I spent lots of words to interpret the finale, but I didn’t answer the most basic question: did I like it or not? Now that is over, was it worth all this time?

Yes. But I don’t intend to ever re-watch another episode. It’s since the finale of Season 5 that the plot has progressively fallen apart and crumbled. I’ve already said that I started to enjoy the show only from Season 2 when the mythology was being flashed out and hint at the possibility of it not being a fraud, but in the end it’s the mythology that got dumped in favor of empathy with characters, letting just the emotion to drive the show to conclusion. I have zero interest to rewatch it because I consider it a closed experience. I enjoyed it, but the show exhausted its meaning for me. Evangelion, for example, I always gladly rewatch because every time I discover something new, some nuance, or it gets me thinking. This happens because I believe it taps into something “true”. Lost also taps into something true, but in a kind of superficial way that doesn’t make it flourish. Lost exploits more than makes thrive. And in the end I don’t enjoy much its “carrot on a stick” model that ultimately lead to something entirely different than what it promised.

Maybe with the exclusion of the finale: I think the finale was probably the most honest and truthful part of the show. But it was also optimist to the point that for me felt too gratifying. And I always distrust gratification.

I spent some time reading official and unofficial interpretations of the finale and there’s a lot of ambiguity and derailed interpretations that are starting to be shared by the majority. I cling with the interpretation I’ve given because it’s coherent with what we’ve been shown, while all other interpretations I’m reading have various crucial lapses of logic.

At the end the only way to find the “best” interpretation is to pick the one that is the least contradictory, and that’s what I was doing.

Let’s begin.

First there’s Jeff Jensen again, who followed one of those hyperlinks no one bothers to follow, and discovered something meaningful and that reinforces my theory that most of the mysteries in Lost have to be seen and interpreted in a symbolic way, and not literally as many are wont to do.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

Haroun is a self-aware fairy tale about a young hero (whose name means ”Aaron”) who has an adventure in a realm that happens to be the source of all stories.

Haroun fights a monstrous, shape-shifting Man In Black who seeks to destroy the ”sea of stories.” The villain is a crazed, control freak man of science/political tyrant who wants to put a cork in the wellspring of meaning itself and then spike the Sea of Story with a toxin of ”anti-story,” or meaninglessness.

Haroun saves the day, and for his trouble, the administrators who manage the fantastical realm give him a happy ending. Haroun is slightly troubled by this; he feels this ”happy ending” business is terribly contrived. Yet he accepts the gift anyway, and appreciates it more and more as the benefits roll in. Love. Hope. Forgiveness. Empowerment. Redemption. Reconciliation. Restoration. In the end (and this is just my interpretation), Haroun decides to worry less about the origin of this windfall — an inexplicable palette drop loaded with yummy, nourishing soul food — and instead decides to worry more about living a life worthy of these eternal values. The mechanism of the delivery may have been contrived, but the values themselves are truthful and real.

This works way too well to not be acceptable. It wraps completely what happened in the whole series, comparing mysteries and everything else as “devices” in order to enjoy a finality.

It only leaves to interpretation the Purgatory part, that is now the most controversial and the one whose interpretations I see as inconsistent. Including the one given by Jeff Jensen (I’ll continue to use Jeff Jensen as a template since he spells things out clearly and his interpretation is the one most widespread).

In particular the object of discord is the interpretation of what happens to Ben at the end.

The widespread interpretation I criticize:

We begin with Benjamin Linus. I was surprised and moved to learn that the bug-eyed devil got a ticket to the castaways’ afterlife rocket launch, that he was even considered a member of this spiritual clan. How very ”love thy enemy.”

Here I agree. These are the people that Ben got connected the most with. But accepting this, means that the second part is wrong. Which “ticket” to get is NOT a choice. This, and just this, is the clan he gets to be with. He doesn’t get another. In his life Ben connected with THESE people.

