Do I really need to mention there will spoilers? Because there will be. The title out front shoulda told ya.
I'm doing this without reading anybody else's take on what happened, which is kinda a first for me. I usually read all the reviews and blogs I can (not that there are many that I read,) and eventually lose sight of what I read somewhere and what I came up with on my own. So I'm staying away from my usual reading materials until I have this post done and posted. If nothing else, it will motivate me to post something to my blog for the first time since PoMoOftMo fizzled out in mid-March.
Alrighty then, I think I've padded this out enough that the block of text that ends up on Facebook will be spoiler-free. On to the business at hand. Here are my thoughts, in the order in which I think of them.
So, the producers have been shooting down the theory that the Island is Purgatory since the first season, and they were right - the Sideways World was Purgatory. But instead of everyone dying when the plane crashed, as some have suggested and I started thinking last night, everyone died either when we saw them die on the show or at some point in the future (in Hurley and Ben's case, maybe a long, long time in the future.) It took a single line of dialogue that I had to go back and listen to again, because I didn't make it out the first time ("They all died, some before you, some long after you,") for me to realize that.
The people on the Sideways Oceanic 815 were different from the people on the Season 1 Oceanic 815 because they had changed over the years. Hurley was more confident here because he had spent years (centuries? millennia?) as Protector of The Island. Sawyer had become more lawman than crook, by virtue of his LaFleur days, and so manifested as a cop in the afterlife. There are some holes in the theory, Charlie being a prime example, but I think it holds up pretty well.
And so, the only thing that detonating the nuke did was send everyone who didn't belong in 1977 back to 2007. The Sideways world was, in fact, completely separate from The Incident (or, at least, no more related than anything else that happened during the series.)
The Island side of things was pretty straightforward, I think. I did miss why, exactly, Jack thought sending Desmond down the hole to pull the plug was such a great idea. Maybe he didn't know that Desmond was going to do that and just figured Des would only do something down there that would destroy SmokeLocke. Of course, he did that too, and Smokie became very killable.
I was hoping to see Walt again, since they had played him up so much in the first season as being Special. And he re-appeared in Season 2 as Creepy Wet Walt (though I'm starting to think that maybe the Smoke Monster might have been posing as him at that point and, since he was posing as a living person, was unable to actually speak, thus the garbled messages.) But I guess it came down to this: as Special as Walt may have been, circumstances led to him leaving the Island instead and becoming irrelevant. Also, only three years passed over the course of six seasons, so having a 16 year old playing a 13 year old would have been a bit weird.
The same can be said for Aaron, the baby that got a psychic all excited. I guess his relevance was more indirect that we previously believed. Perhaps the goal the psychic had in mind was the chain of events that led to Kate being there on the cliff, with a bullet saved for the now-human SmokeLocke. After all, without Aaron and Claire, Kate would have had no motivation to return to the Island.
It was good to see Vincent again. I thought that maybe he would end up being more significant than he was, but he did get to share the final scene, as he shared the first, so I guess his significance was more presentational than plot-related.
Good to see that after, what, five, six attempts, Sawyer was finally able to get off the damn island.
The ending was awesome. As soon as Jack wandered into the bamboo field, I knew he was going to lie down and the final scene would be a zoom on his right eye closing, just as it opened in the first scene of the series. And then, instead of popping up with a "BOOM," the LOST logo just kinda eases in with a musical swell, as if to say "it's all good now."
I think that will do for now. I'm itchin' to see what Nikki Stafford and Doc Jensen thought.
6 comments:
I see your points, but if they don't die in the plane crash - why is the last shot in the credits of the plane looking more destroyed than it does in the first episode? I thought that was supposed to show us what the crash "really" looked like because everyone actually died.
I would have to watch it again (and I plan to,) but I'm guessing that the wreckage has just deteriorated over the years, and what we were seeing was how it looks now, as our remaining heroes fly off into in the sunset in the Lapidus Express.
I agree with Rick. It's just the crash years later. I thought the site pretty much looked like the original, but maybe picked over like the survivors had done over the years.
They didn't all die in the crash, although I had that theory as well.
I think you nailed it Rick, except it was more limbo then purgatory, purgatory is on the island with the voices, and Michael, purgatory is more of a mini hell, where limbo is more of a waiting room which was how I saw the flash sideways
The waiting room metaphor does work better. It's a waiting room constructed by the LOSTers to wait until everybody is ready to go into the light.
I just re-watched the finale and the ending credits. Definitely the crash site as it is now. You can see tarps hanging from the trees and items organized neatly here and there. And the body of the plane has the burn marks from when they set it on fire to dispose of those who didn't survive the crash.
So then what is the island if people aren't dead? That explains the sideways world but doesn't explain the island and how a few of them were able to get off and come back. And why the time travel?
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