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[SpaceWolf]

So over the last few days, I've been re-watching LOST, nostalgically reflecting over those wild and heady days where water-cooler television was pretty much defined by a story of a bunch of predominately American castaways on a crashed flight from Australia getting mind-fucked on a mystery island by an elusive smoke monster. My thoughts on the show have been well documented on this forum, and certainly, on paying the show a re-watch, I personally find the first three or four seasons especially still hold up extremely well. It was a well-written, beautifully shot, exquisitely cast show that fired on all cylinders when it stuck to focusing on its characters, as opposed to the increasingly convoluted mysteries that it could never hope to solve.

However, much like with many television shows, LOST essentially seemed to define itself in a lot people's minds through the way it decide to end. At the time, Lost's final episode certainly seemed to really divide people, and subsrquently over time...more reflective reviewers appear to have been even less kind to it. From the finale's wikipedia article:

In May 2014, WatchMojo placed the episode at number one on their list of the most disappointing TV show finales, calling it "sloppy" and "perturbingly messy" with "so many unanswered questions". Six months later, Chris E. Hayner of Zap2It similarly named "The End" as the number one worst series finale, calling it "the king of disappointing series finales". Indiewire also branded the finale as the number one worst ever, criticizing it for being "unbelievably long" and having a "decided lack of dramatic tension and any real thrills". Discussing the final season as a whole, Indiewire described season six as "directionless" and "largely a 'miss'". Writing for MTV in 2015, Josh Wigler called the episode "the finale that sucks", and said that it would live on "as the model for how NOT to finish your show". Daniel D'Addario, writing for Salon.com, listed "The End" as one of the "worst finales ever", describing the series as "a show whose twists and turns didn't always seem to be undertaken by people who knew what they were doing"

Jesus Christ!

In reflection, do people still feel the finale was really that bad? Personally speaking, although not without its fair share of problems, I thought the final episode served as a pretty satisfying ending, effectively managing to pull off a pretty intimidating balancing act revolving around resolving a dozen different character arcs (even for those fan favourite characters who were just brought back for the finale) whilst bringing the story to a decisive conclusion.

A controversial opinion, I'm sure, but Lost's final episode worked for me a whole lot better than say, Breaking Bad's, which basically saw Walter White

Spoiler

implausibly machine gunning a bunch of Neo Nazis to death as a means of bagging himself a convenient redemption which he didn't really deserve.

Several years on, do some of you still feel Lost's finale deserved its reputation as one of the worst television finales of all time? Or did the finale perhaps work for you in ways that might not necessarily have worked for others?

 

[Duxxy3]

I'll never watch the show again, so yes it was THAT bad.

 

[ostrichKing]

No...it was worse.

 

[Real Hero]

it was grrrrreat

 

[x Power Pad Death Stomp x]

It ended with a giant magic bathtub stopper and zero redemption for the real John Locke. It was a mistake and nothing but trash.

 

[Vixdean]

The finale was actually fine, it was the rest of season seven that was hokey trash.

 

[owlbeak]

No, it wasn't that bad. I even liked it after getting over the initial disappointment. I think a lot of the hate was due to the fact the producers kept saying "they're not dead" for multiple seasons, and that's exactly how it ended, not to mention so many loose plot threads that were never tied up or even explored after being introduced.

IMO, Season 1 is still perhaps the GOAT single season in TV, especially the pilot episode. Series takes a bit of a slide downhill after Season 1 until the midpoint of Season 2 and then is fantastic again. Season 3 was relatively boring, but was interspersed with great episodes. Season 4 was top-notch again, and most of 5 was good, and then it was all sort of downhill after that, to varying degrees, throughout Season 6. But overall, the show was, and still is, one of my all-time favorites (except Ana Lucia).

 

[cyberheater]

I thought it was quite emotional. I actually shed a tear. One of the best TV series ever.

 

[VDenter]

Its not just the finale that was bad its more that the entire two seasons leading up to it were bad.

 

[adj_noun]

In reflection, do people still feel the finale was really that bad?

I thought the resolutions to the show's mysteries were farcical bordering on self-parody, but I was invested in the emotional character moments to the point of filing a claim for mild lower eyelid water damage.

 

[hydrophilic attack]

show went really bad already in season 5

 

[BigAT]

It's okay that Ben got his daughter killed, he helped her with her homework in some bullshit side world. Redemption!

