Carleton College students transform observatory into R2D2

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In "The End," How I Found Lost

The final episode of Lost was a profound experience for me.

Maybe it was for you too, or maybe it was a disappointment. Maybe you thought it was kick ass in spots, confusing in others, and were just cheering for Frank Lapidus the whole time anyway, so whatever. 

You’re probably right. I don’t care. Because I don’t think the final outcome of Lost is really about what we can agree was cool and what wasn’t, and the questions we all had in our heads and our hearts that we were hoping would be answered. In other words, if you watched that and really felt pissed that there wasn’t an adequate explanation of the fertility god statue, you missed the point–or at least, I think you missed the point, but that’s up to you, really. You take what you can carry. You leave behind the rest.*

The last fifteen minutes of Lost are many things, no doubt different for each of us, but one thing I think they were for me is a metaphor for how we are meant to come to terms with the show itself. For six seasons, we have watched and wondered; we have speculated and vented; we have engaged a complicated and frequently convoluted “mythology” and a rich tapestry of characters, both of which occasionally beat us about the face and head (OH JESUS NOT ANOTHER JACK EPISODE WHAT IS IT WITH THIS GUY ANYWAY). 

At the end, there aren’t a full set of answers. There isn’t even an acknowledgment of many of the questions. The show has dealt with what the show will deal with. It’s about moving on–accepting what you’ve been given (or not) and waking up the next morning. Or something. You take what you can carry. You leave behind the rest. 

(The only speculation I’ll offer from my personal mental wanderings is that the final scene in the church suggests that what we saw was specifically Jack’s spiritual closure, and not everybody’s; kind of a shame, if true, since all the characters deserve the same fulfillment. But in a sense, from our perspective, they got it; we just perceived it through Jack’s experience. 

(He was always the man at the head of the action, many times placed in the leadership position of the group; he was a doctor, dedicating his life to the health of others. He had issues with his own father, true, but also needed to know that he had brought all these people he became entangled with to safety and good health, away from the island. 

(So we see somewhat incongruous things, like Sayid with Shannon instead of Nadia, or Charlie and Claire cradling Aaron; and we miss other things, like Penny and Desmond’s child. Surely some of these details would be more fulfilling for those specific characters than what was shown? 

(But not to Jack. Jack fought long and hard, up to the very end, to insure the safety of the others with whom he shared the island experience. In his final moments before walking into the light, he knew everyone from that experience was okay. I presume, as long as I’m speculating, that there are similar moments, maybe in similar churches, waiting for all the island’s castaways, eventually.)

At the end of the day, this series was always about the characters as well as the mythology. This last season did explore and resolve some of the mythology issues, but the amount of time devoted to this “sideways” universe made it clear that in the final summation, what would matter most for this show were the characters, and not the many, MANY bits and pieces of plot that floated around them. 

So if you didn’t get the answers you wanted, so what? Did you enjoy the experience of watching the story unfold, of speculating about what may be going on with the island? Did the episodes themselves satisfy beyond the simple progress on some imagined straight path toward a never-to-come final rundown of why everything was? 

Does life work that way? Do you think you’re moving through your days toward some last conclusion someplace where every event of your life will be explained and contextualized into a neat and tidy megaplot? I realize the writers have been seemingly asking us all this time to care about the island’s complicated mythology, but as the show concluded, they were gently guiding us down a different path. If you choose to follow or not, that’s up to you. You take what you can carry. You leave behind the rest. 

In that sense, it reminded me very much of the exceptional Sopranos finale. There was closure to be found; there were plots that ended, characters whose arcs resolved. But in the end, it was as sloppy and unexplored as life itself. What mattered was emphasized and shown; what didn’t matter was ignored. That’s how it goes. 

That two hours of television, for me, was this amazing spiritual thing that glistens and curves in the memory. It also had some goddamned kick ass stuff in it, like the Jack vs. Locke showdown, and Lapidus getting that plane off the ground, and Desmond uncorking the bottle. Jorge Garcia deserves an Emmy simply for his reaction to Jack dying in the cave. Terry O’Quinn needs one too. 

My friend Jeff Stolarcyk said of Lost that “any answers that we’ll accept are going to be the ones we discover for ourselves.” That is the true gift of this show, and this final episode. We are being handed an opportunity to reflect upon six years of crazy and amazing storytelling, and then realize how it all came down to people helping people, and learning to move on, together. Take what you can carry. Leave behind the rest. 

