Lost: Season 6 Discussion Thread - Page 140

Not that it really matters, but I work with a lot of Lost fans, and the overwhelming majority of them saw the ending as "They died in the crash and the entire show was purgatory".

This thought actually crossed my mind, but the comparison doesn't hold up. It would have been great, though, if they ascended to heaven by sliding out of the frame the way Poochie returned to space.

I thought the general reaction here was relief it was taken care of in the penultimate episode, which meant something else was going to happen in the finale, and Jack likely would not be the protector for long. Which, you know.

And why would meta-commentary require a "humble sandwich" anyway? They also commented on how someone goes off on a mission, insists someone else stays, and that person follows them anyway. It doesn't negate the fact they used that device six hundred times.

Infertility was caused by detonating Jughead is supposedly the writers' answer (from Darlton's mouth, as stated earlier in the thread). Though I think it is dumb I can at least accept that. What's a bit lame is that it's never addressed in-show.

ETA: I definitely don't regret watching the series. It captured my imagination more than any other show ever has, and the fun I had discussing the show with friends and coming up with theories to explain all the crazy shit was more than worth it.

I've heard the same and, honestly, that speaks more to the intelligence level of these viewers than because the writers flubbed that plot point. I mean, for God's sake, Christian "Basil Exposition" Shepherd explicitly states that the Losties died at different times.

Forward them this.

The lack of answers doesn't bother me a great deal. Like Joeypants said, it was clear that a lot of the mysteries were dead and buried. What irked me was the mysteries and questions raised in the very same season getting ignored. Sayids sickness, Dogens power over MIB but most importantly MIBs end game. Having numerous characters say he is "evil incarnate" and "if he leaves everybody dies" just isn't enough. Why will everyone die? What is the Islands hold on him? As Devin mentioned when things like that are murky and vague it makes it so difficult to get invested in (or dare I say it, understand) what is happening. Sure the character beats remain strong, but the plot dam near falls apart.

I'm pretty sure that a friend who texted me angrily "DAMMIT, I CAN'T BELIEVE THEY JUST DID THAT" after the finale probably thinks that. Haven't talked to him about it though so I can't be sure.

I'll add Aaron and the crazy Psychic.
The "rules" of the candidates and Widmore/Ben
What the fuck IS THE ISLAND

And I don't regret watching the series at all. In fact, I'd still recommend it to someone who had never watched it.

It does kill my desire to rewatch the whole thing someday, though.

I'll add the Toy Truck from 'Further instructions'
The mushroom portrait from Sawyer and Juliet's house
Kate's toy airplane
Walt's comic

I know these are small things but they shouldn't have introduced them if they were never planning on answering them

Really? Walts comic book? Maybe you're being sarcastic, but there is mystery and then there's something less than that.

I think this very funny sketch perfectly encapsulates this thread

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjrn4dXE2yI

Yeah the whole Dogens power over MiB and the fact that Smokey couldn't attack the temple unless Dogen was dead irks me too, but I guess it would just be a "rule" that Jacob made? Whatever those are. Same with the ash that was used to block the smoke monster...

Someone brought up earlier Anna Lucia talking to Hurley in season 5. Anna Lucia gives him some advice, than tells him Libby says "hello". So it's dumb that she wasn't in the church and that she "isn't ready yet".

It was a show full of twists and turns because the plot was arbitrary. They could twist anything they wanted, make any crazy reveal, because none of the narrative needed to cohere in the end.

And the infertility is your only problem? Just to use one well discussed point: you're ok with Eloise being a Time Lord with zero explanation?

In a later episode with Eko, the psychic told Eko he was a fraud. This is the answer the producers want you to think about. Disregard the fact that the guy paid for Claire's plane ticket so she could get out of Dodge because the baby was in grave danger. It's unsatisfying, but there ya go.

Farradays journal! It's not a good explanation, but I think it technically qualifies as one.

It's been gone over a dozen times, but Faraday's journal is no explanation. It's like if you went back to 1776 with a history book - you might know the big details, but you wouldn't know, moment by moment, who gets taken out by cannon fire. And Eloise had knowledge down to the last moments. As well as a complete knowledge of the way that fate itself works! She told Desmond about course correction.

She was presented as a supernatural being, and the show never bothered to deal with that. It's part of why this was one of of the most ambitiously poorly written longform narratives in history.