Ben chose to stay in the Sideways world instead of joining the castaways in their communal upload into the Source. He said he still had some things he needed to work out for himself. I’ve heard that some fans didn’t like the implications of Ben’s decision. If souls are allowed to kick around Purgatory for eternity and figure themselves out, then doesn’t the Sideways world effectively cheapen the Island story? If our redemption issues can be processed easily and painlessly in the cushy limbo of our own blue heaven, then what does it matter what manner of evil that we commit or suffering we endure in the world of matter?

Yes, you can stay and ”figure things out,” but this introspection doesn’t change who you are. Or rather, were. You don’t get to craft a flattering interpretation of yourself. You don’t get to accumulate more experience to improve your chances at heavenly election. You only get one life to live, and the opportunity that the Sideways world provides is the chance to puzzle together and come to grips with the person you became while you lived it.

The second paragraph shares the same explanation I’ve given: you don’t get a second chance in Purgatory. What matters is the “first” life and whatever you’ve experienced/learned there. Purgatory only represents consequence of your life, but you don’t get to fix mistakes and become a better person in Purgatory so that you can too aspire to paradise. What is done is done. Do we agree up to this point?

Agreeing with this means that the beginning of the first paragraph is WRONG. Ben doesn’t choose to stay in the Sideways world.

So everything lies in the interpretation of Ben’s statement: “I have some things that I still need to work out. I think I’ll stay here a while.”

People doing wishful thinking have straightly assumed that it means that Ben decides to stay out in the Purgatory and awaken Danielle and daughter or something like that, and it’s with them that he’ll do the afterlife rocket launch into bright light. I don’t swallow this interpretation because it contradicts every other premise.

First: Ben lost his chance to bond with other people. He wasn’t able to create real bonds in his life, if not maybe with Hurley in the island time span we don’t get to see. Danielle and her daughter represent missed opportunities.

Second: the Purgatory is a construct. It is fake wishland. It’s just a preparatory set-up so that the “soul cluster” can meet and move on together. Its function is merely of “acceptance”. Letting go what you thought was meaningful. Its function is merely revelatory and transitory. Meaning that Ben can’t go out and get a second chance because Danielle and her daughter are also fake constructs. Wishful thinking. They are furniture. In the same way the plane not crashing was solely a symbolic event they decided to put at the basis of their Purgatory construct. In the same way Jack’s son was also wishful thinking and furniture. In Purgatory you don’t craft a better life for yourself or get to fix your mistakes. Purgatory is made to reveal and accept what you’ve been and just that.

This is again reinforced by the fact that every slightly meaningful role is taken by someone who appeared in the show. We get to see a cameo of basically every character because this sideways reality was effectively built by those who end up in the church, with everyone else being merely a construct:

The Sideways world is a manifestation of the castaway soul cluster’s collective yearning. They wanted a world where they never crashed on The Island. They wanted a world where The Island had no sway over their lives. Ergo, their purgatory paradise reflects that yearning.

I have also seen The Island as a symbol for a world with objective meaning. Truth is ”out there;” it can be sought and found, even if it ultimately requires individual interpretation. The destroyed Island in Sidewaysabad is a symbol for subjective, meaning-challenged world where the only things that are truly real — the Island-world souls of the castaways — are literally submerged and lost in the murky depths of their Sideways avatars.

This still doesn’t explain what Ben says and why he decides to not join everyone else in the church.

My interpretation of his words and intent: Ben is outside, sitting alone and looking miserable. He is exactly like Scrooge in the Dickens’ Christmas tale. He gets to see people happy and understands how miserable he was. Ben wasn’t able to connect enough with Danielle or his daughter to be there with them. He lost his chance and now he’s alone.

It’s fairly silly to expect him to go out and awaken them. First because it’s too late to bond with them now, secondly because everything out there isn’t real. And trying to awaken Danielle is like trying to awaken furniture. Ben understands this. He will ultimately follow the others into the light (the last thing Hurely tells Ben is “I’ll see you”, nodding with his head toward the inside of the church), but he’ll still feel missing something.

He’s screwed and looks miserable. It’s a sad ending.

