Lost: Season Six (2 Viewers)

[Dave Mack]

I think it totally matters when they died because if we had known from the first ep. that nothing we saw happened in reality and was all an "in their minds, afterlife" thing ala Twilight Zone I would have said "meh... that's been done as a twist for 50 years now" and wouldn't have watched another episode.

 

[mattCR]

Originally Posted by Dave Mack

just watched the final scene again and the first thing Jack sees when he touches his father's coffin is his "death scene" on the island, lying down on the ground looking up at the sky. This is where he finally "remembers" all that happened. If he really didn't die then but years before in the crash this would make no sense. That implies like a "Double" purgatory. One would be all the events on the island and two would be the alternate reality. That's just too silly if you ask me... Wouldn't he remember his actual death in the plane crash?

No. Wow, we go through all of this talk for seasons about the links to Christianity and faith, etc. The flashback for all of them is the things that they remembered together as they gained acceptance. If this is really steeped in Christian mythos, then the death of the physical body is not nearly as important a step as when they gain acceptance into the afterlife, and what happened there.


Why would you bother remembering being blown to bits in a plane? What kind of terrible afterlife would that be?


Have you ever seen "What Dreams May Come" ?

 

[Jeffery_H]

Originally Posted by mattCR




Yes, JJ says so.. more then 2 years ago, but writing can change a great deal, and they obviously didn't have the series finale written.


Like I said, we will agree to disagree. I understand your viewpoint, I just don't accept it, just as you won't accept mine. Neither are right or wrong.

It's kind of like Lord of the Rings. People can argue about the WWI/WWII overtones. The writer says it had nothing to do with it. I'd say hogwash. Even the writer of a work can not realize how they are being influenced. If you'd ask Shakespeare about much of his work, he'd have a much different opinion of meanings them I'm sure most of us do.


The opinion they had about the potential conclusion 2 years ago in a youtube video isn't necessarily meaningful at all to where they ended up.

I certainly see your points and remain somewhat conflicted myself at this time as to the island being real or not. Certainly it can be thought of in at least a couple of different ways and your views are one of them.


Another thing that had me thinking about this show and how it ended was the movie "Passengers". If you have not seen it yet and like Lost I would HIGHLY recommend it. There is no way to discuss the movie, even with spoiler tags and made the point so if you don't want the movie spoiler ruined then STOP NOW.........





The movie was highly similar to the way Lost ended and they all died in a plane crash and were in purgatory. Each person had to find their own way and come to terms before being able to move on to the after life. What I find that can support Matt's theory here is that in the movie each person that they had known in their life plays a different role in helping them deal with movie on. For example, her mentor in the movie really is her old music teacher she knew when she was just a child in school. They were all people she had known in her life, some playing different roles from how she had known them when she was living, helping her work her way through purgatory. Like I said, a VERY interesting movie if you like Lost and one that has theories of what you are saying here.

 

[Cory S.]

Interesting write up: http://scottalanmendelson.blogspot.com/2010/05/what-they-died-for-not-much-it-turns.html


I don't know how I feel about it because he does make a few good points...

 

[mattCR]

Originally Posted by Dave Mack

I think it totally matters when they died because if we had known from the first ep. that nothing we saw happened in reality and was all an "in their minds, afterlife" thing ala Twilight Zone I would have said "meh... that's been done as a twist for 50 years now" and wouldn't have watched another episode.

Why would it be all in their minds? In many religious mythos (Catholicism, Islam, Mormon) the existance of a purgatory as a matter of trials to overcome as our acceptance of fate is a significant one.


And, come on, the links are so obvious I'm struggling that everyone thinks the opinion is nuts. Has no one else read Dante's Divine Comedy? The links to Purgatorio?


I think you say "well, if it's all in their minds, it doesn't matter at all.." I have never said that. If you buy into any of those religious mythos, the battle for their soul, and what happens next is critical as to who they are, who those characters are, and what happens to them. So, I'm not sure how them being dead all along changes anything about what happens in that way outside of the fact that it was the journey they took... after death.

 

[Dave Mack]

wow, he sounds grumpy. I think the finale totally made the series as a whole great.

 

[Dave Mack]

Ok Matt, I get where you're coming from. But just to ME maybe, the fact that all of the series maybe existed in purgatory as a real place, (not just in their minds) doesn't interest me at all and I would have tuned out. Maybe it's just me.


But I do completely understand now and respect your viewpoint.


But if that IS what they were showing at the end then as storytellers they did a really bad job conveying that. Most everyone I know seems to agree with my take on it.