 

[Username1198]

My whole thing was they said no purgatory but isn't that what the final season was? Plus they didn't answer a bunch of questions. The journey? It was confusing I dunno maybe I misunderstood it.

I'm hoping leftovers has a better ending then I can forget about lost altogether

Smoke monster was dumb af too now that I think about it there was a lot of dumb shot going on

 

[-tetsuo-]

It gets worse and worse to me as time goes by. It was terrible.

 

[WrenchNinja]

The finale was bad. But the episode where they killed off Sayid, Sun and Jin all in like 5 minutes was worse.

 

[John Kowalski]

It was great and i loved it.

 

[RangerX]

Yeah I thought it was awful. Then again the last couple of seasons were awful. Theres been a lot of revisionist history that the show was always about the characters. Bullshit. The show for its first three seasons was all about the mysteries. Thays what Lindelof and the writers talked up in every interview. Its only when the show became huge and the writers didn't gave a clue where they were going that they spun it into being about the characters. The finale answered fuck all about the mysteries. So yeah, pretty awful.

 

[- J - D -]

The mysteries! Answers? Welllllll...

Carrot on stick. But in the end we never got carrot.

 

[Sojgat]

Its not just the finale that was bad its more that the entire two seasons leading up to it were bad.

I counted six.

 

[rootbeerafloat]

I thought Lost was mostly garbage after season 2, and the finale still failed to meet my already impossibly low expectations.

 

[Real Hero]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L5tcJMswh0

this is the best

 

[Zach]

I didn't hate it.

 

[Salmonax]

No, it wasn't that bad. I even liked it after getting over the initial disappointment. I think a lot of the hate was due to the fact the producers kept saying "they're not dead" for multiple seasons, and that's exactly how it ended, not to mention so many loose plot threads that were never tied up or even explored after being introduced.

They weren't dead until the very end. They lied about a lot of stuff, but not that.

 

[5taquitos]

I liked it, and thought it wrapped up the series nicely.

That's a tall order, so I think they did an admirable job.

 

[mattwhite924]

It wasn't amazing, but it was good enough. I watched through it with a friend recently, and the show holds up better than I remember. A good chunk of the mysteries are solved, and the island story has a decent conclusion.

Now the flash-sideways stuff was disappointing. It was just kind of pointless. It adds nothing to the story other than being a red herring. Not to mention that it confused a good chunk of viewers into thinking the whole thing was purgatory (which they very much say it wasn't but I still hear people get it wrong).

Personally I would have ended the series on one last cliffhanger. Something new that lets fans speculate what happened, but at the same time isn't a hanging plot thread from earlier in the show.

 

[dohdough]

The finale was bad. But the episode where they killed off Sayid, Sun and Jin all in like 5 minutes was worse.

And they cribbed Titanic for Sun and Jin's deaths. Made me even angrier.

 

[Erekiddo]

They wrote themselves into a hole they couldn't get themselves out of. Expectations were so high there was no way not to disappoint people.

I hated the ending. Felt like a bad breakup.

 

[Jeevesmeister]

That's the real ending. The dog was dreaming the whole thing. All of it. All the way back to the first episode. You were watching dog dreams this entire time.

 

[Rayven]

Its only redeeming quality was that it confirmed the writers had no idea where the show was headed along the way.

 

[Reptars Revenge]

The first four seasons are incredible. People are split on what I like to call Sci-Five and FantaSix. I personally loved the first but hated the latter

 

[Biske]

I actually liked the church stuff.


The Island conclusion and the giant cork was kind of dumb.


As a show, it was destined to end in disappointment, too many balls in the air and there were many clear parts where they were just winging it, not one whole cohesive plan. So you have some insanely good highs and some ridiculous lows as they just cobbled it together.



Was a hell of a ride though. Used to always buy a pizza and buckle in for the night.

 

[Forsaken82]

The show didn't end horribly, but what I hate about it is that most of the avid viewers figured out the ending back in season 2, and when approached about it, the show runners were like "NO THEY AREN'T DEAD, IT'S NOT PURGATORY I SWEAR!" and then Season 6 drops, and the flash forwards are literally purgatory showing us how everyone was just waiting for Jack to die on the island so they could all move on...

It was like a "Gotcha! See? The island was real and they were very much alive! Except until the final set of flashbacks/flash forwards.... You guys were close!"

