Defending ABC’s ‘Lost’ finale

Welcome to No Shame November! This week we’re diving into the pop culture we love that society tells us we shouldn’t.

First of all, I would like to apologize.

I realize that I court chaos by dusting off Lost finale discourse in the year of our lord 2021, but the assignment was to talk about something I love without shame, and that is the LOST finale.

Time has not been kind to “The End,” written by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse and airing on ABC May 23, 2010. Despite strong reviews and ratings, “the Lost finale” quickly became shorthand for something that was shoddy, nonsensical, and not worth the wait. But “The End” was never the problem — it was the best way to conclude Lost given where all the characters ended up, and shouldn’t be blamed for the plotting, production, and business interests that loomed over this monumental series.

Watching this again knowing that Jack is basically going to a job interview…wild.
Credit: KOBAL/ABC/SHUTTERSTOCK

“The End” was a feature-length TV episode and an event unto itself. On the island, Jack, Kate, Sawyer and the rest face off against the Man in Black in John Locke’s body. They search for a way off the island but also a way to save it from him. In the flash-sideways, which we learn is the afterlife, characters from every season collide and remember their life on the island before meeting in the church and moving on.

I did my first full Lost rewatch in a decade last year, and “The End” still made me sob. It meant more this time around, knowing where everything was leading — even if the people who created Lost didn’t know all those details from the start. It is so clear upon revisiting the series that its weakness was filler. Remember that Lost was born a network show in a network world; bound contractually to 22 episodes a year with the possibility of cancellation after every season. Every episode had to sustain conflict toward a finale, and every finale had to toe the line between summer’s hottest cliffhanger and the potential end of the show forever. 

The show is actually at its weakest in Season 3, whose plot and character work are visibly treading water — this is the season that gave us “Stranger in a Strange Land,” John Locke’s past growing weed in a cult, and the notorious “there are two islands” reveal which was quietly shushed in time for Season 4 to move the island in “There’s No Place Like Home.” Season 3’s cracks in character and plot point glaringly toward a creative team that hit a wall. There is a flash-sideways alternate reality here where Lost was not granted its final three-season order and continued to live in network purgatory for four or six or 10 excruciating years — a world full of Nikkis and Paolos and Ben Linus torturing rabbits and putting people in cages ostensibly to watch them have sex.

After that, as viewers know, Lost began a bold but calculated move toward the show I believe it truly wanted to be. Season 4 ruthlessly cut characters left and right, narrowing the show’s focus while also leaning into the abject bleakness established in the pilot. It dismantled time and space so Season 5 could find our characters cast away in more ways than one. Slowly, imperceptibly, Lindelof and Cuse widened the broader world of Lost while honing in on its characters, preparing for the finale’s big picture perspective.

Maybe the only person who had any idea where all this was going.
Credit: KOBAL/ABC/SHUTTERSTOCK

I will freely admit that Season 6 is not great, and a lot of hatred borne by the finale stems from this. A lot of what happens on the island and in the flash-sideways proves to be the same water-treading filler that defined Season 3. Remember the Ajira flight? Or the Temple? Remember whatever the heck happened to Sayid? Of course you don’t, nor should you. 18 episodes, while trimmed from the usual 22, is still a lot of time to kill. I quake to think what Lost could be in the 10-episode seasons of today — a structure Lindelof would try his hand at with HBO’s The Leftovers, one of the unequivocal best shows of the 2010s and clearly the series he was destined to make.

The show’s grand scope may have worked well in the writers’ room, but for weekly viewers it was piecing together a 10,000 piece puzzle without the picture on the box. You can’t blame anyone for fixating on the “magic box” and the Dharma Initiative when these mysteries were so utterly engrossing. It’s easy to miss the mark when you’re a thousand miles off course. 

The show’s final hours — especially “Across the Sea” — are doing some heavy lifting with exposition and answers, and digesting so much information in a short time can be jarring. How else do you explain the sheer number of fans who still think the Island was purgatory? (if this is you, the flash-sideways was purgatory. The Island was real.) Look at How I Met Your Mother, another notorious finale. Would fans have reacted more positively if they met the mother sooner, if earlier episodes had hinted and chipped away at her fate so the show’s last moments weren’t deeply traumatic? Absolutely.

In so many ways, Lost created a foundation for the future of TV. We owe it our emotional, character-driven flashbacks, our faith in the full orchestral score, our willingness to embrace some truly messed up stuff on a network drama. As divisive as the finale was, we owe it everything we learned since then about what can make or break a great show. Perhaps most important of all, Lost should be a lesson for TV fans and creatives to not fixate too strongly on the end. Focus on the beginning, and on trusting writers with vision and foresight that can steer a show toward a smooth landing.

Lost is now streaming on Hulu.