'Lost' Finale Suggests A Way Out of Here
By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 30, 2008
Warning: This whole thing is a "Lost" spoiler. One. Big. Spoiler.
Proceed at your own risk.
A lot of people are dead.
With the ABC show's history of mind-blasting season-enders (Season 1: They open the hatch! 2: They destroy the hatch! 3: They flash forward, not back!), "Lost" viewers wondered what revelatory twist would be added to close out a season that already had introduced time travel and freighter people. And the answer, in last night's fourth-season finale, was:
No totally unbelievable twists -- movable island? Pfft. We've seen weirder.
Just death.
But those deaths were culturally significant, to the show and even more so to the fans.
In the two-hour episode, we saw the whacking of Michael and possibly Jin. We received tentative confirmation that Claire, who's been wandering around, ghostlike, with Jack's dead dad, is dead, too. And we saw that a dead Locke was in that much-discussed coffin, and that everybody wants to get him back to the island to resurrect him.
Add this slew to the body count of previous episodes (Charlie? Dead. Rousseau? Dead. Boone and Shannon? Dead and dead. Walt? Not dead, but mostly gone), and 50 percent of the original cast now resides in Jack's makeshift graveyard.
Sigh.
You know how sometimes bands will kick out a couple of original members, but keep the same name and go on as if nothing happened? (Think Destiny's Child, AC/DC.) New fans will discover the new version, and say they love the group. And old fans will allow them into the fold, but they secretly know there was another, totally different band before.
That's "Lost," now. This past season? It was your last chance to become a fan of the original series. Your last chance to witness the times when everyone hated Ben instead of feeling terribly sorry for him for growing emotions.
One of the hallmarks of the show has been its incredible mutation, the elegant way it folded in more characters and more plot. This finale seemed comparatively simple. It gave us more answers than questions. It gave us Desmond and Penny tearfully kissing on a rescue boat! Perhaps because the writers now have an end date to work toward, everything seems to be wrapping up. The beginning of the end.
Of course, in the "Lost" world, no one can be counted out permanently. Spirits have a way of popping up in the oddest places. We theoretically could see more of Jin (probably) or Michael (probably not). Next season could be a return to the show's roots of mind-numbing mystery.
We remember Boone.
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