“Cold hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colors from our sight
Red is gray and yellow white
But we decide which is Right
And which is an Illusion” – Moody Blues
“Now, now,” Bobby says, comforting her. “It was just a bad dream.”
It was pretty much impossible for LOST to have a completely satisfying ending, as the entire series has swung from fun to frustrating to totally impenetrable. But I did like it, for the most part. A wrap up that said, in effect, it’s just a TV Show and none of it really happened anyway.
LOST’s writers followed the same path of least resistance which George Lucas followed when he decide to shove aside C3PO and R2D2 and make Darth Vader the main character of the Star Wars saga-once LOST became the Ben Linus Show and we wandered over to the realm of madness, it lost a bit of it’s appeal for me.
They wimped out by making Richard a slave from a few hundred years ago instead of a Pharaoh from a few thousand years ago. They left all the Egyptian stuff unexplained and unimportant. The Monster becoming nothing but a cloud of smoke was a letdown, and that it turned out to be an Evil Twin complete with a black goatee was just downright silly.
The Numbers ultimately meant nothing. The Polar meant nothing. The Dharma Initiative and The Others meant nothing. The constant expansion of The Island to include ever more large groups of inhabitants meant nothing. The ancient buildings, the statue, the lair of the Monster, well, everything.
Dorothy never returns to Kansas. Alice never gets back from Wonderland. LOST’s Near Infinite Cast is whittled down to just a handful and each death means less than the one before it. If we are told-wink wink nudge nudge-that it never happened, are we really expected to cry over each meaningless death?
As the credits start to roll and our Heroes have all Moved On, without even needing the help of the Ghost Whisper, we are once more on The Island. The beach is again strewn with the wreckage of Oceanic Flight 815. Was it all a dream?