This is a show that has invited us over its six seasons to bring our own questions and ideas to the table, and which at its end gives us one final idea to ponder. You can speculate, analyze, discuss; you can unpack the ways in which the eventual abandonment of the many questions within the mythology was disappointing. In the end, it wasn’t about that. The Beatles had it right: “And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.” 

Move on, into the light. 

* That recurring bit is a shameless swipe from a great Bruce Springsteen song, “Land of Hope and Dreams,” which I think fits this final episode and its message well. It’s what I want to believe about the world and life itself, neatly fit into around eight minutes and change. 

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The End

I realized that we had a flawed episode when I tried to explain the finale to my girlfriend, who is completely unfamiliar with the show aside from the spillover that she gets from knowing a few rabid fans.  I realized it more fully when I heard someone insist that the final shots of the unpeopled remains of Oceanic 815 were an indicator that none of the show’s events ever really happened. And then I realized that there are people who are really bothered that we never saw what really happened to Stuart Radzinsky and who thought that the finale was awful for not answering that question. It gave me a dose of perspective.  But there were big, broad awesome things in this episode that worked. It was a series of emotionally manipulative beats perfectly executed, and the fabric between them shows as thin sometimes.  Knowing that it could not please everyone, it tried to please the most people possible. It pleased me.

There were three hundred and twenty four passengers on Oceanic flight 815. When the plane crashed on a mysterious island, the seventy-two survivors were stranded together for one hundred and one days. But most of them died before that. Six were rescued. Then, three years later, they came back. In the end, six left again, though not the same six as before.

Each of those survivors lived for years – decades, for all of them except Walt* – prior to coming to the Island. They’d had friends, been in love, held fulfilling jobs, saved lives, killed, coveted, were thrown out an 8th story window, sailed around the world. They were people in crisis who’d lived imperfect lives or good people confronted with bad things on their horizons, but as we saw more and more of their pasts, we knew more about them, more about why these people mattered.

In spite all of that, the most important moments in those lives, even the ones that managed to live long, fulfilling lives after flying away, were those comparatively brief days spent on that Island.  The characters left an impact on each other that is indelible. So much so that their bonds survive after death.  That much is apparent in each of the ‘reconnection’ montages our characters undergo.

That is the final and most important reveal that the Island held in store for us, and one that the series had been preparing us for for six years – the secret of the Island is not a four-toed statue or the name of a cloud of sinister fog or who exactly fired those shots. It has never been about those things and those things are frankly inessential to any real understanding of the substance of the show, an obfuscation over its heart. The real secret of the Island has always been the characters, the survivors, the castaways.

They are everyone in our lives that we knew only briefly yet molded us and changed us for the better.  They are that for us because they were that for each other and we have always been one of them, too.

*WAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Happy Birthday, Empire Strikes Back

Yep, I had that lunchbox as a kid. Nope, it’s not for sale.

There’s a classic story about George Lucas and the opening day of Star Wars in 1977. As the film premiered in New York and Los Angeles, he was busy in a dark room mixing foreign language versions of the film. His then-wife Marsha arrived and they decided to have dinner together.

Heading toward the Hamburger Hamlet on Hollywood Boulevard, directly across the street from Grauman’s Chinese Theater, they sat in a terrible traffic jam, wondering what could be causing such a disruption. It wasn’t until they finally reached the restaurant and glanced across the street that they realized what they were seeing. Star Wars was playing, and the lines stretched down the block.

“So we sat in Hamburger Hamlet and watched the giant crowd out there, and then I went back and mixed all night,” Lucas told author Dale Pollock for his biography of the filmmaker, Skywalking. “It wasn’t excitement, it was amazement.”

Imagine the pressure, then, of creating the inevitable sequel to Star Wars. You have a public clamoring for the latest adventures of Luke, Han and Leia. You have a burgeoning nerddom already scooping up collectibles and discussing the film eagerly at conventions and in fanzines. You have pressure from your collaborators and pressure from the studio. Pretty intimidating stuff.

Somehow, Lucas and his team managed to satisfy just about everyone. In 1977, George Lucas transformed Hollywood and popular culture with Star Wars. In 1980, he upped the ante by suggesting a new strategy. He defied just about every convention of popular filmmaking, and he let the bad guys win.

By the time the credits roll, The Empire Strikes Back has floored you with the emotional impact of a punch in the gut. Five minutes into the film, Luke Skywalker is attacked by a scary snow monster. Two hours later, Han Solo is on his way to Jabba the Hutt, Leia is mourning the loss of her newfound love, and Luke is coming to terms with four words that would change his life forever (not to mention the loss of his right hand).

