And in the end, they all died and went to heaven. The series finale of Lost brought us both back to the beginning and to the threshold of eternity. In one world, Armageddon was averted. In another world, we got the Rapture. The closing moments aspired to a twist ending: Sidewaysabad, a flawed matrix of good-enough contentment, wasn't an alternate reality at all but a psycho-spiritual virtual reality, a vast active living intelligence system (to borrow a phrase from Philip K. Dick's VALIS) created by the collective yearning of the castaways, an ethereal transfer station located at an unspecified junction between life and afterlife. All along, the Sideways characters have been shells, waiting for someone to ignite their soul's pilot light. And on the Pentecost Sunday, it was total ''FLAME ON!'' I thought ''The End'' was a fantastic though not flawless fantasy that stirred more of my emotions than my mind, and I was satisfied with that. The Jin-Sun awakening. The Sawyer-Juliet reunion. The John Locke resurrection. The preservation of The Island and the promise that it lives in our imaginations under the stewardship of big-hearted Hurley and his humble Number 2, Benjamin Linus. Under their regime, a new era of the soul awaits mankind, which I think was one of the big points of it all: Let us rediscover and reinvent spirituality for a new generation that finds it's both too easy to fall for dubious ideas and too hard to believe in anything. I loved the opening montage, the crosscutting between the Island and Sideways characters as they awaited destiny. And I thought the final 10 minutes — which toggled between Island Jack's last moments of life with Sideways Jack's launch into the afterlife aboard The Ark of the Castaway Covenant — were pretty close to perfect. The final episode was a very personal work of its writers, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. I am grateful for the story they chose to give us.
In a way, this really was the zombie season of Lost after all, wasn't? The Sideways world was a Bardo, a kind of Tibetan Book of the Dead intermediate state. It was... Purgatory theory come true! All pause for laughter — and all pause to appreciate the point Lost hammered home all episode long. The Island world was real. Everything that happened on that damn rock mattered. We worried at the beginning of the season that five years of investment would be squandered by a time reboot. Nope. We worried the messy redemption struggles of each soul would be cheapened by Jughead's clean and easy atomic whiteout. Nope. ''Whatever happened, happened,'' Jack told Desmond, admonishing the idealistic Scot for his wanting cheap, painless shortcuts to salvation. Still, what did the Sideways world mean? And was it truly dramatically necessary to Lost? Some thoughts to come.
NEXT: Man of finale, man of faith?
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