Also: this can be used as a parallel for another meaningful message the show tries to reveal. Remember the scene when Jack fills the plastic bottle with water to transfer the guardian role to Hurley (and plausibly grant him immortality and other undisclosed powers)? Well, the pragmatist in us would say that it couldn’t work. Because Jack didn’t say the magic words. In the exact same way the pragmatist in you pretends that Ben doesn’t share his companions’ destination in the bright light, simply because he’s sitting outside.

The point, and something that the show tried hard to prove, is that the “rules” can be made along the way. They are arbitrary customs so that we can make ourselves understood. They are conceits. They can be this and that, but it doesn’t matter in the end. If you cling to the rules you cling to the part that doesn’t matter. Magic words or not, in or out the church. A word represents meaning, but the meaning isn’t the word. Those are the same aspects of life that you are supposed to “let go”. Same for the hardcore explanations for every mystery: they aren’t the point. Clinging to strict rules is about clinging to the delusion of an imaginary world. Like Jack clinging to the idea that his son is “real”.

My yesterday’s post was too long and even a bit too vague, so I’ll use a forum post to illustrate better my point of view on the mysteries of the series and why I say that we were given all the answers that we needed to understand it fully.

JeffL: Sure, I have a ton of imagination, probably too much for my own good. But if they wanted me to make up all the answers to the fundamental questions, they could have just have one season and then a panel that says “OK, we gave you the template, now you come up with all the stories and what happens next.”

It’s really not that.

It’s a mix of laziness and it being not the point. If you want to fill the gaps you can try, but the message of the show is that it’s not the point. It shouldn’t matter. The mystery stays unresolved because it’s the nature of the mystery, and not because an answer has been denied. Things remain “abstract” like they can be in a dream. The mechanics of a dream do not follow logic, because they are symbolic. And a lot of mysteries in Lost aren’t to be “resolved” because their purpose is entirely symbolic. Or better: things need to be interpreted, not explained.

Trying to solve or understand a dream through the sheer logic of what happens in that dream is the very best way to miss its meaning.

But the MIB/Smokey story line was set up by the writers, and people like Jacob spoke as if they knew what the horror of him leaving the island would be. Yet – we’re given no real indications of why it would be so bad. The only thing MIB ever expressed was frustration that his un-mom lied to him, that there was an entire world out there, and he wanted to see it but he was told by his un-mom and then his brother, no, you can’t leave and see the rest of the world.

MiB (in smoke form) represents hate and vengeance. When Jacob sends his dead brother in the magic pool, he unleashes/shapes an “evil” part of the island that absorbs MiB’s original goals and twists them. The magic pool worked in that case like a sort of amplifier of the last bad thoughts stuck in that body. Even here the menace is entirely abstract because it is symbolic. There is no need or way to detail what concretely happens if the smoke monster is unleashed on the rest of world. It’s just a symbolic threat.

Jacob was himself a flawed protector because of his deranged mother. He inherits and brings along the flaws of his mortal self. Becoming immortal and drinking the magic pool kool-aid doesn’t make him better or particularly enlightened, in fact Jacob is an idiot (and you see in my longer explanation why this is a core point of the whole show). It’s Jacob who causes all this mess, and it’s Jacob who tries to close the loop he created by having the smoke monster destroyed (through Jack). Hurley becomes Jacob’s successor, but it’s implied that he’ll be a much better successor because he’s already a better person. Even the island mythology gets some kind of “betterment” from the process. But this process of “betterment” is always “human”-driven.

When he becomes Smokey, all of his actions still appear to be focused on just getting off the island.

Because the smoke monster is the manifestation and perversion of the original intent MiB had. It is twisted into hate, representing that “bad” part that makes humans human. So flawed.

It basically means: at the beginning our aims are always legitimate and good. But they can be twisted toward hate and nihilism. (see my post about chains and choices)

The smoke monster simply represents the corruption of a legitimate intent.

So yeah, the one thing I would have preferred is a simple dialog where Jacob or Jack or whoever states why Smoky getting to see the rest of the world would indeed end the world.

The threat is symbolic. It implies the danger of men giving up to their “bad” side (which is the fear and belief of Jacob and MiB’s mother). The smoke monster represents that possibility.

