This is the way Lost ends: BADLY

*sigh*

On the Series Finale Scale, fitted on one side with the likes of St. Elsewhere and Battlestar Galactica and on the other with Newhart and Jericho, Lost sadly enough falls in with the former. (It's been over twenty years since St. Elsewhere went off the air and there are people still arguing about Tommy Westphall. People have written academic papers about the discussion and, much more sanely, someone mapped out every last show that would have had to take place in Tommy's mind thanks to various crossovers. And, actually, Lost is one of those shows, thanks to Oceanic Air being the airline of choice for both JAG and Diagnosis Murder, to Nozz-a-la Cola for being readily available in all Stephen King vending machines, and to Charlie Pace for dating a girl who's father worked in a paper factory in Slough. So, I guess, all the blame for everything below goes to Tommy.) (And while we're on the subject of St. Elsewhere, let's all not forget that after the show (arguably) announced that everything people had watched for six seasons was just a dream, it went and topped itself by killing Mimsie the kitten.)

Holy fucking hell, NBC.

And as long as I'm on a tangent about these shows, not everybody agrees with me about Jericho, but seriously, I screamed outloud twice during that finale, one "FUCK YEAH!" and one "FUCK YEAH YOU DID!" Of all the dramas I have watched the entire way through and supported, Jericho easily has the most satisfying and entertaining finale. Nothing else comes close.

But we're here to talk about Lost.
Okay, so, first off? I was digging the finale for…oh, I’d say the first two hours and ten minutes. Everything was solid, everything was interesting, there were plenty of emotional payoffs and returning characters (I screamed Frank’s name so loud when he showed up in the ocean that I think I scared my upstairs neighbor, which is fine because she’s a T-Rex and I hate her). But even if the finale had stopped there and the last twenty minutes (which I’ll get to later) never happened, I still would have had major problems with the whole thing once I was given a few minutes to think about it.

I'll never think again...

Let’s start with the Real Universe, as opposed to the Alternate Universe, which, I guess, is not really an alternate universe so much as…I’m still not sure. Anyway, we’re starting with the Real Universe for now, and my biggest problem here was that I felt that the ending to the overarching mythology of the show had been robbed of the time and energy that was truly needed to give it a satisfying stop. This is an even bigger problem if you consider that it seemed like the writers were trying to give a satisfying ending to the mytharc in the first reality while giving a satisfying emotional ending over in the alternate reality.

This is a patently bullshit way to write anything, by the way. It’s right there in the description – you’re splitting up your endings and hoping to give pieces of satisfaction that will add up to a whole instead of giving whole satisfaction. It’s a writing basic that the ending of anything generally needs to be straightforward and simple. If you’re writing about a group of people, it’s much better to see them all come out together in a single event than all go through their singular events only to meet up afterwards. You need to be very skilled or very, very thoughtful if you’re going to write multiple climaxes that add up to something as powerful as one big ending without confusing or pissing off your audience.

Lost was working with a different kind of multiple ending, dealing with the same characters in different situations, where one situation would lead to the mytharc ending and the other to the emotional ending, and that, in the end, is very, very cheap. And the easy way out. It’s obviously trickier to write an ending for a group of characters that will solve the plot and the emotional growth at the same time, hopefully with the plot feeding off the growth and vice versa. But it’s kind of easier to end the plot while ignoring the emotions and end the growth while ignoring the plot and that’s exactly what happened here.

And by doing that they totally negated everything. Everything. They spread themselves too thin and ended up with nothing.

Essentially, they divided by zero.

So let’s go back to the ending of the mytharc. Jack is now the new Jacob and NotLocke is still trying to get off the island. Right away we have problems. We have had terrific character growth from Jack, once a Man of Science who has become a solid Man of Faith in what was a solidly written arc, who practically tackled Jacob to get the Goblet of Mystery out of his hands and gulped the whole thing like he was a freshman at a frat party. It was well written because the change came on slowly enough, first with Jack coming back to the island in the seventies and giving off an ‘I really just can’t even give a shit anymore’ vibe that eventually became the We’re Here For a Reason battle cry that others (give it a minute) have been crying since, well, ever; it was also well written because the very basis of the character didn’t change. Jack has always been something of a martyr with a God complex, and in the end that’s exactly what he got to be. Jack got the most complete ending of any character in the show, and the most fulfilling.

