Tonight It All Ends

It was almost six years ago now that Vicki and I sat down to watch, with some skepticism, the premiere of a new drama that TV Guide, in their Fall Preview issue, had given a very strong recommendation to. They'd managed to make somewhat intriguing what had initially sounded like a cross between Survivor (a complete waste of time which I've never had any interest in, then or now) and Gilligan's Island (something I'd long since outgrown). If I remember correctly, they predicted that viewers would be truly shocked by what they saw. And they weren't wrong. Lost's pilot episode (all 2 hours of it) blew Vicki and I away.

By the time Walkabout aired, a week or two later, I was officially hooked. The characters who crashed on the island certainly weren't proving to be the one-dimensional caricatures that inhabited other prime time dramas, as each subsequent flashback in Season One provided new insight into Jack Shepherd, Kate Austin, John Locke and the rest. This attention to character-building was something fairly new, at least within the realm of TV science fiction.

Tonight, we get the final installment of the journey that is Lost. There have been numerous and undeniable clues all season long that this isn't going to be the sort of wrap-up that many of us had expected and even hoped for; we weren't going to get closure on dozens of mini-mysteries that had been launched throughout the show's six years. I've read many articles and posts lately that seem to celebrate that fact, but I'm still sitting in the section of the arena that believes at least some of that is simply bad planning, execution or writing. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe Lindeloff and Cuse, the show-runners of Lost, always intended it to be this way. But at times it strikes me as a little like a murder mystery in which the writer loses interest in who the killer is after setting up a delightful locked-room crime.

Regardless, we'll get what we get. For all the thrills, twists and turns, and wonderful character development, not to mention the many hours of thinking, talking and writing about the show that ensued since the pilot aired, it's been time well spent following this little island adventure. I hope there's a big finish that encourages us to re-watch earlier seasons through a new lens of understanding; but that may or may not be delivered tonight. In just a few short hours it'll all be over, and every generation of fans who discover the show from now on will have a very different experience of it than we, the "live viewers," ever did. In that sense, while one era ends tonight, another one is just about to begin. And that's pretty awesome to consider.