What was Sawyer's resolution? And not the purgatory-story one, because that one doesnt count for anything at all.

It turns out Sawyer's story ended somewhere in mid-season 5. He was just along for the ride since then.

Exaclty. If Sawyer, Kate and the other plane survivors actually made it off the island, then the story is not over. These characters (survivors on the plane) still live in a world where all the mysteries that happened on the island (i.e. time-travel, location warping, electromagnetic oddity, fertility issues based on location, etc.) exist. The only finality we got was that Jack died. For the survivors, they left on the plane without knowing anything about what the island was, and neither do we.

How's that dumb? Ana Lucia could talk to Hurley because her soul hadn't passed on yet.

They left behind their good friend in a quasi-omnipotent position. Hurley could obviously come hang out with them, or get them back to the Island for holidays.

Except her soul was in purgatory not knowing it was dead. Or that there was a Hurley, or an Island.

Yep. I don't know what she did between Faraday's death and when she first showed up in the series. Maybe she went to Time School. Or the island gave her powers or knowledge or something.

I've encountered that as well. I thought I was going to have to break out some graphs and charts to illustrate it with one guy. There are a lot of things open to interpretation, criticism and like/dislike but at some point you need to pay attention to what is there.

The sideways universe and the regular universe have no chronological relation to each other.

Ana Lucia's soul stayed in the regular world (as a whisperer, who Hurley can talk to explicitly) until her role was finished, and eventually passed into the sideways world when she was ready to take that next step.

It's sloppy and one of my major complaints about the Alt-Sideways. It was ill defined and left a little too much ambiguity and dependence on audience inference to be 100% satisfactory.

Which I suppose is the most damning criticism of the show itself as whole for some people.

That's tragic apologism. Why even bother showing things like 'events' and 'character arcs' if the audience will literally fill in the blanks for you? Is that how a good story is told? "Well, this character was offscreen, so literally ANYTHING could have happened, and I'm okay with them returning to the narrative with a thirty foot tall death robot. I mean, how do I know she WASN'T building one that whole time?"

You're going to look back in two years and wince at that one.

I actually think they missed an opportunity to give him some closure, at least in regards to his whole "quest to find the real Sawyer" thing. I mean, I always thought they were leading to a scene where he confronts a comatose Anthony Cooper, contemplates killing him anyway, then realizes he should just move on.

I don't think it's a stretch for Daniel's journal being the source of Eloise's knowledge. Or at least the impetus for it. Now if you want to argue it's an idea that was poorly executed and explained? Sure, I can go down that road with you.

I don't disagree about filling in too many blanks, but this is an absurd argument. If she had been left detailed schematics for building a thirty foot tall death robot, it would not be at all surprising to find that she had built one. What she was left was a detailed manuscript of how time travel works.

You thought Sawyer was going to confront Cooper because Sawyer explicitly said he was going to do that.

Well, I firmly disagree on that last one. After a certain point, I never felt like I even wanted to know "what the island is." That is perhaps the biggest mystery that after the 2nd season, I was pretty comfortable with them never answering. THAT could've been the Macguffin if there was to be one.

As for Aaron and the Psychic...

I was going to mention that, but you beat me to it. However, let me elaborate...

This might end up dueling it out for single most annoying dropped/retconned thread of the series. It makes ZERO fucking sense for the psychic to go through the trouble of buying her an expensive plane ticket if he's a fraud.

And my anger/frustration is, like most things on this show, amplified by how compelling the original mystery was. When I first watched the first season, this episode was probably the second major "holy shit!" moment for me after Walkabout.

When I rewatch the series I may go back on this, but I seem to recall the second appearance of Mr. Psychic leading to my first major case of way, WAY overthinking the show. He announces he's a fraud to Eko, but meanwhile, his fucking daughter has risen from the dead (and off island, no less). Ok, some weird shit is going down on this man's property and/or with his progeny. SURELY he's lying about being a fraud, right? RIGHT?!

Oh, I'm sorry Darlton. Didn't realize that THIS was you coming "clean" and admitting, "oh, see? He's actually a fraud. Baby prophecy = negated." At the time I assumed that this immensely clever show was pulling some insane triple-gotcha mindfuck on me that would pay off tenfold down the road. Nope. Merely lazily ditching out on one of the more compelling mysteries they'd set up.

