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[krickets]

You know what? I've been to the other side. Trust me. It's not that great. And the food sucks!



Let me preface this by telling you a[n extremely short] story. Today some friends of ours came over to the house and brought their two daughters, Diana and Soraya. Soraya is five years old and is finishing up kindergarten. It was raining buckets today and she and I went outside and sat on the back deck underneath the awning while it rained. At some point, she randomly said to me, "One day we're all going to get old and die." This of course prompted a serious, but short conversation between me and this adorable and precocious little one. But at the end of the day, who knew she was spoiling the end of lost for me?

Now, don't get me wrong, there was a lot I liked about the finale. There were also things I didn't like. A lot of people have said, "it's not perfect." And I'll concur with that, but I think I may have to re-watch in order to appreciate the complexities of the whole she-bang. This reaction primarily deals with the last fifteen minutes of the show and nothing more than that.

I was thrilled that they finally merged the sideshow and the island timeline. That was something I was hoping for and something I knew that we would get. But as I told slybrunette, I wasn't particularly happy with the place that thought-submarine eventually docked.

Sideshow, for me, now means that they're all, including Aaron and probably Ji Yeon, dead. Whoever survived -- those who did or did not make it off the island -- they lived full lives and then eventually died, as people are prone to do. So now, the sideshow is after they are all dead and have met up in their "special place with all the glowy white light" aka heaven.

I don't know, it just felt heavy-handed and too overt and well, plain. Juliet was wrong. It didn't work. [Unless you're talking heavenly candy bars.] Not even in some "wait, we can still make this work, kind-of" sort of way. I was hoping the sideshow would end up being something fantastical, some actual chance for these characters to start over.

But it isn't magic at all. It's simply the afterlife. And that makes me sad in a way that isn't cathartic at all.

It is simply these last few moments of the show that have me wishing it ended differently. So I will have to go back and watch it again to properly digest how I feel about the finale as a whole.

Comments

[crickets.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised you liked it given all the shippy fan service that went on. Which you tend to hate. My heart is not made of coal, I do care about these characters, but I don't really give a shit whether or not Charlie [who, despite everyone else having better lives, was still a junkie douchebag in the sideshow] ends up with Claire in the afterlife. But maybe that's just me!

[It's probably just me.]

The idea that some die, that some move on and live their lives until their last -- all the while missing the person that they loved -- Richard, Kate, Sawyer, Claire, without their so-called better halves, Isabella, Jack, Juliet, Charlie -- that is very realistic. And maybe they didn't even live to be old men and women, maybe they died young. We don't know what happened to them and maybe we shouldn't. And maybe if that is how it ended, without the fucking heaven metaphor, I would have been happier. Even without the possibility of the sideshow being a second chance at life.

But that saccharine sweet, Titanic ending did not sit well with me. This is what it was to me [Youtube embed below]:

[kools-pad.livejournal.com]

I hate Titanic. Dread it. I hate ships. Dread them. And yeah, the campy thing was off the damn chain in this ending. However, considering I was expecting something as bad as almost every episode Ive seen for over 3 seasons. I was i guess touched that they gave our tortured characters closure.

Also, Jack was at his roots again. He was really tragic in the finale. And while I thought the heaven thing was kinda cheesy, I liked how the purgatory thing and moving on, told more stories about what happened to the characters afterwards. Sawyer probably tried to redeem himself, maybe raising his daughter, Claire raised Aaron, Kate helped Aaron and Claire and pined for Jack, and Hurley and Ben had an entire journey together on the Island.