Rewind Files: Why Haven't We Forgiven Lost?

Rewind Files is when we take a second look at a piece of media to gain a better sense of its greatness, its awfulness, or its place in the cultural landscape. 

At this point, defending the Lost finale is a useless, redundant exercise. People know how they feel about it and those feelings aren’t going to change, which might be too bad, but here we are all the same. What might be more interesting is exploring why people still want to defend the Lost finale, and why the episode’s detractors seem to be as passionate, embittered, and ticked off as they were in 2010. So, that’s what we’re going to talk about instead.**

**For the record, I love the finale of Lost, and I feel that’s important to say because the episode’s reputation has become so notorious that it’s likely me dodging this sort of declaration would be considered cowardly or even dishonest. So yeah, “The End” is wondrous to me. Feel free to harass me online about it.

There are two kinds of Lost viewers, and which kind you are drastically affects the way you view the show’s conclusion. Some people watch Lost for the island, and some people watch Lost for the characters. Those in the former camp were likely profoundly disappointed by “The End” because “The End” did next to nothing to resolve the show’s many puzzles and questions. Those in the latter camp probably saw the finale more favorably, because “The End” is almost entirely devoted to completing the story of Lost’s ensemble.

Most people fell into the former camp, which, while probably not the show’s intent, is certainly the show’s fault. The pilot of Lost (a transcendent, innovative episode of television if there ever was one) exposes the show’s backbone from Day One: a character-driven action-drama with just the perfect amount of mystery on the side. There’s a clear primary objective—present our ensemble and compel the viewer to care about them—and a clear secondary objective—tempt the viewer with the mythology of the island. For every thin, wispy smoke monster, we’re given three or four rich, complicated, multi-dimensional characters. The show dangles a chocolate bar in front of you, but still provides enough food to make a satisfying meal.

However, as Lost went on into deeper seasons, and Jack, Kate, Locke and Co. ventured deeper into the island’s secrets, the show pivoted toward its mystery and away from its humanity, and with that pivot came numerous false promises that this show would give you all the answers. It was a messy, strained, impossible task, and when Lost realized its error and made a last-second correction toward its characters in the finale, those who had become invested in those mysteries threw up their hands. This wasn’t the conclusion they had been lead to expect, and their resulting vitriol was not only inevitable, but understandable, too. Meanwhile, those of us who were always in it for the contextualizing flashbacks and the escalating war of personal ideologies had a deep, powerful, emotional experience. To us, “The End” was lovely. To everyone else, “The End” was a betrayal.

It’s odd, though, that the Lost finale still carries as much reputational weight as it does. In truth, its perceived shortcomings have come to define the show at large, and the resentment that people have for that final hour has tragically extended to the entire series. The Lost finale disappointed, thus the whole show disappointed.

Other shows don’t see that dynamic. Other series with less-than-satisfactory endings—The Sopranos, How I Met Your Mother, some would even say Breaking Bad and Mad Men didn’t reach the level of perfection their totalities had promised—aren’t lumped in with the finale on the way to the dumpster. People still praise those shows despite their dying whimpers, but Lost sees the hate on an across-the-board level. It’s undeserved and unfair, but the uniqueness of that response reflects Lost’s influence. The response exists precisely because of the show’s impact, innovation, and importance.

It’s appropriate that “The End” gives us a few micro-flashbacks of Lost’s best moments, because the legacy of the episode ironically masks so many of them. The show gave us two all-time cliffhangers with season one’s hatch and season three’s trembling, momentous “Through the Looking Glass.” It legitimized the all-too-prevalent subsection of “mystery shows” that exist to ask questions (Westworld) and search for answers (The Night Of). It became an early binge-watch titan and is still one of the most Netflixable shows you can find, and it without question gave us the best top-to-bottom roster of characters in modern television. Lost was excellent, excellent programming. Its low points may have been unwieldy and feeble, sure, but its peaks were positively insurmountable. It doesn’t receive enough credit.

Maybe popular culture won’t forgive Lost because it knew how good the show could be. Maybe the first show to initiate series-long mysteries and compel viewers with questions instead of completions needed to race through, instead of stumble across, the finish line. Maybe. On the other hand, Lost has had dozens of imitators but remains to be replicated. It’s certainly one of the most influential television programs ever made. We talk about finales, and the Lost finale especially, like they’re sporting events: A strikeout to end the game could cost the entire World Series. But TV shouldn’t work that way. Our evaluations should be more holistic, like a test in school. If you scored 99 out of 100 and missed the final question, does that mean you failed? By no means.

Remember what Lost’s final pivot told us: This show, at the end of it all, was always about the characters. It was about total strangers coming together through crisis and trauma to forge everlasting bonds, and through those bonds, ultimately find meaning. “The End” drives that home over its whole two hours. Yes, Lost was about the island, but it used the island as a catalyst for its inhabitants to grow, change, and connect to one another. The island wasn’t the story; it was there to make the story possible.

Why do we forget that the island did exactly the same thing for us, too? It was a catalyst for the first obsessive, meticulous, conspiratorial fan base of the Internet age. It brought an audience together like few shows ever had before, connecting strangers over the web, forging bonds in theory-spinning forums, and dropping millions of people back into its mythical jungle, every Wednesday night on Fox. Lost was an utterly special communal experience, and it earned that attention by giving us some of the most tangible, abundant, and powerful storytelling the small screen had ever displayed.

As Lost asked questions and demanded answers, so did we, and for a long time, where the show went, we followed. Yet, when it came to that final set of double doors, we inexplicably stopped. We watched all our beloved characters move on, but we never did. At “The End,” our leading man found the intersection of science and faith. The island hadn’t provided all the answers, but he had learned to trust it anyway. Maybe that, for us too, was the lesson all along.