Running list of great quotes about Lost as a whole (perhaps to be updated as I find more).

Drew McWeeny:

[N]o matter what I think of certain ideas or elements of not just this season but every season, I think “Lost” will stand as one of the biggest, boldest, strangest shows for a network to ever nurture and complete. The show existed on its own crazy terms for six years, and they’ve been six of the best years of TV I’ve ever enjoyed.

Alan Sepinwall:

Ultimately, “Lost” didn’t succeed because of the mythology. We’ve seen too many examples of mythology-heavy, character-light series fail over the last six years to think that. “Lost” succeeded on emotion…. When “Lost” was really and truly great, it locked you so deep into the emotions of the moment that the larger questions didn’t really matter.

Thoughts on the end of Lost:

— The episode title had a double meaning. Not just “The End” of the show, but… the real end. Death. The end of the show was about Buddhism. Letting go. Accepting death. All questions lead to more questions, as Allison Janney’s character said in “Across the Sea.” You get no answers in life. Life is about being lost. Death is the only place where you are not lost. It is the eternal answer.

It gives greater symbolism to all those times on the show when we focused in on someone’s eye opening. Waking up, pain, constant conflict and struggle, terror, alertness, awareness of suffering: life. With the end of the show comes the end of Jack: death. The end of pain and suffering and struggle.

Rose and Bernard had it right in last season’s finale, “The Incident.” When Sawyer, Kate and Juliet ran into them and explained how they had to stop Jack or they all would die, Bernard shrugged and said, “So we die.” Rose and Bernard had already learned to let go.

— Even though this wasn’t the answer for the flash-sideways universe I would have written, I accept it. It was poetic and poignant. It worked for me. I respect Cuse and Lindelof’s choices.

That said… a bit too much deception and manipulation on their part. This whole season, it seemed like the flash-sideways world was a result of the nuclear bomb. In “Happily Ever After” (that episode title makes more sense now), I thought Widmore put Desmond into the electromagnetic chamber in order to make him see the flash-sideways universe, because Widmore somehow knew about it, and Desmond’s knowledge of it would somehow help save the island. I thought the flash-sideways characters and the real characters would somehow penetrate the barrier between their two worlds and help make things right. But it turns out there was no connection after all. Widmore put Desmond into the chamber merely to test his electromagnetic resistance and see if he could survive in the Heart of the Island in order to help save it, yes. But what happened to Desmond in the flash-sideways world in that episode wasn’t connected plotwise to what happened to him in the real world in that episode. I think.

But… Eloise wasn’t part of the group who created the flash-sideways purgatory. The group would have had to create her. But none of them knew that she had killed Faraday and that she would therefore not want to let go of that world. So… that didn’t really make sense. Actually, I guess Jack and Kate read Faraday’s journal in the Others’ tent in 1977, and could have pieced it together, right? So they could have known.

Still, I don’t know. Cuse and Lindelof were a bit too clever by half in their deception (or not clever enough?), and the execution was kind of sloppy. Doesn’t totally make sense as a story. But even if it didn’t totally work for me logically and intellectually, it worked for me poetically and emotionally. I don’t totally buy it, but I do accept it and love it for what it is, if that makes sense.

— I guess Ben wasn’t ready to let go. Still atoning? Wanting to spend more time with imaginary Danielle and Alex, even if he knew it was imaginary?

— I really lost it when Claire gave birth to Aaron and Charlie came back in and all of Claire’s memories of the two of them came flashing back. Full-on waterworks. Tears, sniffling, shortness of breath. It happened again to a lesser extent when Sawyer and Juliet reunited. Those moments were just incredibly sweet and touching and emotionally fulfilling.

— As I said on Twitter: Jack Shephard was the William Henry Harrison of Island protectors.

— I wonder what year Hurley and Ben finally died. How long did they protect the island? I want to see a show where they have eternal life and they eventually bring another group of candidates to the island who arrive in a futuristic robot plane or boat and they are cyborgs.

— So Shannon, not Nadia, is Sayid’s true love?

— I really want to know what happened to Sawyer, Kate and Claire when they left the island and got back to the real world. What did they do for the rest of their lives? Especially Sawyer. Did he spend the rest of his life alone, pining for Juliet, until he died?

— Took me a while to figure out what the ending meant, especially when I saw the shoe still stuck in the bamboo tree after all this time. First I thought the whole island experience had turned out to have been a figment of Jack’s imagination, and that he had actually died in the first few seconds of the pilot episode. But no, he wasn’t wearing the same clothes as in the pilot, and he saw the Ajira plane overhead, and of course if he died in the pilot, he would never have had the profound experiences with everyone on the island, and what his father said to him in the church (that they all created this purgatory/holding area together because they had their most significant experiences of their lives together) wouldn’t have made sense. (Nor would Ben’s conversations outside the church with Locke and with Hurley.)

— So… I liked the ending. Everyone together and happy. It gave me this nice and warm feeling: this tight group of people who had these transformative experiences together.

Lost is over. But I won’t be letting go of it for a long time.

R.I.P, Losties.

Lost ends on Sunday night, and I simultaneously can’t wait for the finale and don’t want the show to end. I’ve remained adamantly spoiler-free as to plot and guest stars, and I plan to keep it that way, but I’m really, really excited to see what happens.

