Remember when Lost was maybe about Dinosaurs?

Lost ends this Sunday, that’s in ONE day! One day to re-watch anything and everything before the finale! CAN YOU DO IT? It’s a sad realization. Not just because we’re losing Lost, but because this marks the end of an era. It’s true. TV networks aren’t taking chances like this anymore, so the likelihood of seeing another show like this isn’t huge. We have moved on to reality TV as a nation. And even if there are lots of us looking out of our plane windows longingly, too many are content to watch the Kardashian’s yap at each other.

There are some who want a quick recap, they say “Hey, what is Lost about?” There’s mythology and magic and religion and … there’s a lot. The people running the show say that it’s a character study. Long gone our the theories that there are dinosaurs on the island, or that they’re all dead or in purgatory. We’ve gone through those easier explanations (yes, those were the easy ones!) and delved deeper into questions of science, faith, and right and wrong.

The thing I’ve finally realized now, is that the series was not about having patience to figure out the end game (a phrase popular in the J.J. Abrams show Alias, for sure). It was about living (vicariously) through the journey. The destination wasn’t the island, and the destination we’ve sought hasn’t been just to get back to the island, or to leave it. The destination doesn’t matter at all. Whether every single person on the show ends up dead tomorrow, or they all end up alive – what matter’s is what brought them to that point. You could say that every season of Lost changed drastically. It did. At least I think so.

But that’s what was great, and that’s what kept us interested. You don’t have to go back and re-watch seasons, just because you know more now. The purest and simplest way of enjoying those early seasons was just as they were unfolding – how everyone had theories, how everyone was talking and thinking about all of these things that they otherwise wouldn’t. TV doesn’t make people think very often. Cheers to a series that did.