Thursday, May 27, 2010

Pondering Lost - Assistance Welcome


Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar territory.
G. Behn


I don't watch much TV. My favorites? Jeopardy, The Daily Show, Deadliest Catch, and Lost. Every Tuesday night since Lost returned to the TV screen in January, I've missed the show. Baseball games. My youngest son, Ian, and I have kept watch on www.abc.com. Baseball's now over. Last Sunday night, I saw the finale in prime time. I'm still thinking about it.

What was that all about? Any enlightenment welcome.

Were the passengers all killed in the original plane crash - the plane found filled with all dead in the ocean far from the island a true scenario?

Was this island a purgatory "the survivors" endured until death?

Why were women not able to have babies on island? No new life because everyone was dead? Except the Dharma people weren't dead, were they? What was the point of them, anyway?

Who are the rest of the lost souls, like Michael, that whisper in the forest.

With the ending focusing on the characters, does it seem like the island's mysteries were immaterial to the story?


How come nobody ever came across that cave with the light? And the Man in Black couldn't ever find it again? If it were just beyond the bamboo?

Did life go on at the island with Hurley and Ben in charge after Jack died?

Desmond? How did he fit in there?

Was the gathering at the end just a gathering for Jack's demise? That the rest all lived their own lives and died at different times? Had Ben not died yet and that's why he sat outside?

That it has provoked such thought suggests that our invested time was a worthwhile venture. The ending focused on the characters, which is also what makes a good book. The scenery and the workings of the island used as the vehicle to aid the characters in their search?

That these lost, troubled souls gathered to put their lives together and all found their own peace.

Aside from my questioning, I enjoyed it. Did you?

Now, back to my date with my vacuum.

26 comments:

  1. I've never seen Lost, but I do love Jeopardy!

    Maybe the writers made the ending bizarre to make the viewers talk about the show indefinitely. Hmmm...

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  2. I really liked the way LOST ended. For me it made perfect sense. If they had made it end any other way alot of things that happened in earlier episodes would not have fit. I bought Season 1 & 2 on dvd and plan to buy all of the rest. I bet I'll catch all kinds of hints along the way that I missed during the original broadcasts.

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  3. I am pretty frustrated by Lost. I think the writers didn't know where they were going but had to wrap it up and tried to salvage their meandering storyline somehow. But I don't think they did save it. Too many unanswered questions. Leaving a story open to interpretation is one thing; this left so many loose ends, it's hard to feel good about any of the possible scenarios. Two thumbs down from me!

    Thanks for the pics and for dinner. I enjoyed myself immensely.

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  4. Got lost in your questions...I tried watching Lost once...couldn't hang with it. But I get the part about vacuuming.

    Have a great weekend and I hope you'll find something to fill that you've space you've Lost. :)

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  5. I didn't get in on the beginning of the series....now I can't wait to start from the beginning and watch them all....I'm a little behind/ha

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  6. I don't envy you your date. I have one in a minute here with our fluffy winter comforters--paring down now to our summer covers.

    I have never watched a single LOST, but I feel like I have. I read some interesting reviews of the finale on The Huffington Post (I think?) a couple days ago--kind of from the angle of "well, that was annoying...but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense." Maybe that would help you untangle?

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  7. I love all these questions. We've watched Lost from the very first episode and loved every season of it. I really liked the ending and I have a pretty low tolerance for ambiguity that smacks of chickening out or laziness.

    I think there were a lot of unanswered questions - lots of loose ends that I think happened as the writers discovered the story that wanted to be told. If this had been a book, there would have been some editing that tied things up neater.

    I love that the ending was character based. It seemed to me that the ultimate message was that love wins every time, and that this group of people had accomplished an important soul task so they were ready to move on. I also think their soul connection was such that they kept running into each other in different lifetimes (which might be a way to explain their time on the island - or not).

    I think Ben didn't go with them because he still had some learning to do. He was the one character who could never quite decide whether to follow the good or the evil.

    The fact that I'm thinking so much about a story like this does speak to its power. When Joan of Arcadia was on it had a similar impact on me. Lots of unexplained improbability that I accepted because the message was one of love and because it stretched me.