Which leads us to the problem, and that is Locke. Or, rather, NotLocke, because despite the characters’ continued insistence to call him Locke, he wasn’t. He was the Man in Black; the Smoke Monster; Jacob’s brother; the guy the show refused to name (although apparently he was named by the writers). In the past, the real Locke and Jack have consistently been poised against each other (“I think Locke and Jack are a little too busy worrying about Jack and Locke,” says Ana Lucia). It was made obvious that Jack was the Man of Science and Locke the Man of Faith. Locke held a gun to Jack’s head to keep him from calling the chopper. Jack held a gun to Locke’s head and pulled the trigger for killing Naomi. Jack made it utterly clear that he felt that Locke was keeping him on the island just as much as Ben and the Others were. Locke made it clear that it was Jack’s lack of faith that killed him (“I wish you had believed me.”) If this show was going to do such justice to Jack’s character, it needed to do the same to Locke’s, and the two needed to be entwined, somehow, in the end.

It takes a skilled man to pull off such an intense guilt trip from beyond the grave.

But Locke has been dead since the middle of season five, a fact the audience didn’t know until the last episode of that season. The thing pretending to be Locke has no part of Jack and Locke’s fight of science and faith, and doesn’t want any part either. It just wants to leave. The writers had managed to do a very good job of setting up a relationship between Locke and the smoke monster; Locke saw the monster early in the first season, was the first character not to get killed by it immediately after seeing it, and while everybody else apparently saw what we saw, namely black smoke, Locke claimed he saw a brilliant white light. Of course, ranged anywhere from ‘mildly’ to ‘poo flinging bugfuck’ on the crazy scale, so who knows exactly what he saw. But it was set up early on that Smokey had some interest in Locke and from that little seed the idea of Smokey taking over Locke’s form perhaps makes sense.

There's a reason I called him 'Crazypants McBaldHead.'

But it takes away any sense of closure for Jack and Locke and their sometimes epic bickering. Locke is dead; Jack kind of wins by default. And with Jack, in the end, gaining the same mindset as Locke, who knows what exactly would have happened if Locke was still himself. There was plenty to play with there, especially with Locke’s deepening sense of despair at not being able to convince anyone to come back to the island. But it all stopped when Ben killed Locke and then the Locke back on the island was not actually him. Game over.


So we are left with a battle between an evolved Jack and a fake Locke. They must go to the shiny underwater cave and…do something. And here we run into more problems.


Almost everything that happened in the finale regarding the mytharc wasn’t introduced until the final season, or at the very earliest the fifth season finale, and what we had previously seen in the first five seasons didn’t seem to mean much, in the end. The Dharma stations? Used and thrown away. The temple wall? Destroyed by Smokey. Hell, the Others themselves end up all dead midway through the final season. This group of people who terrorized our characters, and were positioned as the main antagonists (whether they thought they were the good guys or not), should have been part of the final battle. Instead they were killed before we even got to the last episodes.

Remember how much we hated them? Remember how their 'we're the good guys'  holier than thou schtick and 'never give an honest answer when you can pretend you don't understand the question' motto drove us crazy and pissed us off? REMEMBER WHEN WE DIDN'T GET TO SEE THEM PUNCHED TO DEATH?!?

Other things replaced them. First came the Man in Black, who wanted to kill Jacob. Then the Lighthouse, never seen before Hurley and Jack climbed up and saw the scratched out names, and never seen after. The episode surrounding Richard hinted at what we would more thoroughly explore in the episode surrounding Jacob and the Man in Black and their crazy Allison Janey Mom – that the Island is some sort of stopper for evil, that Jacob created Smokey, that without the Island and Jacob keeping Smokey there, the world is completely and utterly doomed.

