Preparing for “There’s No Place Like Home”
When Lost ends its fourth season tonight, it has a lot to live up to: not only is the show known for its mind-blowing finales, in particular its most recent one, but it is coming at the end of a season with a lot of momentum. It’s hard to deny that the show’s fourth season has been strong, and also that it has made the best of its shortened schedule. As a result, excuse me if I have high hopes for its end note.
Now, that’s not to say that I think tonight’s finale (airing at 9 EST on ABC, but I’ll be watching it at 6 EST due to the Canadian simulcast) will reach the heights of “Through the Looking Glass,” the stunning conclusion to last season. It’s the same logic I used in defending the slower pace of the season premiere, “The Beginning of the End,” to those who felt that it lost some of its momentum. This sentiment implies, falsely in my mind, that the only momentum the finale created was “OMG, Flash Forwards;” clearly, its success goes beyond that.
I love “Through the Looking Glass” because it feels like a high point in the show’s mythology while also feeling like the climax of a high-powered adventure film. As Michael Giacchino’s score ramps up, and as we get soaring helicopter shots of various travelers, there is something about it that feels epic and sweeping. In the weeks previous, they had set all of the moving parts in place: whether it’s the Looking Glass itself, the trip to the radio tower, the arrival of Naomi, Charlie’s sacrifice, Locke’s apparent death, or the beach ambush, a lot came to a head in that two hours simply on an action level. At the same time, of course, we ended on a realization that it was frakking with the show’s structure more than we ever bargained for.
Season Four, with only fourteen episodes, doesn’t seem like it should have had time to get to that point. After last year’s finale, there was a lot of questions, but the season has done a great job of developing a structure that best serves those questions on a dramatic level. No, they aren’t answering a question a week, but the future has done wonders for the show’s ability to create dramatic pathos. Flash forwards are intriguing in their own right, but their greatest benefit is providing build-in payoff to a season that (even shortened by the strike) that has every ability to feel like a complete ride in the process.
Yes, some flash forwards were better than others (Kate’s “Eggtown” probably being the weakest), but the sheer weight of the realization that the Oceanic Six leave the island created instantaneous tension for this finale. Even though the on-island action cannot possibly measure up to everything that Through the Looking Glass had on the table (Particularly in terms of the amazing meaning given to Charlie’s passing due to “Greatest Hits”), we have a different set of questions now: how, precisely, do they get from where we are (With various groups comprised of some Oceanic Six and some not) to where we know we end up (With six leaving the island and the rest…well, that’s an open question)?
Which is why this entire season is really the momentum of “Through the Looking Glass,” something that will likely never happen again in the series’ run. It created a scenario that is getting its first, but not last, payoff tonight, when we find out how the Oceanic Six emerge from the island, and how everyone else does not. But, of course, that is not to say there are not storylines to continue: what happens to those who stay behind? And, while it likely won’t be as game-changing as flash forwards, how might the structure of the show shift when five of its cast members are living off-island?
And thus, we end the season on the perfect note, one the series has hit multiple times this year, where character development and structural/mythological buildup are combined as opposed to separated. If anything, this has been the benefit of a shortened season: sure, there are disadvantages (We were robbed of spending more time getting to know someone like Charlotte, for example), but at the same time it meant that very few episodes were JUST character studies. What the season lacked in volume it had in quality, with episodes like “The Shape of Things to Come” providing a stunning investigation into Michael Emerson’s Ben while also introducing some fascinating information about the island history and future.
And the season even had time to blow our minds with something like “The Constant,” where time travel became not a flimsy excuse for the show’s madness but an intense interpersonal journey for one of the show’s characters. The result of episodes like this is that we get excited both for how the show will deal with this new element, and more importantly fascinating insights into Desmond, Faraday, and a romance of two people we almost never see together.
In that way, the season has done a lot of intriguing things: whether it’s time travel, the “rules” of the island, the Orchid, the cabin, or the nature of death on the island, the season has in a short time created a lot of questions. They might not be as big as the one the season started on, but in the process of fulfilling the potential of “Through the Looking Glass” they have managed to return Lost to a series with a narrative and character complexity that most other series on television should be extremely jealous of. It’s almost fitting that Lost is really the last network series to have its finale, free of any attempt at competition from the other networks.
Tonight, Lost is the only game in town, and I have high hopes that it will be another journey, if not through the looking glass this time around.
An extended version of last week’s part one of “There’s No Place Like Home” precedes the two-hour conclusion, starting at 8 EST on ABC and CTV (Except in eastern and western time zones). We’ll have a full review by around 10:45, so stay tuned!
Cultural Learnings 