Number 2800: LOST's Sixth Season Brings the Series to a Compelling Conclusion

This year marked the end of an era for me. In the past decade, I have had the pleasure of getting swept away in three epics: the Harry Potter book series, the Lord of the Rings movie series and the television series LOST. Thanks to Dominic Monaghan, who played the hobbit Merry Brandybuck in LotR and the rocker Charlie Pace in LOST, I segued quite naturally into the television show, whose plane-crashing-on-an-island premise also intrigued me greatly. Now that it’s over, I’m feeling adrift indeed, left without a suitable replacement. But boy, what a ride it’s been!

LOST is a series that inspired an almost unprecedented amount of fan speculation and interaction. Its extremely serial nature helped usher in the phenomenon of putting television shows online so that people could get caught up if they missed an episode on the night it aired. It incorporated Alternate Reality Games (some, annoyingly, only accessible to owners of Blu-Ray players) and mini-episodes intended to be watched on one’s phone. Hundreds of bloggers and television columnists, most notably Doc Jensen of Entertainment Weekly, pored over every detail in the series, formulating complex theories, while many others expressed their love for LOST via artwork, desktop backgrounds, custom t-shirts, music videos and other fan projects.

I hashed each episode out with friends; basked in the brilliance of the Injustice League’s I’ll Never Be LOST Again; bought goodies from my favorite LOST graphic designer at gritfx.com/lost; and poured out my own reactions to the show by writing lyrics to 235 filksongs (lostwithoutcharlie.blogspot.com). I got in pretty deep, and in the waning hours before the finale, I experienced a spectacular crash that made even my post-Harry Potter malaise pale in comparison as I discovered the dangers of following Doc Jensen too far down the rabbit hole, especially after two weeks in which I was generally too hyped up to sleep. LOST is a show that can mess with your mind. But I’d gladly do it all over again, so it seems only fitting to mark my 2800th post here on Epinions with my review of the sixth season.

Back in its third season, which happened to be the season when I began watching “live”, there were rumblings of complaints that the show was beginning to stall. This led to a most unusual decision: to negotiate and announce an end date for the series. LOST would end in 2010, and head writers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, along with the rest of their talented team, would have three years to bring the show to exactly the conclusion they wanted. Knowing this, expectations for the last half of the series, and especially the final season, were astronomically high. Hence, while the show lost more fans earlier in the series once it started veering toward science fiction, the sixth season invited the most heated debates because there were very few casual fans left. Most of the season six crowd was heavily invested in the mysteries or the characters or both, so the potential for disappointment was high.

The season began with LA X, and it seems that most fans reserved judgment after this mind-bender of an opener until it was clearer just where the show was going. The most controversial element of the season was the introduction of the “Flash Sideways,” which showed familiar characters in a world in which Oceanic 815 had never crashed. The assumption was that the creation of this alternate timeline was somehow connected with the detonation of the hydrogen bomb Jughead in the season five finale, though how the two stories would interconnect was anyone’s guess. Initially, it seemed very peculiar to me that we were seeing two sets of the same people, but given the fact that every previous season incorporated action both on the Island and off, it would have seemed a little strange to root this season solely in the immediate conflict on the Island. But there seemed to be so much ground to cover on the Island and so many questions not adequately answered that discontent with the Sideways was apparent in many fan reactions from the second episode on.

For my part, although I was itching to know what was happening on the Island, I generally found the Sideways stories both enlightening and something of a relief. For one thing, the Sideways incorporated many characters from seasons past, from major players like Charlie and Charlotte Lewis (Rebecca Mader) to minor characters like Frogurt (Sean Whalen) and Dr. Leslie Arzt (Daniel Roebuck). With the Island cast dwindling, it was increasingly heartening to see so many old faces popping up in this strange alternate reality, often in very unexpected ways. What’s more, most of the Sideways storylines had a welcome element of light-heartedness about them, and the majority of the characters we found there were happier and more well-adjusted than they had been at the time of the initial plane crash. Clearly, there were many differences in these characters’ lives, some subtle and some glaring, and it was fun to draw comparisons to earlier episodes as the season progressed.

