THE END

LOST ended three months ago. Hard to believe that we’re already looking down the barrel of the gun for the DVD release of both season six as well as the complete series. Time goes by quickly, I guess, even if you have a magical electromagnetic island to slow things down.

I spent a decent amount of time this summer composing my each and every thought on both the finale as well as the series as a whole, organizing it all into what was intended to be my final major blog post about LOST. Since it had taken me so long, I decided to wait until shortly before the DVD release, as that would give both myself and anyone who may be reading a fresher and clearer perspective on the show, as well as tapping into the excitement over the final DVD set and its inclusion of the show’s epilogue, “The New Man in Charge,” a humorous and slightly emotional goodbye forever to the world of LOST (as well as an attempt to clarify certain mythological questions, and give closure to the one character who had to be glossed over in the final season’s narrative).

Yes, there are many reasons to finally post my thoughts on “The End,” and I almost did just that. But I’ve decided against it. LOST is over. LOST is gone. Therefore, I think this blog has outlived its reason for being, too. There is not much point in posting my thoughts about the show. Not now. I have other things I’d rather think about, and I doubt many people will be visiting this site much in the future, or even currently. And anyone who may have been eagerly awaiting my post about the finale has, I’m sure, long since given up (and rightfully so).

The reaction to the final season of LOST was an intense one, and I’d be lying if I said I’m okay with being a part of that reaction. I’m very much not okay with it, actually. The sheer amount of anger, hate and feelings of betrayal directed at the series in the wake of the finale was staggering, even to me, and I expected a pretty strongly negative reaction to begin with. But constructive criticism seems to have flown out the window in favor of a response that is grudgingly unfulfilled at best and passionately spiteful at worst. And hey, everyone is free to feel however they’re gonna feel. I just don’t want to be part of it.

Three months after the finale and message boards, blogspots and chat rooms are still filled with ridiculous comments, the collective pitter-patter chitter-chatter of so much empty and angry cyber-rhetoric being flung at all sides like so much bullshit. Liked the finale? Then you’re a moron who doesn’t know what a good story is, who’ll buy any touchy-feely religious claptrap thrown your direction, and who can’t accept that Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse are two no-talent jackass hacks who conned the audience every step of the way. Didn’t like the finale? Then you’re just a cold-hearted creep who only cares about answers to the show’s mythology and couldn’t appreciate the characters, and were never a “real fan”. Yep, real productive there.

When “Across the Sea” aired, this seemed to be the beginning of the type of polarized, name-calling bickering masquerading as conversation. I remember wanting to write an in-depth discussion about the episode, about why people hated it so much and about why I liked it. But I didn’t. Couldn’t. At the time I thought it was just general laziness, and while that certainly was a factor, I realize now the reason I didn’t defend the episode was because there was no point. I had no real overwhelming drive to discuss or defend LOST in a public forum. It was the end of the show. I just wanted to watch it.

I understand now that my laziness was actually a type of fatigue, a bored and disinterested attitude not toward the show but towards writing about the show on the internet. Online discussions about LOST have always been contentious, but in the furor over the last season, those increasingly rare and tenuously constructive conversations were largely replaced with something else, a growing disillusionment that was really the end point of the game we’d been playing with the show for years.

You see, LOST is the case of the show that offered itself to the audience, and that audience tore it to pieces. The series had built such loyalty and dedication that it seemed like the viewers would be willing to go along for the ride. And that’s where LOST made the mistake. It encouraged the willingness of the core audience to hang on every word, to investigate every subtle reference, despite serious misgivings from those audience members about the show’s characters, storylines, pacing, and direction. The situation was such that, the further the show went along, if anything it actually discouraged people from going along for the ride. People stayed, but many seemed to do so reluctantly.

