It all started out so promisingly. Season four was easily the show’s strongest season (by a mile). It looked like the writers really did have a plan and knew what they were doing. So when the fifth season opened with most of the remaining castaways stuck in 1977 and a few in the present, I thought I was in for a pretty interesting journey to where their paths would eventually cross. Instead, all I got was a whole lot of nothing. Sure the writers spend all kinds of time answering many of the little questions that were left unexplained in last season’s finale (who beat up Ben, how Hurley knew which flight to get on, why Kate came back, etc.), but the fifth season has precious little narrative momentum.
Here’s the plot of all seventeen episodes in a nutshell: In the present, John Locke is back from the dead. He leads the Others to Jacob. Jack, Sawyer and everyone else are in the past. They try not to let anyone find out they’re from the future, fail, then concoct some harebrained scheme to try to alter history. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. It’s like the terrible, meandering, creatively bankrupt, middle episodes of previous Lost seasons writ large.
What’s really disappointing, though, is that no matter how terrible the middle parts of any of the past seasons were (I’m looking at you, seasons two and three), the finales were always outstanding. It was like the writers were holding back all the good stuff so they could cram it into the last few episodes. The three-parter that closed the second season (wherein the hatch blew up and the Others kidnapped Jack, Kate and Sawyer) was as good as this show ever got. The three-parter that closed the third season (wherein the castaways ambush the Others and it’s revealed that some of them do make it off the island) almost redeemed what was otherwise a very uneven season. And the two-parter that closed the fourth season (wherein all the questions about the Oceanic 6 and the freighter were answered) was the highlight of the series’ only front-to-back great year.
So even though the first dozen or so episodes of season five had been pretty terrible, I still had high hopes for the finale. Even in the fourteenth episode, when Daniel Faraday starts talking about some crazy idea to detonate a nuclear warhead in order to erase the last three years of everyone’s lives and make it so that their plane never crashed on the island, I still held out hope. I thought the writers couldn’t really be so stupid as to actually hang the finale on such a transparently absurd idea. And when they killed Dan, the only character who could conceivably know how to detonate a hydrogen bomb, at the end of episode 15, I figured they had come to their senses. But then, two scenes into the first episode of the two-part finale, it became clear that that’s exactly what the writers had in mind. Dan, you see, ‘left detailed notes in his journal.’ So Sayid and Jack are going to blow the thing up and alter history so that Oceanic flight 815 doesn’t crash by reading Dan’s helpful instruction manual.
I can understand why Sayid, still heartbroken over finding and then losing the woman of his dreams, would want to erase the last three years and start over with another shot at finding Nadia. But with Jack, the writers have turned him into such a pompous, stubborn douchebag that I have no idea what his motivation could possibly be. His life was awful when he got on the plane in Australia and it’s awful now. Why doesn’t he just kill himself? It would accomplish pretty much the same thing without having to detonate a nuclear warhead. For that matter, I don’t know why Kate and Sawyer (who came back to the island to stop Jack’s insane plan) didn’t just shoot him. In fact, I was really really hoping someone would just put a bullet between the asshole’s eyes.
I don’t know that I’ve ever hated a character more than I do Jack at the end of season five (including the incomparably awful Claire and the stupendously dull Charlie). And I don’t think I’ve ever cared less about a love triangle than I do the Jack-Sawyer-Kate one that plays a major role in this episode. I haven’t cared about which of these two get together since episode one (probably because Evangeline Lilly has no talent whatsoever, but that’s neither here nor there) and I can’t imagine how anyone could. After the third season, I thought the writers themselves had started to feel this way and decided to go in another direction (pairing up Sawyer and Juliet on the island and letting Jack and Kate compete to see who could be the bigger charisma vacuum back in the real world). But no, they were just holding it back so it could re-emerge in the middle of what is probably the show’s single worst episode.
Over its first few years, there were some episodes of Lost that were real clunkers, so I don’t make the claim that the finale of season five was the worst episode ever lightly. But any episode that culminates in what I can only assume is an homage to the Sarlacc pit sequence in Return of the Jedi where everyone tries to avoid getting pulled into a hole by various metal objects (chains, railings, scaffolding, etc.) is so creatively bankrupt and so poorly executed that it has to at least be in contention for the title of worst ever. Why Lost would make an extended reference to a Star Wars movie that has no thematic relevance, I have no idea. Why they would shoot it like a horror movie, I also have no idea. Whatever the writers’ reasons were, the whole sequence is just awful. And the rest of the episode, in which Locke ‘tricks’ Ben into killing Jacob, is just as ludicrous. Everyone involved in creating this nonsense should be embarrassed.
The problem with the whole detonate-a-nuclear-warhead-to-erase-the-last-three-years idea is that no one in the audience wants it to work. If Jack and Juliet (who’s on Jack’s side for some unfathomable reason) are successful in changing the past so that Oceanic 815 never crashes on the island, everything that we’ve watched for the last five seasons would be undone. All that time would have meant nothing. And while you might (maybe rightly) claim that time spent watching this show is a waste anyway, I don’t think the writer would agree. They invested so much effort in making Sawyer into a leader and hero, a person who’s come to terms with his past and is now, finally, in place where he can be happy. The bomb would undo that. Jin and Sun-- who’ve become closer than they ever were before (even though they’re now separated by thirty years)-- would go back to the cold, unhappy couple they were when we first met them. Kate would be back in handcuffs on her way to prison for the rest of her life. And on and on. There’s just no way, as a viewer, to root for that to happen. Thus, the audience is in the position of hoping that what the characters are trying to do fails. And because of that, the finale becomes perhaps the most frustrating episode the series has yet produced.
So the finale is the most haplessly written, poorly shot episode of the series as well as being, from a viewer’s standpoint, its most annoying and frustrating. Frankly, at this point, I really don’t care to watch another episode of this series. I will, of course, just to see it all the way through to the end. But to go from being really excited about the possibilities of where this series could go at the end of the season four to being so deeply disappointed in it at the end of season five is something of an accomplishment. Lost burned through four seasons of good will in just seventeen episodes. If it weren’t so disappointing, it’d be sort of impressive.
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