I’ll still defend the ‘worst TV finale ever’ 15 years later

I’ll still defend the ‘worst TV finale ever’ 15 years later

I completely missed Lost while it aired in real time.

I’d only just started high school when it eventually reached the UK in 2005 – despite starting a year earlier.

And when it came to a close in 2010, I was lost somewhere down a Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad rabbit hole. 

However, despite being entirely ignorant of the show, I still heard the taunts about its supposedly lacklustre finale.

The series had apparently piled up mysteries and questions it didn’t know how to resolve, its cerebral science-fiction had slowly descended into wishy-washy fantasy guff, and, of course, the big one: It was all a worthless endeavour because the characters were dead the whole time (something the show’s creators have consistently refuted).

After heeding those warnings for several years, I eventually watched Lost during the pandemic and – as I wept throughout its 100-minute bumper finale – I realised that a lot of people who claimed to have watched Lost, and had been dissing the ending for a decade, clearly hadn’t been paying full attention.

Fifteen years on, it’s time to call the Lost finale what it is: The greatest final episode of any TV show from the 21st century. And possibly of all time.

Instantly gripping, Lost followed the survivors of flight Oceanic 815 that crashed on a mysterious island. Initially a sci-fi survival drama, Lost quickly became a plate-spinning, super-ambitious TV megahit. A fantasy-mystery-action-adventure series all in one, with numerous strings attached to its resplendent bow. 

But throughout its run, above all else, Lost prioritised the characters at the centre of its story. Its fully-formed, beautiful, truly unforgettable characters. No matter how lofty and complicated things got, the incomparable ensemble cast kept everything grounded.

Jack (Matthew Fox), the headstrong doctor with daddy issues. Kate (Evangeline Lilly), the restless fugitive. Sawyer (Josh Holloway), the distrusting con man. Hurley (Jorge Garcia), the superstitious lottery winner with an eating disorder.

John (Terry O’Quinn), whose working legs were Lost’s first true miracle. Charlie (Dominic Monaghan), the washed-up rockstar with a tender heart. Sayid (Naveen Andrews), an ex-torturer with a guilty conscience. Claire (Emilie De Ravin), the innocent 22-year-old mum-to-be. And so, so many others. 

Its character-centric flashbacks weren’t a storytelling gimmick – they were a constant reminder of the broken lives these people had endured before coming to the island, and they repeatedly asked Lost’s central question: Can broken people learn to fix themselves?

Lost’s finale stands above all others because it shoots for something incomprehensibly huge and sticks the landing.

Despite all the smoke monsters, time flashes, complicated physics, and eerie orientation videos, Lost was a show about the human condition at its heart. It often wondered aloud whether people, both as individuals and as a species, deserve a second chance.

We watched as the survivors talked to ghosts and resurrected people, pressed the same button every 108 minutes, blew up a nuke in 1977, and also fixed up a camper van – but the survivors themselves were always the driving force, and their journeys towards personal healing were of utmost importance.

‘The final was and remains, perfect’ 

Which is why the finale was, and remains, perfect. Season six’s parallel flashes – which ostensibly showed what would have happened if Oceanic 815 had never crashed – are revealed to be an afterlife, created by the survivors’ souls so they could be reunited in the great beyond.

For its very final statement, Lost proudly wore sentimentality and spirituality on its sleeve and bravely argued that not only is there a place after death, but that we make that place ourselves by loving the people we love. These broken characters fixed each other over the course of the show.

There was no better character to communicate this than Jack Shephard. A stubborn man of science and scepticism, Jack was afflicted with a need to fix everything – except himself.

Jack was afflicted with a need to fix everything – except himself

By the end, he believes in the magic of the universe, basks in the love of the people around him, and knows he’s heading somewhere better when he dies.

In other words, he fixes himself.

As each character ‘wakes up’ in the afterlife, remembering that they were real and that they had been on the island, the mysteries of the show – and all its apparently unanswered theories – vanish. Pride for the life each character has lived, and belief in the afterlife they’re about to experience, are all that matter.

Not only because so many fan theories had already been definitively answered several times, but because they weren’t the point anyway.

Much like life itself, Lost threw a bunch of folks into a predicament, watched on as they tried to overcome some plot hurdles, and then told us that the seemingly little things – like fixing that Dharma van or playing jungle golf – were providing the big story answers all along. 

Just like in our own lives, the meaning of each passing day on the island would become clear to the characters eventually, so long as they made peace with themselves and enriched the lives of others before the end. That’s the difference between plot and story – the plot is the stuff characters do, the story is who they become as a result.

‘Lost’s finale shoots for something incomprehensibly huge’

Writers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse also suggested with the finale that, whether it’s a benevolent god, an unknown entity, or a man-made energy, a greater force connects us to those we love. And it saves this argument for the very end.

What other TV show was brave enough to save its big philosophical mission statement for last? What other TV show still had something so valuable to say after almost 100 hours?

And what other show dared to break the fourth wall with its finale, telling us that not only were the characters vitally important to each other’s lives, but that they were vitally important to our lives too, as viewers?

Lost’s finale stands above all others because it shoots for something incomprehensibly huge and sticks the landing. It successfully presents a worthy explanation of the meaning of life, arguing that it’s to make peace with your own death.

And how do you accept, as Jack’s father Christian Shephard (John Terry) says, that ‘Everyone dies some time, kiddo’? By righting your wrongs and fixing yourself. That’s a philosophy to live by in this life and take into the next one.

The finale is proof, too, of the magic of TV and longform storytelling – that, as a medium, TV is capable of producing a soul-bearing treatise on human existence, spirituality, the possibility of there being something beyond our world, and everything that makes us who we are.