On LOST and Dostoevsky

I’ve read The Brothers’ Karamatzov three times. 

I’ve made it to the end once.

I got to The Grand Inquisitor twice and my mind almost exploded and both times I put it down for several months before trying again.  The third time I read it, I quit trying to figure it out and just enjoyed the story.  There was a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I was missing some pretty important elements and symbols, but I knew if I tried to figure them out, I’d get stuck again, so I ignored the feeling and got lost in the plot.

For much of the last two seasons, I’ve felt the same feeling while watching LOST.  It is the Dostoevsky of television.  There was so much symbolism, so much to get out of the show from a spiritual and worldview standpoint, but if I thought about it too long, I felt like my head would explode, so I got “lost” in the story instead.

And it was a great story.  Probably the greatest TV plotline in history.  It was original and weird and dramatic and funny.  It made you think and laugh and cry and shout.  It was a really, really great show.

I’m not a TV person.  I don’t love to sit and watch TV.  The constant movement and noise makes me crazy.  Aside from FRIENDS, I’ve never before been so addicted to a show that I would put aside life for a short bit of time each week to watch.

But LOST was different.  For six years, LOST has been a date night for Lee and I.  Every week for 18 weeks, we’ve put the kids to bed early, piled up on the couch and enjoyed unravelling the mysteries of the island.  We’ve talked through theories and the significance of what the characters were experiencing.  We’ve grumbled when the plotlines didn’t make sense and clapped our hands with glee when they were so good we felt like we could jump out of our skins.

It’s kind of embarrassing to admit that I’m going to miss a TV show, but I am going to miss LOST.  It’s amazing how attached you can become to characters.  I know they aren’t real, but for six years I’ve invested in the stories of these finctional people.  It was like a long novel that I never wanted to end.  I’m going to miss watching the show with my husband each week.  I can’t imagine another show ever taking it’s place.  I actually told Lee that we should maybe just go ahead and cancel cable.

He thought that might be a little rash.

Warning – Spoiler Alerts Ahead!

Last night’s series finale left me feeling a little confused.  When it ended I almost felt let down a bit.  The nature of LOST is to leave you with questions, so I fully expected to be a little baffled.  But, like Dostoevsky, I felt like the last few minutes were so deep and metaphorical that I missed the whole meaning.  And there was a fear that maybe the writer’s had pulled the wool over my eyes for so long.

They were all dead?! What!

For about fifteen minutes, I felt confused and frustrated.  But it didn’t make sense.  Surely they hadn’t been dead the whole time.  The writer’s wouldn’t do that.  So Lee and I rewatched the ending and it seemed to answer the most pressing question.

The survivors were not dead on the island.  All that was real.  But somewhere along the way, they all eventually died.  Some, like Jin and Sun, Sayiid and Shannon and Boone, died on the island.  Others, like Claire, Kate and Sawyer got off the island and lived life.  We don’t know what happened to them, but they lived and died.  Jack, of course, died on the island, in the same place where he began six years ago.  Laying in the bamboo field. 

Brilliant. 

The sideways reality was a sort of purgatory.  It was a waiting ground – a place for all of them to be connected again.  I still don’t really understand all of that, honestly.  There are a lot of unanswered questions and this is the part of the story that I could either go crazy trying to unravel or I could simply enjoy the story and leave it at that.  Again, it’s the nature of LOST to leave you feeling completely confused and exhilerated all at once.

Dumb smart people…

But the island happened.  And that’s the story that I invested six years of my life into, so I was relieved to know that it was “real.” 

I loved the way that they brought all the characters back together in the sideays reality, even if I’m not crazy about how it ended.  It felt like there was closure.  Kate and Jack were together.  Sawyer and Juliet found one another again.  Sayiid and Shannon were reunited.  It was so good to see all of these storylines intersect once again.  It ended with everyone where they should be.

So all in all, I enjoyed the series finale of LOST.  I still feel like there is so much I missed.  There was deep symbolism leading up to last night’s finale.  I got some of it, I probably overanalyzed a little, and I’m sure I missed a lot.  But strip all that away and I still fell in love with a great story.

If you didn’t watch the show, well, you missed out.  But there’s hope!  Never fear.  Lee and I, being the deep nerds that we are, have every single season on DVD.  You can borrow them anytime you want.

And I am now finished bleeding nerdiness all over my keyboard.

The End.