Sadly, Lost is over.
After giving the dust a little time to settle, I would say that it is probably my second favourite serial drama of all time, second only to The West Wing, and barely edging out Star Trek: The Next Generation (although I would still rank the Star Trek franchise as a whole ahead of it). I thought carefully about whether it should be first, but although The West Wing faltered a little in its later years, the first four or five seasons were so well written, so intellectually stimulating, and so real-world relevant they edge out the epic mythology, mysticism and cultural connectivity that makes Lost so amazing.
Lost could have been the best. I'm not sure when that title slipped away, but I would venture that the series hit its high point either in the second half of season 2 with "The 23rd Psalm,"" The Hunting Party,""Lockdown" and "Live Together, Die Alone," or in late season 3 and early season 4, with "The Man Behind the Curtain,""Through the Looking Glass," and "The Constant". Some parts of the last two seasons were mishandled a bit, and that is probably what prevented the show from being my favourite of all time.
Certain episodes of the show, however, rate right up there with the best episodes of any television show I have ever seen. The gold standards for me have always been TNG's "The Best of Both Worlds" and the West Wing's "Two Cathedrals", with honourable mentions to The Simpsons "Homer the Great," and several episodes of The Colbert Report & the original Law & Order. Here are my 10 favourite episodes of Lost, the best of which will stand beside the episodes I have just listed as the benchmark for any future TV show I watch:
1. Exodus
2. Walkabout
3. The Hunting Party
4. Live Together, Die Alone
5. Pilot
6. The Constant
7. The Man Behind the Curtain
8. Orientation
9. Through the Looking Glass
10. The Shape of Things to Come
Honourable mentions to Lockdown and Raised by Another, two more great episodes that just missed the top 10. I also have to say that the episode commonly regarded to be the series' best, "The Constant," dropped a little for me because as wonderful as the Desmond/Penny phone call was, I was underwhelmed by the rest of the episode, and feel that the "time travelling consciousness" theme didn't fit well logically with the other time travel presented in the show.
After all this, all these great episodes, the hours of reading theories online, where did the end of the show leave us? The most common response I have heard is "confused," and there certainly were some loose ends left hanging. However, I think that leaving a little ambiguity allows viewers to complete the story in their own minds, which allows a broad spectrum of people to feel satisfied with the show.
That said, here is my interpretation of the show's overarching mythology. I have to give credit to Entertainment Weekly's Jeff Jensen for his thoughts about the effects of the Source on people's souls, which influenced my own thinking.
My first thought about the show is that there is a place for some kind of God in the mythology. Nowhere was this more clear to me than during the final scene. The room Jack & Christian were in could not have expressed more clearly that all the world's religions are just different narratives trying to explain the same thing, the "one true way". Once you accept that, and based on the other evidence presented in the finale, I think it is pretty easy to conclude that the show subscribes to the religions tenet that the difference between people and animals, the cause of consciousness, is that humans possess some kind of soul, given to them by God, which persists into another life after bodily demise.
If each person in the Lost world is a blend of body and soul, I agree with Jeff Jensen that the Source is what gives people those immortal souls. This makes those theories about the Island being the Garden of Eden seem very accurate to me. When Desmond shut off the Source, everyone's souls ceased to be immortal and (in my mind) slowly began to fade away, as the Island started to sink into the sea. I imagine that if Jack had not restarted the Source, everyone in the world would have slowly lost their humanity, and the MiB, if he had escaped, would have been free to institute a reign of terror for a short time before his own soul finally faded away, leaving the universe empty, without consciousness, without love, and without meaning.
However, the show suggests that the source has a variety of other powers besides its soul-giving property. It seems likely to be the cause of the Island's healing powers, and most likely the cause of the Island's constant movement and difficulty of accessing it. It also seems to allow certain people, notably Desmond, Miles, Hurley, MiB, Jack, Ben and Locke, to interact with people who are deceased. Given the finale's reveal about the stages of the afterlife, it is likely that all the people who appeared were still in the "purgatory" stage and that the Source allows people to somehow interact between planes. Desmond appears to be the only one who can actually be simultaneously aware of both worlds. Finally, the source is likely able to be harnessed by "special" people like Jacob and Walt to accomplish various paranormal phenomena.