 

[Jeffery_H]

Originally Posted by Cory S.

Interesting write up: http://scottalanmendelson.blogspot.com/2010/05/what-they-died-for-not-much-it-turns.html


I don't know how I feel about it because he does make a few good points...

Totally don't like how he comes off and disagree on many things with that article. I think what it comes down to is what they said all along. They are prepared for some fan backlash on how it ended. It will come down to what side you fall on as they have said all along, even on Jimmy Kimmel last night. It did not shy away at all with their religious aspects and went full on into them in the end. That is why I rank it so highly, they simply did not compromise their own personal beliefs

 

[NeilO]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TravisR

I think that's an interesting theory but it's a big leap to make.

As has been stated many pages back, I believe it is entirely consistent in the show that the fertility problem became manifest on the island in the aftermath of The Incident. That's all the explanation that I need for that.

 

[mattCR]

Originally Posted by Dave Mack

Ok Matt, I get where you're coming from. But just to ME maybe, the fact that all of the series maybe existed in purgatory as a real place, (not just in their minds) doesn't interest me at all and I would have tuned out. Maybe it's just me.


But I do completely understand now and respect your viewpoint.


But if that IS what they were showing at the end then as storytellers they did a really bad job conveying that. Most everyone I know seems to agree with my take on it.

I get your viewpoint too. It's odd, I see a lot of people on both sides. I guess for me it just clicks the one way, maybe too much of a bow because then wild time swings and the existance of things like Polar Bears etc. is not a problem


But I respect your viewpoint too. I think a big part of it comes from how you viewed the series all along. And I think it's good that the ending can cause a bit of a battle about what it means.


I said earlier that despite those who hated the Sopranos ending, I loved it.. thought it was maybe one of the most brilliant series endings ever, in that it just said "no simple answers.. the rest of their lives they will always be waiting on the gunshot that will kill them" black. I thought that was brilliant. I respected others who hated it.


With LOST, I've always had one viewpoint.

At first, first watch of it, I was really thrown because I kept thinking about it as "they are all real, it all really happens" kind of like your viewpoint, and then I found it a huge emotional letdown because so many characters became completely meaningless, plotlines became nothing or fictional.. but if I accepted that they were all dead, it became much more rewarding to me, I could see the entire series from a different perspective.


So, I'm happier with the end (much), but I respecall the viewpoints, and I think it's good for a show to end with a real hammer it out over "what did it mean" because it says as much about the viewer as the show, and the fact that it makes you think critically is good all the way around, which is something some of the bloggers seem to miss

 

[Bryan^H]

With a show so dense, and vague.....I don't think there are any wrong conclusions. I think that that is the beauty of this great show. It can be debated forever, but the bottom line is that we still enjoyed the show immensely.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

It's kind of like Lord of the Rings. People can argue about the WWI/WWII overtones. The writer says it had nothing to do with it. I'd say hogwash.

Just to correct an off-topic error. Tolkein never said anything like the statement you attribute to him. Tolkein wasn't an idiot, and he knew better. What he said was that The Lord of the Rings was not written as an allegory of WWII, and that is indisputable, since many key sections were written or outlined before the war even began, nor does the story remotely follow that course of that war. Even the Scouring of the Shire, which many assume to be an image of post-war England, was nothing of the kind. It was where the story was always headed and sketched out before the outbreak of war in 1939.

This was no Faerie Queen, where the characters and nations in the story represented specific real people and nations of the 30s and 40s, or where the plot followed the outline of the actual war, or Narnia, where Aslan is a quite literal Christ-figure to that other world. Tolkein certainly never denied that his experience in the trenches of WWI (where nearly all of his friends died) shaped his approach to the story (the passage of the Dead Marshes certainly recalls the experience of picking one's way through the unburied corpses of No Man's Land, for instance.) He drew a distinction (which I think applies to Lost as well) between applicability, the ability to see general resemblances between fiction and real life - which lies in the freedom of the reader - and allegory, the deliberate substitution of fictional elements for their real counterparts where everyone is supposed to know what is "really" meant. Allegory represents the tyrrany of the writer. (The modern version is the roman a clef, the kind of potboiling novel that Jacqueline Suzanne used to write and that Jackie Collins writes today, which purport to give you the inside skinny on political or show biz scandal by depicting quite recognizable people under barely-disguised fictional names. Just enough to keep the libel lawyers at bay.)