The series coasted for years on ambiguity and mystery, and those enigmatic gaps were filled by the imaginations of viewers who enjoyed trying to decipher What Is Really Going On. Clues were handed out through alternate reality games, websites, tie-in novels, jigsaw puzzles and podcasts. It all seemed to be leading somewhere, to some defined endpoint where everything would make sense, and many people were willing to accept LOST on the condition that this would turn out to be true. And it wasn’t true. LOST was indeed telling a complex and grandiose story, but not in the way many viewers had assumed. Therefore, the almost paranoid attention to minute details added up to not much in the way of anything when it came to the grand scheme of things.

This isn’t to say those elements didn’t matter. For those interested, they offered a richer background to the universe in which LOST took place. But fun mystery games providing extraneous mythological details were not what many of the most dedicated viewers were hoping for. Again, many people accepted these elements conditionally, on the notion that LOST would bring it all together in the end. And that faith was misguided. LOST, albeit somewhat inadvertently though not totally blamelessly, bred a fanbase almost incapable of just sitting back and enjoying the ride, as the series actually encouraged its own scrutiny, cultivating a cultural hysteria that came back at the show in a major way. Many viewers were incapable of accepting the series in total as they were too busy hypercriticizing every single step along the path, trying to ensure that each move made concise sense and added to the complete picture. And it’s difficult to enjoy something when you’re trapped in the details, lost with no perspective in an endless tangle of mythological questions seemingly going nowhere. John Locke didn’t really believe, but he wanted to. LOST’s viewers were the same way: they weren’t really convinced, but they hoped they would be.

The show’s open-ended mysteries allowed viewers to create their own speculative answers, which in turn gave audience members the license to more or less invent their own LOST. You could decide what was acceptable in terms of the direction of the series, and then hold the series to that expectation. Don’t like Jack and Kate? Hopefully they’ll die before the end of the show. They’d better. Is the mysticism of the island too New Age hocus pocus for you? Well, you heard that everything on the island can be explained scientifically, so that stuff should go away. It’d better. Fascinated by the Egyptian stuff, and need to know more? Rest assured the series will explain all of that in detail, as the writers wouldn’t just be adding that stuff for stage dressing. Right???

I could go on. When you don’t know where things are going, it’s easy to make mountains out of mole hills, and that most certainly happened in the audience’s fascination with the island mythology. Eventually it became so big in the minds of viewers that no answer could ever really be satisfying, as the answers were dwarfed by the questions which spawned them. In the final season there was an overwhelming outcry about answers . . . about not having answers that were deserved, about the answers given being ultimately lame and unsatisfying, about the delivery of those answers having been underwhelmingly written. It was a lose-lose situation, which perhaps makes the title of the series ultimately more fitting. LOST was really doomed from the start, when you think about it.

Perhaps LOST’s biggest failing was that it led people to believe, or at least allowed them to believe, that the series was a solvable mystery . . . a kind of cosmic whodunit with the revelation of the killer replaced with the revelation of What Is The Island. But it wasn’t that kind of mystery. LOST was about the ungraspable nature of mystery, the ineffable experience of truly encountering the unknown, and how people make sense of that encounter as they come to terms with their own lives. But enough of that.

I don’t really think it’s entirely the fault of the show’s writers that good portions of the audience decided to read what they wanted into the series and ignore what the show was actually doing. After all, you can’t control how the audience will react or interpret. All the writers could do was tell the story they wanted to tell, the story they knew they were telling. And ambiguity is the nature of the game with LOST, so it would never be possible to fully clarify to the audience without being pedantic, didactic and condescending, not to mention dramatically inert. But this worked against the show as it bred resentment, when LOST turned out not to be the show many people imagined or wanted it to be. Was the audience really listening to the series or just hearing what they wanted to hear? I have no idea. Furthermore, I don’t give a shit at this point.

Sadly, LOST is heralded as the series that used the internet to become a runaway success. Because of online communities, message boards, fan podcasts and devoted blogs, LOST created a net-based community that supposedly kept the flame alive. Damon and Carlton’s own podcasts as well as the producer-run message board the Fuselage contributed to the increased interactivity between author and audience. However, all of this ultimately turned against the show. The internet community the series helped to foster was the first segment to attack the series when it became abundantly clear that expectations were not going to be met. And Damon and Carlton’s increased media exposure simply ensured that fans would hold them personally responsible for wasting six years of their precious lives.

