the lost finale

i know that a couple of you follow lost, so i figured i'd throw my proverbial hat in the ring and share some of my thoughts on the series finale.

but before that, some background.

i've recently renewed my love of reading, especially fiction, and found a new focus within that, specifically with russian literature.  my exploration has found me beginning bakhtin's "problems of dostoevsky's poetics," which is a philosophically oriented literary critique of what bakhtin believed to be the factor which made dostoevsky's novels stand out: namely, the concept of a polyphonic novel.

to the best of my understanding so far, bakhtin believes that the ultimate aim of a novel is to present and reflect the "polyphonic" (which means many-voiced), multi-centered nature of both the world and ourselves.  he posits that we do not live in some sort of vacuum, and that our own voices and natures are amalgamations and interpretations of the many others present around us.  we affect our world and are affected by it.

bakhtin believed that dostoevsky created his works by refusing to condense the individual worlds and voices of his characters into or under a singular narrative voice, thus creating not the classical aristotelian "closed" text, but an open one, where his characters fully existed in an ultimately unfinalizable world, a world of the dialogical, constantly developing "we" over the monological, narrow "i."

returning to lost, i didn't like the ending.

it's not that it wasn't exciting, or well written, or illuminating enough.  it's just that the nature of a series finale, in my opinion, is essentially compromising to a series like lost.

the show was never really about the island.  it was about the people.  the lives of jack, kate, sawyer, hugo, locke, sayid, ben, claire, sun and jin, and all the others were the points of references for the whole series, and the dynamic effects of their lives and the island on each others' was what made the show so compelling.  each character existed as a means to his or her own end.  they were never compressed into a monologic narrative; rather the writing chose to show that each character inhabited and experienced his or her own world, with the joys and struggles within it.

in short, lost was a polyphonic television show.  lost, while keeping us amused with science fiction, conspiracy theories, and international intrigue was at its core a show about people, and more than that, about people together, trying to make sense of the world and themselves within it.  it reflected life, it its own way.

and to be honest, i have to applaud the implication at the very end in the church that their stories really never did end.  the ones who survived kept on living, but their lives remained connected as they prepared for whatever would come next, even after death.  ending the island's story without necessarily ending the character's story was still nothing short of a remarkable feat.

i don't regret watching lost, because as in life, it's the adventures and the relationships that count.  there's no ending to lost that could have done the journey justice.

but i'll tell you, they gave it a hell of a sendoff.