LOST Character Leaderboards, Season 4, Episode 14

Previous Episode: 411

  1. Desmond: Man, you fucking earned your happy ending.

    Achievements unlocked:

  2. Hurley: It's pretty cool that you came to see Sun's baby, dude. (407)

    Achievements unlocked:

  3. Jin: No. I don't believe it. Jin is far too awesome to die!
  4. Sawyer: Aw, Sawyer's being protective of Claire! How adorable. (411)

    Achievements unlocked:

  5. Sayid: That's....that's a bummer, man. That's a bummer. (411)

    Achievements unlocked:

  6. Sun ↑4: Don't worry, Sun. Jin's far too awesome to die.
  7. Ben ↓1: I want one of those telescoping batons. (411)

    Achievements unlocked:

  8. Faraday ↓1: There aren't enough nervous science geeks on TV. (403)
  9. Kate ↓1: So did the "Kate wears a man's shirt and no pants for 20 minutes" episode air during sweeps or something? (411)

    Achievements unlocked:

  10. Jack ↓1: Thank God Jack's latent dysfunction and alcoholism sabotaged that relationship in one episode. (411)

    Achievements unlocked:

  11. Miles: Does the vacuum cleaner annoy the spirits, or just the viewers? (403)
  12. Charlotte: Meh. (403)
  13. Juliet: Damnit, please de-arch your eyebrows! (411)
  14. Michael ↑1: You've got a lot of "Waaaaaaaaalt!" to work off, buddy. (411)

    Achievements unlocked:

  15. Locke ↓1: This week on "John Locke's Had a Shit Life": the first known instance of DTMWICD. (411)

    Achievements unlocked:

  16. Claire: Yay, Claire's with Christian and isn't every coming back!

Summary

It's here that we can see LOST's contractual obligations reflect themselves in the storyline. Supposedly, after LOST became a hit, JJ Abrams and company negotiated a contract with ABC that either party had to give two season's notice to end the show. There is very clearly an end in sight for the show; the Six will leave the Island, come back somehow, and obviously they're not going to come back to screw in the jungle for another 50 episodes.

This is why I'm both extremely sympathetic to the people who wrote off LOST in Season 3, and in violent disagreement regarding that assessment of the show. The scuttlebutt is that Cuse+Lindeloff had the entire show's arc planned during Season 2, but it's only now that they're able to point the way to some sort of resolution. Season 3 was clearly necessary to develop the Others, but it still dragged on way too long and didn't seem to be going anywhere. Personally, this is why I remembered my latent X-Files trauma and studiously ignored the show until 2009;

But now everything's great! Things actually happen in this finale. We get the outlines of the Final Conflict (Ben vs. Widmore, with some indications that they are only proxies of a much, much larger war), tidy ends for some characters, cliffhangers for others, a better idea of why the Island is special (some bizarre substance that bends spacetime and has a personality) and a solid direction for the next two seasons.

Oh, and lots of shit blows up, and there are gunfights, and there's the expected quantity of badassery. I was actually impressed with how well the plotting held together; this finale required a huge amount of movement and backtracking, characters leaving and getting back together, reasons to go to a place and then leave it, all to end up in a situation that the audience already knew. Everyone knew that exactly six people would get off the island, and we kept wondering how on earth the writers were going to make that swing. It's almost like reading the last chapter of a novel before starting at the beginning, but it actually worked.

So yeah, Season 4 is the best yet, and LOST is a totally different (and better) show. Now, on to the TEMPORAL WAVE ANOMALY.