The Daily Beast: "Secrets of Lost Revealed on New DVD" (a.k.a. My Thoughts on "The New Man in Charge")
Today, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment released both Lost: The Complete Collection and Lost: The Complete Sixth and Final Season on DVD and Blu-ray. The box sets contain the latest--and possibly last--in-canon adventures of the Lost cast via the twelve-minute epilogue entitled "The New Man in Charge," which stars Michael Emerson, Jorge Garcia, and... Well, that would be telling.
Over at The Daily Beast, I discuss "Lost: The New Man in Charge" as well as my thoughts about the strength or weakness of the epilogue as a narrative outgrowth of the series in a piece entitled "Secrets of Lost Revealed on New DVD."
Plus, I check in with fellow television critics and writers Maureen Ryan (now of AOL Television), Entertainment Weekly's Jeff "Doc" Jensen, Time's James Poniewozik, and New York Magazine's Emily Nussbaum to see their reactions to the Lost epilogue, how it fits in with the contentious ending of the series itself, and its effects on the legacy of the series.
Head to the comments section to discuss your take on the epilogue and whether it gels with your need for answers or whether you feel that the creative team should have left well enough alone.
Lost: The Complete Sixth and Final Season DVD retails for $59.99 (or get it on Amazon for $37.99), while Lost: The Complete Collection has a suggested retail price of $229.99 (or $148.99 on Amazon).
Comments
(I have to believe that's the last time anyone does that for a while...)
Apropos of the finale itself, my reaction to the epilogue (which I prefer to think of as a FLASH-AFTER rather than an actual alternate ending) was somewhat mixed.
In a lot of ways it illustrated the difficulty of balancing the need to withhold information versus offering so-called 'answers' to the show's mysteries. Personally I'm a lot less interested in answers than in closure, which are different things entirely. And I do wonder if Darlton and Co. intermittently confused the two as they got closer towards the finale. Answers can be blurted out, closure cannot.
In this respect I quite enjoyed the Walt scene because I thought it offered some much-needed closure to Walt's storyline, which was pretty clumsily shunted aside due to the actor's inconvenient tendency to keep, you know, aging in real time. Even though I could've inferred as much on my own, there was still something dramatically satisfying about seeing him invited back to the island, perhaps as a potential candidate, as it managed to rescue all those earlier Walt scenes from complete and utter irrelevance.
As for the Dharma video, perhaps the less said of this the better. Not only was it surprisingly poorly done, bordering on parody (er, did I say bordering?) but was there really anyone out there demanding answers regarding the polar bears, the cages or Room 23? Anyone capable of adding 2+2, that is? And the 'Hurley-bird' thing was never really a mystery, just plain random.
However I'm embarrassed to admit that I never made the connection between the Lamp Post station and the Dharma drops. In retrospect it does seem perfectly obvious... it is an automated tracking station after all. So I did appreciate having that one spelled out for me in big neon letters.
But I could've lived without it too. Again, not really closure there, just answers. Had they revealed this during the episode "316" when the Lamp Post was first introduced, it probably would've carried a lot more dramatic weight and felt a lot more meaningful than seeing it in this form. Which kind of begs the question of why they simply didn't do so at the time (or at least hint at it more strongly), given that there was nothing gained from withholding it?
In the end by biggest gripe with this final chapter was simply, who really cares about polar bears and cages when we still don't know anything more about Alvar Hanso? After all that teasing, he's really just some rich guy we never get to meet? Ever? Not even in a FLASH-AFTER?
Oh well, maybe they're saving it for the 10th Anniversary Box Set in 2014. Namaste and goodnight