Meanwhile, the season premiere brought the time-traveling castaways from the 1970s into the contemporary timeline, where Ben Linus (Michael Emerson) had just murdered Jacob (Mark Pellegrino), the elusive Island entity whose existence had been hinted at from the second season, at the request of Jacob’s ancient nemesis, now assuming the form of John Locke (Terry O’Quinn). As the season begins, Ben realizes just a little too late that he has been taking orders not from the resurrected John but from an evil entity known throughout most of the series as the Smoke Monster. Hence, with Jacob out of the way, the stage is set for Smokey, alternatively known as the Man in Black, to execute a plan that has been in the works for ages. But first, he needs to do something about the remaining castaways, most of whom are soon revealed to be Candidates for Jacob’s position.

Throughout the series, Jack Shephard has been the closest thing that this ensemble drama has had to a main character. While he is a heroic, fundamentally decent person, he’s not one of the characters I’ve connected to very much, but in season six, I found myself entirely drawn in by his vulnerability, his burgeoning faith and his humility. This was a Jack who had to broken down before he could be built up again, and Matthew Fox truly stepped up to the challenge, earning an Emmy nomination for his efforts and finally making Jack a character who was truly appealing to me. I was especially interested in how he related to Hurley in this season, as the latter, bolstered by the confidence that came with his special connection to Jacob, often found himself leading Jack instead of the other way around. Their camaraderie in Lighthouse, one of the season’s funniest and most illuminating episodes, is a precursor to some of Jack’s most moving scenes in the series. Additionally, the only major new character introduced in Sideways world has a connection with Jack that ultimately renders him one of the most intriguing aspects of that timeline.

Jorge Garcia’s Hurley, more often referred to as Hugo in season six, has always been the heart of the series, but in the first season or two, it might have been easy to overlook him as mostly comic relief. While few characters on the show can be counted upon so consistently for lightening up an episode, Hurley’s altruism has had a profound impact throughout the series, and in season six it becomes clear just how important his contributions have been as he continues to find ways of nurturing those around him, even in the midst of his own confusion. Meanwhile, in Sideways world, he conducts himself with a suave cool that the rather bumbling Island Hurley rarely achieves. Describing himself as “the luckiest guy alive,” he uses his good fortune to benefit others while building a fried chicken empire. One unanswered question that remains at the end of the series is how he got his nickname, but given its absence in the Sideways, it seems that he’s better off without it.

After the fifth season allowed him to finally make the transition from anti-hero to hero, Sawyer finds himself in a very dark place this season, and Josh Holloway’s angsty, anguished performance as a man whose grief has stripped his life of meaning is as riveting as it is painful. Striking off on his own early on, he is the first of the Candidates to ally himself to Smokey, though there is reason to hope that in this instance, he is simply putting his conman skills to good use. In the Sideways, he too goes by his birth name, and he pursues a surprising line of work, joined by a character who becomes one of his closest friends on the Island. While a rather lame romantic subplot detracted from Recon, his centric episode, as did the on-Island introduction of Zoe (Sheila Kelley), the sneering, bespectacled geophysicist who became the show’s most derided character since season three’s Nikki and Paolo, a pointed reference to Little House on the Prairie helped assure me that this was still the Sawyer I knew and loved.

Although What Kate Does was widely criticized for wasting time on Kate’s Sideways shenanigans, I liked the way the episode set up the importance of the bond between Kate and Claire (Emilie de Ravin) in the sixth season. We see a change in Kate as her primary preoccupation involves finding Claire on the Island and convincing her to return to Los Angeles and raise her son. I found her selflessness touching, and I liked the big sisterly rapport that she shared with Sideways Claire after their admittedly bizarre introduction to each other. One might argue that Evangeline Lilly is somewhat underused in the sixth season, but the ending makes up for that. Meanwhile, De Ravin, absent from the show since the fourth season, portrays a jittery Claire Gone Wild who displays many of the same characteristics as “crazy French chick” Danielle Rousseau. It’s clear that she has had a traumatic three years, much of it spent in the company of the manipulative Smokey, making it difficult for her old friends to balance their desire to help her with their fear that she might attack them. Her reunion with Jack, who now knows that she is his sister, is especially disappointing, though the Sideways storyline explores their relationship in a more satisfying way.

While Claire seems unhinged, former torturer Sayid (Naveen Andrews) spends most of the season in a dazed, soul-deadened state after a trip to the Temple brings him back from the edge of death. A tragic character who just can’t seem to rise above his violent tendencies, he backslides horribly in this season after Smokey offers to restore the woman he loves. It’s disturbing to see a character who has had so many noble moments once again carrying out the murderous demands of a master manipulator, and Sundown, in which he makes his fateful choice, is the most depressing episode since season four’s The Shape of Things to Come. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that both episodes feature psychotic mercenary Martin Keamy (Kevin Durand), easily my least favorite character in the series.

