by Megan Bailey, Staff Writer

There have been a million think pieces about LOST’s series finale, and I’m simply adding to the chorus. I could spend the majority of this explaining why I think most common complaints about the finale are misguided, or how a good portion of season six really does answer most of the questions that get brought up as unanswered in the finale, or why they weren’t dead all along, and so on.

But what I’d most like to talk about is, well, that the character work of the show is where it shined the most. You have all these flawed people, who we’ve now seen through six seasons, in flashbacks, flash-forwards, and flash-sideways. And they’re all a little broken, to say the least. But what mattered was what they did once they got to the island together. Jacob (Mark Pellegrino) tells Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lily), Sawyer (Josh Holloway), and Hurley (Jorge Garcia) all about this in the penultimate episode, explaining that they’re the final candidates to take over Jacob’s job of protecting the island. They were flawed people, alone in the world, and the island brought them together, so they could live together instead of dying alone.

The survivors of Oceanic 815 were meant to crash together in order to find one another. And their time on the island was the most important part of their lives. Christian, Jack’s father, reinforces this in the finale too: “Nobody does it all alone. You needed them and they needed you.”

I think that the flash-sideways reinvigorated the series, in the same way the flash-forwards did in season four. It breaks us from the flashbacks, since there can only be so much to tell us about each character’s backstory, and it gives us a chance to see the characters we’ve lost along the way (including Daniel Faraday [Jeremy Davies], my beautiful son).

Throughout the flash-sideways scenes, Desmond goes around, trying to get all the survivors linked back up in order to remember one another. While I loved seeing certain couples remember each other, I think it’s really interesting that so many of the connections are with romantic partners, rather than friends. Even Charlie, who kicks off Desmond’s own memories, frames it as remembering the love of his life, and Desmond has to find Penny in order to get his full memories back. For a show that featured some really meaningful friendships, the focus on romantic connections feels a bit cheap.

To turn that on its head though, toward the end of the flash-sideways, we see Jack start to remember while he’s talking to Locke. The show has put these two against each other often, and it’s a reminder of their dynamic before the Man in Black got into Locke’s body. These men respected each other, even when they didn’t agree. Jack even says as much to him in the finale.

As far as the island plot goes, I have to point out just how few women are left by the end of this thing. Since we started the show with fewer women than men, it’s fine, as a numbers game, that more men make it through to the end. But with Kate and Claire (Emilie de Ravin) as the only women left alive at the end of this, it’s glaring just how few women have survived. I do like a lot of the tension between Kate and Claire, especially with Claire finding out that Kate is the one who took her son and that he’s off the island. Plus, the reveal that Kate came back solely to find Claire and bring her back to him is very sweet. But losing so many women throughout the show is not a coincidence.

The weakest part of the show for me has always been the Charles Widmore (Alan Dale) versus Ben Linus (Michael Emerson) storyline. I just don’t particularly care about these two men facing off, and I’m much more interested in just about every other character. However, the conversation that Ben has with Ilana (Zuleikha Robinson) about choosing the island over everything, including Alex, and how that affected him almost makes up for it.

I want to mention just how incredible “Ab Aeterno” is, especially when compared to the absolute clunker that is “Across the Sea.” I want to be specific here, because Melinda Hsu-Taylor and Greggory Nations did an incredible job weaving Richard’s (Nestor Carbonell) backstory in with the island plotline. And part of why “Across the Sea” is so frustrating is that we stop the entire plot of the show dead in order to show Jacob and the Man in Black’s backstory, with only two episodes left to go. Not to mention that it’s just a cliché storyline about two sons competing for their mother’s approval, one a rebel and one a rule-follower. It’s not nearly as interesting as it wants to be, especially for something this close to the end of the show.

What solidified as I watched the finale this time is that the final episode is really focused on wrapping up the character arcs. The writers answered many of the mysteries earlier in the season, so that this episode could really wrap up the character work. And, of course, when 4 million people who’d stopped watching the show prior to the finale tuned in, it makes sense that they think, for example, that the whispers were never explained.

And for viewers who spent six seasons thinking that the mysteries were the most important part, it must have been an odd feeling. But for me, and for other people who value character over plot, this is an incredible end to a long journey with these characters. This show did function as a mystery box, though, so I certainly understand why some viewers bought into that being an important part. However, this show’s success has always been on the strength of its characters, and I defy anyone to watch the last ten minutes of the show and not feel something.

There are a lot of great elements in the final season and in the finale especially: The final shot that mirrors the pilot episode, the connections between characters in the flash-sideways, Jack’s acceptance of his fate as a chosen one and then his passing the baton to Hurley as the actual protector of the island. Plus, there are also a lot of elements in LOST that inspired other work, which we’ll talk about next month!

Notable episodes:

“Lighthouse” — the moments with Jack and Hurley are delightful.
“Ab Aeterno” — a masterful reveal of Richard’s backstory.
“The End” — for obvious reasons!