Lost: one year since ‘The End’

It may seem unnecessary to still be talking about Lost one year after it ended, perhaps even more so when you consider that I gave my review of the series finale the subtitle “learning to let go”. The truth is, I haven’t entirely let go. I still revisit episodes of the show on a frequent basis and sitting around contemplating the mysteries of the island (while flicking through my copy of The Lost Encyclopedia) remains something of a hobby for me. For many of the show’s fans, it’s not like it suddenly disappeared when it concluded and there’s still a lot to say about the finale of what has become one of the most polarising shows ever on television.

Firstly, I know that there were many fans who were disappointed with the finale. I wasn’t one of them, but I understand what it must feel like to realise that your vision for the show was not what its creators had in mind. I respect the opinions of people who didn’t like ‘The End’ and I’d even encourage them to articulate why they didn’t like it. What I’m always slightly puzzled by though are comments like “the producers wasted the past six years of watching Lost!” or anything that implies that the events of the finale somehow redefined what came before. It’s about time that the persistent attacks and insults directed towards Lost’s Executive Producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse ended, and for certain fans to realise that what happened in ‘The End’ doesn’t in any way ruin previous great episodes like ‘The Constant’, ‘Walkabout’ or ‘The Shape of Things to Come’.

One of the major problems that I continually hear is that the Lost finale didn’t provide any answers to the show’s mysteries. Realistically, there are a whole host of reasons why it was simply unable to give many fans the answers they wanted. However, if you’re still unsure about some of the dangling plot threads and questions, I recommend that you watch the Season 6 DVD extra, ‘The New Man In Charge’, which answers a lot, or just closely consider the possible answers available. Lost was written in such a way that every viewer gains a foundation from which to theorise about the show, I’d implore certain fans to continue the conversation rather than just being angry for not having a clear answer.

Another thing that I’ve heard frequently over the past year and consistently while Lost was actually on the air was that the writers and producers were “making it up as they went along”. It’s a statement that actually confuses me because it’s used in a very negative fashion. Of course it was made up as they went along! That’s how all television is produced and, if it wasn’t, you’d end up with many more shows like FlashForward or The Event. Each individual season of Lost holds up as a tightly plotted arc, but there is absolutely no way that the series’ endgame was planned from the show’s conception. Overly planned stories don’t allow for much flexibility and frequently fail, so I for one am glad that Lost so obviously wasn’t planned out from the beginning.

When it all wrapped up last year, I talked about the legacy that the series would have. A year later and I still feel, perhaps even more so, that it’s unlikely that we’ll see something with the ambition and popular appeal of Lost for a very long time. I think that I and many others have not yet let go of Lost because it had such a powerful effect, whether it be positive or negative, on us as television viewers. In many ways, it is a success of the show that it will continue to be part of critical conversations and that the audience still is engaging with it. No matter what you think about it, the significance of Lost as a cultural milestone has only been strengthened over the past year.

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