In the end if there’s something that the finale makes clear is that the “finality” is represented by choice and human will. Every supernatural element in the show is SUBORDINATE to the human struggle. The supernatural element is merely a “device” for the human struggle to surface and happen, and not “the point”. This is why the writers themselves continue to repeat that in the finale they wanted to focus on the characters and their lives, because the characters are what matters the most in the show. The Indiscriminate Happy End reinforces this concept: the journey existed because the characters faced their problems and got a chance of resolving themselves. This is why every character has a personal story arc, with flashbacks and everything. It is to show that these people had to face their problems, making mistakes or making progress. What they learn determines what they become, and, ultimately, what they bring along in the afterlife. What matters: what they have become and the people they got linked to. What doesn’t matter: the physical world they leave behind and “let go”, including the concrete answers to the mysteries.

Every threat or mystery they face is symbolic or thematic. They are “devices” used from a side to capture the attention of the audience (us, watching the show), from the other as symbols and metaphors of everyone’s journey and struggle. If some of you still think there are unexplained things it’s probably just because you don’t want to accept the real answers.

So you are left in Purgatory, forever looking for answers that do not exist.

This started as a forum reply, then it got too big. So I post it here.

Hold on a sec.

We all agree that the sideways reality we’ve been shown is now officially “purgatory”, waiting for the light representing paradise. One decides if this was a satisfying resolution or not. But what about what happened BEFORE?

People who don’t get to live fancy sci-fi adventures don’t go in paradise? How this mythology propagates to the rest of the world? What if a character decided to kill himself at some point? In the end they all went in paradise, so why bother fussing in the previous life?

If you buy this metaphysical package then you HAVE to deal with it. If you accept that paradise exists, then not only the purgatory is so, but even the previous island life. Everything is preparatory and transitory to the new happy, un-flawed life. So, if we all go in paradise in the end, why the need to bother with a mortal life? So that we can set up an heartwarming get together party? Or it’s just a trick so that you can offer an “happy end” when there was no way for the plot to go someplace?

In other words, instead of addressing the central mysteries that have driven the show since the beginning, the writers conjured up a brand new mystery at the beginning of this season, and then used the *series* finale to resolve only that new mystery. And the resolution to that mystery – that this group had such fun times on the island that they decided to share a slice of afterlife together – is utterly unconnected to any other mystery that has ever been raised in the show. How anyone could watch this and conclude the writers totally had this planned out from the start is beyond me – there’s nothing in the finale that would support that interpretation.

Seriously, if you think about it, this “they had such fun together they decided to meet up again after they all died” device could be used as a feel-good tear-jerker ending to *any* ensemble show. It’s really a totally meaningless cop-out ending.

Because you can use that type of ending for EVERY story (TV series, books, movies, whatever): there was a big fuss, but they eventually, sooner or later, died, and were happy in paradise. You must be pleased. You got six seasons of characters being tortured, then you get to see them finally happy. Everyone. Even those who died two episodes ago. Doesn’t this make YOU happy?

So let’s re-interpret: the bomb did nothing at all beside getting Juliet killed so that she could go do Visitors. Whatever happened happened. Hurley and Ben took Jacob’s role for an indeterminate amount of time, and maybe managed to ship Desmond back home (unresolved). Jack died just after re-corking the steaming shithole, saving the world (from what, we’ll never know). The rest of the crew got off the island and, presumably, landed safely. Claire got to try being a mother, maybe going insane from time to time so that life would not get too boring, Kate would probably try to kidnap Ji Yeon (Sun & Jin daughter), since that daughter is now an orphan, probably finishing in the very evil hands of Sun’s father. Sawyer got nothing if not a sorrowful life, maybe he gets to help Kate kidnapping Ji Yeon and play the father. It would be nice if this makes Sawyer get two wives when in paradise, and Jack nothing. Jack got a kiss, hope it was satisfying because it’s all you’ll get. Yet it’s absolutely coherent to assume that Sawyer gets to pass his life with Kate for what is left of their lives in the normal world. He already managed to get it to work with Juliet, so he’ll probably manage to get it to work even with Kate.

