LOST - 6x17 "The End" - Episode Review
<---Arrivals / Departures --->
Plot summary: The battle lines are drawn as Locke puts his plan into action, which could finally liberate him from the Island.
Written by Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse. Directed by Jack Bender.
And cue the SIX FEET UNDER death card!
So here we are again. The bamboo grove, the shoe, Vincent, and the opening/closing eye; all that was missing was the mini liquor bottle.
Not so surprisingly, much of what I stated in my epic review of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA’s “Daybreak” about the nature of series finales and many of the specific criticisms I had therein could easily be applied to “The End”, LOST’s epically maddening conclusion. Once again, I wanted to wait a while before penning my response (so long, it turns out that I was able to revisit the episode on the Season 6 Blu-ray), but as always, my initial feelings remain fairly unchanged.
So some four (4, get it?) months later, after all the hype, both negative and positive, has died down, the cast and crew has moved onto other projects or done nothing at all, and "The New Man In Charge” epilogue has been released and dissected, what does “The End” do for the legacy of LOST? Plenty, of course. It muddled an already uneven season, with the Purgatory revelation creating a seemingly disconcerted thematic statement on the series as a whole. It was a ‘shipper’s delight of teary, long-awaited reunions, justifying that the true strength and longevity of the show lasted in its multitude of compelling characters. It was a theorist’s nightmare of blind alleys and unanswered questions, proving once and for all that the disparity between Carlton / Cuse and their audience was greater than they wished it was. It was great in the moment, as the best LOST episodes were, and ended on a triumphant moment for Michael Giacchino and his scoring duties. It was everything great and terrible about what will probably go down in history as one of the most ambitious, vexing, and compelling network shows in the history of the medium. In short, it was your typical episode of LOST.
In terms of plot mechanics, “The End” was a virtual sprint to the plot’s finish line, with little room for exposition (or answers). During my initial viewing back in May, I wrote that “they were getting to it much quicker than expected” and by that I was referring to the whole Jack vs. Locke (MiB) confrontation, coupled with the rapidity of all those re-awakenings in the Alternative-Universe. When Jack booted Locke off the cliff at 10:28 pm, I knew in my gut they weren’t going to get to the “answers” at any time soon if at all, and while that didn’t bother me to a large degree, I could easily imagine others tearing their hair out in frustration. And with five minutes left to go in the entire series, when Jack opened the coffin, and Christian appeared and dropped the afterlife bombshell, I was wondering if JK Rowling and Alan Ball’s lawyers were going to come a-knocking at the Bad Robot production offices.
But after all the whining and complaining I endured regarding BATTLESTAR’s fan-polarizing ending, I understood why LOST ended as it did. The most objectionable plot turns in “Daybreak” came about precisely because of its pre-mandated ending, an unavoidable X-Y-Z progression to get to the final shot Ron Moore had dreamed up years before. And so I thought of the inevitable sequencing of events, when Matthew Fox announced on Jimmy Kimmel’s post show special that he knew Jack’s eyes closing (in death) was going to be the final image of the show, same as he had stated in other interviews for a few seasons now. Since LOST is now revealed, much like SIX FEET UNDER, as the hero’s progression towards, and acceptance of, his own mortality, the season-long Purgatory arc make more thematic sense (if not logically within its own contextual presentation). Or in other words, how else were they going to pay off Jack’s death in the end, coupled with their traditional bi-narrative structure (one very close to Season Four’s before/after schism of events)?
When Carlton n’ Cuse talked their game about Season Six being like Season One, it make sense insofar that the emotional investment we put into the characters in Season One paid off in their afterlife interactions and beyond - after all the central mystery of Season Six was the meaning and purpose behind the “Flash Sideways”. I talked a lot about do-overs and seconds chances in previous reviews, and how this alternative universe was going to be a place where that could occur as a reward or punishment. I was, of course, right and wrong about that, but the basic inter-connection between characters, as well as the audience watching them, was the key to the “payoff” to the series, and not in the myriad shell games being played out on the macro and micro levels. Most fans seem to agree that Season One was the strongest of them all, and that’s because it’s the most accessibly character-oriented season of them all. By doing that leg work up front, by spending most of its fundamental time in exploration of its well- drawn, constantly compelling main characters, and by more importantly, keeping most of the heavy mythology in the background, LOST earned its classic status. It’s why the slew of LOST imitators ever since (THE NINE, INVASION, DAY BREAK, FLASH FORWARD, THE EVENT to name a few), have all floundered out of the gate - because the hook was presented before the necessary groundwork with characters was fully established. If LOST was originally presented as a grand Senet game between two immortal beings on a magical island powered by a glowing toilet bowl, who would have watched that show for six seasons?
