Mike Norton is awesome, and he proves it by summing up my greatest hopes for a spin-off of the just wrapped Lost, as part of his series of “Found” strips.
(Though, clearly the “Number One” and “Number Two” nomenclature suggests that it might turn into a different island altogether…)
I have stayed away from internet discussion of Lost the last few months intentionally, and tried to avoid completely the back-and-forth over the finale. My $.02 is that the finale was clearly the ending to the story that Lindelof and Cuse had been telling all these years, and while it wasn’t the ending that I would have written, it represents the most satisfying conclusion to all of the character arcs in the series of any long form serial television to date. I will acept that the ending might not have been to everyone’s taste, and I think that “I didn’t like that story” is an acceptable objection, but all of the naysayers who insist that the ending is somehow proof that they were “making it up as they went along” were watching a different TV series than I was (or, in many cases, often weren’t watching it at all). As for the mysteries that weren’t solved? It was clear by midway through the last season that the things many of us in the audience thought were important to the larger story really weren’t, and that many of the Big Mysteries were just set dressing. That said, I think that the show-runners intentionally left them open to interpretation, while at the same time putting enough evidence on screen for viewers to work out the solutions themselves. And if you think that six seasons of fantastic character and relationship drama is spoiled because you aren’t told exactly where that pallet of food came from in season two, you’re probably better off watching something else. As Linda Holmes said on the NPR site last week, “There comes a point where you are asking for the midichlorians…”