Regards,


Joe

 

[Tim Gerdes]

Originally Posted by mattCR

And, come on, the links are so obvious I'm struggling that everyone thinks the opinion is nuts. Has no one else read Dante's Divine Comedy? The links to Purgatorio?


I think you say "well, if it's all in their minds, it doesn't matter at all.." I have never said that. If you buy into any of those religious mythos, the battle for their soul, and what happens next is critical as to who they are, who those characters are, and what happens to them. So, I'm not sure how them being dead all along changes anything about what happens in that way outside of the fact that it was the journey they took... after death.

I'm struggling with your interpretation simply because we witnessed everything you describe here (the journey after death, the concept of purgatory, what happens next). The flash sideways was clearly defined as this rest stop before heading into the light.

What's confusing to me about your interpretation is that if, as you suggest, the Island represented this place after death, then why not go from the Island directly to the light, why wade through a second purgatory before reaching the final destination?


Beyond which, I feel that this was all clearly telegraphed in Christian's speech and the fact that we witnessed Jack die (not to mention other crash survivors over the last six years).


Not that the finale wasn't open to interpretation. Why did Eloise not want Daniel to move forward? For that matter, what was Eloise? she clearly knew more about the Island, alternate realities, and purgatory than anyone else. What about Michael? Is he perpetually trapped in Limbo, never to reach the sideways world and white light beyond? What happened to Eko? Who, or what exactly was David?


They were very clear, though, about what the Island was, what the flash sideways really was, and when Jack literally died, after saving the Island, and the world.

And if the Island truly was purgatory, who built the encampment clearly visible in one of those final images over the end credits? ;-)

 

[Dave Mack]

man, i am gonna miss this show and these characters,,,,

 

[Holadem]

"Not that the finale wasn't open to interpretation. Why did Eloise not want Daniel to move forward? For that matter, what was Eloise? she clearly knew more about the Island, alternate realities, and purgatory than anyone else."


Eloise is the one mystery about which I actually do not what to learn more. She is my Tom Bombadil.


As for why she'd want Daniel to stay behind, well, he is her child, and I am guessing she is still there because she has her own issues to resolve with him. Same reason Ben stayed.


--

H

 

[Bryan^H]

Originally Posted by Tim Gerdes


What's confusing to me about your interpretation is that if, as you suggest, the Island represented this place after death, then why not go from the Island directly to the light, why wade through a second purgatory before reaching the final destination?

It could possibly be that their souls were not ready for the next step yet, and that is what the island represents: a place to where the souls work out their issues, become stronger, and more adaptive toward others. I'm not saying Matt is absolutely correct, but he certainly isn't absolutely wrong, especially when season 4 hinted more than a few times that the passengers of the Oceanic flight were already dead.

 

[Arild]

Originally Posted by Bryan^H

season 4 hinted more than a few times that the passengers of the Oceanic flight were already dead.

How so?

 

[Brent M]

Originally Posted by Bryan^H

With a show so dense, and vague.....I don't think there are any wrong conclusions. I think that that is the beauty of this great show. It can be debated forever, but the bottom line is that we still enjoyed the show immensely.

That sums it up perfectly. What really happened is going to be debated forever just like when the screen went black at the end of The Sopranos and while the finale of LOST wasn't perfect it was certainly better than the last episode of the aforementioned show.

 

[James_Kiang]

Just a few thoughts/reactions to the finale:


- Personally, I really enjoyed it. There were many times I found myself tearing up. I thought the decision to focus more on the characters as opposed to the remaining questions in the story was the right way to go. Whatever the answers to those questions are, knowing what happens to these characters was completely satisfying and made perfect sense to me, as it was the characters that kept me coming back over the last 6 years.


- I fall firmly in the camp that Oceanic 815 crashed on the island, there were survivors, the Oceanic 6 (and Locke as well as at least Ben) were able to leave the island, they returned, etc. All of that happened and they at no time were all dead. The flash-sideways I thought was clearly defined by Christian as the place they all made so that when they did die they would be able to all come together first befor moving on. That notion does not match up with my Christian belief, but as this is a tv show I have no problem with it and found it to be full of heart-touching moments.


- I'm sorry I don't have the name of the person who said this here first, but I am thinking that the "it worked" that Miles picked up from Juliet may have been part of the conversation she had with Sawyer in the flash sideways life. She definitely says those words.

 

[Jeff Brooks]

I recorded it and have not watched it; but, I have read everything posted here since the broadcast and up to this point. What I see is a lot of opinions and interpretations.



Perhaps that is a sure sign of good writing---that it causes people to think and draw their own conclusions.



Just MHO.