Lost routinely gets a lot of good commentary pieces in the mainstream press, but today more so than most. A handful of quick reviews…
Patrick Kevin Day at The LA Times admits he was fooled by the not-so-explosive fake ending and surprised when the bomb eventually went off. More so than some, he’s satisfied that the story of Jacob and Esau meshes with the first four seasons. “What I think this season finale did more than anything, was to finally give us a stable frame with which to watch the entire series. So much we’ve seen before makes perfect sense. Remember the dream where we saw Locke with the black eye and the white eye? His talk with Walt about there always being two sides. The mysterious behavior of Christian Shepherd, the resurrected Locke and the smoke monster. Poor Ben, he was fooled the whole time into thinking he was working on the side of the angels. Poor, pitiful Ben. No matter what else happens next season, I think we’ll finally see Ben redeem himself in sacrifice. His tortured confrontation with Jacob revealed that his manipulations have only been a ruse to cover up his sense of lonliness and wanting to belong. I predict Season 6 will give us Good Ben (though don’t expect it right away).”
Ginia Bellafante at the New York Times was much harsher, using the episode as the perfect example of why she’s lost all confidence in the series. “Why, why, why “Lost” did you decide in the end to turn into “Gossip Girl” with a an evil black smoke
machine?… So basically, we’re supposed to believe that everyone here is motivated toward instigating cataclysmic events because their dating lives just aren’t going in the right direction…. If the great message of “Lost” turns out to be that the best way to avoid pain is to erase the past, I’m going to ask the producers to get Ben Linus to turn back the clock and give me the 4,000 hours of my life I will have wasted watching the show, right back.”
Doc Jensen at Entertainment Weekly comes the closest to matching my response, referring to “last night’s exhilarating, heartbreaking, and I can’t believe they ended it THERE! infuriating season finale.” Somehow the fact that I agree with Jensen doesn’t surprise me. He makes a clever movie allusion, saying Juliet “tumbled down the drill hole of the Swan and survived long enough to pull a Beneath The Planet of the Apes.” And a TV allusion - “the screen flooded as white as a clean slate — a reverse-negative of The Sopranos‘ infamous cut-to-black series final.” He theorizes that “the shape and form of the new timeline will be determined by now-former castaways, thanks to the two gifts given to them by Jacob in the finale: a second chance at life — and the freedom to create their own destiny.” Basically he races through the episode making little quips and observations and looking things up on Wikipedia as he thinks of them.
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