YNTE Movie Night: I'm not even sure this counts as a movie edition

...but since it was two and a half hours, I'm counting it.

For better or worse, "Lost" is over.

There will be spoilers ahead, so if you worry about that sort of thing you should probably stop reading.

The finale was pretty much your standard Lost fare. There were more questions than answers, the whole thing was left pretty ambiguous so that the internet could argue over what "REALLY" happened.

Basically, this season, they've been flipping back and forth between two different timelines. The one on the island and the "flashsideways", a world where their plane had never crashed on the island, and they all went on to eventually live pretty swell lives.

In the primeline, most of the cast is dead prior to this episode, but the surviving members fight and eventually kill the black smoke monster. Everyone (except for Jack, Hurley, and Ben) escape on a plane, even though they have no way of knowing where the island is and where civilization is in relation to it. Hurley is put in charge of the island, Evil Ben becomes his chief advisor, and Jack bleeds to death alone in the woods.

In the sideways world, it's revealed that everyone there has died, and were living out happy fantasy lives with each other before they "moved on". The entire cast (Even people who haven't been with the show since season one) smile and hug. It's basically a contrived plot point to give the show a "happy" ending.

The last two paragraphs took two and a half hours. There was a lot of filler.

It's important to point out that a good deal of the episode centered around the showdown between Jack and the Smoke Monster. They both believed that Desmond, due to his "special powers", would give them the upper hand. What are these special powers? THE ABILITY TO LIFT A ROCK OUT OF A HOLE.

It is perhaps also important to point out that Jack had to put the rock back in the hole later on, and despite not having desmond's magic rock powers, moved it just fine.

At no point was it fully explained what the island is, why it was SO IMPORTANT that it be protected, what the job of the protector really was, or what the mystical "rules" were that governed the job. They did spend a lot of time killing cast members to defend the island from the evil smoke monster who just wanted to leave, but couldn't due to the "rules". They also put a decent amount of focus on who that protector happened to be at any given moment, and how Hurley's first act as protector was changing the rules so people were allowed to leave now.

The whole thing was a big dramatic clusterfuck that took too long and only answered stupid pointless questions, while leaving the big important questions completely confusing. In short, it was pretty much like any other Lost episode, and kind of a fitting finale.

Did you see the finale and have an opinion? Leave your thoughts in the comments or shoot an email over to evan@jimmyandthehammer.com and I will post them up before the end of the month.