Mmm. [LOST SPOILERS HALLO]

[prog]

So Lost ended, and firstly let me say that I liked the note that the "real world" thread ended on, finding it a perfectly fine and even touching closure. They even gave ol' Vincent a rationale for being there. This was good and I appreciated it. I will even fondly remember it.

I can't say I felt that way about the other business. That the show pulled a fast one on us about the context of the side-stories wasn't itself objectionable -- indeed, the reveal in 2007 that that season's flashbacks were actually flash-forwards remains a series high point. But the "the 'alternate timeline' was actually Heaven" thing... eeugh. What does that have to do with anything that came before? It felt like the show stapled a made-up-at-the-last-minute cosmology onto the end, totally divorced of anything the characters or DHARMA or any other element of the drama, and then dumped us all into it.

I can also add that propping a carefully panreligious stained-glass window into the final side-scene doesn't make it anything other than a distinctly bubblegum-Christian depiction of the afterlife, but I am sure that wiser critics will do a better job sighing at that than I. Oh well. I don't regret watching it, nor do I regret taking a pass from watching the previous several episodes.

The rest of you may all commence making fun of me for grousing about this but still liking Battlestar Galactica.

Comments

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

"I can also add that propping a carefully panreligious stained-glass window into the final side-scene doesn't make it anything other than a distinctly bubblegum-Christian depiction of the afterlife"

At first I thought that was just a particularly creative way to describe some stupid thing the show did, and then I realized no, omg no, that's -actually- what they did. (Have never seen any of the show, and it still made me say WTF?)

But I still like "bubblegum-Christian" as a descriptor.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I wasn't paying close attention to the show, so I thought at first the character was in a chapel attached to an otherwise secular funeral home, where the window would have made more sense, and I just thought the show's creators were going out on a carefully nondenominational note. But then this ended up being the setting for the big reveal.

But by framing that window so prominently, LOST replaced all the fun, puzzling mystery of the DHARMA logos -- the compelling I Ching-based symbols that symbolized the general attitude of the first couple of seasons -- with the familiar reassurance of the cross/star/crescent/wheel/aum, as if the whole series had become born again at the moment of its own death, and asked you-the-viewer to just forget its troubled past and remember it in the embrace of insert-your-favorite-god-here.