Lostie Prom Night
Prom never felt so right. Last night was the long-awaited Lost series finale. After years of Tuesday get-togethers at Pepe’s house, this would be the last official TV-crew gathering. Every Tuesday for the last few years we’d get together, bring popcorn, cupcakes, wine, beer, whiskey, chips, etc, and have a geek-out feast. We also did this for Battlestar Galactica and Heroes, but these series are long finished and gone (or have been horribly malformed! Sorry, Heroes!). Lost is the last of its kind, so this one finale brings with it a taste of sadness and nostalgia… much like prom, you’re saying good-bye to Lostie classmates.
So a number of friends, slightly more than the ordinary TV-crew, agreed to meet up for the last time at Pepe’s house. And, like we do in cases in which some of us are traveling from more or less the same area, a few of these friends decided to meet up at my house first so we could carpool to Pepe’s. This is where the fun starts.
First we had Cecilia (one of Eze’s coworkers, charming as a button) come to our house in dire need of a shower. She’s been camping out at the Río Piedras campus during the strike, so she had no cell phone to call us up and let us know she was there, so she proceeded to climb the condo’s fence and then call out Eze’s name like a madwoman. In the process she got a tear in her lovely sundress, and as soon as she came up laughing her head off (she was slightly drunk), I knew it was going to be an epic night.
We carpooled there: Cecilia, Lynnie, Josian, Katiuska, Eze & I, and when we got there, the house was already full! (as I used to say to my sister on those Saturdays of yore: “Caaaasa llena!”) We arrived with more than an hour to spare, so we did what we always do when there’s a lull or pause in our TV-watching activities: we ate and we drank, we sat outside to talk shit and smoke, etc… And then I see Ceci come out from the kitchen juggling three plastic cups full to the brim, and she offers me two (one for me, one for Lynnie). I think *Hey, that looks like a handful, I should help her out and grab those two in her left hand* … always follow your hunches. I went to grab one and the second one cascaded on me.
Oh, the contents? Calimocho: a delicious mix of Coca Cola and wine. Thankfully, the top I was wearing was red. Not so lucky that my pants were a beige-y tone of gray: now I had a map of burgundy continents down my legs. I walked in and headed to the bathroom, where I tried a few on-the-spot solutions for the wine stains: commercial spot removers, hand sanitizer, and ultimately took my pants off and washed them off with Ivory. Suffice it to say, I spent the rest of the night wearing wet pants.
The Lost finale in itself: there’s not much I can say that hasn’t been said. The event has been a mediatic carnival: people have either loved or hated what happened there. The one thing that I can say without being biased: the series was 6 full years of buildup on a fan-base that was as hardcore as they get. People obsessed over the tiniest little details, and read into every single line uttered in that show. I think it would’ve been unreasonable to expect EVERY viewer to love the finale. So many expectations were on the line with those last 2.5 hours, that some of those had to fall through. Some people felt it was a cop-out (memories of likewise comments about BSG’s finale come to me). I think it was an unconventional happy ending in a time in which morbid cynicism is the expected norm, and that took guts. Lost shall be missed, to some extent as the compelling story we grew to love and obsess about, and then as the easy motive to gather around each week as a family to watch a narrative that gave us topics to pore over for hours and hours.
…however, why the FUCK can’t dogs go to heaven!? C’mon, Damon & Lindeloff! What gives!
Vincent, we will miss you!
He’s probably hanging out with BSG’s Jake in a place way cooler than the island or Jack’s heaven.
Sounds like it was a fun evening. For the record, since we’ve had some arguments about this, I rather enjoyed the ending, sans a few lines here and there that pissed me off. I thought the fact that it was upbeat and positive was a nice way to go, and it was the best of the possible endings. An ending such as, perhaps, all of them dying and the LOST credit come up would have sucked balls. The ending I had proposed a while ago (that they end the series way back in Season 3 with Jack yelling “We have to go back!” through ten pounds of beard) would have been an unpopular ending, although you know me….I love things that evoke Schadenfreude; my girlfriend always looks at me odd when I cackle.
My disdain remains though, with how the series got the ending. This season had its ups and downs for me, most of them downs (with a notable exception in Alpert’s backstory ep. That ep was pretty well done, I thought) And after wading through a season, because that’s what it was for me (And I’m sorry, but Ben capping Widmore in the ass like a stone cold killah did nothing for me) this series finale weighed heavy with the pervasive feeling of the entire season (again, imo) It was as if you had an entire 3 course meal, consisting of: stale, watery salad, cold, albeit charred and entirely over-seasoned steak with soggy steak fries, topped off by a delicious, scrumptrulescent piece of tiramisu. All in all, that’s a pretty sucky meal, but there remains something to be said about the desert.
Epic analogy failures aside, a lot of people are comparing the open ended kind of ending of Lost to the series finale of BSG. And while I can see the similarities, it boils down to one simple thing: The much disputed BSG ending sent me on my way feeling full of wonderment and satisfied with the time I had dedicated to the A-shaped halls and to Lee’s emo-ness. The Lost series finale sent me off on a positive note (and yes, kudos to that, it did take guts) but I was also simply glad it was over.
Perhaps Lost for me was more about getting together with the Losties and enjoying a delectable experience as a group, with people I was blessed with having as friends and peers, rather than enjoying flashbacks, flashforwards, and exclusively set aside for Season 6, side-flashes. Because Lindeloff will flash the fuck out of a series if he can, apparently.
Anyway, my two cents.
-Kiwi