What it's really all about by Tom Aylott

This morning, I awoke to an alarm at half past four, eager to watch the two hour conclusion of what has been my favourite television show for a long time - Lost. Until around half an hour after I finished watching it, I was a little disappointed. I had previously thought that the show was about the Island, and the characters weaving through the episodes were just there to facilitate ‘the answers’ to questions naturally asked of the origin, purpose and nature of the island itself - none of these mysteries ever had the fundamental answer that had been seemingly built towards over six seasons of tense and gripping television.

After a reflective and slightly dissatisfied shower, I ended up looking at the real point of the show from another perspective that showed the ending to be both calibrated with the writers’ claim that they knew what they were doing all along, and a fitting conclusion to what will be remembered as a brilliant yet frustrating television experience.

The main criticisms levelled at the ending of Lost from what I’ve seen this morning is that there was neither true final plot twist or explanation of many of the mysteries associated with the show. The thing is that, though perhaps verging on cringe-worthy, the ending was needed to deliver the real final twist and meaning, which was that the show was never even really about the island at all.

The writers made it very clear in Jack’s conversation with his father than the events on the island did happen, and implicitly that only the parts originally discussed as ‘flash-sideways’ from Season 6 were the purgatorial allegory, not the island parts itself. The ending was never meant to feel like a perfect cadence, you’re supposed to feel a little cheated out of answers to the big questions because that is the nature of life - you just can’t know everything. Jack begins as a man of science, seeking answers, retribution, to lead men and to better his father’s footsteps, and ends up letting go and embracing his fate.

The Dharma Initiative, time travel, Walt’s psychic powers, the ‘light cave’ at the center of the island, the smoke monster, the frozen donkey wheel, the numbers, Miles, Richard, Jacob and Hurley’s strange powers, and every other mystery that gave the show it’s character have been left purposefully unexplained because that’s the point - ‘why?’ is not important in the end. We don’t know whether there’s a true meaning for existence and it’s very likely that we’ll either never know or that there is no meaning at all, but as a person you can either accept that ‘whatever happens, happens’, or you can struggle against it and go crazy, but regardless of theisms and whether a next life exists or not, your present life will end at some point and you’ll have to let go - whether it’s today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, when you’re a hundred, or less likely with some freaky science in 3010.

Conclusively, and if you’ll allow me to once more labour the Lost/Life simile - meaning and enjoyment are never to be found in the beginning or the end, rather your interpretation of how the events takes place. You can either obsess with finding the answers, or you can recognise the futility of the questions. It up to you.

Taken from my blog here, thought it might sit well on DarkUFO.... http://gotwit.tumblr.com/