On the surface, Empire is as fun and fast as Star Wars, yet somehow more relentless than the intense original film. The classic chases between the Millennium Falcon and the Imperial fleet move at a breakneck pace, helped along by John Williams’ breathless score. Action moves briskly from an ice planet to a swamp planet to the depths of space and finally to a mystical city in the clouds, where our heroes face the ultimate reckoning against the Empire. Even when the film seems to slow, it never stops.

As Han and Leia and the comic relief wing their way hither and yon in their futile efforts to escape evil, Luke finally learns something of substance about the mysterious Force that flows so strongly through him. His sequences with Yoda provide interludes of humor and depth between the frantic chase sequences, and so it’s easy to take them for granted as you wait to soar again through space in the Falcon with Star Destroyers hot on your tail.

Watch Yoda and Luke and Artoo more closely next time you see Empire; inhale with your brain and take in every detail. Each scene is a minor gem of filmmaking magic, especially in today’s CG-drenched age, where Frank Oz’s puppetry has been pushed aside and replaced by ones and zeroes. You find yourself quickly and fully invested in a puppet and a robot and a young student struggling to grasp profundities rattled off in a grumpy growl.

Some have called Lucas’ notions about the Force little more than pop hokum; others have adopted them as a near-religion. Whatever your own feelings, there’s some beautiful and simple ideas there, expressed by the script and the actors with uncommon grace. “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter…” We could do a lot worse than to live by those words as we shuffle through this world.

Meanwhile, the Falcon soars on, and the dialogue onboard the spacecraft effortlessly fleshes out the characters through classic one-liners, each of them delivered with the anxiousness of that one panicked moment when all seems lost and they’re about to be obliterated by their adversaries. There’s not a single scene between Han and Leia that doesn’t crackle, as screenwriters Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett cast Han and Leia as an otherworldly Hepburn and Tracy, quipping their way across the galaxy with the Empire’s sinister agents in hot pursuit.

But whatever the fun, whatever the quips, whatever the depth of Empire, an undercurrent of darkness and desperation runs beneath it all. The desolate opening sequence on Hoth suggests the loneliness and impossibility of the Rebellion’s struggle. Throughout, evil is never more than a step behind our heroes. The Falcon never does manage to completely shake the Empire until Han has been frozen in carbonite and Luke has narrowly slipped between Vader’s fingers. Even the sequences in which Yoda teaches Luke the ways of the Force are insidiously downbeat—we may learn a lot from the sage Jedi Master, but Luke certainly doesn’t seem to.

No moment is more bleak, more impassioned and more desperate than when Artoo finally opens the hatch that will lead Leia and Lando and the rest out to the waiting Falcon at Cloud City. Williams’ bittersweet romantic theme for Han and Leia swells, Artoo unleashes a cloud of smoke that provides an uncertain haze, and Leia blasts angrily at the stormtroopers hot on their tail. The look on her face tells us that she has no idea that she’ll ever see the man she loves again.

It’s a crushing moment, and honestly, has a big summer event movie ever managed to crush you emotionally the way Empire can? Even when you know that Return of the Jedi will come along next and make everything okay, it still has an undeniable impact. It’s still that punch in the gut.

As a sequel, Empire did the impossible. It raised every possible stake in the Star Wars series. The characters and story gain unexpected new dimensions that echo both backward to the original Star Wars and forward into Return of the Jedi. That makes Empire the heart of the original trilogy.

Taken on its own terms, The Empire Strikes Back is as sweeping as Gone With the Wind, as sharp as The Philadelphia Story, and perhaps the most simply imaginative sci-fi film ever. The Rebellion may have lost this one, but in the end, it was geeks the world over who won.

Taken from the pages of Poodoo, my book-length compilation of writings about Star Wars, available now and absolutely free! Even on yer iPad!

More great Empire tributes:

The film that introduced a generation to tragedy
The movie that made being a nerd cool
30 Reasons the Empire Still Rules

Nerdly Advice – Funeral Edition

[The following post contains spoilers for the finale of Siege and the various one-shots and specials that spin out of it. If you have not read Siege #4 and wish to remain unspoiled, you might want to skip this one.]

Sometimes nerds have questions, and we do our best to answer them. Sometimes they’re about important things, but mostly they’re about the ridiculous curiosities of fandom. It’s kind of like Antiques Roadshow in the Batcave. Or something. We call it Nerdly Advice.

Today’s question comes from ‘CLOC’, who wants to know “Jeff, What’s the deal with the Sentry? I don’t know anything about him except that he did it with Rogue and probably Crystal, too, right?”