Give the "Lost" Creators a Break

I know I always write about politics, but I'm going to digress for once.

Like millions of other TV viewers, I watched the "Lost" series finale this past week. Apparently UNlike many of those viewers, I actually enjoyed the heck out of it. I thought it lived up to the hype, that it had just as much suspense as any of their other episodes, and I liked how everything played out. I had a few complaints, but they were minor. Overall I liked the wrap-up and respected the storyline that they came up with. Was I the only one?

The day after I watched the finale, I paged through the newspaper and online magazines for reactions, and saw just a lot of negativity. They hadn't answered any big questions, they said; the whole "purgatory" thing was as bad as the "dream" season on "Dallas"; all the reunion moments were just "sniff sniff" tissue moments, unworthy of the show.

I have to say, all that is garbage. I think these reviewers would have been disappointed no matter what the writers ultimately came up with. Look, this is a fictional TV show that takes plenty of liberties with reality. You're simply not going to get a complete explanation as to why everything happened, because there just isn't one. Furthermore, you're much better off in many cases not having heard one, because you can imagine one yourself that's just as plausible as whatever the writers might have come up with, and it'd be just as valid.

The one good review I read, a couple of lengthy pieces in Entertainment Weekly, I thought was pretty dead-on. The reviewer mentioned his favorite "hankie" moments and I even agreed with almost all of them. Come on, most of the "reunion moments" were tear-jerkers, reminding viewers of a lot of great moments from years ago in the series.

This last season was particularly satisfying because they knew they had a finite number of shows left in which to tell the rest of their story; so they didn't introduce many new questions, while spending a lot of time answering questions they'd raised in the prior 5 seasons. They gave us Jacob's life story and what his job was. They explained - mostly - how Smokey came to be, and revealed that he'd been the one Jack had seen in the form of his deceased father, Christian. They explained why our cast had been brought to the island, why they weren't supposed to have left, and why they'd been chosen in the first place. The list goes on.

In the end they even explained what we'd been seeing with all the "flash-sideways" events from this last season. The survivors had been in a sort of Purgatory, perhaps in an area they had made, themselves, in order to reunite with each other in the afterlife, before "moving on" to Heaven. Far from being alive and well because Juliet had detonated the atom bomb in the mid 1970's, in fact they were all just living a "second" life of sorts in this purgatory, until they eventually snapped out of it and realized where they were and that they'd died sometime earlier. Since their purgatory was outside of space and time, they'd all just come there after they had died, whether they'd died in the first season on the island, like Boone and Shannon, or at the end of the series, like Jack, or even some time much later than that, like Hugo and Ben. I thought it was a clever device to bring back all the viewers' favorite characters in one place again, to reunite and be happy, and to ultimately go away to that "better place" we all long for.

I also thought the very ending, with Jack nearing death and wandering back to the exact spot where he had been lying when his first plane crashed on the beach, then closing out the series with his closing eye in exact opposite to the series opening, was brilliant. I actually went back and watched the last 30 minutes of the show a few times, it was so moving.

One review I read ranked the "Lost" series finale right up there among the worst ever, including the "Seinfeld" series ender that was so horrible. I think that's just crazy. The "Lost" finale was riveting all throughout, wrapping up what they'd been working up to all season long, giving us a solid "win" against the smoke monster and resurrecting our favorite characters one last time so we could send them all off into the light for good.