Et Tu, John Locke? LOST Season Finale

Spoilers lurk in the following paragraphs, so TiVoers and bittorrent fans beware...

Videos

Lost - Island of Silence

see larger video

sourced by Jordan Yerman

------

The third season of Lost has finally concluded, bringing with it the best episode of the year. Good thing, too, because they nearly lost me in the opening weeks of the season. The whole plane-crash survivors-vs.-Others storyline got rather repetitive: the Others are always smarter/better-organized/better-equipped than the ragtag bunch of cataways, blah-blah-blah. Missing from most of the season were the non-romantic plotlines: we got a lot of Charlie and Claire, Jack, Kate and Sawyer, Jack and Juliet, Juliet and Ben, Claudio and whatshername (did we ever care who these two were?), and all the emo that has accompanied them, but what about the life-and-death nuts and bolts of the story itself?

Photos

I want to be LOST

see larger image

uploaded by Graceº

• 

  uploaded by Graceº | add comment

• 

  uploaded by Nitevision | add comment

• 

  uploaded by stella nicholson | add comment

• 

  uploaded by parrao | add comment

• 

  uploaded by Jordan Yerman | add comment

Couples would trek into the jungle to carry on their dramatic duologues, forgetting about the black smoke, the mysteriously-occurring polar bears, and, well the Others, led by the brilliantly-deranged Ben. Rousseau? They only seemed to remember the hermetic French sniper running around the island when they needed her for the A-story. The Numbers? Forgotten like my high-school Calculus.
And along came the season finale. First of all, thank the island spirits that John Lock lives! He is, to me, the most compelling character on the show, as he as a vested interest in staying on the island forever. His life back in the real world was pretty much crap, and here he can walk, climb, swing, jump, and Weismuller around in the jungle, lord of his island kingdom. John Locke has always been my favorite character: a tough survivalist with the soul of a little boy who's been taken advantage of his entire life. He's willing to kill to stay on the island, just as the other castaways are desperate to leave.

Jack's daddy complex seems to drive him towards a rescue that , to be honest, wouldn't really help him: like Locke, Jack doesn't have much to look forward to back in Los Angeles.

For me, though, the real coup was the re-framing of the show. During the last three seasons, each episode chronicled the current events of the island intercut with flashbacks from a given character's past. This time, though, there was a twist: the flashbacks of a bearded Jack (who seemed to have borrowed Christian Bale's facial hair) going through a pills-and-booze phase... turned out to be the actual present, and the events on the island turned out to be in the past!

So the season ends with the viewers secure in the knowledge that at least some of the castaways left the island, though Jack wished he never escaped. The new mystery is, how did they escape? Who are the castaway's rescuers?

Also: Who are the others? What were they doing on the island? How come John Locke has Wolverine's healing powers? What are the numbers? What's the black smoke? Why do Sawyer and Jack fancy Kate so danged much? Is Juliet a ninja? Do the writers even have a plan? We have two seasons left in which to find out, and I hope that this last episode is the herald of a return to form for a show that was seriously losing its way.