All of this bothers me on a writing level. As I said, none of this really came up before this last season. None. There is nothing in the first five seasons you can point to that would lead you to believe that the final showdown would be between two brothers wanting to kill each other. Nothing that would make you suspect that if the island was destroyed, so goes the world. There is insufficient foreshadowing, basically, and not only that, but the abandonment of all the groundwork already put down placing the final showdown against the Others, or at the very least Charles Widmore, another character who gets unceremoniously dumped before we even headed into the big finale. This is changing tracks at the last minute. This is writing a mystery novel and not introducing the real murderer until the last ten pages. A bait and switch. To have a truly effective ending using Jacob and the Man in Black on either side, the groundwork for this should have started much earlier, preferably from the very beginning.
 
But, hey, I’m a realist. I’ve always suspected the writers didn’t have an end game from the beginning. What I did suspect was they figured it out after season three, when they announced they had an end date in mind and exactly how many episodes we were going to get. And if that were true we would have seen hints starting way back when. But we didn’t.


All of this still could have been okay, perhaps even great. It would have taken a lot effort, but they could have pulled a satisfactory ending together using Jacob and the Man in Black. But what ruined that possibility was the lack of focus and time. There was not nearly enough time devoted to fleshing out this story. We got all the back story in one rushed episode, and we did not get nearly enough of it. Jack and NotLocke get to the Cave of Wonders and drop Desmond down into the shiny light. Here we find that Jacob’s metaphor to Richard about a wine stopper is fairly true and Desmond has to move a rock. Water disappears. The light goes out. The island starts shaking.

All of this had never been seen before, none of it made enough sense, and I found myself not caring. An audience can’t care about what they don’t understand.

Let me revise that.

An audience can care about something they don’t understand when they’re assured that, at some point in the future, they will understand. Then that something can become even more tantalizing. But at the point when the audience knows that what they are being shown is all the explanation they are ever going to get on it? They need to understand what the hell is going on or they are not going to care. And I kind of didn’t. He pulled a rock out. Stuff happened. Hooray? (Of course, part of the reason I didn’t care at this point was that I was still confident that the writers were going to do something amazing with the flashsideways, but we’re not there yet.)


I will admit, though, the fistfight between Jack and NotLocke, ending with Kate shooting NotLocke and killing him because NotLocke accidentally changed the rules (and doing it with a choice one liner, I must say) was awesome. It was not as awesome as some kind of final showdown between Jack and the real Locke would have been, but I’ll take what I can get. That flying facepunch from Jack was all kinds of amazing, and realizing Kate had killed what was ostensibly the last thing that stood between them and getting off the island safe and sound forever was pure joy.

"I WILL NEVER BE AS AWESOME AS I AM AT THIS EXACT MINUTE."

In the Real Universe, I cared less about Desmond and the Cave of Wonders and Jack and NotLocke and more about the others who were steadily working towards getting off the island. I screamed when Frank was still alive, but I should have known it was going to happen because the plane was the only way off and they needed a pilot. Also, because while everyone was crying their eyes out (myself included) about Sayid and Sun and Jin dying, nobody was saying word one about Frank being dead. Which they should have, anyway. They all thought he was dead, right? I mean, they obviously aren’t going to get hit with it as hard as they would with the others because they were closer to them, but that’s still a dead human being there.

Although, to be fair, they have had a lot of practice.

Anyway, this was the part of the Real Universe that got the most emotional response out of me. Everybody and their brother had called it on the boards when they said Jack’s time as Jacob would be temporary and Hurley would end up with the real burden, but his desperation that Jack not make him take it was gut wrenching.


It was also no surprise that Ben would want to stay on the island (and while we’re on the subject of Ben, way to just abandon the whole ‘pinned under a tree’ thing you had going, writers. One minute it’s life or death, the next he’s strolling into the next scene without a scratch on him) but it was also deeply satisfying to hear Ben tell Hurley that he could send Desmond home, and that he didn’t need to run the island like Jacob had, i.e., he didn’t have to a be a tool.

