Dodai may have broken up with LOST and lived to tell the tale, but I’m still madly in love with the show, and I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with myself once the story finally ends.
It is a very strange thing when a television show you love comes to an end. There are certain shows that leave you with a comfortable sense of closure (Six Feet Under, for example), other shows that go out perhaps too abruptly, leaving you angry and confused (The Sopranos), and others that are depressing simply because there’s an overwhelming sense of what might have been (Gilmore Girls, My So-Called Life). But any show that you’ve put a great deal of time into is bound to leave you feeling all sorts of emotionally wrecked when it finally leaves your life, because for a brief period, it was a part of you, something that made you laugh and cry and think, and, in the case of LOST, throw things at the screen whenever Kate Austen appeared.
While Dodai has compared LOST to a bad relationship, for me, a more apt metaphor would be summer camp, in that it’s the type of thing you show up to with low expectations and even dread, until you meet a core group of friends and enemies who provide that kind of intense adolescent drama that makes you feel like dancing on some days and vomiting in the nurses office on others. And just like the last day of summer camp, the last episode of LOST is sure to provoke feelings of intense nostalgia and loss: even if you hated every minute of it, you somehow know it has changed you, and it feels weird to be going back home to your normal life, away from all of the drama and the players involved.
So how will those of us attached to LOST handle the post-finale depression? Here are a few ideas:
1. Find A New Show, Fast: A rebound show might help ease the pain a bit. Consider streaming a season of a show you’ve always meant to catch up on via Hulu or Netflix or via a friend’s DVD collection. Or, as my first grade teacher always said, “Go to the library and find an adventure in a book.”
2. FanFic: Didn’t get the closure you wanted? Write a new episode yourself, or read the work of fellow obsessives devoted to keeping the story going. There’s enough love for this story, and the characters in it, to keep fanfic writers going for decades, and there are already thousands of stories online to choose from.
3. Re-Watch It From The Beginning: Now that you know how it ended, it might be fun to go back to Season 1 to try to pick up any clues you missed along the way. And you can always skip the so-so episodes in favor of watching gems like “The Constant” over and over again.
4. Listen To Drive Shaft’s “You All Everybody” On Loop For 24 Hours: You’ll get over your heartbreak, fast.
5. Wallow With Your Fellow Super Fans: Starting Sunday night, the discussion about this finale is probably going to take over most of television and the internet, so you won’t have any trouble finding kindred souls who need a place to cry or vent or celebrate or bitch or discuss the hotness that is Desmond. We’ll be having an open thread on Sunday for such purposes, and our LOST expert Tracie will be discussing the show on Monday, so if nothing else, you have a place here to wallow in your Lost loss.
So how do you plan to deal with the loss of Lost? Feel free to detail your coping mechanisms in the comments below.
Earlier: How I Broke Up With Lost And Never Looked Back