Keamy also turns up in The Package, the one episode in the season that engaged me the least, partly because the Sideways story is both a downer and a bit of a retread, partly because it revolves around a subplot involving Sun (Yun-jin Kim) that ultimately seems pretty pointless. She and Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) get entirely too little time in the sixth season, though they are at the heart of a couple of the season’s most powerful moments. One of my hopes for the season was that there would be another appearance by Jin’s father (John Shin), who, in brief appearances in just two episodes, became my favorite of all the parents on the show, but there’s little opportunity to delve into their extended family.

Jin is one of the first castaways this season to interact with Charles Widmore (Alan Dale), who finally finds a way back to the Island in the sixth season. It seems Jin is being set up for a central role in the final conflict in which the allegiances of this arrogant Island leader deposed by Ben are unclear. However, the history and motivations of Charles remain murky. How did he amass such a fortune when he spent most of his life on the Island? Who is the mother of his daughter Penny? No other family tree is quite as messy as Charles’, though there are several instances throughout the series in which we learn characters are parents and children who have different names. Methinks they got a bit carried away with the name-dropping at times and abandoned practical considerations like how a young man whose mother is a Hawking and whose father is a Widmore ends up with the name Faraday.

That would be Daniel Faraday (Jeremy Davies), a character I had hoped to see more of in this sixth season. While his role is ultimately a small one, he makes an impact in his scenes, particularly with Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick), the time-traveling Scotsman whose unconventional episode finds him crossing paths with oodles of Island folks in the Sideways. We’re able to see the gentle physicist embracing a different sort of destiny, but his connection to Desmond remains as strong as ever, making him an important catalyst in Desmond’s journey. In both timelines, Desmond is defined by a calm sense of purpose, which is a nice change for this character who has spent so much of the series tortured and despondent. His unflappable manner leads to some of the funniest moments in the season, and his sagacity allows for my favorite scene in The Last Recruit, an episode that brings most of the Candidates in close proximity to each other.

Ever since his first appearance on the show, Michael Emerson has made Ben Linus one of the most intriguing characters ever to grace a television screen. His exceptional acting ability puts him in a class nearly by himself among an already very talented cast, and it’s impossible for me to look away whenever Ben is speaking. This incredibly nuanced character is brilliantly written as well, making him probably the biggest wild card of the series. Going into the sixth season, I knew that my enjoyment of the show’s conclusion would hinge partly on the direction he took. In season six, we see a Ben who is rarely in control of his own circumstances. Instead of leading, he spends most of the season following, though always carefully considering his next move. Although he takes a bit of a backseat in many of the episodes, he is front and center in Dr. Linus, a remarkable episode that was easily the most cathartic of the season, and probably the entire series, for me. His Sideways self is radically different from his normal self, yet one can imagine how, under different circumstances, the erudite Ben could have taken this path. The drama that unfolds there is made all the more powerful by a supporting cast of characters long gone on the Island. Meanwhile, in the main timeline, the truth comes out about his role in Jacob’s death, leading to my favorite Ben moment since the wordless scene in season four’s Cabin Fever when he and Hurley share a candy bar. For this episode alone, Emerson deserves the Emmy nomination once again lavished upon him.

Part of the credit to that exceptional scene must also go to Zuleikha Robinson, who portrays Ilana, the enigmatic woman who comes to the Island at the special request of Jacob as a bodyguard for his Candidates. I was hoping for a full-blown flashback episode for her, especially once I determined that she ranked among my favorite female characters on the show, but we’re left to imagine just how Jacob became “the closest thing she had to a father”. While I found myself frustrated that I didn’t see more of her, this tough but compassionate woman became one of my favorite elements of the sixth season, particularly in her scenes with Ben and Frank Lapidus (Jeff Fahey).

Throughout most of the season, Frank has little more to do than toss out zingers, but I love the way his caustic sense of humor adds levity to scenes as somber as the funeral in The Substitute, my favorite of the show’s many memorial services. He also elicited one of my biggest cheers of the series late in the season. Similarly, acerbic Miles (Ken Leung) is barely involved in most of the season’s main events, but he provides some levity at key moments and is a catalyst for one of my favorite scenes. Moreover, he shows some nice development as a character, becoming more considerate toward others while still maintaining some self-serving quirks that hilariously manifest themselves in a callback to the third season.

