SmartRemarks

Sunday’s final episode of Lost, that is… a show I’ve been watching with fascination for five years now. (No, not six… I missed S1 when it aired, but got hooked by the DVDs.)

That’s not to say that I found it completely satisfying, especially on an intellectual level. But clearly the show was shooting for emotional catharsis in the finale, more than anything else, and on those terms it succeeded very effectively. It was true to the characters we’ve come to know and care about, hitting emotional beats that almost brought tears to my eyes more than once. And it didn’t do that by resorting to cheap sentimentality; it was well-earned sentiment. As a viewer, one had to have been following along with these characters through years of travail, had to understand who they were, what they’d experienced, what kind of redemption they’d been seeking, in order for those moments to work. When everything is weighed in the balance, I think that this will go down as one of the most ambitious, and artistically successful, shows in television history.

[Spoilers below.]

Read the rest of this entry »