It just felt like a cop out.

 

[kitschykitty]

I watched the entire series with my family when it originally aired, I remember our general thoughts on the ending was that it was just fine,nothing amazing. By that point in the series we knew all the questions weren't going to be answered and that there wasn't a great way to wrap it up, basically we came for the final reveal, took a moment to take in that it was finally over, and then went on with our lives.

I think the last season as a whole soured my views on the series though, I definitely thought it felt a bit unnecessary but I honestly couldn't say why because I haven't watched that season since they aired. I also think once you know the reveals throughout the entire series a lot of episodes have a lot of filler of just teasing the reveals which makes it a bit harder to come back to in my opinion.

 

[adj_noun]

I will say I don't think there's a Ben scene I don't enjoy at least on some level. I love that character.

 

[AoM]

In terms of emotion and characters, it's my favorite series finale.

In terms of plot and story, not so much.

 

[The Salt Life]

Idk, I teared the fuck up when Vincent laid down next to jack as he died. Show answered no questions but giachino and that music man, when everyone got back together at the end, those god damn feels

 

[collige]

The entire last two seasons were sloppy, not just the finale.

 

[Bobby Roberts]

Both LOST and Battlestar Galactica, the two shows that basically solidified the manner in which most people consume & discuss television, play much better when binged. Subtracted from the week-to-week insane crowdsourced-theorizing and second guessing, the coherence of the overall story becomes much more clear.

It's sort of funny that without those two shows, a lot of how we talk about TV would be different, but had those two shows come along later, their receptions would likely be very different because of that.

Not to say either show didn't make mistakes, because of course they did: LOST bogged down multiple times, and the writers themselves got a little caught up in playing games with the weekly audience once they realized they could spy on their fevered theorizing that turned their narrative arcs into nothing more than puzzle-boxes for the solving. BSG was hampered more by the number of episodes being forced on them by the networks, introducing wheel-spinning and storytelling bloat that it otherwise would have avoided.

But no, the finale of LOST wasn't that bad. The last two seasons of Battlestar weren't either. The problems in narrative were mostly made up for by the positives in characterization, and what negatives were still leftover have basically become not much more than knee-jerk memes exacerbating a somewhat undeserved reputation for both shows as Spud-in-Trainspotting-level bedshitters.

Removing both shows from the ridiculous speculation olympics (I personally know at least two people that used to watch the show with fucking spreadsheets of their theories & mysteries) that fueled them on their initial runs absolutely helps them. And you're going to see a lot of posts in this thread that keep coming back to that gamification of the show as being their source of disappointment. Returning to the scene of those olympics to pose questions to people loitering in the stands still hungover from the blackout drunks they would incur weekly is going to lead to a lot more soused grumbling than if you simply take it on its own merits.

Probably the most negative effect of these two shows is popularizing and promoting the ridiculous (and stupid) myth that storytelling is somehow lesser-in-value unless every aspect of it is mapped out beforehand, and that "making it up as you go" is an invalid means of creating and telling a story, despite the fact most stories (including many of your very favorite narratives) are created exactly that way.

 

[Steeped in a Sea of Games]

I hated it. It literally made me think less of the series as a whole.

You can take literally any show and end it the same way. It was basically a way for the writers to try and tell you "Hey, that island stuff and all the mystery? None of that really matters at all because we're all just gonna die some day anyway. (please, please don't notice that we were just flying by the seat of our pants the whole time)"

Absolute bullshit.

 

[Won]

Poor John Locke. Sitting all by himself in that church. Forever alone.

Last season overall was all kinds of bad. They settled on a gimmick and had no story to tell to get to the actually end.

 

[bremon]

Jacob and Smokey stuff was infuriating. Finale didn't have time to wrap up the mysteries because writers had no clue how and wasted time on flash sideways.

 

[The Salt Life]

The show didn't end horribly, but what I hate about it is that most of the avid viewers figured out the ending back in season 2, and when approached about it, the show runners were like "NO THEY AREN'T DEAD, IT'S NOT PURGATORY I SWEAR!" and then Season 6 drops, and the flash forwards are literally purgatory showing us how everyone was just waiting for Jack to die on the island so they could all move on...

It was like a "Gotcha! See? The island was real and they were very much alive! Except until the final set of flashbacks/flash forwards.... You guys were close!"

It just felt like a cop out.

But the those people were wrong back in season 2, the island wasn't purgatory.

