what didn't matter. Desmond's smug attitude towards his existence on the island stemmed from him believing that the Sideways world is the real one, and that his actions would jump him there accordingly. Desmond's painful realization that this was not the case solidified the existence of the island itself.

Miles pulling a gray hair from Richard's head, Richard marvelling at it and professing his desire to live.

But far and away the best part was Ben and Hurley becoming the new Alpert and Jacob of the island. Hurley was always the true heart of the show, releasing everyone's tensions and helping out as much as he could. He went from comic relief to a real player of the island's game. Ben and Hurley had been the weirdest pair (and another) in the whole show, and if you had told me in season three that they would become the immortal protectors of the island as a team I would have laughed and laughed. Ben's earnest statement to Hurley that he "could find a better way" was the most affecting to me. If I were a fan-fic reading kind of person I would immediately find all of the new stories about Hurley and Ben's more humane leadership of the island of lost souls.

In the end, rules were meant to be broken, rewritten. In the end, no one really dies alone.