If you accept all that, which I believe derives relatively easily from the show, you can start to extrapolate to more speculative thoughts on the Lost universe. My current thought on some of the dialogue in "Across the Sea" suggests to me that in addition to the properties listed above, the Source is the cause of human free will. The show suggests, both by the very existence of the Valenzetti equation and by the philosophy of "course correction," that the Lost universe is mostly deterministic, but with a small allowance for free will.
If you take that in conjunction with Mother's statement that everyone has "a little bit of the light inside them, but they always want more" in that context it makes perfect sense. Everyone has a little free will, ability to change small things about the world, but what they all desire is more ability to control their own destiny, and ultimately, the ability to change the Valenzetti equation and change the destiny of the human race. However, people like Eloise & Mother, who warn against trying to do this ("you could put it out") believe that because power is corrupting, that if humans actually succeeded in grabbing control of their own destiny, it would lead to evil instead of good. They believe (I think) that destiny is best left in God's hand rather than man's.
Given that mythological context, some of the mysteries of the island become more clear. I will try and go through some of the ones that irked me the most. The first of these has to do with the show's final scene. There has been much debate about the people who ended up in the church at the end of the show, and why they were there to the exclusion of others. As the show explained, the sideways were a kind of shared consciousness, constructed by the souls of the people that had died, because they could not move on until the group was complete.
There also seems to be an element of repentance for people like Ben, Michael and Ana Lucia, who have passed into the sideways but must stay there "a bit longer" to atone for the sins of their life. The Island's properties as the source of human souls makes it "closer" per se to the sideways and enables limited communication between worlds.
So, in a nutshell I see it like this: when you die, you pass into the shared consciousness. If you are a "good person," you simply stay there until you have formed a complete group of the people who were truly important to you in your life. Then you move on (I like to think that when they walked into the light they ended up back on the Island, but a version of the island that was "more real" like the new Narnia at the end of C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle).
On the other hand, if you have been a "bad person," you must accomplish two things before you can move on. Not only must you find your "core group", but you must also atone for your crimes, and if you cannot, or will not, you remain in limbo forever.
So, when we see the group in the church (Christian, Jack, Kate, Hurley, Libby, Sawyer, Juliet, Desmond, Penny, Sun, Jin, Charlie, Claire, Aaron, Sayid, Boone, Shannon, Locke, Rose & Bernard) it makes sense for the most part. There are, however, some loose ends. The first of these is Sayid. His whole backstory has been about his great love for Nadia, and although he may have loved Shannon as well, the fact that he could move on without Nadia seems wrong. The second problem is Aaron. Why is he a baby? Presumably, if he has died, he would appear as an adult.
I also originally had a problem with the absence of Walt, but have changed my mind on this one. Others had a problem with the presence of Penny, or the absence of Helen, but I did not. Locke's real love was for the Island, although he loved Helen as well, that love was lesser. Conversely, Penny's whole life was bound to Desmond, and they could not move on without each other.
I am going to pretend that Nadia was in the church, and that Aaron was, like Jack's son David, an illusion created by the shared consciousness of the people in the church in order to facilitate the "moving on". The real Aaron is not in the sideways, I like to think, because he is not dead. There was an enormous amount of talk in the early seasons of Lost that both Walt and Aaron (more so Walt) were "special," a plotline that was never really resolved. My theory here is that sometime well after the ending of the show, Walt and Aaron return to the Island to fulfill their destinies, and eventually end up replacing Ben and Hurley as the #1 and #2 protectors of the Island. This allows Hurley and Ben to move on with the others, and ties up nicely Walt and Aaron's connection to the Island.
There are a number of other small things that still bug me about the overarching story of Lost, things like the Egyptians, the Supply Drop (and the ultimate fate of Dharma/Alvar Hanso), Miles' weird abilities despite not being "special" in the way other characters were, and the weird consciousness-flashing that Desmond experienced.
Nonetheless, I will leave it there except to say that I always thought (back in the early seasons) that the very best ending to Lost would have all the characters standing on the beach, as a rescue boat finally pulls up to take them all home. They all look at their would-be rescuers, and then at each other, and the series ends with a montage (ideally set to Blue Rodeo's "Lost Together") of each survivor flashing back to some of their moments of joy on the Island, realizing that there was nothing for them back in the real world, and one by one, starting with Locke and ending with Jack, turn around, away from rescue, and slowly walk into the jungle, embracing their destinies.