Somewhere in Season 4 these moments all started to add up to me and I realized that they look at this show like most others: a series of well-made seasons that when loosely strung together will hopefully add up to a compelling overall narrative. But the overall narrative isn't where the focus is primarily placed, it's more concentrated on making sure each season functions as it's own "non-submersible unit" (to borrow a phrase from Kubrick).

And as far as legitimate theorizing goes:

If "heaven" bothers you so much, you could legitimately argue that none of the purgatory stuff is "real." I mean, it's real in the sense that Jack (and we assume everyone else, although that doesn't work in what I'm about to suggest) is experiencing it.

But there's real study into whether or not our brains give us similar hallucinations in an effort to comfort us before dropping off into the great untold "nothing" (or "everything," depending on how you look at it).

I made half-jokes about it earlier, but perhaps the purgatory world is really just Jack's dying hallucination/delusion/gift-from-his-brain to give him one last smile or comfort before letting go.

If you look at it this way, it doesn't negate his "faith" as Schwartz suggested in that other thread. Heaven isn't something that's definitively answered in this scenario.


However... I do not think this is how the show comes down on it. I think the producers firmly come down on the side of: there is a heaven, and our characters/everyone goes there once they're done in purgatory.

Also if you were to subscribe to the view I've suggested, that makes every moment of the purgatory plots even more pointless. Unless you figure that Jack cared about the others enough that his brain had to factor their happiness or state of afterlife readiness into everything. Which when you're dealing with hallucinations/fever dreams/etc. is entirely possible.

Anybody wanna talk about the Numbers?

I forgot about all that. The O6 did get to know her on the rescue boat. Thanks for the reminder.

as far as the psychic goes, you could just say Jacob visited him and told him what to do.

Nothing Compares 2 Shannon

I need to watch the finale again, but did Jack do a little chuckle as he lay dying and the Ajira plane flew over him? Kind of laughing at the symmetry of it all, or just happy that his friends got away safely?

Remember that feeling you had way back in season 1, when you thought about giving up on the show because the characters never asked any pertinent questions? And then you decided to stick it out, and it turned into a great mystery show with characters you liked, and wanted to see succeed? And then they started answering a mystery with a mystery, and then they introduced time-travel, and you thought "well, that opens up the possibility of major plot-holes" and you continued to discuss everything for hours and hours with your friends and on CHUD?

That's why answers about the island itself are so important, it's because THAT'S ALL WE DISCUSSED in the last 80,000+ posts over the last 5 years, not "ooh, happy relationships!!!"

They got to know her on the rescue boat... and THAT'S enough to get her into their heaven? I don't even think the main Island people knew Desmond well enough for him to end up there.

I know, right? Right up until the last second of the show they were dropping more mysteries!!!

which part about the #'s? the fact that the #'s on the cave of the final 6 candidates are seen all over for no apparent reason?

If it's not real and is just Jack's dying vision, there are even more narrative problems with the alt-dimension than there are if you assume it's real. Until the very end of the finale, the focus in the alt-reality was not strictly on Jack. As you mention, we saw everyone experience their individual epiphanies before Jack did. In addition, Jack wouldn't have the background on the other survivors to subconsciously construct their backstories with details that correspond to reality (Anthony Cooper, Helen, Nadia, Roger Linus, etc.).

As poorly as it works, I'm pretty sure we're supposed to take this alt-reality as a literal representation of the characters in the afterlife. The alternative is, unbelievably, even sloppier somehow.

There's a deleted scene on the DVD that implies the Psychic is paid to get Claire on the plane by the family that wants to adopt Aaron. I don't have my DVD's anymore though so I can't check.

It's so funny - those numbers were everywhere (and years before the Losties came to the Island), so Jacob could have just paid better attention and figured out which handful of candidates were the right ones a long time ago.

From lostpedia.

On the Lost Season 2 DVD Lost Connections there is a previously unseen clip when the navigation moves from Eko to Richard Malkin. Malkin tells Eko that he was paid $16,000 by a couple in Los Angeles to convince a pregnant girl to board a plane (note that this is a deleted scene and, as such, is not necessarily canon).

Yes, her general knowledge of time travel could potentially be explained by Daniel's journal. But she explained time travel to Desmond by literally having them walk to a specific spot on the street in London and then watch a guy get murdered before their eyes. A guy neither of them knew. The show definitely set her up to have knowledge about very specific events that were unrelated to Desmond, Daniel, or the Island.