Lost (Possible Spoilers)

It's soooo difficult for me to stay away from spoilers right now. This season was the only season where I was spoiled for pretty much every episode. For the past episodes, nothing huge was ever given away early via spoilers. The only one I remember reading that I wished I hadn't was about the sub explosion and who dies. Regardless, I want to go into the Finale completely blind.

Some Final Predictions:

• Aaron will not turn out to have anything to do with the end game.
• However, Ji Yeon will
• The Flash-Sideways will be an epilogue of sorts
• Jack will sacrifice his Flash-sideways life, and son to continue to protect the Island (I believe this was the point of Dogens story, foreshadowing)
• Desmond will end up being more important than we all think.
• The Island will turn out to be the back of a giant time traveling intergalactic sea turtle.

That is all. see ya on the other side.

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" I see in your eyes, the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, whe we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. May and hour of wolves and shattered shields before the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day! This day we Fight! For all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand men of the west!!"
-Aragorn: The Lord of the Rings the Return of the King

giant time traveling intergalactic sea turtle.

Nice stuff. I particularly like the Dogen comparison. Very nice observation. Re: the turtle. You know, Darlton (in their final podcast) teased readers who wrote in to ask about the significance of the turtle on the beach. But with that comment, it makes me think it was a deliberate reference to "turtles all the way down." Specifically directed at people who want firm answers.

Finale predictions! Some bolder than others, naturally.

• Something big -- and probably bad -- is going to happen at that concert.
  
• The Losties will fail to kill MiB, making Desmond's "failsafe" option necessary. It will involve his immunity to electromagnestism -- probably to the tune of having him walk into The Source, possibly sacrificing himself in the process.
  
• The ending will not constitute the ending of a loop, or a cycle. The ending will represent an actual end. I think this was foreshadowed by Jack asking "how long will I have to do this job?" The question will eventually look ironic, because the answer will end up being: not very long.
  
• Juliet will be revealed to be David's mom, and it'll be clear that she already knows what's going on.
  
• John Locke is going to be a big flippin' deal. He's too important to the show to go out the way he did. He may exert his influence via Alt-Locke, or by still being "inside" of MiB and influencing him somehow.
  
  Longer shot: his influence may be merely through Jack's memory of him, as he's more or less taken his place. But the more removed we are from Locke's direct, literal influence, the more the show will play up the symbolic influence. He's going to go out with style.
  

Re: Aaron. I'm defiantly holding out hope. If I had to bet, I'd say that Aaron will still play a role. That said, Aaron's significance might actually about Claire: that she'll have to make a choice, and the prophecy of sorts about her son will cause her to make the right choice. A little abstract, but enough to satisfy the mystery.
I had more, but I wrote them down on a different computer and won't be able to get at them until Monday, at which time I'll only post the ones that ended up being right.

After last episode reveal of what makes a Candidate, i think David's presence in FS has become a lot more relevant. I hope it will come down to Jack making a choice between the two, however that will work. What i'd like to see is Jack have his FS life and Locke move into OT to defeat MiB and have his destiny. I guess Desmond will be the one to facilitate this all.

I think all the talk of loops and ending how it started is because people misunderstood the term 'loophole'. It may end with Jack opening his eye and reliving a similar scene with another major character but in a different situation, it won't be a scene for scene of Jacob in The Incident

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i really think there gonna end it bad, i think they started something they didnt know how to finish.

Don't you dare say such things!

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Fear the Probe!

i do season 1 good
season 2 good
season 3 good
season 4 bad
season 5 wtf is going on
season 6 wtf is going on

they just went silly with it

Two hours to go! I'll be away from the 'Net (mostly intentionally) the rest of the night and probably not be back until tomorrow morning, at which point I'm sure a lot of us will have quite a few thoughts. See you guys on the other side.

I've decided to stay up for the 2am live stream, god hoping it works. Just been playing catch up watching last 3 eps

Only 58 minutes away now. So excited!!!!

Yoda and Lady C are here! We are READY!!!! Half an hour away now!

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Linda's Author Website
Linda's Amazon Author page

Weak

Wow.
That was epic.
Every single 'moment of clarity' scene was…

I was hoping the last 5 minutes would have been different though.
Was hoping it all meant something else but they decided on a different explaination.

What a load of ********. How can they do that to all the fans. Wait a minute, though, is Ben not dead because he didn't go inside the church? It's still a pretty annoying ending.

Agreed. The episode was grand in scale. I will miss this show terribly . As for the ending and the show's explanation I cant believe they went that route. My brother in law first of all had the thought of them ending up where they did since season 2. He'll be in shock when he finds out he had the whole thing down pat haha
But seriously though, They should have done it differently though. I was a little miffed. Surprised but miffed. They could have wrapped it up though using the destruction /sinking of the island ... showing us the something at least because the scene in the premiere then was just merely useless. IDK... having them where they ended up to me seemed to be just a last minute to do. Maybe that's why the show was made to last 2 and a half hours instead of just 2 hours at the last minute.