It was the sense of ownership, entitlement and even co-authorship that LOST provided to the audience which ultimately led to its unraveling in the minds of that very audience, because that authorship was an illusion. The audience really had no say in the direction of the show, nor should they have. But an entire network of rabidly devoted websites would seem to suggest otherwise. When it dawned on viewers that LOST was not beholden to their wishes or demands, people took it very, very personally.

It also doesn’t help that LOST trod out themes that people tend to take personally anyway, especially when they become so mentally engaged in a particular work that its status as a piece of fiction becomes less prominent than its status as something really important and meaningful. (And I consider it a good thing that people found it meaningful; I did as well). Good and evil, life and death, science and faith are all philosophical issues that strike chords with people and rightfully so, but LOST did not play those particular chords or cards especially well for many viewers. LOST was perhaps invested with too much meaning, so that when all was said and done, its failure to live up to that level of meaning has caused it to be perceived as ultimately meaningless.

The criticism of the show is more of a blur than a consensus. LOST should have had more science and less mysticism. It should have been more religious and less sci-fi. It should have been more about good and evil. The good and evil were too ambiguous. They weren’t ambiguous enough. The mysteries were over-explained. The mysteries were under-explained. More Jacob, more Man in Black. Jacob and MIB suck. No afterlife please, this is a show about time travel. Less time travel please, this is a show about people. Less people please, this is a show about mystery. Less mystery please, this is a show about plane crashes. Enough plane crashes, this is a show about tropical fruit. LOST was too complicated. It was too simple. It wasn’t enough of anything.

This glut of boringly dissatisfied feedback hangs over any attempt to discuss the show online like the black smoke monster waiting to pounce after a particularly mind-numbing bender. Why? Because it isn’t just with LOST that many attempts at meaningful conversation dissolve into hyperbolic white noise. It’s with the internet at large, as the web is a medium which encourages a sense of entitlement, in this case an entitlement to opinion. And of course we all are entitled to our opinions, but the internet encourages the broadcasting of those opinions. Everyone is a critic, and everyone is a cynic. As a forum for conversation, the internet often fails because it simultaneously strokes our sense of self-importance and self-righteousness, which ultimately results in a breakdown of actual communication, as our words fall upon eyes that simply will see what they want to see, and the words themselves were probably self-satisfied gibberish anyway.

Even this blog posting is likely a bunch of nonsense, and possibly guilty of everything I’ve said above.

And that’s the problem. By maintaining this blog, I’ve added to the white noise, and inadvertently contributed to the negative and hostile atmosphere surrounding the discussion of this show. People don’t want to have a calm and fun conversation about something they thought was cool. They want to scream and moan and bitch about how much it sucked and what a waste of time it was, or they want to dismiss those who didn’t like it as being less than human (over a TV show???), or they want to sit back with cool indifference and write the whole thing off as an exercise for idiots. The internet—not all of it, but in decent amounts—is a place of gossip, of self-absorbed whining, of ego-stoking fantasies and always justified indignant negativity.

Visit the comments on a Yahoo news article, an IMDB message board, or a LOST blog and you’ll see the same predictable antagonism being recycled ad nauseum. By criticizing the internet on the internet I am in fact fulfilling those same functions. It’s truly like a Hydra: cut off the head, and two grow in its place. It cannot be defeated. The moronic beast that was television is now giving us shows like LOST; thankfully, we can use the internet to destroy such things. Plus, TV is still giving us shows like “My Super Sweet 16,” so the dream hasn’t died completely. We can use the internet to destroy such things. Cyberspace is the equal opportunity destroyer, after all. It is a toxic, poisonous place where everyone gets to be fashionably disappointed together. And, as the Comedian is fond of pointing out, it’s all a joke.

