Saint Wrote:
a friend emailed this. not sure if it helped.
"In the end, a man named Christian Shephard gathered a flock (including his prodigal son) in a place of worship, where they joyfully accepted their fate and moved on to the next phase of the afterlife, indicated by a bright and glorious light.
As always, “Lost” was about redemption and forgiveness, faith and hope, trying to be the best person you can be — and letting go when your time is up.
Is Christian the father, Jack the son and Desmond the Holy Ghost? Were Jacob and his nemesis Cain and Abel? Was the island the Garden of Eden?
It’s probably not that simple; nothing with “Lost” was ever easy. But the Biblical imagery and references have been there from the start, so we shouldn’t have been surprised that the finale was so steeped in religious themes.
In the final episode, we learned the “Sideways” world was more like a purgatory, where each of the characters believed he or she was operating in a real-life setting, when in fact they were all gone
How could it be that Jack, who died on the island, was existing in this world that included Kate and Sawyer and others who had managed to escape? Because time doesn’t work in the same way in the afterlife as it does on Earth. (“There is no ‘now’ here,” Christian Shephard tells his son. And, by the way, did you notice the menorah and the Buddha statue in that room in the church?)
“You can let go now,” Rose told Jack when Oceanic 815 didn’t crash in that alternate world. In the post-mortem show, Jimmy Kimmel posited to Matthew Fox that when Rose said those words, Jack was dying on the island, and everything we saw after that in Los Angeles was part of Jack’s purgatory.
Let’s say Jack spent 40 years in that alternate world as a surgeon with an ex-wife, a young son — nobody really aging, Jack not aware that time wasn’t really moving. In the real world, the other characters live their lives, some dying of old age. Eventually, they’re all in that same Los Angeles-looking afterlife, continuing to grow spiritually until they were ready to move on.
Except for those who weren’t ready, e.g., Benjamin Linus, who remained outside the place of worship and said he still had some things to take care of.
Take this cup and drink from it
No way the last episode could tie up all the loose ends left dangling after six years of watching this long-form narrative play out. If the series’ creators had taken questions for three hours after the show, we STILL wouldn’t have all the answers.
But over the last few weeks, a number of major mysteries were resolved — and, in the final episode, we saw so many familiar faces from past seasons return for powerful reunions. Love stories. Siblings. Fathers and sons. Friends."
This is just someone making excuses for the show. "No way the last episode could tie up all the loose ends left dangling after six years of watching this long-form narrative play out"... well, yeah, there's no way they could when it was all arbitrary bullshit that didn't mean anything. But they
could have if they'd had a plan from day 1.
"Time doesn’t work in the same way in the afterlife as it does on Earth." No, genius, time simply doesn't exist in the afterlife. To an eternal being (and, in Christian lore, the afterlife is eternal) there is no past nor future. Everything happens at once, always happened, and always will happen.
But anyway, this whole Christian reading of
Lost is a cop out. It's a way to offer "answers" for everything as long as you don't think too hard (like Christianity itself). The kindergarten-level notion of purgatory explains the flash-sideways (badly - and remember that plotline only appeared this season), but explains nothing else. Obviously, some viewers are gonna feel all warm and fuzzy that their fave characters got to go to heaven (and btw fuck you, Winston - dogs got no souls), but to pretend that's anything other than cheap emotional manipulation is delusional.
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