It sure helped that LOST’s cast was uniformly excellent most of the time, and “The End” provided fitting showcases for just about all of them, especially its main character, whom at previous points in the series had been the most exasperating of them all. Season Six did a nice rehab on the good doctor, and Matthew Fox delivered my favorite lines of the episode (“You’re not John Locke. You disrespect his memory by wearing his face, but you’re nothing like him. Turns out he was right about most everything. I just wish I could have told him that while he was still alive.”). Also touching were the Juliet-Sawyer reunion, the passage of power between Jack and Hurley, and Ben’s final two conversations with Hurley and Locke, respectively, and said actors knocked it of the park as they always did.
On the theory end of things, of course things could have been better resolved. The Jack / MiB was almost anticlimactic, the magic drain stopper in the cave of light was borderline ridiculous, and many, many plot points still remained in a fog of uncertainty at the end. The epilogue “The New Man In Charge” added a bit of lip service to certain theories fans obsessed over (the pregnancy issue, the Hurley bird, the food drops) and added in a major omission to the general text (Walt’s story), but it may have been a case of too little too late.
(WTF????)
Yes, the series suffered from a lack of answers in “The End”, and it was most amusing to see SHIELD creator Shawn Ryan in the Blu-ray extras talking about a series creator’s responsibilities to the fans, especially considering how well-regarded “Family Meeting” was held amongst most critics and fans. And as previously mentioned the Purgatory reveal clouded that entire “Flash Sideways” arc in general - why for instance, would the Island be underwater in “LAX” and why does Purgatory seemingly employ dream logic (or shared subconscious memories) in its integration of peripheral characters (other then the real-world misdirection and casting fun). But having re-watched a Season Six marathon in preparation for this review, the AU and the Jacob-MIB conflict all fit together much better than what was seemingly presented in a week-by-basis (as it almost always did in this show), and given the overwhelming level of supernatural / magical nonsense in the later seasons I suppose there’s a higher suspension of belief to be required of the viewer. I suppose whatever frustrations one brought to these issues stems depends upon your commitment to the theory-related components of the show in the first place.
As I’d mentioned all along, I wasn’t as fixated on getting answers, and therefore didn’t feel cheated by their almost total exclusion in “The End” but I will concede that to not pay attention to them at all created a fundamental disconnect between the creators’ and audiences expectations. And to paraphrase Ron Moore once again, since “it was all about the characters, stupid”, that final montage served as probably the most important moment in the series, the moment in which Carlton / Cuse went fully for the heart, instead of the head, by using the shows not-so-secret weapon, composer Michael Giacchino, to help push their agenda past the tipping point.
(I’m going to go a little in depth from this point, but it’s the thing most worth talking about from this episode, and, I believe, the key to the entire thing)
Giacchino’s score for the series at large, was particularly strong, but lacked the fundamental character leitmotifs, thematic foreshadowing/payoffs to push it into true greatness - although I attribute that to his working process for the show (he refused to watch cuts in advance or be made aware of upcoming plot arcs, and composed on an moment-by-moment basis based on each episodes’ events). Where he really excelled was in the emotive end of events, and his final composition “Moving On” was a highly effective synthesis of some of his best cues for the show:
Click to viewSeason One: “Parting Words” (extended in “Oceanic 815”)
Season Four: “There’s No Place Like Home” (extended in “Landing Party”)
Season Six: “LAX” (also re-used during the opening montage of “The End”)
Much like Bear McCreary’s music for “Daybreak”, it was these combined motifs in the final montage that really decoded the show’s intention as a whole. Each of those tracks, scored for huge, HUGE moments in the show, was predicated on an arrival and departure of sorts, and seeing as how the end of “The End” was all about the big departure, tonally it made perfect sense to combine them all together as the final statement on LOST was made.
(Please forgive my errors of advanced musical theory in the next segment, I'm a complete novice in that department...)
Season Six: “Moving On” (Click "play" and keep reading!)
(1x20 “Do No Harm”, the first appearance of Giacchino’s “Life or Death” motif)
The "Moving On" cue begins on piano, as most of these cues do, as Jack realizes the truth of his new existence, as mutated strains of “Life and Death” play on piano or harp.
