My thoughts on the LOST Season 3 Finale

Much like the Season 3 finale of The Office, my first impression of the LOST Season 3 finale episode was that it was kind of meh. Like everybody else, I figured out pretty early in the episode that the scenes of Jack in L.A. were from the future. I doubt very many people were surprised at the end when Kate got out of the car. I wish this had been a little less obvious so it would have been a surprise at that point, because that would have been pretty cool.

I usually dislike it when a show does an episode set in the future or reveals significant things about what's going to happen since a lot of the fun comes from not knowing what happens and being able to speculate. For example, the Nip/Tuck episode "Conor McNamara, 2026" from Season 4 showed what all the characters were up to 20 years in the future. Now, Nip/Tuck is kind of a guilty pleasure show, but I still thought that revealing what happens to everyone was a big mistake. Not only was the episode the worst of the series, but also it makes the show that much less enjoyable.

After watching again the episode again, though, my opinion of the episode improved dramatically. For one thing, I think the 15 minutes or so where it seemed that Jin, Sayid, and Bernard were dead had a major negative impact on my initial impression of the episode. For another, after finding out for sure that the Jack in L.A. scenes were from the future, I realized that there were still a ton of unanswered questions; there are even more now than before, in fact.

Of the unanswered questions, the most interesting to me is probably the identity of the person who died in the flash-forward. There are some close-up pictures of the obituary from the newspaper over at Lost Screencaps and Easter Eggs, and while it's not possible to make out the whole thing, apparently the entire message has been leaked, and the name in the obituary is John Lantham. This could be a pseudonym or the real name of an established character, or a new character that hasn't been introduced on the show yet. Apparently there's an artist named John Latham that died in 2006 with some ideas that have a lot to do with LOST. For more, check out the Wikipedia page about him.

While arguments can be made that it was John Locke, Michael, or a yet to be introduced character, my guess is that it was Ben Linus that died. When Jack read the obituary he was devastated, to the point that he almost jumped off a bridge. We know that Jack has become obsessed with getting back to the island, and Ben would probably be the person best able to help him accomplish that. Plus, if it was Ben's funeral, then Jack's strong emotions of sadness and regret would juxtapose nicely with his antipathy towards Ben back on the island. As to the identity of the teenage son mentioned in the obituary, perhaps it's Karl, since the identity of his parents haven't been revealed yet.

Also, I'm really interested in seeing how things get to the point in time they are in the flash-forward, and even more interested in seeing what happens after that. I think that would be awesome if the scenes from the flash-forward occur in real time at some point in Season 5, or Season 6 at the latest, leaving at least one full season to see what happens after the small glimpse into the future that we got in this episode.

Unfortunately, Season 4 isn't going to start airing until 2008, so there's still 8 months to speculate on what will happen next. In the meantime, here are a few interesting links:

Lost Screencaps And Easter Eggs
- This site has a bunch of screencap of important and interesting things that range from difficult to impossible to spot during the first viewing.

Liquid Generation: Top 10 Moments of the Lost Season Finale
- What the link says. It's a very good list.

Lost Redux: Damon Lindelof Breaks "Radio Silence" to Reveal Why Charlie Died and More
- An interesting interview with one of the show's producers, including a Q&A about the future of the show.