Miles’ and Richard’s moment of mini-bonding over gray hair, followed quickly by Richard’s realization that he had decided he wanted to live had me grinning like a fool.


Claire holding that gun up to them on Hydra Island, on the other hand, had me freaking the fuck out. Of course minutes after the no longer immortal Richard decides he wants to live he’s going to get blown away. I was already furious with the show and thought all three of them were going to die before Claire finally put down the gun.

And even after I had just been punched in the face by the ending to the flashsideways (getting there, getting there), even as I felt the show had just stomped all over my soul, even as I was cursing Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, that moment when Jack found the spot he had first woken up in, when he put himself on the ground, when Vincent came over and sat down with him, when he looked up into the sky and saw the plane carrying the others off the island for good, I started bawling like a baby and I didn’t stop for about ten minutes.

If you didn't cry at this, you're dead inside.

That right there? That was the emotional pay off. That was what the show should have been the whole two and half hours. These people who had spent years just trying to leave – not trying to save the world, not trying to change anything, not trying to do anything more drastic than going home – they did it. It was only some of them, and of those few only three of them were original cast members, but it was enough. They were going home. Broke me up right then and there.


But of course, my happiness at that scene was fairly destroyed by the flashsideways.

Yes, let’s talk about the Alternate Universe, or, as we found out in the end, the…purgatory universe? Metaphysical universe? I don’t even know what to call it. What’s for sure is that the name ‘flashsideways’ is patently false, and we were really dealing with, I guess, flashallthewayforwards.

All season long I have defended the flashsideways. I thought it was a great idea, and really built upon another idea the show had been playing with all through season five: can you change the past? Could our heroes stop the thing that brought them to the island in the first place? And I thought it was working on a few levels. Lost had found new ways to weave the story since season three, and going from flashback to flashfoward to flashsideways seemed like a natural movement. And by having this other universe you got to play around with the very basic idea of change. Maybe what this meant was that you could change the past, but in effect you were just creating this alternate universe, and while there would be a version of you living in the different timeline, you would be stuck living in the one that had already happened.

When the first universe started to bleed through to the alternate universe, starting with Charlie and Desmond, I had high hopes. Maybe they were figuring out that their universe had been created by an action in another. Maybe they would find a way to collapse the two. Or maybe it was the other way around, and they would have to find a way to keep it together and not collapse. I really thought they could bring it all together in the end.
 
I started getting very, very worried immediately after Kate remembered the other universe after giving birth to Aaron for the second time. She was just so…peaceful and serene and calm. In fact, they all were. I started getting this creepy vibe, like in the church they were all planning mass suicide or something. But, I mean, come on, ABC wasn’t going to let that on their station. So, what then?
 
And then I realized that their attitudes going into the church reminded me a lot of the very last scene in Titanic, where the old lady dies in her sleep and everybody is waiting for her on the ship and it’s all pretty and oh, look, there’s Jack looking all fine and-


…

Oh, shit.

Oh, shit.

No.

No, they’re not going there.

They can’t be going there.

If he’s not in that casket-

…

FUCK.

Celine Dion gets partial blame for this.

And that was the beginning of the end. Christian showed up and explained the whole ‘world you all created to help you move over’ thing and I immediately felt like choking something. I am getting angry all over again.


First of all, this alternate universe not being alternate and rather being the weigh station before liftoff that it was just completely ignored the entire changing the past question. It didn’t give an answer on it at all. Could they change the past? Who knows! I mean, I guess the answer is ‘no,’ in as much as they didn’t, but it was never confirmed or mentioned.

It was also clear that the writers wanted us to think that it was an alternate world in the beginning. First and foremost, Juliet manages to tell Sawyer, through Miles, that ‘It worked,’ indicating maybe at the time of death they could see the other universe, which is a cool concept. Until you find out that actually, in that universe they’re all already dead, in which case that just makes Juliet confused.

Or a dirty liar.