(1x23 “Exodus Part I” and 4x12 “There’s No Place Like Home, Part I”, the respective first appearances of “Parting Words” and “TNPLH”)
As Christian hugs his dead son, the strings enter with a variant of the beginning of “Parting Words”. Christian verifies that the entire series was “real” as “Parting Words” continues in piano statements, intertwined with the first few chords from “There’s No Place Like Home”.
Christian talks about moving on, and the chords jump up a notch in a direct restatement of those from “There’s No Place Like Home”.
(4x13 “There’s No Place Like Home”)
As Jack joins his fellow deceased castaways (and Penny) and the hug-a-thon begins, the orchestra enters with the full “No Place” statement, just like it did when the Oceanic Six stepped off the plane in Hawaii (S2, 0:50-1:22)
As Jack greets everyone (intercut with him dying on-Island and stumbling towards the bamboo field), the pianos return to “Parting Words”, overlayed with the final violins from “Landing Party” (2:48-3:00) after a few phases.
The orchestra swells in what sounds like a variant on “LAX”, as Jack collapses on the island, and then softens as the characters take their pew seats.
(6x01 “LAX”, 1x23 “Exodus Part I)
Christian emerges and puts his hand on Jack, as violins warmly play the main “Parting Words” chords. Low strings play the “LAX” intro and swing back around to “Parting Words” near the end.
The “Life and Death” solo piano then returns, as Vincent emerges from the brush (as he did in the “Pilot”) so that Jack doesn’t have to die alone. Strings start playing “There’s No Place Like Home” over the piano after the first 3 bars.
The higher strings then segue in to the main “Life and Death” theme, as “No Place” shifts into the lower end melodies, as Christian (and his white shoes of death) opens the church door and the blinding light floods into the building.
Moments from death, Jack looks upwards into the sky as the full orchestra transitions into “Life or Death”. As Ajira Flight 315 passes over him (and its auditory wake is revealed as the Flash-Sideways transition cue), the orchestra down shifts into a minor rendition of “Oceanic 815” (2:38-2:55)
In the next moment, Jack dies on one plane of existence, and “moves on” in the AU, as the orchestra holds a final solitary note from “Oceanic 815”, and then ends in a down tempo note, as opposed to the high ptiched sting that ended most LOST episodes. Cue end credits.
So what does it all mean? Well, in short, they were all going home.
That final montage, emotive and effective as it was, was neither a dealbreaker or a soaring triumph to me; rather it fell somewhere in the middle. It was also highly predictable, as soon as it started transpiring, I verbally called out each major beat before it happened, except for Vincent’s presence). Nevertheless, it was the most appropriate ending they could have filmed, based on the image they intended to go out on all along (Jack’s closing eye).
Cover to The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
When you consider that Stephen King’s THE DARK TOWER series was a huge inspiration to Carlton/Cuse, then the circular beginning and ending images make even greater sense, thematically (it also fits with “The End” ’s canny inversion of series-spanning narrative events, as they restaged and referenced certain events, but in backwards order). But whereas Roland was in effect being punished for his audacity in defying ka, Jack was finally being rewarded for “letting go.” What LOST seemed to be saying in the end is that life is fleeting, and the choices we make reverb through time and space, that though all our comings and goings, the one constant is the connections we make in life. Note that each of those previous cues focused on an arrival or a departure of a sort, a reunion or a birth or a death. I jokingly considered “All You Need Is Love” as the title for this review, seeing how it was the memories of lost loves that re-awoke most of our 815ers, but after their success with a certain reunion in “The Constant”, how could Carlton / Cuse envision anything else for their ending but a grand re-fusing of all its characters’ fractured natures.
The opposite of lost, of course, is found, and as Jacob stated in “What They Died For”, his candidates were all chosen because they wanted to be found in some way. The island provided that for them, and if we look past all the Island nonsense, what we have is the essential human condition in a nutshell. Who doesn’t feel lost at times? Who doesn’t want to be found in some manner? The multi-denominational symbols in the church was a big tip off at the end, because that’s what religion is at its base, a means to explain the unexplainable, the amazing grace that John Newton wrote about. Giacchino’s emotive approach worked perfectly because it wasn’t about the individual themes, but their collective baggage, their shared highs and lows.
