I was going to respond to a comment on my previous post with another comment, but I decided to put my response here instead, since it was so long and I went off on tangents.
The question posed was: "..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?"
My response:
I've come up with an answer for any question about why the island does what it does: midichlorians. If it worked for The Force, it'll work for The Island!
The island is just an island that happens to have serious metaphysical properties that apparently affect the soul of every human being that has ever walked the earth. The nature of that effect is, of course, open to interpretation. Maybe its existence is what makes us human, rather than unthinking animals, and its total collapse into the ocean would have undone that.
There was a specific route in which one could get on and off the island. Considering what Ben said to Hurley, I'm guessing that this was something Jacob set in place to control traffic to and from the Island, but it could just be an electromagnetism thing. The Oceanic Six had taken that specific route out, as had Michael/Walt and, I would guess, the Dharma/Other subs. I guess that one could fly over the island without problems, since the only thing that kept Oceanic 815 from passing the Island by was Desmond failing to punch in the "stop the magnetic burst before it rips apart a plane" code in time. Since all of Jacob's Candidates were on that plane, however, I'm going to assume that Jacob had something to do with Desmond being late for that particular timer reset.
The time travel? The jumping was due to the Frozen Donkey Wheel being stuck, so apparently, at some point after the Man In Black was foiled, killed, and turned into smoke, someone came along, finished his work on the wheel, tapped into The Light, and figured out how to manipulate time with it. And how did The Light manipulate time? Midichlorians. Don't know if Jacob or Smokey was behind the whole "move the island" thing that led to the time jumping, but I will point out that when the Ajira flight came along, only the Candidates got sent back to 1977 (that would give us an idea which Kwon was Candidate #42.) Whether that was Jacob trying to get the Candidates all together, the MiB trying to keep the Candidates all in a place where they could get purged with the rest of the Dharma Initiative, or neither, is anybody's guess.
I think I'll stop. For now. I might watch the entire series again soon, now that we know how it all ends. Would anybody be interested if I posted thoughts on the old episodes, with the whole-series perspective?
Showing posts with label LOST. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LOST. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
Thoughts on The LOST Finale
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.
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.
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