Obviously nothing of this could have been shown explicitly while at the same time making it satisfying and conclusive. So we don’t get that and we get the “Cumulative & Indiscriminate Happy End” in its place.

The fact is, the ending we were given would be rather sad if you take away the whole side-reality part. Too sad to swallow. So they figured out this trick that would offer an ULTIMATE happy end, no matter what. Or maybe it matters, since the whole point is leaving a sweet aftertaste instead of a bitter one. Then, at least SOME of the audience will be pleased. Or not?

Or NOT? What if the purgatory scene is solely Jack’s wishland? The way he hallucinates the story to end? And he figures HIS happy end in regards to everyone he knows. He definitely prefers Sawyer with Juliet, while he gets Kate all for himself. Quite neat. Why does Sayid get to be with Shannon and not Nadia? Because Jack only saw Shannon, not Nadia, so Nadia was not invited to Jack’s wishland party. Heh. Other findings?

Those who have seen Evangelion probably arrived to the same conclusion since Evangelion ended in a similar way to Lost. If you never watched Evangelion I wouldn’t suggest doing it if you don’t dig that type of thing, but at least you may try to read the script of the last episode (TV, not the movies). The end of the Evangelion TV series mimics exactly the spiritual part of the end of Lost, and does it in an even more direct and open way. In Japan this last episode produced a huge outrage and the director received a lot of personal death threats. This because the last episode of the TV series completely dropped the “plot” and only focused on the “message” they were sending, using the plot merely as a means to carry that message. People were focusing TOO MUCH on what didn’t truly matter for the director. The discussions existed solely about the plot, mysteries and their details, disregarding the real message and purpose of the show. So the director decided (since they were also running out of money) to drop every plot-related element and just leave the essence of the message. It led to a final episode that was abstract and stylized, completely different from the rest of the series. The director of Evangelion, not unlike Lost, was accused of not answering any of the mysteries of the show and all this produced an unprecedented outrage. In the end they decided to make two more movies that do not expand the “meaning” or message of the show, but conclude the mysteries they left behind and the plot itself.

I kind of chuckle at people trying to figure details such as how Jack got out of the glowing pool. If there’s something this finale has made clear is that it’s not like the writers didn’t give a proper answer to mysteries, it’s that the answers simply do not exist. Or better: solving mysteries is beside the point. If you really want to speculate fancy solutions, go on. But that’s not part of the purpose of the show.

Instead there’s another aspect that is worth discussing, and it is about the relationship between the lives of the characters.

So see me trying to wrap everything together in the way it should have been, without making anything up:

Level 1: Quantum reality. A whole, completely unresolved part of this series is “time travel”. The concept itself is in the show a loop that never closes. Merely a plot devices that doesn’t connect with a true meaning. They played a bit with the scientific theories, but ultimately this lead to a dead end. Unresolved, if you are an optimist, a failure if you’re not. An interesting aspect of the quantum reality theory, is the quantum immortality part. It’s loosely based on the concept: “I think, therefore I am”. It means that if there’s a conscious being aware of himself, then that conscious being must be immortal. The “quantum immortality” theory relies on the assumption of another theory, one requires the other: “many worlds interpretation”. This because the immortality of conscience relies on the fact that it will always exist in some other “world”. Being the worlds and possibilities infinite means that a conscious being can never completely cease to be. Desmond is clearly a mechanism of these theories. We aren’t being shown him simply as a bridge between sideways reality/purgatory and island. If I remember correctly (please point out the details if you remember) when Desmond time travel is described we see him looping quite a bit between alternate universes. Over and over. In the show we watch one world-story, but it is implied in the official mythology that there are infinite numbers of possible alternate worlds, maybe all pivoting on some immutable events, but still existing in parallel.

