Finished Lost! I really enjoyed reading all the discussion lately, but since much of it concerned the end of the show I figured I should at least watch it before chiming in.
In previous years I'd considered the final season good, but not my favorite year of the show. Now I'd say, irrespective of whether it's my favorite, there's a good case to be made for it being the single boldest year of the show. I know I've said before there was a sense of people sometimes not seeing the forest for the trees with Lost when it was on, and that might be especially true of the final season. I'm in awe of the fact this thing even exists. This is a season which entirely jettisons the complicated high strangeness of the past season for something stark and minimalist. It's like Lost goes from being the high water mark of the Richard Kelly 2000s sci-fi and gets in on the ground floor of the kind of highly intentional, mythological storytelling we might label "A24 style" today. Nicolas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising had only just come out, other stuff like Ben Wheatley's Kill List and even A24 itself weren't yet out!
Instead of watching like a hawk because of so many moving parts, you're watching like a hawk because every word feels like it carries the utmost importance. It's like they really embrace the Japanese "ma" philosophy, some of the headiest storytelling of it's kind this side of Twin Peaks: The Return.
For the other half of the season you're asked to devote significant time as an audience to something completely separate from the plot, something centered around irony and juxtaposition, devoted entirely to character and theme. That's pretty crazy in television. I might expect in a few anime shows like Shin Sekai Yori, but not so often in western tv.
I can see why some would dislike it. They might have expected it to get a little easier in the end but if anything it gets harder, but I did enjoy the way it caused me to really consider each episode, each line, to form an interpretation.
Another bold decision, and one I can see people not liking, is the show's decision to end with "Lost as fantasy." I think some people just like thrillers and sci-fi more than fantasy, and Lindelof decides to go out with mystics, demigods, and ancient, magic relics. Jacob's theme is pointedly reminiscent of Indiana Jones, another slice of spiritualist magic realism, and we have a bigger visual shift than in season five. The Island is framed now as a particularly magical place, a place just slightly unreal, a place which causes us to question the nature of our existence and how the world works. This probably owes to the generally slower pace of season six compared to season five.
Where we once saw a special high-tech fence built to repel the Smoke Monster, we now see magic ash, imbued with the power of the Island's source and collected by Jacob at a deposit somewhere around the Island.
Where we once saw Daniel Faraday's complex mathematical equations which allowed him to gain a sense for time's flow, we now see an ancient lighthouse with the ability to see the Variables, now the Candidates, across space and time. Where once we had "negatively charged exotic matter imbued with electromagnetism," we now have "the Source of life, death, and rebirth."
First Lost examined the political narrative, then the scientific narrative, it finally turns toward the spiritualist narrative. We're introduced to a kind of Sufist for the Others named Dogen, played with great majesty by Hiroyuki Sanada. Dogen is certainly learned, part of the Other's secret Cool Kids Club Jacob personally recruited, almost certainly as a reaction to Charles Widmore embracing capitalism as a way to execute his duties, a perfect example of Jacob's avoidant leadership style. As we get to know him, however, we come to see he's out of his element, just a salaryman who nearly got his kid killed, spouting reductive mumbo jumbo which we know could only be true in some metaphorical sense.
From then on we move to Jacob and his brother, feuding demigods whom we find not forthcoming and ultimately woefully underinformed as to the nature of things in their own right. This ultimately leads us to their Mother, who seems like she might legitimately know things, things she's learned from painful experience, things she seeks to hide from her sons, a mistake in itself. Each man (or woman) behind the curtain only leads to another, and every narrative ultimately fails to completely comprehend the nature of the universe, because what human could know?
My interpretation of a lot of the imagery we see in season six (gleaned with assistance of course from having rewatched it, having had many discussions with other fans, articles and videos etc I either did or did not agree with over the years) that the Island was put there by the Source, the energy at the heart of the Island itself. I believe that energy is sentient, fourth dimensional, noncorporeal, a nexus between space, time, consciousness, and the Beyond. It has been here since the beginning. Just as we're comprised of the same basic building blocks as the planets and stars we depend upon for survival, so too are we in part comprised of that Source energy (per Mother in Across the Sea). This energy crisscrosses the globe, concentrated at certain pockets (as Isaac of Uluru tells Rose in season two), with the Island as it's primary font. This is how the Island moves, and makes the Island the Axis Mundi, the place on Earth in which all the planes of existence are linked, a bit like the World Tree in Norse mythology. We see the Island encompasses the material worlds of the living and the dead, it moves through space and facilitates movement through time, and upon death our inner light, our souls, return to the Source and enter Bardo. This process can be interrupted for various reasons, and those lost souls collect around the Axis Mundi as the Whispers.
The energy itself sits in a cave, kept in balance by the cooling water circulating the Island and the volcanic energy underneath, and the specific properties of this energy change according to a number of factors including intensity and method of exposure, climate, etc.