Always-underused L. Scott Caldwell and Sam Anderson appear in just four episodes as contented couple Rose and Bernard, but each of their scenes makes a powerful impression, whether they are gently mentoring characters in the Sideways or calmly facing a threat in what was, for me, the most terrifying moment of the season. Also appearing in just a few episodes are new characters Dogen (Hiroyuki Sanada), the intimidating guardian of the Island’s Temple, and Lennon (John Hawkes), his hippie-ish translator. These two never really took off with a lot of people, but I was glad for the sojourn in the Temple, an Island landmark I’d been very curious about, and I liked both Lennon’s humor and the respectful rapport between Dogen and Jack.

When the Sideways turned up in the season premiere, it led to a great deal of speculation as to whether there would be any traditional flashbacks this time around. I was hoping we’d have at least a couple, and one character who definitely merited a flashback was Richard Alpert (Nestor Carbonell), the wise, diplomatic Other who never seemed to age. While Richard always seems extremely in the know in earlier seasons, season six leaves him just as confused and disillusioned as Ben, with the result that there are many cracks in his sage demeanor. We watch him wrestle with his doubts as to the task he has been given, and in Ab Aeterno, we spend almost an entire episode in his distant past, learning how he came to be on the Island and stop aging and getting several other answers in the process. One of the most polarizing episodes of the season, it is anchored by an absorbing, physically demanding performance by Carbonell, who spends most of the episode speaking broken English. I admired his performance and the episode’s epic scope, along with the surprising revelations about Jacob, Smokey and Richard himself. While I’d long ago resolved to like Richard despite my suspicions about him early on, this was the episode that cemented him as one of my favorite characters.

Similarly, Across the Sea spends an entire episode in the Island’s ancient past in order to give us the backstories of Jacob and Smokey. Probably the most reviled episode of the season, it came after an especially shocking cliffhanger, forcing viewers to wait an extra week before moving on to the true denouement of the series. For me, however, it came at the perfect time, finally showing us exactly how these old enemies related to one another while giving us a brief respite from the main conflict. From his first appearance in the season five finale, I found myself magnetically drawn to Mark Pellegrino’s performance. Jacob was a character whose official introduction I’d so anxiously awaited, I was convinced that he could never live up to all the hype, but when he finally showed up, he drew me in more completely than I ever could have anticipated. As each episode of the sixth season began, I hoped that he would make an appearance, and despite the fact that he died in the same episode in which we met him, he preoccupied me more than any other character, in part because of his wonderful rapport with ghost whisperer Hurley, both before and after his death. As with Ben, I was acutely interested in the direction Jacob would take, and Across the Sea was the episode that settled my opinion of him once and for all. Pellegrino continued to impress me as he added earthier flavors to this mystical character, and Titus Welliver played against him brilliantly as a much older incarnation of the Man in Black, as he did in two previous episodes.

Ab Aeterno and Across the Sea are the season’s most “mythological” episodes, addressing such questions as What happened to Jacob’s statue? Why is there a slave ship in the middle of the jungle? Who were the people whose skeletons were dubbed Adam and Eve in the first season? How long have Jacob and Smokey been on the Island? and Just what is the Island, anyway? These episodes provide a partial answer to this all-important last question, though it’s as incomplete as the answer to what makes the Numbers so special, which is provided earlier in the season. As for me, I felt sure that we’d find out a little more about Annie, Ben’s childhood friend, but like Aaron, she turns out to be a character who is not nearly as significant as it first seemed.

While Cuse and Lindelof promised to answer questions and implied that they would have more concrete answers than they ultimately provided, the final season drops several self-referential hints in order to limit audience expectations. They poke fun at the obsessive need to find answers to everything when they have Jack find Shannon’s inhalers, a moment that tracks back to 2009’s Comic-Con, when Jorge Garcia, casting about for insignificant unsolved mysteries, demands to know their location during a question-and-answer period. Later, we’re told that “every question will only lead to another question”. It’s easy to see why many found the final season frustrating when so many threads were left dangling, but when explicit answers were provided, more often than not, fans found them disappointing. Throughout season six, mirrors frequently come into play, and it seems to me that we’re ultimately meant to look at LOST as a mirror of sorts. When we peer into it, each person sees something a little different, and leaving a lot of things open-ended allows for a multitude of interpretations. I think LOST is ultimately more about questions than answers.

