Linkmeister

EW on Lost (Part Two)

Doc Jensen has been writing about the show for a long long time; most of the EW links I've been posting for this season go to his essays. Here's his day-after recap, after the initial one I linked to below.

Here's how he explains the Sideways world:

We had learned from Christian that the castaways had become — or always were — bonded on a spiritual level, a ''soul cluster'' to use a phrase given to me by a reader whose name I'll credit in a later column when I can dig up the correct e-mail. This cluster was a living thing unto itself, and a thing with great power. It had the ability to create a world, the Sideways world, from which they could meet anew after death and journey together into whatever comes next.

He admits, however, that that explanation doesn't quite persuade him.

And yet, I can't say the Sideways device totally worked for me. I wanted to get lost in Lost during its last 18 hours. But the Sideways conceit often left me standing outside of it, trying to figure out what it was all about. It's kinda hard to emotionally connect with people when wondering if they're also, like, ''real.'' In the end, I think it was asking too much of us to buy into a creatively uneven season-long storyline whose purpose only revealed itself in the last moments of the finale. The Sixth Sense was awesome. The Sixth Sense stretched over 18 hours? A much tougher magic trick, and Lost didn't quite pull it off.

I disagree. After a day or two of thinking about it, it pulled it off enough for me.

Posted by Linkmeister at May 25, 2010 03:46 PM | TrackBack