I’ve loved the show for six years, but I’ve really immersed myself in it this season. While watching season six, I’ve also rewatched the first five seasons in order — all 103 episodes. I finished my rewatch a couple of weeks ago. (It helps that I work from home a few days a week; I’ve been able to knock one episode off during lunch and another one right after work, plus a few more at other times.)

It was a terrific experience. I hadn’t seen most of the episodes since they first aired; it was especially fun to rewatch season two, with the hatch and the button. And it was neat to watch earlier episodes knowing how things would later turn out. There were some interesting insights: for example, Jacob was first mentioned a lot earlier in the series than I’d remembered. And the convoluted timeline of the last few seasons was easier to follow the second time around: because I rewatched the episodes during such a compressed time period, it was easier to remember what was happening and keep the bigger picture in my head.

I was also shocked to realize how much of Lost I’d forgotten. There were a few scenes I literally couldn’t remember at all. Um, Juliet got branded on her lower back? (Part of the meandering season three.)

One thing I’ve paid more attention to the second time around has been the music. I’ve always loved Michael Giacchino’s beautiful score; Lost is rare in that it uses a full orchestra to record its score, rather than a synthesizer. But I never realized how complex that score is: there are so many different recurring themes for characters and plot situations. (One of my favorites is the mournful version of Ben’s theme, which is first heard during the Purge and recurs at various Ben-moments during the series.) I was thrilled to see that Alex Ross had a profile of Giacchino and his Lost scoring techniques in a recent New Yorker. Unfortunately, the full article isn’t online, but if you’re a fan of the music, you should find it and read it.

People like Lost for different reasons. They might like it because they want answers to the mysteries, or because they love the metaphysical issues it brings up, or because they love the characters, or because they like the cool way the narrative plays around with time, or because they like sci-fi or fantasy or adventure shows. This is a show with millions of fans, and clearly not everyone is going to like it for the same reasons.

For me, it has never been just about the mysteries. Although that has been a huge part of the fun, a show has to have more going for it than just a mystery. There’s a reason Lost succeeded while similar shows haven’t. For me, that reason is the characters. I’ve never been a big fan of Star Trek or Stargate-type shows because they’re usually less about character and more about techy sci-fi stuff. But I really enjoyed Battlestar Galactica, because it was about great characters and a greater mythology as much as it was a space opera. Lots of people were dissatisfied with how that show ended, because they didn’t like how the mythology came together, but I enjoyed it, because the character arcs mostly ended in satisfying ways.

What I learned from shows like The X-Files and Alias is that mystery serials will almost never be resolved satisfactorily. As Lost meandered through its third season and the mysteries only expanded, it seemed like the writers didn’t know where they were going. It was only after season three, when they gave themselves an end date, that things began to tighten up and the show got better again. (Shorter seasons also helped.)

But based on my previous experience with these types of shows, I’ve tried not to get my hopes too high for satisfying answers to all of Lost‘s mysteries. What I really care about are the characters. Jack has evolved from an arrogant skeptic into an almost mystical believer. Sawyer has changed from a reprobate into a more caring, loving person. Ben has been transformed from a scary, powerful man into a sad, sympathetic guy who has lost everything he had.

I’d really like to see a satisfying ending to everything on Sunday night. But if the mysteries don’t get fully resolved, I’ll be okay. As long as the characters all get satisfying endings, I’ll be happy.

God, I can’t wait.

Lost is my favorite show on TV, even though the final season so far has been a little slow and disappointing. But the other night it was practically unwatchable, because for nearly the entire hour there was this bright red “V” at the bottom of the screen along with a countdown clock, promoting an upcoming episode of, well, V. The first scene of the episode was tinted green, because the characters were being seen through night-vision lenses, which made the ugly red V stand out even more. This episode also had lots of subtitles and a couple of scenes where a character was writing on a pad, and some of the words were obscured:

[image via Alan Sepinwall]

The TV executive who came up with this idea should be fired, though it’ll never happen. I’m used to bugs by now, but, really? Bright red? It couldn’t at least have been translucent? And you needed to include a countdown? We don’t have clocks?

And apparently it worked, because now for an aside about V.

I watched the first episode of the V remake last fall and was underwhelmed. Perhaps I’d have liked it better if I hadn’t seen the original as a kid. First of all, on the new series, the characters refer to the aliens as “the V’s,” which is totally ridiculous because in the original story, “V” stood both for “Visitors” (the aliens) and for the hoped-for “victory” against them; it wasn’t their frickin’ nickname. But I guess in the 21st century we have to dumb everything down.

I also actively hated a couple of the characters. I haven’t watched the show since.

So some big stupid red V is not going to make me tune in to your stupid remake. Lost is practically a religious experience for some people — me included — and we don’t want any distractions. You want to put garbage on the screen during something like Dancing With the Stars that doesn’t require any brain cells, fine, but don’t interrupt me when I’m trying to watch Lost.

The Hulu.com version didn’t have the V at the bottom, but that would have required waiting a day and trying to avoid spoilers.

Here’s more on the stupid red thing. And Alan Sepinwall went on a long rant about it, which made me feel better because it meant I wasn’t alone in hating it.

I’m just waiting until the night my dreams start to have TV logos in the bottom corner. Dude, what if someday they invent a sleeping pill that has in-dream ads for cola and TV shows?