Couple days late in tapping my keyboard about the season finale of Lost in large part because of the vast number of characters made dead. I almost can’t count that high. And if the episode’s still sitting on your DVR or VCR tape unwatched, move along because I gotta break down the massive carnage.
Let’s see. By far the greatest bulk of deceased stems from 10 of “the others” who took the bait in invading the survivors’ boobytrapped and deserted beachfront camp. Seven of ’em were dynamited at the outset of the attack and then later the other three were dispatched via a broken neck from a patented Sayid leg lock; a coldblooded bullet from Sawyer and the front end of a VW bus being piloted at speed by Hurley.
After that and in no real order I remember Locke (suffering little the effects of being gutshot at the end of the previous episode by Ben) showing up to throw a hunting knife with deadly accuracy into the back of “rescuer” Naomi (so long, we hardly knew ya); then there was the good chick/bad chick duo in the underwater station, both shot by the mysterious one-eyed dude on orders from Ben but who was then surprised and dispatched by Desmond armed with a crossbow.
But actually old cyclops wasn’t, and lived to die later (or did he?) pulling the pin on a grenade that sealed Charlie’s fate and sent him to Davey Jones’ locker (or did it?).
Did I forget anyone? Well, Jack did beat the tar out of Ben but didn’t kill him so… no. I think the final deathtoll from Wednesday’s show stands at 15. Heck of a bodycount!
Couple odd ends: Walt shows up to rally and rise Locke from where Ben left him to die. I don’t think we’ve seen the kid since the second season and though only 90 or so days have passed for the survivors of Oceanic Flight No. 815, on this side of the TV screen it’s been a couple/three years, the latter half of which is plenty of time for a prepubescent actor to have enough of a growth spurt to make him look hardly like the Walt we remember. Kinda jarring.
And in regards to the writers shuffling Charlie off, I’m troubled by what I see as a bad decision not to have him save himself… especially when the scribes gave him the opportunity to do so. When the not dead one-eyed guy surprisingly appears outside the underwater station porthole window as Charlie’s communicating with the “rescue” boat and pulls the pin on the grenade, Charlie — now armed with a new crucial bit of information to pass on to Desmond — has plenty of time to bolt out of the chamber to where Desmond is and pull the watertight door shut behind him before the explosion. But instead he remains in there and shuts the door between him and Desmond. When the boom breaks the window’s glass and water starts flooding into the now sealed room, he pulls out a pen and writes that aforementioned news nugget on his palm that he then places up against the watertight door’s window for Desmond to read. Desmond makes out the “Not Penny’s Boat” scrawled there and then Charlie drowns.
WTF? Why not just go to Desmond close the door, contain the water and tell him? Or hell, just tell him and then get the hell outta there back up to the ocean’s surface.
I suppose one could argue that as Desmond had foretold it was Charlie’s fate to die so that his beloved Claire and her child might live, and I’m fine with Charlie fulfilling that and sacrificing himself for whatever greater good, but the scene was rushed and there was no real moment of clarity provided in which Charlie makes that decision. He just ran to the door and shut it and then started scribbling on his hand. Feh.
And in regards to the one-eyed man with the crossbow arrow sticking through his chest, why go to all the trouble of swimming out of the station and finding the window to the chamber to blow up Charlie. His grenade would’ve worked just fine or better even lobbed at Desmond and Charlie from where things were dry and oxygentated.
Anyway, endgame glitches aside it was a great finish to a season that managed to keep me glued to the show despite a number of hitches throughout its run, and I’m looking forward to next year!
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