Often throughout the show we see people who are ageless, but not immortal. The Island is the biggest such example. Another theme is people who work through intermediaries. Ben works through Tom, Widmore works through Zoe, Jacob works through Richard. The Island also depends on an intermediary, giving this person a modicum of control over the flow of time and existence to both protect the Island and work its will. This intermediary is chosen by absorbing cooled energy from the upper level of the Source pocket itself, which gives this person significant power over the world of the living. A further, but not strictly necessary step, is for the Intermediary to lower themselves down into the cave, and absorb the hellish energy at the bottom of the pocket, which grants them power over the world of the dead. Only the Intermediary can do this without suffering a "fate worse than death." Mother made Jacob the Intermediary in a pinch, and in his ignorance he threw his brother down the cave and turned him into the Lord of the Dead. Where the circuit once flowed through one, it now flowed through two.
I believe the Smoke Monster pretended to take an interest in the task of guarding the Island, overseeing a community of Egyptians and Romans with Jacob, long enough to convince some of them to finish his task of building a wheel to channel the Island's energy to try and leave. The system they built was half-assed, and broke the circulation of water, interrupting the Light and creating the same conditions seen in the end of the show. Jacob had to take some guys to reset the Wheel, build a series of aqueducts to ensure the Wheel could be turned safely in the future, probably directing some to the Temple to bless for healing purposes as payment, per the stone cork referencing their feud. This would have heightened the schism between the Brothers, which is why the chambers devoted to the Monster in the bowels of the Temple were long blocked off, to the point where even Ben Linus didn't know about them. The Monster and his loyalists would have then left and built living quarters where the Dharma Barracks would eventually be constructed, which is why the Monster can actively be summoned from there (by draining a pool).
Their feud simmered, Jacob seeing it as a mere philosophical dispute, until 1867, at which point the Monster conscripted Richard to kill Jacob. Jacob at that point understood he needed to be searching for his replacement, and thus found 108 Candidates to succeed him.
The Monster began to search for his own Candidates to kill Jacob, trying out Richard, then Mr. Eko, before settling on Ben Linus. Eventually he succeeds, and then the circuit is broken. Unbalanced, the Island begins to behave strangely, especially where Jacob worked his magic as Intermediary. Where the Temple spring once healed the living, it now resurrects the dead, Richard Alpert begins to age, and so on.
You can see all kinds of thematic ideas rising from all this subtle non-discursive storytelling. It's a metaphor for leadership: Jacob is meek and avoidant, his brother manipulative for his own petty ends. It symbolizes the concept of history repeating: competing tribes of Egyptians and Romans, the military and Alpert's group, the Hostiles and the Dharma Initiative, the Castaways and the Others. New feuds often built atop the ruins of the old. It symbolizes the constructive vs destructive impulses of mankind. Turning the Wheel upset the balance, mankind had eaten from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Turns out Morrissey is wrong (surprise surprise), the light can go out, we can be the causes of our own extinction.
It's funny all this sits beside a few moments of almost laughably obvious storytelling. They hold a guy's head underwater and Hurley shouts "YOU'RE NOT SAVIN' HIM, YER DROWNIN' HIM!" Yes, thanks Hurley, couldn't have figured it without you. Sun speaks English for the first time in a few episodes and Frank says "looks like someone got their voice back." Yes Frank, thank you, couldn't have figured it out without you. Obviously the reveal of the Whispers is another example. I know that's relatively normal, Twin Peaks has done that, too, but it's still funny.
As for the ending, I love it. It's true the ending is likely somewhat determined by the realities and even politics of producing network television, but what means the most to me is that about any given episode of this show could make me cry. Probably happened with every major character at least once. So to me, to see these people, to move on with these people, to let go of the time I had with them, is what matters. That's what means the most to me, and it's probably the most moving finale of any show I've ever seen alongside Peaks (season two, FWWM, The Return, Lynch nails it every time).
One last stray observation: I really like the storytelling around the decline of the Dharma Initiative. We know the two organizations held a truce, and just as our characters caused the Incident which led to their plane crashing, they also hastened the end for Dharma. Dharma would have considered their presence an infiltration, the Others would have learned they were breaking the terms of the truce and making highly destructive mistakes, so as soon as they felt the Island was safe enough to travel on without hazmat suits relations would no doubt soon break down completely. I believe Ben Linus found evidence Dharma intended to annex the Temple (a memo he later gives Alex) and so Widmore would have initiated the Purge, the Gettysburg as it were for the Initiative's war with the Others. At that point Radzinsky would have taken control from the Swan, relaying orders to people hunkered down in the remaining militarized stations as they fought the last bitter years of the war, recruiting spooks like Kelvin instead of scientists, and also likely why Radzinsky spliced out the bit about using the computer to communicate. What was once bad opsec is now a necessity. Eventually the Swan would have been the only station left, practically impossible to take since it was heavily fortified, manned by ex-soldiers, and doing important work on equipment the Others couldn't compromise, so they just decided to monitor from the Pearl station and leave them be. Eventually this led to the revelation the Oceanic 815 survivors had gotten in, which led to Ben watching them to formulate a plan to convince Jack to operate on him, which led to him getting captured, which frames the whole second half of season two. Sometimes Lost is very elegant.