But then even some of the stuff going on in that world indicated it would be an alternate universe. Sure, maybe Jack has a kid because he’s still working through his own daddy issues, and maybe Sayid can’t be with Nadia because he still, still, thinks he doesn’t deserve her. But why did Locke feel the need to create a world where he’s still paralyzed, he made his dad a vegetable, and he feels guilty about it? Why did Sun need to create a world where she gets shot? Why did Charlie become an alcoholic after remembering his life instead of getting all gooey eyed like the rest of them? There was stuff here that did not make sense in the ‘this is the world we WANT to build’ way.
 
Other stuff didn’t make sense. Why the hell would Sayid end up with Shannon? Nadia is right there. Right there. As in, you were living in her house, as in, it’s a world you made so who gives a fuck if she’s married to your brother? She’s not really married to your brother. Just make her remember and skip off to Where Ever together! Sayid knew Shannon for no more than two months, loved her for maybe three weeks. I can see where they’re coming from with the ‘everyone on the island needs everyone else to remember,’ but really, that’s just weak storytelling and writing.
 
And I’ll bring this up now, because it ties together. I got linked to this by a friend, and the whole letter sounds exactly like some of the stuff I would hear in my creative writing classes in college when someone couldn’t handle criticism of their story. “You guys just don’t get it. It’s good, but you have to get it.” And you know what the answer to that is? “You have to make me get it. Don’t tell me I don’t get it, fix it until I do.” And this part here is perhaps the most infuriating:
 

“They were NOT linked to Anna Lucia, Daniel, Roussou, Alex, Miles, Lupidis [sic], (and all the rest who weren’t in the chuch [sic] — basically everyone who wasn’t in season 1).”

BULLSHIT. BULLSHIT. BULLSHIT ALL OVER TOWN.

Juliet was in that church. Desmond was in that church. Penny was in that church.

And for right now, Penny is the most important. Why? Because Penny has never set a foot on that island.

You know who else hasn’t set foot on the island? Nadia. So, if Penny gets to be part of the group rate on the boat across the Styx, so can Nadia. There was no well written, good reason for Sayid to end up with Shannon and not her.

Perhaps the most infuriating implication of this world is that no one who survived the Island ever had any other meaningful experiences in their lives, ever. I can understand the ones who died on the island creating this world because the show makes it clear that before the island their lives kind of sucked so the period after the crash and before their deaths would be the most meaningful. And I can understand Ben and Hurley, because they never left the island. The people I have a problem with are Sawyer, Kate, Claire, Desmond, and Penny.


These are the people in the church who presumably made it off the island. If we are to assume they made it safely and lived happy full lives, who is to say they wouldn’t want to cross over with other people? Nothing ever happened to them again, ever? Claire has no other good memories or experiences with Aaron and must remember him as a newborn? Where is Desmond and Penny’s son? Didn’t they have any more kids? Kate or Sawyer never tried the family thing together, or met anybody else? It was all just loneliness and ennui until the big end? Really?

Well, maybe they didn’t have a life after the plane took off, and that leads us into an even bigger problem which we grazed before: by splitting up the narration into two separate worlds that really, truly would not connect back to each other and really didn’t have any effect on each other, time and effort was siphoned from both narratives until the viewers were left with nothing at all.

Because ‘they all died’ is not an ending. Not the way Lost told it. Because with most of these people, we never find out how they died, nor how they lived. We were told straight off that time is wibbly-wobbly in this afterworld waiting room, and people showed up when they died, but those who died first didn’t feel like they had to wait for those who died last, most likely Hurley and Ben (because even though Ben didn’t cross over with them he was still offered the invitation). So we have no idea when these people died.

You can add 'BFFs in Heaven' to 'jump the shark' and 'nuke the fridge' on your scorecard now.

The people on the plane? Sawyer, Claire, Kate, Miles, Richard and Frank. Maybe they never made it back to land. Maybe there was more C4 on board. Maybe they ran out of gas. Maybe they experienced mechanical failure and went down in the ocean. We’ll never know.


And Desmond. Hurley said he was going to get him off the island, but did he? Could he?

We don’t know. We don’t know the real fate of these people. Everybody dies. Everybody moves on to something else. So telling us that everybody is dead but not how or why? Not great storytelling.