    Aren't you glad you asked? :-)

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  8. I don't know what I expected but I was disappointed with the finale.
    So many unanswered questions....I am not going to get "into" a series like that again, too frustrating......:-) Hugs

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  9. LOVE the quote and OH! how true! Never saw the t.v. show you mention but I hardly ever watch t.v.
    Dave and I have never seen American Idol which has been on for ten years and is now changing hands...or some such. One of the men is leaving it seems.

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  11. Wish that I could help with the questions, but I don't watch T.V. very often and have never watched LOST. But, it sounds like an interesting series. Hope your have a wonderful weekend, cher! Cheers!

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  12. Yes, I really enjoyed it. I can't answer all of your questions because I'm not sure the writing didn't change as the seasons commenced. But I thought they did a good job of the ending. My thought was that it was time for the soul group to "leave" and go into the light, as the last person had died. Ben may have needed more time to think about the incarnation before he moved to the light. I think they were all dead, but died at different times. Jack died from the wound on the island, and others died before and after him. The island was a mutual construct to work out karmic issues, with all of them playing parts for each other to be able to do that.

    Anyway, that's my 2 cents! :-)

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  14. Your attitude about Lost pretty much falls into line with my own. At the end of last season, I realized that no matter how they planned to end the series it wasn't going to make much sense. It was an interesting-if not totally satisfying experience. Despite the obsessive analysis in online forums by Lost fans, when I watched the DVD box set, I realized that there was no overall master script and each season was handled independently. So, naturally, that got me a bit worried about how the heck they planned to tie all the loose ends together. I'm not even sure what I actually viewed in the last episode. What I would have liked to have seen.. would have been a collapsing of the Island time and the sideways times becoming the ONLY reality. As people remembered the island experience one by one, they would disappear from the island. storyline.

    Have you managed to follow any of the MAD MEN series? The pace is hard for a lot of people to get used to. It's more like reading and some of the lines can be quite subtle. Much is left to your own interpretation but I think it is one of the best things I've seen on TV. It's worth starting from the beginning just so you can appreciate the internal references.

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  15. Unfortunately, I am no help. Up until two weeks ago, I didn't even own a tv. My cousin gave me her son's tv that had an inadequate number of gaming(?) connections. It's huge! Or, at least it is to me.

    Until two days ago, it sat in the middle of the living room in its box. It was in the way, so I put it on a table in the corner, but I don't have an antenna and I'm too cheap to pay for cable, so it just sits unplugged in the corner behind my housemate's guitar amp. On the bright side, I've played with the guitar!

    I feel like such a luddite!

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  16. I honestly believe the writers were high. I've read the work of of stoned writers. They come up with cool ideas but can't begin to tie anything together.

    What a monumental rip off!
    But I'm not bitter...

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  17. Hi!

    I'm glad you enjoyed my review!

    As for "Why were women not able to have babies on island?" is sadly one of the many un-answered questions they had to leave by the way-side in order to wrap things up properly with the characters. Apparently they went a bit crazy in seasons 2 and 3 with new questions/mysteries 'cause they didn't know how long the show was going to last so they added some "filler", and then they found themselves with an "end date" and not enough time to answer everything! (like who the hell were the Dharma people?)

    As for the women/babies, it's assumed "The Incident" (detonation of Jughead) is probably the cause. Leftover radiation in the atmosphere causing misscarriages?

    All good questions! Gives us plenty more to think about. I like it that things aren't all packaged in a box with a neat little bow, lets us use our brains! :o)

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  18. I wish I could answer your questions but I've never seen a single episode of Lost. A lot of people sure have been fascinated by that show but for some reason, it never intrigued me. I'm glad you enjoyed it though.. and hope that the ending wasn't a disappointment for you. There was a lot of hype.

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  19. I stopped watching LOST after season 1. No idea why, but Mr. L-S was a devoted follower. The ending confused us both (he was always certain the island was Purgatory, though): raised more questions than it answered, ultimately.

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  20. I watched Lost from the very beginning until the bitter (and I do mean bitter) end. I would have quit watching two seasons ago, but when I learned the show had a definite ending date and that the producers knew where the story was going, I decided to stick with it. Not sure it was worth it. I still don't understand the ending. Though I did see some of the cast on Jimmy Kimmel Live right after the finale aired and Matthew Fox (Jack) said that the church scene basically represented a "Limbo" type place where the dead need to spend some time before moving on to "heaven". But if some of the people died long before Jack and some long after, how is that they are all there together. Wouldn't some of them already have moved on. Whatever. Crazy show. I probably should have stopped watching two seasons ago. Hindsight is 20/20.

