Thursday, May 14, 2009

Last Night's LOST Finale

I am definitely one of those people who has been very vocally critical of Lost this season. All year, I have viewed the entire time travel arc as a way for the writers to conveniently escape from the corner into which they had painted themselves over the course of the previous four seasons. It’s easy to be skeptical when time travel was involved, and to me, they had not really earned the dramatic license that they were taking, because there has been exactly zero payoff surrounding the islands central mysteries. Yes, there were episodes that were entertaining and somewhat satisfying, but you can almost hear the conversation in the Lost writers’ room: “So, now that we’ve thrown a four-toed Egyptian statue, a shipwreck from colonial times and a colony of scientists from the seventies together, how are we going to resolve this? I know, time travel! WE ARE GENIUSES!”

But then, last night, they made me eat my own foot.

While the time travel arc still hasn’t necessarily paid off yet, it at least shows a lot more promise than it did last week, with the detonation of the atomic bomb. My main problem with the entire season, however, has been the death and resurrection of John Locke, and the fact that the new John Locke had a very specific agenda with no real motivation behind it. We’ve spent all season watching John saunter around the island and issuing orders telling everyone who questioned him that “the island” was telling him what to do and when to do it.

“Bullshit! That is not a real reason!” I would yell at the tv, each time this has happened. For a show that had always promised that the answers were coming, “because the island said so” is a pitiful, lame response, and I was mighty pissed if that was what we were getting after five years of loyalty. Last night, it was revealed that the whole thing actually was total bullshit; we’ve spent all season watching someone we thought was Locke act like an entitled asshole with some sort of mystery mandate that he’s deemed too important to reveal to us, when in fact we’ve been watching someone who is not Locke use the island as a weapon of manipulation. And that? Is pretty damn cool.

Turning Locke into an otherworldly antagonist is cool for a couple of reasons: It’s not only an impressive feat of script writing to take my perceptions and criticisms from the past five months and turn them into a plot device, but it also completely changes the way we perceive John Locke as a character. Last week, he was a man so seemingly confident in his own destiny that he was able to bend the entire island to his will. This week, he’s been utilized as a pawn by other, stronger-willed individuals, which is the role he’s been doomed to play throughout his life. His father steals his kidney. His fiancĂ© leaves him. He works at a low-level job in a cardboard factory. His father pushes him out the window and confines him to a wheelchair for life. He’s constantly been used by other people, and he continues to go back to them, believing in humanity’s inherent goodness. He’s rewarded for it by becoming the mark in the biggest con job yet, one that took his faith in his own destiny and used it against him, to the point that he tried to commit suicide in order to follow this belief. Last night’s finale turned him from an annoying character into an incredibly tragic one.

While the Locke revelation was mainly what turned this season from mediocrity to awesomeness, there were several other great things going on last night mainly we finally got to meet Jacob after five seasons, and we saw that he’s been responsible for bringing people to the island over the years, including the castaways. Sawyer has been consistently awesome all season, including last night, when he got to beat the shit out of Jack, who is becoming increasingly irrelevant in all of the goings-on.

Which brings me to the fact that there are still some problems with the show, mainly that Kate still exists. Does Kate have any other function besides to fuck everything up for everyone else? I hate her for ruining the relationship between Sawyer and Juliet (who is twenty times cooler), I hate her for her terrible acting, I hate her for being a brat for the last sixteen weeks. I suppose it was too much to hope, after they killed Charlie last year, that they would do me a solid and kill another annoying character this go round. They also killed Juliet last night, which was a terrible move because it removes the best actress in the show from the cast. As I’ve said, the jury is still out on the time travel arc as well.

The point, however, is that I went from feeling ambivalent about this season to counting the days until the show returns in 2010. Well done, show.

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