The End

The End

May 25

I realized that we had a flawed episode when I tried to explain the finale to my girlfriend, who is completely unfamiliar with the show aside from the spillover that she gets from knowing a few rabid fans.  I realized it more fully when I heard someone insist that the final shots of the unpeopled remains of Oceanic 815 were an indicator that none of the show’s events ever really happened. And then I realized that there are people who are really bothered that we never saw what really happened to Stuart Radzinsky and who thought that the finale was awful for not answering that question. It gave me a dose of perspective.  But there were big, broad awesome things in this episode that worked. It was a series of emotionally manipulative beats perfectly executed, and the fabric between them shows as thin sometimes.  Knowing that it could not please everyone, it tried to please the most people possible. It pleased me.

There were three hundred and twenty four passengers on Oceanic flight 815. When the plane crashed on a mysterious island, the seventy-two survivors were stranded together for one hundred and one days. But most of them died before that. Six were rescued. Then, three years later, they came back. In the end, six left again, though not the same six as before.

Each of those survivors lived for years – decades, for all of them except Walt* – prior to coming to the Island. They’d had friends, been in love, held fulfilling jobs, saved lives, killed, coveted, were thrown out an 8th story window, sailed around the world. They were people in crisis who’d lived imperfect lives or good people confronted with bad things on their horizons, but as we saw more and more of their pasts, we knew more about them, more about why these people mattered.

In spite all of that, the most important moments in those lives, even the ones that managed to live long, fulfilling lives after flying away, were those comparatively brief days spent on that Island.  The characters left an impact on each other that is indelible. So much so that their bonds survive after death.  That much is apparent in each of the ‘reconnection’ montages our characters undergo.

That is the final and most important reveal that the Island held in store for us, and one that the series had been preparing us for for six years – the secret of the Island is not a four-toed statue or the name of a cloud of sinister fog or who exactly fired those shots. It has never been about those things and those things are frankly inessential to any real understanding of the substance of the show, an obfuscation over its heart. The real secret of the Island has always been the characters, the survivors, the castaways.

They are everyone in our lives that we knew only briefly yet molded us and changed us for the better.  They are that for us because they were that for each other and we have always been one of them, too.

*WAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1