Review by for Lost: The Complete Sixth and Final Season
Rating:
This was a truly great series, well done and well acted, and kept us on the edge of our seats as we worked through the entire series on DVD over the course of a year. With so many enigmatic puzzles, wild coincidental events and posing such potentially huge existential issues regarding life, death, the afterlife, second chances, time travel, “GOD”, the clash of good and evil and our too-frequent inability to know the difference, and many other questions, I thoroughly anticipated some satisfactory conclusions to at least some of the story lines. Instead, this is simply lazy scriptwriting and mystery-writing in its most blatant form. Why does one leave the Island one way and land in Tunisia (but you can also leave via sub, chopper or very small outboard (remember Michael?) if you know the right coordinates?) How does Jacob manage to have visited many of our heroes during their previous lifetimes? What is the true meaning of a certain perplexingly omnipresent number sequence? And why? Why the presence of ancient Egyptian culture on this remote South Pacific Island?

I’m sorry to say this was, in the end, one of the sorriest excuses for developing such intriguingly complex story-lines just to let them fall flat without explanation. Lost fans might enjoy seeing what their hero’s lives could have been like, and might enjoy watching them coincidentally run into each other in parallel-developing lifetimes that didn’t actually happen, and they might enjoy the utter destruction of another hippy-dippy semi-spiritual commune (a’la the poison-gassing of those creepy Dharma Three-Dog-Night listening hippies). But they won’t enjoy watching Sawyer and Kate and Jin fly off the island in a 747 to do…what? Or watch Jack re-unite with his father just to be told by him “guess what, you’re dead, so are your friends!”. Or see reluctant hero Hurley get sacked with the burden of becoming the island’s new Jacob.

Anyway, like an addict with his drugs suddenly taken away, what Season 6 did for me was to leave me inexplicitly yearning for another fix, thinking that that next hit might lead me to Nirvana. But alas, I realize the utter laziness and incompetence of the scriptwriters and I realize that they really, truly never did even imagine the resolution of the enigmatic puzzles they so intriguingly teased us with. And I know in my heart that this television drug can never give me the pleasure I thought (hoped?) it could. Now I too am Lost and I’m only left asking: where’s the end? Click.

Review by Michael for Lost: The Complete Sixth and Final Season
Rating:
I can deal with an unsatisfactory ending, but I can’t really deal with a pointless ending and broken promises.

After season 3, I was getting worried that we’d just see more and more mysteries and we’d never get any answers. Then when they said there would be 6 seasons, I saw a lot of things that gave me hope:

“From the very beginning, fans and even critics have been saying, ‘Are you making it up as you go along?’ ‘ which was ‘a legitimate question.’

Now, with a still far-away ending in sight, Lindelof says he and executive producer Carlton Cuse have ’specific designs for ending the next two seasons’ and promises that with the answer-filled season finale May 23, viewers “will begin to get an idea of what that design will be, and it will not be at all what they expect.’”

“Straight from the mouth of Damon Lindelof: ‘You won’t have to wait until 2010 to get all the answers you really care about.’”

Then right before season 6 : “Matthew Fox says Lost creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse will prove they knew where they were going all along when the show ends in ‘an incredibly powerful, very sad and beautiful way. I think is going to be pretty awesome.’”

So I continued and continued and believed I would get an ending that at least somewhat resolved things. The fact that the ending left so many things hanging, and left so many things that didn’t make sense–I just can’t see myself buying the series! And really, it’s not because I didn’t enjoy the characters. The worst lie the creators/writers told us at the end is that the show was about the characters and not the mysteries. The characters I invested in are worthless because so much of the series was worthless according to the ending! I feel like I’ve wasted my time investing emotion in their struggles because so many of their struggles are meaningless. And that might be ok if the story was about meaninglessness–but the story told us it was about meaning!

The struggles in season 6? Half of them are meaningless because they were dead. Whoops, spoiler alert. Their struggles with Walt? Meaningless because they’re left hanging. Their issues with Jacks dad. Meaningless because it wasn’t him. Lock? Meaningless because it wasn’t really him later on. The characters we saw after they died? Who knows what that meant or if they were even the characters. Jacob’s actions and everyone on the island’s interactions with him? Well pretty meaningless because they were just whatever Jacob wanted to do.

Then there are the mysteries that are solved that still don’t make sense in comparison to earlier seasons. If you watch season one again, will the smoke monster make any sense now that you know what it was? Do Loch’s actions mean anything now that you know how he ends up? The numbers? It just all becomes meaningless because it had no meaning. How can I even reinvest in the characters if I know so much of it is meaningless? Sayid likes this girl, but he really loves that girl, but he truly loved this girl?

Then there’s just the ending. What were they smoking? When did anyone invest in these characters to find out what happened to them after they died?

They said it was all about the characters. But to really care about characters they have to have consistency and meaningfulness. Without that, Lost really lives up to it’s name! I can deal with some mysteries left unsolved, but too many of the ones left open make the characters worthless.

Review by P. Mastrosimone for Lost: The Complete Sixth and Final Season
Rating:
Prior to season 6, I would have rated Lost as a 5 star show without question. Despite a few weak singular episodes from seasons 1-5, all in all I loved this show and was a HUGE fan. Perhaps obsessively so, I read all the episode recaps (Doc Jensen being my favorite), looked for spoilers and often debated/chatted with friends, family and co-workers over this amazing show. I defended its honor when people would question the direction or label it confusing. I had, up until “The End”, a lot of confidence in Cuse & Lindelof as writers.

Despite my increasing worry throughout season 6, I kept the faith right up until the finale. I will say that “Across the Sea”, did almost put the nail in the coffin, but I still wanted to believe there would come an “ah ha” moment when it would all tie together. I was even willing to allow a few things unanswered questions or things left open to interpretation, but I never expected them to end the show in such a cliché’ manner. I also never thought they would end the series without telling us what the island was. “A Cork” is not an answer, it’s a cop out!

I also felt the sideways world ended up being completely useless and I was baffled that our Losties would choose a multi-denomination church, instead of beach, as their final meeting place. Jacob and MIB ultimately, despite a lot of indication that they were, ended up to be of little importance to the overall story. Honestly, as it turned out these fine actors played out to be more filler then storyline. There we were at the end of the road and the whole story of these two is that their non-mother was crazy and one brother flushed the other down the golden island toilet, thus turning him into the smoke monster. Huh?

After a lot of careful consideration, I’ve drawn my own final conclusion in an attempt to provide some personal satisfaction. I believe the writer’s either had another ending in mind and for some reason couldn’t pull it off. Or they lied and never really knew how to end the show. But here is the kicker, if you didn’t know how to end the series or how to answer questions that you posed in the first place, why not go for another season? I’m sure ABC would have loved to milk Lost for all it’s worth. You didn’t do your show or your legions of loyal fans any justice by wrapping it up to absurdly. We didn’t need Dogan, Lennon or the sideways world at all. We didn’t need Sun to stop speaking English for no apparent reason or Shannon to come back for ha ha’s. What fans wanted was answers, conclusion and a little something to think about when it was all over.

And hey, if you wanted to go all religious, why not have the island be purgatory all along? Sure everyone guessed it in Season 1, but at least it would have made all the island nonsensical stuff somewhat believable. The audience could have chalked up the millions of unanswered questions as part of some ultimate soul test. Instead you ended the show with footage of the plane crash and then came back and said it was just for fun, no relevance, the island was after all, “real”! Jimmy Fallon said best during the 2010 Emmy’s, “I didn’t understand it, but I tried.”