So long, Ben.
It's been a long haul. B and I have watched all six seasons of Lost since its inception. We started a little way into the first season and stuck with it all the way through, including the stupid and awful third season. Sunday was the finale, during which they finally killed the stupid smoke monster, various people got off the island, and everything ended on a reassuringly confusing note. I guess...the alternate time-stream thing was actually the pan-denominational afterlife?* But they really had been on a magic island together, maybe up until the nuclear blast at the end of last season? I dunno.
The thing that kind of pissed me off was that, of the various questions they did answer (the whispers were dead people!!!), they did not, in fact, explain what the fucking island was. One of the earliest theories floating around the internet was that it was a kind of purgatory, that everyone died in the initial plane crash and they were all working through their respective sins. That theory seemed to be debunked, but there was clearly some kind of already-dead shenanigans going down.
Anyway. It's a relief. I find watching shows like Lost to be pretty stressful. Interesting and fun, hopefully, but tiring. One of the reasons I love True Blood so much is that it's just 100% pure uncomplicated good times, while most other "really good" shows (i.e. Mad Men) make me very nervous while I'm watching them.
I am very happy to never have to watch Sawyer and Jack argue ever again.
Ben and Desmond were the best characters.
* The cheeseball "all religions are the same" stained glass window thing at the very end: groan.
P.S. Here's a decent attempt at a big explain-it-all write-up.
The thing that kind of pissed me off was that, of the various questions they did answer (the whispers were dead people!!!), they did not, in fact, explain what the fucking island was. One of the earliest theories floating around the internet was that it was a kind of purgatory, that everyone died in the initial plane crash and they were all working through their respective sins. That theory seemed to be debunked, but there was clearly some kind of already-dead shenanigans going down.
Anyway. It's a relief. I find watching shows like Lost to be pretty stressful. Interesting and fun, hopefully, but tiring. One of the reasons I love True Blood so much is that it's just 100% pure uncomplicated good times, while most other "really good" shows (i.e. Mad Men) make me very nervous while I'm watching them.
I am very happy to never have to watch Sawyer and Jack argue ever again.
Ben and Desmond were the best characters.
* The cheeseball "all religions are the same" stained glass window thing at the very end: groan.
P.S. Here's a decent attempt at a big explain-it-all write-up.
3 comments:
I agree; Ben and Desmond were among the best characters. And Sayid. (Though his death was lame. Sigh.)
[Theory Warning!]
I think the main reason they did not explain what the island actually is relates to the fact that it's origins pre-date all the events that inform the specific six seasons of the show we watched. The stone plug in The Heart of The Island is covered in cuneiform writing, potentially placing human interaction with the island, at the earliest, in the 34th Century BC, and at the earliest, just prior to the 4th Century BC structures we have been finding all over the island. (The statue of Taweret, The Temple, the vast tunnel system, the Egyptian Hieroglyphs found all over the island, and the engravings from the same time period that show early settlers of the island fighting a different, previous smoke monster.) The history of the island, between the creation of the stone plug, and the arrival of the 1st Century Roman settlers of whom Jacob and his brother were a part of, is another story entirely. Personally, I think will make a really fascinating series of Comics.
Just sayin'.
So they were speaking Latin when Jacob's mom washed up? I couldn't tell if it was Spanish or something else...
Word up. A tactic that modern TV shows seem to use is to have a "sound effect" signal a transition between the real language being spoken by the characters, and the English we hear as the audience. (It also explains why, when they were speaking Latin, it was choppy at best. It was spoken by non-Latin speakers.)
You could still sort of gauge the time period on the costumes and technology everyone was using (just after 1 AD), and then reverse-engineer that it must have been Latin. But the revelation from this episode seems to have gone unnoticed by a lot of people: the reason The Others spoke Latin throughout the show was that it was Jacob's (and the MIB's) first language.
And, yes, I'm totally nerding way too much over this. But for the first time, the kinds of stories they tell in comics are on the TV. How can I resist?
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