And when I factored in the SIX FEET UNDER comparison, its because this montage was all about the acceptance of one’s own death and rebirth, something the “Breathe Me” sequence in “Everyone’s Waiting” exploited to devastating effect. And while not nearly as effective and wrenching as SFU, LOST’s tip of the hat served the same purpose. It was a way for its characters to say goodbye to each other, and to the lives that they had. To use as the ultimate expression of free will versus destiny (the selling hook for the final season) as choice between life and what lies beyond. Sure, there were important characters missing from the church at the end (Walt and Michael immediately came to mind, given the overwhelming majority of Season One characters), but think about the two characters who consciously decided to stay behind, despite knowing the truth of their current existence: Ben and Eloise Hawking. Both had done terrible things in life, and both felt compelled to stay behind, to work out their own issues (see “Dr. Linus” or “What They Died For” for Ben’s mindset, and “The Variable” for Eloise). But it was our core group that all chose to move on (even though we never saw Rose and Bernard awaken), and it was their journeies in both life and death that we should have been focused upon, and not their destination. They had found each other and were on their way home, heading to a spiritual destination instead of a physical one.
Can you handle that and move on? Ore are you stuck in the mire of the past?
++++
The bottom line, is that I thought “The End” was a mostly effective finale while watching it in the moment, an average series finale in the pantheon of endings, and a mixed mission statement for the series as a whole. Did it make me hate the show as a whole? Of course not. Did it disappoint me a bit in the end? Of course. Am I glad I booked a ticket on 815 for the whole flight? You bet. Because in the end, there was nothing like LOST, both the show itself and the experience of watching and dissecting it, and there probably won’t be again for a very long time.
I just wanted to point out that this is the first time I’ve written a review for a LOST finale. Better late than never to be found, eh?
Other notes
• Lovely opening montage. It wasn’t until I went back to re-watch the entire season that I realized that the music wasn't original to “The End”, that it originated in “LAX”, and had to re-conceptualize some of my thoughts on the finale.
• Jimmy Kimmel’s special afterwards provided two thrilling insights if you didn’t happen to catch it. Kimmel pointed out Rose’s statement “You can let go now” statement during “LAX” and postulated that in the nanosecond between the plane shuddering and not beginning to crash, was the moment in which Jack died and transferred over to Purgatory. I really liked that theory.
In addition, his first two lines of the show were utterly priceless quips: “I think we learned two things tonight: First, don’t go chasing waterfalls. Second, all dogs don’t go to heaven.” I was on the floor.
• Clever use of the same repeated lines for Claire's "second" birth. So where was Ji-Yeon in the Church? Guess she's not a part of that family...
• I call bullshit on Shannon being Sayid’s great afterlife love. But in a sense, I understood their rationalization from “The Package”, that he was still tortured by the fact that he was never “good enough” for Nadia, and that his constant disconnect with her was punishment for that in both this life and the next.
• So rufushonkeriv and I were right all along, Hurley was indeed a great choice to be the next Jacob, and in retrospective, the hints for that twist had been there all the way since Season Four when Hurley was the only one besides Locke to see Jacob’s cabin, and when he started having the power to see dead people. One supposes that Hurley’s Island reign would be a fun spinoff if ABC ever gets that desperate for material…
• Watching those odd behind-the-scenes “Lost Throwdowns” with Carlton/Cuse and the Muppets (on the Blu-ray bonus disc) revealed the genesis of “You only get to answer one question” line from “The Man Behind The Curtain”. Regardless, it posed the interesting question of whether young Mr. Dawson would be the next in line for Hurley’s job (or at least that’s the impression I got) …
• A nitpicky complaint about the official Season 6 soundtrack was its exclusion of the final Jack/Locke fight scene. Maybe it was that mandated act break in the middle, which was one of the editing masterstrokes of “The End”.
• The Blu-ray commentary for “Across the Sea” helpfully pointed out that Jack and the original Man In Black were both deposited in the same place after being expelled from the (cheestastic) Cave of Light. Not sure what that implies, but it’s a neat touch nonetheless.
• Here’s an amusing video of all the unanswered questions. Lots of good points, but nothing that keeps me up at night. Guess I don’t have a very questioning nature….
• Desmond’s signature line was retrospectively speaking, terrific foreshadowing of the themes and events to come. And it’s the perfect sign off for my time with LOST.
“See you in the next life, brotha.”
Episode Grade: B