And of course it was totally in their right to not tell us what happened. Plenty of endings, the best endings, really, don’t give you a clear cut answer, not necessarily leaving the plot open for sequels, but leaving the plot open a little bit so the characters can live out their lives in the audience’s head, so the reader or viewer gets to wonder in his idle time what became of the character they became deeply involved with for however long the show or book lasted.

OR you can kill your character, so no one else ever gets to play with him.

But my problem here is Lost’s attitude, which is that they did not leave that up in the air, and that they answered all our questions and gave us a definite answer when they did not. ‘They all died, at some point, somehow, but now they’re back together again isn’t that sweet, awwww!’ No. I am not playing that game. That is a bullshit ending right there. And bad storytelling.


To be worthwhile, the flashsideways narration had to come together with the Real Universe narration in a way that it didn’t. The plots had to converge, the two universes had to somehow become aware, and the major, final battle had to happen and include both worlds. It didn’t. The flashsideways was, in the end, the denouement starting before the final climax and continuing during. It was like if Saturday Night Live had the cast waving goodbye on stage as soon as Weekend Update was over and continuing on while the back half sketches continued in the background. And it really had nothing to do with the plot whatsoever.

Nothing in that universe affected the real universe. Nothing in that universe could affect the other by definition. It was happening years afterwards on some metaphysical plane where going back was not an option! There was literally no reason for any of it to be showed. They could have played with the flashsideways for one episode and used the free time to actually explore the plot and the mytharc and bring a satisfactory emotional ending to our living characters. Instead they wasted time screwing with the viewers on a plot that really meant nothing. They all need to remember each other to finish dying. Whoop de fucking doo. What I had defended so hard and for so long was exactly what the detractors had always said it was: a waste of time, ever more so than they ever thought.


Many people will defend the ending by saying that the show was always a character driven show, always more about the characters, so the flashsideways was more important than the Real Universe because we got to see the endings of our characters. I have many problems with this.

One, as I said, no, no we didn’t get to see the endings. We got to see them after the endings, which don’t really count.


Two, yes, indeed, the show was always character driven. But it was also plot driven, because would you want to watch a show where they just profiled fake people for an hour? If an episode was just a rundown of Charlie’s likes and dislikes or exactly what torture skills Sayid possessed, would you watch? Alternatively, would you watch a show where this group of characters lived in a neighborhood and did average Schmoe things like mow the lawn and have barbeques and go grocery shopping? And I mean in all seriousness, nothing situational or comedic about it. Just because we fell in love with these characters doesn’t mean we want to watch them doing the same shit we do. We want to see them have adventures and trials and do things we wouldn’t or couldn’t do. Thus the island, thus the magic, thus the fights and the loves and the deaths. We need to watch the characters doing something, and whatever that something is that they’re doing comes with an expectation that it will have a resolution in the end, hopefully one that doesn’t make us tear our hair out.

"Coming up next week on Shit You Could Experience On Your Own"...

 
Three, anyone who says that the flashsideways counted for more than the Real Universe couldn’t have been paying attention for the past six years. Six. Years. We became entranced and glued to events that happened in a particular universe in a particular place with a particular group of people for six years. This other world we have known for sixteen weeks and in the end means jack-diddly anyway. It’s the same reason people felt so cheated when St. Elsewhere turned out to be a vivid story about a snow globe, or when Bobby Ewing turned up alive and well in the shower. It’s a huge ‘fuck you’ to the audience, the people who have watched it and loved it, to tell them that actually, none of that happened, and it wasn’t real. The audience was invested in the Real Universe, not the flashsideways, and that was where the real ending needed to happen.

"Sadly, Lost's ending is reality. Can you pass the soap?"

