It's hard to believe it's been almost twenty years since Lost made its debut on television, and some 13 years since it came to its, in my opinion, highly dissatisfying conclusion. When I watched the final season on TV, I felt like it was the worst conglomeration of disconnected ideas I'd ever encountered. It seemed as if the writers had run out of anything innovative and stitched together previously rejected script ideas to come up with enough material to call it a season. And when the eagerly awaited series finale finally arrived, the only phrase I could utter was "out with a whimper," as one of the most innovative shows on television concluded with what, to me and others, felt like a sea of missed opportunities. The brilliance of Lost was, indeed, truly lost.
So deep was my disappointment in the show's sixth and final season that I vowed never to own it on DVD or Blu-Ray, preferring instead to see the finale episode of season five, in which Juliette, stuck in the Dharma compound in the late '70s, detonates a hydrogen bomb, as a far more appropriate and enigmatic place to end the series. By comparison, the sixteen episodes of season six added little of interest or narrative value to the show's overall story arc.
What was especially disappointing to me then as now was that for most of its run, the show had lived up to its potential as a tightly crafted, if somewhat convoluted, narrative of a group of plane crash survivors on a (not so) deserted island in the south Pacific, and their myriad connections with each other prior to the crash, told via extensive flashbacks to the past, as well as flashes 'sideways' into alternate realities.
To be fair, the show's descent into chaos was not limited to season six. The beginning of the end came with the finale of season four, where Ben Linus moved the island. To me, this took to a whole new dimension the concept of jumping the shark, which originated with an episode of Happy Days, where Fonzie won a skiing contest in Hawaii by jumping over a shark, after which the show began a slow descent into irrelevance.
As a result of the moving of the island, the narrative for season five was more than a little disjointed and stretched credibility to the breaking point, such that the only real—and fairly elegant—solution was to set off an H-bomb. I say that it was an elegant solution because setting off the bomb in the past meant the island was already destroyed in the present, thus annihilating the events of the whole show. I maintain to this day that it would have been the best possible conclusion to the show, leaving viewers eternally wondering what the hell just happened. Honestly, everything that transpired in season six was superfluous.
So, why am I choosing to write about this now? Despite having stood firm on my decision not to acquire season six on DVD, I finally broke down and got it. I found a copy on eBay, the purchase of which benefited charity, for half the price I normally see them at my local second-hand music, movie, and book store. There is apparently sufficient demand for the final season, lackluster though it may be, that it still commands a premium price, when the earlier five seasons routinely show up in the bargain bin for two dollars each. I'm guessing the previous owner of the season six set I bought didn't like it much, either, because it's in absolutely pristine shape and they donated it to charity.
The five-disc set arrived today, and I intend to watch them in the near future to see if I can make anything remotely resembling coherent sense out of it. I'm just wondering whether or how many of the earlier seasons I'll need to watch first. I'll amend this post with my final impressions once watch it.
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