Ok, so we’ve just finished watching the final season of Lost. Admittedly, by the time we had gotten to season 3, it was mainly me pushing to watch it. That was around the time when it became painfully obvious that the writers had no clue what they were doing and were just making things up as they went along. That was bad enough, but what really ticked my wife off was the stupid back-and-forth characterization: Kate loves Jack, no, she loves Sawyer, nope, she still loves Jack. This made character development a joke and all but ensured that audiences cared not one whit for the characters.

Still, I insisted on watching for a variety of reasons. It’s worth remembering just how fantastic and promising the first season was. This was a major television series made using near theatrical-quality cinematography and high production values. It had a huge ensemble cast, some of whom gave truly stellar performances. It was a mainstream show, yet drew extensively on science-fiction and fantasy themes. And even if it ended up promising more than it could deliver, it successfully created a compelling and fascinating mythology of its own. Considering how much we’d already invested in the show, I thought we might as well see it through to the end.

So what do I think of the final season? After the mess of the previous seasons, I went in with diminished expectations so this season had a low bar to pass anyway. With that in mind, I’d say that it does successfully end the series. Sure, it didn’t offer any conclusive answers about the island’s mythology. In the episode telling the story of Jacob and the Man in Black’s origins, the mother even explicitly states that answering questions would only lead to new questions. As one QT3 poster pointed out, this is tantamount to saying that it’s “turtles all the way down”. I’ve have preferred going with Dharma Initiative pseudo-science instead of full blown mystic war, but at least the writers didn’t completely dodge the subject and did nail down the main points.

What the season really succeeds in is providing some emotional closure for the characters we’ve come to know over the past six years. It was satisfying to see Jack, for example, finally come around and complete his character arc even if he took way too long probably. Evangeline Lilly’s single “I missed you so much” line probably represented the best acting she’d ever done for the series. The idea of a Hurley and Ben duo running the island after everyone had gone is strangely attractive. And of course, it was a lot of fun to see all the dead characters back again. The end is cliched but still fitting and I was amused that the writers managed to work in the concept of Purgatory while simultaneously sticking to their promise that the Island was not Purgatory.

Even so, if you have yet to watch a single episode of the series and asked me if it were worth watching, I’d recommend that you stay with the first couple of seasons and then make up your own ending afterward. Not only does it become harder and harder to achieve suspension of disbelief in the later seasons, but it looks like they tried to save money by cutting back on the shots of sweeping vistas that was so impressive in the early seasons.

Overall, I think Lost is a fascinating television experiment in just how far you can get through sheer polish and technical competence, but little actual content. Instead of a single unified vision, it had a large number of writers who in turn were guided by audience reactions and ratings as episodes were aired. Unpopular characters were killed off and popular characters were allowed to live for far too long despite their stories being completely played out. It’s creation by committee at its purest. The result might not be great art but it’s pretty compelling entertainment.