feliciano182 wrote:
Where the hell does all of this come from
? weren't you Mr. "I was sleeping thinking about the afterlife"
?
Well, the episode ended at 11:30. I spent maybe a half hour checking out the initial reaction on the web, then went to bed. The next morning I was still buzzing from all the feel goodness about seeing everyone happy. Like I said, the scene worked on an emotional level, and the last shots of Jack walking through the bamboo worked perfectly. But as I've been reading other's thoughts about the episode and other's problems I beginning to see the finale in a different, poorer light, and mostly it's because of the mechanics of the afterlife, not that the idea itself is hard to explain:
- In "The Beginning of the End", Charlie appears to Hurley and tells him he has to go back to the island because the others need him (which turned out to be not true when you think about it). Okay, so Charlie's dead, right? He's coming from the afterlife, right? So why in season 6 is he in purgatory (or whatever you want to call it) with Hurley? Why is Hurley more in the know than Charlie? If we are made to believe that Hurley spoke with Charlie in season 4, then why are they going through the afterlife again together?
- In "The Lie", Anna Lucia appears to Hurley as he's trying to drive around Sayid who has lost consciousness. So she's appearing to him from the afterlife. She also tells him that Libby said "hi". So clearly both those characters are dead and in acceptance of their fates. So why is that Anna Lucia doesn't know who Hurley is in the afterlife, and that she isn't ready to move on?
- I didn't realize it when first watching it, but quite a few faces were missing at the church. Miles isn't there even though he has just as much a right to be there as some of the other characters. He lived with Sawyer, Jin, Juliet, and Daniel for three years. He's known Sawyer longer than Hurley has. And he presumably got to know Sawyer, Kate and co in the years to come. Same with Frank. Daniel and Charlotte maybe didn't spend as much time with everyone else, but Daniel helped Desmond see the light, so why didn't Desmond return the favour?
- Other things seem odd when you start to really think about them. Why did Jack and Juliet have a son together? Or, maybe more accurately, why did they create a son together in this afterlife? If Jack wanted a son why didn't he just imaging his wife to be his ex wife? Or Kate? Why was Artz a co worker of Ben's when the two never met? Why did Locke come up with that strange bit about his dad?
- If time has no meaning in the afterlife, then why do they have to wait for characters to be ready to move on? And why did time seem to be of the essence? Why have Desmond go through all that nonsense of getting himself arrested and rescuing Kate and Sayid when none of it was real?
The thing about the ending is that it only works as a send off for these characters, but not as an ending to the series. It just kind of comes out of nowhere. With the twists to episodes like "Walkabout", or "Through the Looking Glass" or "The Incident", they all managed to make you think "why didn't I see that coming?". They all became clear in hindsight. I don't think that's the case for "The End". It seems like something they just came up with in the last season. Jughead turned out to be a complete dead end, and this season just prolonged that dead end. And, as I said in an earlier post, I think this season could have worked just as well, maybe better, if you took out these flash sideways. If they wanted to imply an afterlife they still could have done so. Remember when Eko died? And he started to remember himself and his brother as kids? That was a moving and subtle hint of an afterlife. They could have done the same thing here.
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