The entire last two seasons were sloppy, not just the finale.

Season 5 was amazing and they could have ended the series when that bomb went off.

 

[acevans2]

I would rather they had gone batshit crazy with off-the-wall answers than hand-wave the rest of them away and attempt that feel good no-value finale.

They screwed themselves over long before the finale, but gosh if they were finishing it all up I wish they would've put a bit more effort in.

 

[Kenclops]

So over the last few days, I've been watching LOST, nostalgically reflecting over those wild and heady days where water-cooler television was pretty much defined by a story of a bunch of predominately American castaways on a crashed flight from Australia getting mind-fucked on a mystery island by an elusive smoke monster. My thoughts on the show have been well documented on this forum, and certainly, on paying the show a re-watch, I personally find the first three or four seasons especially still hold up extremely well. It was a well-written, beautifully shot, exquisitely cast show that fired on all cylinders when it stuck to focusing on its characters, as opposed to the increasingly convoluted mysteries that it could never hope to solve.

However, much like with many television shows, LOST essentially seemed to define itself in a lot people's through the way it managed to end. At the time, Lost's final episode certainly seemed to really divide people, and over time...later, more reflective reviewers appear to have been even less kind to it. From the finale's wikipedia article:



Jesus Christ!

In reflection, do people still feel the finale was really that bad? Personally speaking, although not without its fair share of problems, I thought the final episode served as a pretty satisfying ending, effectively managing to pull off a pretty intimidating balancing act revolving around resolving a dozen different character arcs (even for those fan favourite characters who were just brought back for the finale) whilst bringing the story to a decisive conclusion.

A controversial opinion, I'm sure, but Lost's final episode worked for me a whole lot better thAn say, Breaking Bad's, which basically saw Walter White

Spoiler

implausibly machine gunning a bunch of Neo Nazis to death as a means of bagging himself a convenient redemption which he didn't really deserve.

Several years on, do some of you still feel Lost's finale deserved its reputation as one of the worst television finales of all time? Or did the finale perhaps work for you in ways that might not necessarily have worked for others?

It was a great ending, but I was expecting dinosaurs.

 

[tearsintherain]

It was decent on its own, while I didn't particularly like its "explanation" it was an ending.

The problem is a big part of Lost was the weekly discussion on theories of various stuff, and what you thought new stuff shown meant. The final season was EXTREMELY weak in really wrapping up most of the mysteries of the show, so in that sense the finale was a massive failure in my mind. You can't ride on the ratings bonanza of having a ton of massive mysteries and not accept the criticism when very little of it gets wrapped up well.

I did really enjoy the Richard episode though, his story line was pretty cool. Smoke guy and Jacob, not so much. What the Island actually is, still don't really understand. Or the light thing. Or smoke monster. Or a lot of stuff about time travel. Or why that one scientist guy was so adamant about not changing the past. Or the wheel. Polar bears. The computer. etc, etc. Why Sayid's afterlife partner is the blonde on the island instead of, you know, the girl he was chasing for much of his life. I'm sure some of them have answers I didn't look, but I just couldn't get myself to care after it was all revealed as "a semi afterlife where you get affairs in order".

 

[meow]

I legit thought Lost was just about people lost on an island until a few months ago when I caught a few episodes when my sister was binge watching it. Was NOT expecting alternate realities and time travel and monsters or whatever it was that was going on, I never was completely sure.

Anyway, it was too confusing for me to keep watching, but I do know my sister also hated the ending.

 

[disappeared]

I felt very mixed watching it at the time, but was still invested in the characters enough so I it hit me right in the feels.

I still wonder what would have happened if Eko had remained on the show. Apparently his departure forced some changes in the overall narrative.

 

[bremon]

Season 5 was amazing and they could have ended the series when that bomb went off.

Yeah we had a lot of fun with season 5 at my house.

 

[Incandenza]

My pet peeve is when people say that the finale amounts to "They were dead all along!" when there's a lengthy scene in the finale where Christian sits the viewers down and says that no, they weren't dead all along.

 

[Balphon]

It was a nice sentimental finale.

The writers painted themselves into a corner by dicking around with their mythology too much in the middle seasons. They created an expectation of a grand reveal they couldn't possibly deliver on because they'd woven too many disparate threads in the interim. A lot of the disappointment over the finale (and really the series in general) stems from that.