Finale wrap-up: "Lost"

Mysterious clues, competing philosophies and tempers collide in a heart-stopping, unforgettable second-season finale.

By Heather Havrilesky

Read more: Lost, TV, Season Finales, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Heather Havrilesky, Series & Season Finales (2006)

Naveen Andrews, Matthew Fox and Josh Holloway

May 25, 2006 | While the headlines focused on the millions of Americans anxiously awaiting the finale of "American Idol" last night, an equally rabid group of fans were frothing at the mouth in anticipation of the two-hour finale of ABC's drama series "Lost." Thanks to a suspenseful second season punctuated by increasingly provocative clues and a few unexpected and devastating plot twists, followers of this multilayered, character-driven drama were already working themselves into a lather when the show's creator, J.J. Abrams, busted out some seriously grandiose proclamations about the finale, calling it "incredible" and "the greatest finale I have ever heard [of]."

Those are mighty strong words to describe a show about a bunch of pretty castaways stranded on a tropical island. But what looked like a slow-moving, character-based monster drama back in the fall of 2004 has evolved in its second season into a dynamic and intriguing maze of story lines, competing ideologies and hidden messages. The last few episodes of the season, in particular, featured some deeply unsettling new developments, from Michael's shocking murder of Ana Lucia and Libby to Locke and Eko's discovery of another hatch, "The Pearl," in the island's interior. While at first it was easy to assume that Michael had been brainwashed by the Others, we learned last week that he had simply struck a deal with them to get his son Walt back. But what did Walt mean when he told Michael that the Others were "pretending"? And did the newly discovered hatch, which was apparently set up to monitor and observe the other hatches, suggest that the button-pushing and the countdowns in the survivors' hatch were all just part of some elaborate experiment in human behavior?

With all of these questions hanging in the air, it seemed tough to imagine a final episode that would provide some satisfying answers, but still leave enough doors open that anticipation for the next season would be stronger than ever. Amazingly, the writers delivered just that, a finale as suspenseful as it was heartbreaking, and the speculation as to the meaning of it all, on blogs and in fan forums and among friends, has grown to a fever pitch, encompassing everything from experimental psychology to Greek mythology to electromagnetism.

Of course, despite the rampant conjecture, the most fascinating aspect of "Lost" lies not in the mysteries of the island, but in the competing philosophies of its inhabitants. Whether the island is a giant magnet or an elaborate invention created by the Hanso Foundation, what we're witnessing, most importantly, is a microcosm, a tiny reproduction of the human experience over the course of history, with each character representing a different approach to the struggle for meaning.

To say that "Lost" is character-driven doesn't really begin to do justice to the layers and layers of influences, personal traumas, and constructed meanings each survivor arrives with on the island. In most dramas, "character-driven" can stand for psychological profiles as shallow as "Sipowicz is a former alcoholic who doesn't like surprises or emotional outbursts" or "Mackey often plays father figure to needy women." On "Lost," characters not only have intense, emotionally taut back stories, which we witness with our own eyes, but their experiences are rarely one-note: They're offered chances at redemption and they refuse them, they're afforded opportunities to set the past straight or to escape their obsessions, and they get distracted or come up short, they struggle with compulsions and obstacles and bad habits that remain as confusing and uncertain to us as they are to them. On top of that, we see each character's worldview, explicit or implicit, forming from this soup of confusion, guilt and hope for the future. This final piece to the puzzle -- the structure of a character's thoughts, the ideology a person forms in order to give a sense of order to a dismayingly chaotic world -- is at the heart of every conflict we see unfolding on the island.

Next page: Jack and Locke, always at odds; Kate, tough to parse