LOST finale

I posted this very brief review of the finale on PIFeedback and decided to cross-post it here for archiving purposes and for the folks who don't go there... it is not the longest or the best review of last night's finale that you will read, but it's all I felt I needed to add to the conversation about last night and the series in general.

I thought the finale was a very strong episode of TV, and the series as a whole was great TV, but season 6 was pretty disappointing. The payoff to the flash-sideways was fairly lame, but I guess I didn't get that mad about it because I found most of the flash-sideways pretty lame to begin with, so there wasn't a huge letdown.

I think I'll always feel Lost was at its best in the first three years, when as a show it was more character-driven. I actually preferred it back when everyone else called it "slow" and said "nothing was happening," and I'm not sure that them setting an end date really ended up being much of a net gain. It was certainly time to get rid of the regular old flashback structure by the end of season 3, but I'm not sure that a ten-year "slow" run for this show would've really been worse. (And I was most excited about the second half of the run during the season 5 time at Dharma, which I think often captured the spirit of the first three years.) I've felt that way for much of the last three years, and I've usually thought I was in a very, very small minority for feeling that way, but now it seems everyone is saying the show was best in the first three seasons.

Mythologically, yes, tons is left unresolved, but how much of it do I need to know? Eh, not all that much. I do think it'd be helpful to know why Jacob seemed so convinced that letting out MiB or turning out the light would be the end of the whole world... clarifying whether there were big-time stakes on a global level would've been good. Perhaps it was just Jacob's paranoia. What is the light in the middle of the island? Sure, it'd be cool to find out more, but even if we did know more, the best answer would be that it was a big ol' MacGuffin.