When the TV show, Lost, started six years ago, Megan was 14. The three of us were diehard fans, tuning in each week to find out what the survivors of Oceanic flight 813 were going to do next.
As the series progressed, synchronicities among the characters proliferated. We understood they were all connected in some way. But by season two, Rob and I were kind of annoyed by the show. It was obvious the writers had, well, LOST their way, that although the concept had been cool, its execution just didn’t cut it. There were too many reruns.
My editor at the time, Kate Duffy, was also a fan of Lost. We used to touch base after various episodes and speculate about what it all meant. The last time I saw her before she passed away, at a romance writers’ conference in Daytona, we watched one of the episodes together and talked about a lot of weird stuff. That was the thing about Lost. You couldn’t watch it without talking about the weirdness, without speculating about the nature of reality. She and I agreed that it was all an afterlife scenario, that the characters had died in the crash, and that their issues and concerns kept them where they were until they could figure it out.
Rob and I have bee faithful, but critical fans. This last season has been sort of like the last season of X-Files, disjointed, floundering, as if the writers didn’t really grasp the larger picture. But we loved the idea of Lost, the characters, the strangeness. So we kept watching.Tonight, when Rob, Megan, and one of her friends and I watched the finale of Lost, I felt that Kate was there, too. I felt she was in the room, munching on strawberries dipped in honey, sipping wine, enthralled.
Even though her interest in the show waned when the writers were trying to figure out where they were taking these characters, I knew she would want to know how it ended. Kate was always keen on endings, how the loose ends were tied up, how stuff came together. And I think she would be pleased with how the writers pulled all the threads together – maybe not surprised, not shocked, but pleased. And for Kate, that’s saying something.
And for us in our living room tonight, the Lost finale delivered. The story came full circle, myth and reality melted together in a way that the X-Files never did. I’m sorry to see this series end. And I can hear Kate, wherever she is, thinking, “Next?”