Yes Ben died

Oh and I did always think they were in Purgatory. Even said it a few times in this thread in the past....Even though Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse said it wasn't for 6 years and then took that way out.

SPOILERS in case anyone looks before seeing it...

Yeah.
Pretty sure his not going "into the light" meant he remains in purgatory for his sins.

And I agree it seemed like a last minute ending.
The one thing fans did NOT want to see is that they were all dead…
"Hey, gang, here's an idea… For the very end, instead of an alternate timeline which would fit in with everything else so far -- Let's make them all be dead!"

At least we might get a decent ending on the DVD alternates.

Well I wouldn't hold your breath. They only shot one ending. :/

jrs, you didn't have it nailed since season 2. They were NOT dead or in purgatory on the island. That was real life. (Christian came right out and said that.) They were in a sort of limbo in the flash-sideways parts, but NOT on island-time at ALL. That was real-life. That's how we saw Jack actually die at the tail end.

So no, technically, you didn't call it and technically, the producers were right in saying that the island was not purgatory or heaven and that the Losties were not dead on the island.

The island was merely a place where they made really good friends to help them through into the afterlife and where they apparently worked out their issues before they died.

I'm not happy with the ending -- but mostly because it makes half of this final season (the flash sideways stories) all pretty much fake. None of THAT was real. It was this strange transitional phase of their existences -- but yet it had story and detail and characters in it that just don't matter in the broader scheme of the story. So, Jack's son in his transitional period was merely there as a way to help him learn to let go and move on. Etc. etc.

Considering what the flash sideways stories were (limbo transitions), they spent too much time on them this season. I was always far more interested in the island stories this past season and had hope only during the past few episodes that the flash sideways stuff might actually MEAN something.

I was saying at the start of tonight's finale that the two timelines (island timeline, flash sideways timeline) were like split ends of a hair and that it seemed they were going to meld them back together somehow. At one point Yoda and I were sure (as Yoda caught Hurley saying to Ben outside the church, "You were a great second in command") that this meant the flash sideways stuff was in the future, but that they had somehow forgotten things. Or something like that.

We actually liked what Jimmy Kimmel said at the beginning of his post-finale show: That the real story was Jack's all along, including the transitional flash sideways stuff. In other words, the whole point was so that Jack could learn to let go and transition over. And that Rose was the first one to try to get him to let go (on the plane in the flash sideways) ... although even that slightly better, more focused explanation falls apart when you realize that we saw way too much flash sideways story (of other people) for that transition period to be mostly about Jack.

And yes, everyone in the Flash Sideways stuff (the characters in and around the church) was dead, including Ben. He just wasn't ready to go to the afterlife yet. He hadn't quite worked out all his issues, apparently.

I tend to dislike cheap, fake, all-inclusive theology that is so watered down that it's no theology at all -- so this ending feels cheap to me. Perhaps I will feel differently tomorrow (it's only half an hour after Kimmel's show ended), but I think if I rewatched this final season right now, I'd find nearly all the flash-sideways stuff annoying and overwrought with details we never needed -- details that were there only to distract us from the actual ending so we would be surprised.

Ehhh -- as I said to Yoda: This has been done before ... and much better ... in "The Sixth Sense."

Oh, and something I had trouble expressing to Yoda and Lady C is something she finally put into much better words: The ending we got didn't fit in properly with the huge, larger mythos we've been fed for six years. That is, the ending (they're all dead and in a limbo and need to accept that they're dead and move on) is actually trite, non-science-fictiony, and has been done a million times before. Very ho-hum compared to the strange and fascinating world that is the island of Lost.

So, they almost SIDESTEPPED all the good/evil, black/white, light/power of the island stuff completely and made the entire island experience -- as a supernatural place -- irrelevant to the ending of the series. Because everybody dies and the theory that we use loved ones to 'cross over' is hackneyed. We've ALWAYS been more fascinated with the story behind the island -- why was it this way? how did it get this way? what else could it do? what were the rules here?

And it was as if in this last episode, especially the last hour or so, they totally sidestepped all that amazing, crazy story and went for a typical friendship-conquers-all ending that had virtually NOTHING to do with this insane island that had the potential of affecting the entire world. The island didn't have to have ANY of those properties, really, in order for the characters to have gotten where they ended up. They just needed to be in one place fighting off bad circumstances in order to grow and let go of their issues -- but it didn't have to have a smoke monster and polar bears and electromagnetism, etc. etc. etc. That crazy, fascinating stuff was rendered virtually unimportant in the last 15 minutes... and not in a satisfying way because the real story superceded all the craziness.

So, I feel let down. The big questions about the island weren't TRULY answered. They were sidestepped.