 
And why, exactly, did Lost need a big, epic ending? Because Lost was always a literary show, and every writer knows that if you have a good beginning but a weak ending, you’re going nowhere. It’s always hard for a television show to balance standalone episodes with an overarching mytharc. Too many standalones start to feel silly or the mytharc can become overbearing (In my opinion the episodes involving Mulder’s sister and alien cover-ups were always the weakest on The X Files, but there were way too many standalones in this last season of Supernatural that was somehow taking the Apocalypse and making it tremendously boring). Lost seemed to declare from the beginning that there would be absolutely no standalones, that the whole thing was the arc, and it seemed from the very first episode it was going somewhere. Leading up to something. Sure, we had no idea what, but that promise was there from the beginning. And in my estimation, that promise was broken into several thousand pieces, burnt to ashes and scattered over the ocean.


And then, of course, there were the still shots at the end of the show over the credits. I had thought from the beginning that it was just supposed to be a retrospective closing shot that had nothing to do with anything plot-wise (much like the flashsideways), but enough people were freaking out that it meant that Jack had dreamed the whole thing that I started to freak out until ABC calmed us all down. Which is good. Like I said, no one wants to be told the thing they were so obsessed with was even faker than just a story.

Like shouting 'IT WAS ALL A DREAM' in a firehouse. Wait...

Do I think I could have written a better ending? No, actually, I don’t, not by myself. Do I think the writers themselves could have written something better? Absolutely. I’m not sure what really happened here, and I’m not sure who to blame.


Maybe they got scared off the alternate universe train because JJ Abrams has already worked with this idea on two other projects, the recent Star Trek movie and his newer show Fringe (I don’t believe for a second that they had this afterlife ending in mind the whole time like it says in the above letter), which is too bad because while it’s certainly the same general idea, the twists on it are still all different.

Sure, Fringe also deals with another universe. But the origins of this other universe, as far as we know, have nothing to do with our universe. There was no ‘event’ that created this other universe, and you couldn’t call our universe the Original or anything like that. As far as we can tell, in Fringe the idea is that there was always a multiverse instead of a universe, that these universes have existed next to each other for all time, that there may be more universes, but that this particular universe is the one that Walter Bishop managed to get a window to.


They perhaps could be more worried about Star Trek, where an action in time creates a new universe, much like we thought they were going with here. But that doesn’t mean both plots needed to have the same answer. This is science fiction we’re dealing with here, a place where plausibility is at its thinnest and willful disbelief at its highest. It would be easy enough to come up with some other reason the two universes were created – or a different way the two ended – and come away with a completely different story.

Another important difference: Star Trek has aliens.

But as this article gets into heavily, Fringe has never been afraid of its sci-fi routes, whereas Lost almost always felt ashamed by it, tossing us something mystical and then hiding behind a dead girlfriend, and perhaps it was that attitude that damned the writers from the beginning. Lost was what I call "sneak attack science fiction." For the longest time there could have been a semi-plausible reason for everything on that island. I think perhaps the earliest indication that we were absolutely dealing with a world that was not our own was the first time Desmond starts seeing the future. And it certainly says a lot about this show that after four seasons of a black smoke monster, miraculous recoveries, future seeing, consciousness shifting and Walt-specialness, I was still in complete and utter shock when they introduced a character who could straight up talk to the dead. It seemed to me that was the moment when they completely crossed the line into science fiction territory, when really it had started on the far side of that line; they had just covered up the line with a rug so we never could really tell.


It would be silly and patently false to say the ending completely ruined the whole show for me. It certainly leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth, and my general plan is just to pretend season six never happened, but I still love those first five seasons and will continue to watch my DVDs, safe in the idea that no one can make me buy the season six set. It is fiction, after all, and if I want the story to end when Juliet blows up the bomb, I can do that. And maybe it’s good the show self destructed like it did. It’s just a reminder that Lost, however great it had once been, was just a show, and really nothing to be keening about for too long.

…

No. Screw that. Six motherfucking years and it ends on a Styx cruise?!?

I’m going to LA and I am going to fix this. Somebody better get some money together for bail. Just in case.

Oh, PS, they're trying to get you to buy the sixth season DVDs by including a twelve minute 'epilogue' with new scenes. What these scenes entail are readily available on the internet, and as they don't whisper a word about what happened to the plane, I'm ignoring it.