Lost: All Of This Matters
(Oh, and this blog also has a link that everyone who thought the final imagery - of the plane crash on the beach - was a nod to say that everyone died IN THE CRASH needs to read. Cause that just ain't true.)
As but one example of how great this article is, it convinced me that having Sayid and Shannon together was, in its own way, the right decision. (I know!)
But it is the ending of the finale write up which I repeat here because it's really almost brilliant:
Think of how "Lost" handled the death of Shannon. That event took up three whole episodes of mourning. First, she was shot in a shocking moment (in "Abandoned"). Then, the survivors reeled from her death (in "Collision"). And then, she was buried and mourned in a moving funeral (in "What Kate Did"). She was a minor supporting character at best, a person who was always on the edges of the show's big mysteries and someone who didn't really get involved in the stuff most fans were really interested in. Yet the show treated her death as though it was something meaningful, as though her life had value beyond the story function she played, which was simply to cause strife between the reunion of the Losties and the Tailies.
Most other TV shows would have handled Shannon's death like this: She would have been shot suddenly. Someone would have looked sad. The end. The death would have been treated like a shock moment at the end of the episode (as it was in "Abandoned") and then completely forgotten about as the show moved on to something else entirely. Character deaths are merely another sweeps-month tool for too many shows, something to go to when you need to keep the audience on their toes. Rarely do they have the emotional effect they need. We are losing these people too, since we're out in the audience and have built relationships with them. "Lost" got that, on some level. And, furthermore, nearly every one of these deaths, except arguably Jack's and Charlie's, was meaningless. Lives were thrown away because of constant strife that simply didn't need to exist. (And you call "Lost" a post-Sept. 11 show!)
Looked at in this light, the finale is the ultimate expression of this idea. Every life matters. Any one life thrown away because two demigods are playing a game with castaways' lives or because someone absolutely and simply MUST protect their magical Island from ... whatever is one life too many. Shannon may not have mattered as much to you as Sun and Jin did, but her death should matter just as much because it was ultimately meaningless, something that happened because people are never able to put aside their anger and suspicion long enough to be good to one another, and the Island and Monster played off of this. The entire final season, then, is an attempt to give a bunch of dead people, many of whom died for nothing, a kind of peace with what happened, a way finally to let go and head off toward something else, even as the show itself was trying to do the same. "All of this matters," Christian says, and it's the show's mantra. The world is a place where meaningless death shouldn't happen, but it's also a place where it happens every day. The best you can do is try to hold on and savor it.
...
But the more I think about what kind of show "Lost" ultimately was, the more I think it expressed the idea that life is precious in a way that was, ultimately, not trite. We live in a good and beautiful world, a place full of things we can't fully explain and things we're only beginning to learn about. But it's also a dark and horrible world, where people die for little to no reason, and you have to stand back and watch them be mourned and wonder just what meaning any of it has. And yet, after a death, there will be another morning and another and another. You'll keep waking up. You'll keep living your life, and going about your business, and knowing that your most important task is to remember who they were, what they brought to the world. You'll keep waking up until you don't, and then ...
And then you hope that you, too, are remembered.
Wow. Go read the whole thing. NOW.
Also, if you have a few years to kill, this page aims to indicate which mysteries of the island/show were actually answered, and provides a cool collection of things like all the Dharma stations, etc.