No character better reflects the desire for answers than John Locke, so brilliantly played by Terry O’Quinn. In this season, O’Quinn’s talent is on full display in his portrayal of two completely different characters. In the Sideways, we see a character much like the kind but troubled John we met in season one, though there are some subtle differences. On the Island, he’s the ruthless Smoke Monster, a not-quite-man hardened by centuries of struggle against someone with an opposite worldview. He is the most fearsome villain the series has seen, though O’Quinn still brings a glimmer of humanity to him entirely missing from Keamy and cruel conman Anthony Cooper. Shrewd and determined, he has no qualms about using others to achieve his goals, and he cares little about collateral damage - though one might contend that this is also a shortcoming of Jacob, noble as his aims might be. Still, while I hoped that the Candidates would triumph against Smokey, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was any hope that there was good remaining in this entity that could be drawn out in the end. As brilliant as Emerson was this year, as he always is, I can’t help but conclude that O’Quinn’s performance is the cornerstone of the season.

LOST’s sixth season isn’t perfect, and as much as I love the Sideways as a device for exploring characters, I confess I find the mechanics of it a tad confusing, and there’s little doubt that some of its scenes are written with the intent to deceive. Nonetheless, I had several ideas of how the show might end, and the finale came much closer to what I wanted to see than what I didn’t. I think the remaining ambiguities are there largely so that debate and conversation about the series can continue - though it’s rather distressing to see that a show so concerned with people of differing viewpoints learning to get along has sparked some of the most virulent comment wars I’ve ever seen. I doubt that the DVD set for season six will change many minds about the season as a whole, but there are some nifty extras for those who want to stretch the LOST experience out just a little more.

The main attraction is The New Man in Charge, a 12-minute-long epilogue of sorts that explores a missing piece of Island history with two of my favorite characters. Well, after a fashion. None of it actually takes place on the Island, unless you count the filmstrip that is presumably filmed there. That’s the educational portion of the short, once again featuring Dr. Pierre Chang and answering a few lingering questions about the Dharma Initiative. The filmstrip is embedded in a scene involving a visit to a Dharma warehouse, where we are introduced to two amusing fellows whose confusion is meant to reflect our own. This portion is largely comical, while the final part attempts to bring closure to a seemingly abandoned storyline. This poignant scene will probably please longtime fans the most, though it introduces as many questions as it answers. While I was hoping for more interaction between the two characters at the heart of this epilogue, it’s a charming little coda that goes by all too quickly.

There’s the usual bloopers and deleted scenes, with about ten deleted scenes, though only a couple of them are terribly involved or interesting. Segments on the heroic qualities of various characters and on the Sideways are engaging, and a feature about the cast and crew coming to grips with the show ending is quite touching, especially the scene in which Jorge Garcia reads the finale script for the first time. I bought my DVD from Best Buy, where it came with an extra DVD. An amusing feature on Mr. Cluck’s Chicken Shack is well worth the watch, especially for the commentary of Samm Levine of Freaks and Geeks, who appears in a scene in Everybody Loves Hugo. There’s a short segment dealing with the martial arts skills of Sayid and Dogen, and the Lost on Location features dig into my favorite and least favorite episodes of the season. The Sundown segment mostly involves Kevin Durand making freakish faces at Anthony Azizi, who plays Keamy’s right-hand thug Omar, but Dr. Linus has some interesting commentary from Emerson and some of his Sideways co-stars. Probably the best feature, though, is the peek at the LOST Live event in L. A., which allowed fans, along with cast and crew, to experience a live performance of Michael Giacchino’s orchestra playing some of the most iconic themes in the series. As if the music weren’t great enough, it’s accompanied by several actors reading notes that redshirts left in the bottle that went on the raft with Michael and the gang in season one. Keep an ear out for Sonya Walger, Carbonell, Garcia and especially Emerson bringing these background characters to life.

Every person who watched LOST had slightly different expectations for the final season. Mine were mostly met, and while I’ll grant that it’s clear that there was an element of making-it-up-as-we-go-along at play, there were so many callbacks to previous seasons and character arcs satisfyingly resolved that I’m inclined to believe that most of it was planned out in advance, at least roughly. At any rate, however they got there, everyone involved in the show came together over the course of six years to create an epic that will be remembered as a landmark television event, and I thank them for sweeping me up in it. Namaste.