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  21. Lost was an amazing show and I'm going to be in withdrawals for a long time. Flash Forward is another great show too.

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  22. Well - I don't know if my interpretations are "right" or not but here they are:

    1. No - everyone was not really killed in the original plane crash. It was not all just a dream. The dead found in the plane in the ocean back a few seasons ago were dead bodies planted in wreckage by Widmore so people would not find the Island that he was seeking again.

    2. The island was real - not purgatory. Purgatory was the Sideways world that they kept flashing to throughout the final season.

    3. I do not know what the deal was with the childbirth issue. I am assuming it had something to do with all the energy pockets and radiation, etc. released through various diggings and drillings throughout the island's course of inhabitants. This was the one big question I was disappointed they didn't firmly answer. The Dharma people came to the island to research the island's strange energy and set up a commune. They were real - until Ben wiped them out for the Others in the Purge to protect the island's special energy from misuse.

    4. The whispers, as Michael told Hurley, are all of the people who died on the island. If you die there, your soul is trapped there. Although Jack died there, and his soul got to meet everyone else. So maybe if you died there doing unsavory things you were stuck there. Or maybe if you died before Jack saved everything, those were the only trapped souls? But the whispers were the people who died on the island.

    5. The series was always about the characters - the island itself was a character. The mysteries were there for plot advancement - and to mess with our minds.

    Continued...

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  23. Continuing from above...

    6. I don't know why the light cave pool was so hard to find. It seemed that you could only see it on your own if you had been chosen by drinking from its water - a la the crazy Mom, Jacob, Jack and Hurley. Others could be brought there and then see it, but they couldn't do so on their own. Drinking the water ceremony seemed to give people the power to see - kind of like how the dead were always there but only Hurley could see them - because he had the special gift.

    7. Yes - the island continued with Hurley in charge and Ben helping him out. They became the island's stewards. Hurley thanked Ben back in Purgatory/Sideways world for being such a great #2. Don't know what they did or how they died or what happened to the island - but I smell a sequel/movie/spinoff coming.

    8. Desmond was the key to everything. He had the ability to sustain all of that energy's powers where everyone else would have died. He was the Constant which was the key to stopping the time travel skips. He was able to remove the light's plug to make the Man In Black human so he could be destroyed. Then Jack was able to go back and plug it all back up again so the island didn't implode and crash to the bottom of the ocean as alluded to at the beginning of the season. That act ended up costing Jack his life, but he knew it wasn't for nothing since he saw his friends flying off the island just before he closed his eyes and died.

    9. The church gathering the the Sideways world at the end was the point in Purgatory at which time all of the island related people remembered their former lives and the connection to the other island people from their past. Their island experience was so profound that they all needed each other before moving out of purgatory together. Jack just happened to be the last one to let go of everything and accept his death and forgive. I have no idea why Ben didn't go in. He was dead - and he knew what was going on because he had that conversation with Hurley. But maybe he knew he wasn't meant to be in there with them - they thought he was supposed to, but he had a different group or way to move on with. Or maybe he was punishing himself for all the trouble he caused to them and everyone else - keeping himself in purgatory so to speak as self punishment?

    I did enjoy it. I thought the church stuff was a bit hokey - but I loved the final scene with Jack seeing the plane taking off as he had always hoped for - and that he did not die alone - man's best friend was there to comfort him. I do wish they had addressed a few more mysteries in the last few episodes instead of rushing through things. But it was a fun series to feel such a part of!

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  25. I'd love to help you but I have never watched LOST. First of all, I'm a huge NCIS, NCIS Los Angeles and The Good Wife fan and they're on Tuesday night. It's pretty much the only night I watch network television.

    So I hope someone gives you the lowdown on the finale...

    That G. Behn quote is great!! Isn't it the truth?

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  26. Thank you all for your comments and answers. I will respond to you individually as soon as I can. I'm out in the country and my internet is spotty if existent.

    I'm thinking I understand the show much better. Perhaps thinking about it too much. I so enjoyed the show.

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Let me know what you think. Every word you write, I appreciate.

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