Movie Gazette

Season Six of “Lost” has been the subject of much criticism from both longtime fans and more casual viewers as being, somehow all at once, too complicated and to simplified. I, for one, think that as a season, though it did at times feel as if the show was wasting precious episodes as the clock ticked down, it also produced some of the show’s finest episodes, along with a finale that still has people blogging their little fingers off.

As the finale loomed on the horizon, I decided that I needed to wrap my head around something to make the season—and the series—a big cohesive narrative, so I went with the idea of faith, hope, and love. More than any other season, faith was at the forefront, courtesy of former skeptic scientist Jack. We’ve seen faith before in various incarnations from Richard, Ben, and Locke, but Jack’s is different. The faith we’ve seen from others was never really a faith by choice, in that each of the faithful were, in a sense, using the island (or whatever) to fill something or regain something. Jack has lost many things and is, just like everyone on the island, seeking some form of redemption, but his faith, as shown in one of the season’s standout episodes “The Candidate,” that no, we aren’t going to blow up, is unmotivated by servitude. During the mythos-explanation episode “Across the Sea,” we learn that Jacob had no choice as to his fate as the island’s protector, and choice is the ultimate basis of faith.

Hope, as represented in the “Lost”-iverse, appeared in Season Six in the form of the Sideways World. Not a flashback or a flash-forward, this parallel universe is where we saw the Losties in the lives they would’ve had if only it weren’t for that darn crash. We got to see them in intersecting existences that, of course, we come to understand in “The End.” Two of the best of the season’s episodes—“The Substitute” and “Dr. Linus”—centered around the Sideways realities of John Locke and Ben Linus, respectively, and offered some fine performances from Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson.

This brings us, like all things eventually do, to love. Lindelof and others have pretty much said that, in the “Lost” universe, just like in the Bible and The Beatles, all you need is love.  Once you make your way through all the science and mythos and polar bears of six consistently good seasons, it’s the love these people have for each other that, in those final hours, draws them together. Jin and Sun, Jack and Kate, Sawyer and Juliet, Hurley and Libby, Sayid and Shannon, Charlie and Claire—in the end, they all had to let go of whatever was tying them down, and they had to find their constant. The arguments will go on and on, but for this character fan, Season Six was an up and down ride that ended with a finale of beauty.