We know too much. Simple as that. The internet spreads information so quickly that we’ve become accustomed to feeling entitled to that information, and parade this supposed knowledge about as if it’s stone hard fact. Take the instances on LOST of characters being written out of the show. People base their feelings on characters like Ana Lucia, Mr. Eko, Libby, Nikki, Paulo, etc. not just on how those characters’ stories were presented onscreen, but also on what they’ve heard the behind-the-scenes reasons were for those characters being killed off. Ana Lucia sucks because everyone knows Michelle Rodriguez was fired for being difficult to work with, and for her drunk driving arrest. Mr. Eko was great but his death was lame because everyone knows Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje demanded to be written out of the show. Everyone knows there were big plans for Nikki and Paulo but they were killed off because we, the viewers, refused to accept them. But honestly, who cares?

Who gives a fuck if someone was written out because they demanded more money, drove drunk or fought with the caterer? The only thing that matters should be what made it onto the screen, not what our tabloid culture feeds us about the alleged truth. We are killing the illusion, exposing the magic trick before it’s even done being performed, because our hunger for facts that justify our skepticism outweighs our ability to enjoy. We’ve been spoiled by knowledge becoming so available that it’s teetering on disposability.

We contribute to an online culture which claims to appreciate something but then despises that very thing at every turn, just because the internet provides a suitable venue for an arrogant cynicism we don’t get to overtly display in daily life. We treat the things we enjoy as if they’re hunks of meat and we’re ravenous piranhas, the strands of gristle that remain the only bits and pieces we’re willing to appreciate and leave standing, and even then we’ll only appreciate them cautiously, on a trial basis. All of which is just my highly melodramatic (remember, this is the internet) way of saying that I’m tired of talking about LOST online, and it’s time to move on. It’s also my way of saying that I can’t wait to see “Piranha 3D”.

My point isn’t that I hate talking about LOST, or that criticism of LOST is a bad thing. I understand that much of the vitriolic disappointment directed at the show arises from the fact that people were passionate about it. People cared. It’s just that the internet is shaping up to be one of the worst possible places to have these discussions. It’s simply not interesting anymore. I don’t care enough what I think about LOST to write any more expansive blog entries nitpicking every nook and cranny of the show. (Not every nook and cranny, John . . . haha, get it?!). Who gives a shit what I have to say about it, really? Who cares if everyone thinks the characters were dead the whole time? (They weren’t. Sorry, still can’t let that one go). It’s just a TV show, and these are just a bunch of ramblings posted among endless other ramblings in some pervasive net of polished opinions we currently call the blogosphere.

I loved LOST, everything about it, from start to finish, Pilot to The End. But I love it enough that I don’t need to talk about it in a public forum. There will always be plenty of other people who will do that. I’ll keep my ultimate thoughts on the series to myself. I’ve had enough of opinions, even my own. This isn’t a place for living words. The internet is a dead place, with frozen words set to echo effect, disembodied and omnipresent like the whispers which supposedly should have been coming from anything but ghosts. I don’t want to write dead words about a dead show. I want to write something that is alive, and that, my friends, is what I shall do. Time to let go and move on.

I won’t be deleting this blog or anything, as I put too much into it over the last few years. All of the many highlights of my foolishness will remain on display here. (My favorite being when I got mad at season three for not fulfilling my wish about an alternate timeline where the plane never crashed . . . a wish mostly fulfilled three years later, when I thankfully stopped taking the show so personally). Even my whining about Libby’s backstory, Claire’s implant, and Miles’ paranormal abilities are laughable in retrospect. So silly.

Still, I don’t regret this blog. Thank you so much to anyone who visited here, and who cared to read what I had to say. I enjoyed all of the conversations, and I will still read any comments people may leave, even the ones from automated worms that post porn ads in foreign languages and broken English. (“You like a happy time with his slug??? Make a yesterday for satisfying!!!”). Also, to my fellow LOST bloggers who I’ve gotten to know over the years, please don’t take anything said here as being directed at you. It was a pleasure getting to read your thoughts as well. I may one day post my thoughts on the finale, but for now I consider this my final entry and this blog having met its end.

Namaste, and see you in another life.