My Thoughts on LOST Finale

The Simpsons and Lost: Two great tastes that taste great together! There are a lot of thoughts going to be posted on the finale of Lost in the next few hours, days and weeks. In fact, there are a lot of reactions out there on the web already, mostly positive, but not all.

It was clearly, an excellent episode of television, cinematic in its scope, production and ambition and largely worked on these levels. But, Lost has always been a show that works on miltiple levels, a palimpsest of sort. One of the most obvious different levels of analysis of the text that is Lost is from the perspective of a character-driven narrative versus a plot-driven narrative. All meaningful entertainment has to have both, of course.

I would argue that the finale of Lost was more geared towards satisfying the viewers interested in character than plot (not that there's anything wrong with that!)

However, as a finale to a complex, popular and critically acclaimed television series it was not as satisfying as HBO's Six Feet Under's conclusion, but this is not surprising since the two shows were very different. But even if one tries to compare the finale of Lost to the seminal final episodes of other television series like SyFy's Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1, Stargate: Atlantis, HBO's The Wire, J.J. Abrams' own Alias I would say that Lost's outshone all of them with the possible exception of The Wire.

So, while there was a lot more about the episode that I like than disliked, here are the main issues I had with the finale:

1. Two words: Dharma Initiative. There was no explanation about how the Dharma Initiative was founded, and what it's goals were. The producers did explain the creation of the stations all over the island during the series but there was never revealed a "grand unified theory" explaining what Dharma was all about and what they were trying to do with the Island.
2. Walt. In Season 2 and 3, a lot of the plot revolved around The Others and their obsession with kids and the mystery of why women who got pregnant on the island would die. This issue was never resolved in the series.
3. The egyptian statue of Taweret. There never was an explanation of why the oldest parts of the island have hieroglyphics everywhere and why they made a 200-foot statue of the Egyptian fertility god. I am glad they explained how the four-toed statue got there, but it is very disappointing that was all we got.

There are more questions, but these are the main ones that come to mind right now.

Another thought I had is that people are saying that the last image of Lost was that of Jack's eye closing (as he dies) which is a nice symmetry to the very first image of Lost which is of Jack's eye opening, but really the last image was of wreckage on the beach. If that is the wreckage of Oceanic 815, what time period does it belong to? 2007, three years after the crash and just seconds after Jack dies, or is it years in the future, or is it showing us that everyone died and there were no survivors (that was my initial thought but I have rejected that possibility becomes it nullifies all the action of the entire series as basically being a figment of Jack's imagination).

What do you think?

UPDATE 07:17pm 05/25/2010:
Apparently the images of wreckage shown during the credits were not part of Damon Lindelof and Darlton Cuse's script for the show and were added by ABC television executives worried about a harsh transition to the news. (hat/tip LA TIMES ShowTracker)