Level 2: I woke up early to watch Federer at the Roland Garros, then I was too tired and decided to nap before watching Lost. I dreamed something, not even too weird. Then I watched Lost. About 2/3 in, I was interrupted by something (not important what) that gave me a sudden deja-vu of what I dreamed just before. This happened right when in the show the characters were getting constant flashes of their island memories. This analogy got me realizing that all of us get these kinds of flashes daily. Sometime something we do makes us remember something weird we dreamed that night. What we live influences what we dream, and what we dream influences what we live, especially on a deep subconscious level. Then this can be linked back with Level 1: what if our conscience in all parallel worlds has a way to send some sort of feedback, and that feedback help us making choices in a precise instance of parallel universe, and then send back more feedback. Again and again. You are looped to yourself, and then linked to others.

Level 3: Jeff Jensen realized all of this in February, just after that awful Kate episode. He noticed that WHAT the characters did in the island time was then “informing” the sideways reality and made characters self correct. Many times we see a a flaw in a character in the island time that feeds and gets converted into something positive in the sideways time. It’s made explicit that (1) in the sideways time the characters have still their problems to deal with but (2) they learn to deal with them better. This is repeated over and over through the season, the sideways reality is in most cases a better reality simply because the characters learn from their mistakes. Nothing really comes as a “gift” (beside Hurley being lucky, but even that is probably a product and effect of perception), they EARN their “betterment”. The contemporaneity of this process is explicit even if Christian in the end says that the sideways reality has no time. Yet we see actions in island time that translate directly to sideways reality, and at the very least this is done to tell us that the characters are learning directly. And what happens in their “real” life has a finality because what they will become DEPENDS on what they learn and what they have been. It basically means: afterlife doesn’t lead to enlightenment. The enlightenment is something you bring along from your former life.

FINAL level: we do not get to see what the light past the door of the church represents. But it’s explicit that what they bring along from their previous life is ALL that matters, and that there would be nothing past that door if you didn’t bring along your experiences. The fact that this exists as a “pocket reality”, where only people that matter to you get to show up, means that it’s who you are and what you learned matters, even, and in particular, past the door.

Which all leads to the general concept of “Culture”. The show also represents the struggle of men Vs nature. Science Vs belief. The great intuition Jeff Jensen had is that the (island time – sideways reality) relationship is a metaphor for “fiction” in general. We, real people, become the object of this show (instead of the wreckage of the airplane, the final scene should have been about people watching TV, as in a mirror. That would have been a wonderful ending scene with cool subversion included). We watch these characters, get feelings about them. A few of you have cried. The involvement you can have with “fiction” has the same power of the relationship between the realities in the show. We learn things even if we don’t get to live directly those stories. The show, as fiction, tells and teach us stuff. It doesn’t impose anything, we get the choice to learn what we want, or discard everything. The same theme of choice that plays through the show: it’s the characters who do mistakes or learn to correct themselves. They go through a journey and this journey matters solely because it determines what they become. Lessons may be harsh, mistakes leading to tragedy, yet it all has a sense of finality.

The weakness of the ending was that the scene in the church gave more an impression of “nothing really matters, in the end everyone is happy”, when instead the actual message is that the happiness exists and is possible BECAUSE of what they lived, and that the room would be empty if they didn’t get through what they went through. Ben’s character and his reactions are especially meaningful. His life was so filled with hate and selfish drive that he feels uncomfortable joining the others. He’s ashamed of himself. In the end he connects with Hurley because Hurley is the one he gets to spend time with (on the island) and maybe redeem himself. If everyone gets a pocket reality of afterlife shared with the people that matter the most for him, we realize that these are the people that are the most important for Ben, yet he’s still uncomfortable being with them. And this makes it a rather sad and revealing ending. Ben brings with himself the legacy of his previous life. Everyone does.

The smoke monster, the island, the magic pool… Everything was simply a device. Used from a side to capture the attention of the audience and carry us through an extraordinary journey, from the other used so that these characters would face their obsessions and fears, their past. So that they would be tested and get the choice of resolving themselves, making themselves better. They face nightmares and dreams becoming real. The plot was made to liberate you, similarly to how the characters had to “let go” so that they could embrace a new life. If you let the plot & mysteries details tangle you, you’ll sink with them and won’t get the chance to understand what this show is telling you.

You’ll become like Eloise, who was so enamored of the fake reality that she preferred to stay out there.