Something interesting about last night’s two hour finale:  nothing really happened.  Don’t get me wrong, there were some BIG events that went down, with the Looking Glass being deactivated and all of that, but not two hours worth of events.  As a matter of fact, nothing largely significant happened in the first hour (when Idol was also on…coincidence?).  The value of the finale, though, doesn’t come from what happened, but what it all means.

If you’re here, then you have to have already seen the finale, so I’ll skip the step by step replay of what happened on the island (which can be summed up by saying that Locke lives, Charlie dies and the Losties are rescued) and jump to the important parts…the flashes (I’ll withhold from calling them flashbacks or forwards for the time being). 

Our time off the island is spent with Jack, who is in a very dark place in his life.  We open with him drunk on an Oceanic flight.  As the plane comes in for a landing in LA, he sees something that gets his interest in a newspaper.  Later, he stops his jeep on a bridge and makes a call, where he tries to leave a message, but breaks down and hangs up.  Jack crawls out of the car and climbs up on the railing of the bridge.  Whispering “Forgive me”, he is about to jump when there is a wreck on the bridge behind him.  He jumps down and goes to help.  Through the rest of his flashes, we find that he is a fraction of the man he once was…he can’t operate, he’s got a drug addiction, and he has some severe self-pity issues.

I’ll admit, I’m not the guy who is sitting through the episode trying to figure out where it’s going next.  But I did have a sneaking suspicion that something was not right.  When would Jack possibly have had time to take on the Tom Hanks in Castaway look, get hooked on drugs, then get offthose drugs again before he went back to the island?  And then comes the real twist…the flashes are in the future, or at least some variation of the future.  Our Losties have been rescued, and are going about their lives back in the real world.  At least Jack and Kate are, anyway.

So the first question, though hardly the most important…whose funeral was that?  The general consensus is that it is Ben’s, and I think I agree.  The thing that most people are pointing to is the fact that no one showed up…who would want to come to Ben’s funeral?  The thing that sold it for me, though was this:  when Jack made his first phone call, on the bridge in the first flash, I heard him say, “Annie, I just heard…”.  The name Annie should be familiar…that was Ben’s little girlfriend from his early days on the island back in “The Man Behind the Curtain”.  Could she have survived the purge that Ben wrought on the DHARMA workers, and then the two have met when they got back to the “real world”?  These two episodes were too close together for that to be a coincidence.

I’ve heard a few people saying that they expect that this was just a variation of the future, citing the fact that Jack mentioned his father a couple of times, and was using his father’s prescription pad for himself.  The latter can be explained away easily enough…he found an old prescription pad of his father’s, and just began to use it for himself.  As for the mentions that he makes of this father, it’s pretty obvious that he’s either delusional, or is just spouting some drunken ramblings.  I really feel like this is a definite vision of what happens in the future.

I think I’m going to cut the review off here.  This finale has enormous implications for the rest of the ‘Lost’ saga, and that discussion deserves its own post.  Check back for that later today.

I’m starting a rating scale, too.
Episode :  A-
Twist ending : A+