SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't yet seen this episode of Lost, you should avoid reading this article and the user comments, as they will discuss events that happened during the episode.
| 74 | |
| Average User Score*: | 7.4 |
Season 6, Episode 17/18: "The End"
"Lost" may be over, but discussions about the finale are only beginning. As we typically do with any episode of "Lost," we have collected a handful of reviews of the episode from critics and recappers, assigned scores to each review, and averaged them together to get an overall Metascore for the episode.
In this case, however, two things should be noted: First, due to the overwhelming interest in this particular episode, we have quite a few more reviews than we normally do, since many critics who don't weigh in on a weekly basis opted to offer their opinions of the finale. Secondly, in many cases, the reviews quoted below are only preliminary observations of the episode. Due to the finale's length and thought-provoking ending, many critics will be further developing their opinions after (deservedly) giving the episode more thought, and thus their instant reactions that we include there may ultimately differ from their final assessments. Think of the Metascore, then, as a rough guide to viewers' first reactions to what they just saw.
Our collection of individual critic reviews is below. First, we want to know your initial reaction: On a scale of 10 (fantastic) to 0 (terrible), enter your grade for the "Lost" finale below:
| Score | Publication | Reviewer |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | IGN | Chris Carabott |
| The Lost series finale was one of the most enthralling, entertaining and satisfying conclusions I could have hoped for. | ||
| 100 | Orlando Sentinel | Hal Boedeker |
| I can think of several [series] that were more influential:”The Sopranos,” “ER,” “CSI,” “NYPD Blue,” “Hill Street Blues.” But there’s no denying “Lost” was unique, and the series finale was a stunner. | ||
| 100 | St. Petersburg Times | Eric Deggans |
| Sunday’s show was an emotional, funny, expertly measured reminder of what Lost has really centered on since its first moments on the prime time TV landscape: faith, hope, romance and the power of redemption through belief in the best of what moves mankind. | ||
| 100 | Television Without Pity | Cindy McLennan |
| [Grade: A; full recap forthcoming] | ||
| 100 | TV Overmind | Sam McPherson |
| “The End” is the best episode of television I believe I’ve ever seen. Best series finale? Most definitely. | ||
| 100 | USA Today | Robert Bianco |
| Sunday's emotional feast of a finale ... can stand with the best any series has produced. ... Thrillingly, cleverly, and in a manner that tapped into the simple, profound truths of great American works like Our Town, the show spelled out for viewers what it has been saying all along. Lost is about life and death, faith and science, spirit and flesh, and has always stressed that the title refers to the characters' souls, not their location. | ||
| 91 | The Onion A.V. Club | Noel Murray |
| As far as delivering action, emotion, wit and “whoa, what the hell?” I’d say “The End” was enormously entertaining. ... Does making “The End” about the characters “finding each other” rather than about them accomplishing some specific goal or learning some applicable lesson negate the previous 100-odd hours of adventuring? I don’t think so ... but it did make the closing moments in the church ring a little hollow for me. [Grade: A-] | ||
| 90 | Chicago Tribune | Maureen Ryan |
| The first two hours were exciting and emotionally engaging, especially when the island castaways in the Sideways world began remembering their "real" lives. ... But the last half hour or so took the finale to another level. ... The emotional part of the finale worked so well that I don't care much about the analytical/structural stuff. | ||
| 90 | Cultural Learnings | Myles McNutt |
| Lost doesn’t try to end in a way which closes off its plot holes or pieces together its own meandering qualities, but rather creates an episode that says the journey was worthwhile, that the time these characters spent with each other and the time we spent with these characters was all worth it. ... Beautiful and heartwrenching, “The End” captures more than any other series finale I’ve watched the sum total of the series’ experience, awakening in viewers the same power of recall which pulls together half of the series’ narrative. | ||
| 90 | Entertainment Weekly | Jeff Jensen |
| “The End” was an emotionally draining epic that had me crying with almost every single “awakening." ... I was satisfied. More than satisfied. [Jensen's full recap will eventually appear on this page.] | ||
| 90 | Telegraph | Michael Deacon |
| So there we are, then. It wasn’t completely clear. It wasn’t completely logical. But it was completely thrilling. [Deacon has further thoughts here.] | ||
| 90 | Time | James Poniewozik |
| "The End" was an epic, stirring two and a half hours of television, full of heart and commitment, that was true to Lost's characters as we knew them from season one. | ||
| 90 | TV Squad | Jason Hughes |
| As finales go, 'The End' will definitely go down as one of the more satisfying ones; even though it didn't come close to answering all of our questions about the Island and its special properties. | ||
| 90 | Zap2It | Ryan McGee |
| Looking at it from an emotional perspective, I thought the finale was a masterpiece. | ||
| 80 | Entertainment Weekly | Ken Tucker |
| For most of its long but rarely boring length, the final Lost did not huff and puff and labor toward a heavy metaphorical conclusion. Instead, it was, well, pretty delightful, full of reunions that were both emotional and funny. ... Was this an all-time great finale? I wouldn’t say so. | ||
| 80 | HitFix | Drew McWeeny |
| The finale is about 80% "Wow, they're doing it! They're doing it!" and about 20% "Oh, crap, they're doing that!". And that's a ratio that I can absolutely live with. ... The way the show paid off the various emotional arcs that it's been building for six years was impressive, and there was a series of major moments that are some of the most memorable I've ever seen in a finale. | ||
| 80 | Los Angeles Times | Todd VanDerWerff |
| Very little of the actual plot is, really, all that thrilling. But it works and it becomes thrilling because it provides character payoffs we've been waiting for. ... The important thing ... is not answers. It's resolution. And "Lost" provided that in spades. ... [But] I don't know where I'd rank "The End" against all other "Lost" episodes. There were some jokes that fell flat, and an overreliance on sentimentality that could be a little grating at times. | ||
| 80 | TV Fanatic | M.L. House |
| I found myself almost bored, anxious to get everyone enlightened so we could get to the show's overarching resolution. | ||
| 80 | TV Worth Watching | David Bianculli |
| The general tendency, after a show this complicated says goodbye, is to pick it apart and complain about every untied plot thread, every final inconsistency, every forgotten character. But I'd rather just thank Lost for the ride, and for providing such unforgettable characters and performances, and presenting a series of such originality. | ||
| 70 | Los Angeles Times | Mary McNamara |
| No matter how you felt about the resolution of the finale, the 144 or so minutes that preceded it were pretty compelling television. | ||
| 70 | San Francisco Chronicle | Tim Goodman |
| As a series finale it overjoyed the heart and annoyed the brain. But if I had to do it all over again, knowing how it all plays out, I'd still watch. | ||
| 70 | The Star-Ledger [Newark] | Vicki Hyman |
| A conclusion that delivered gratifying codas for beloved characters, though it maddeningly side-stepped the show’s legion of unresolved enigmas. | ||
| 70 | What's Alan Watching | Alan Sepinwall |
| I'm still wrestling with my feelings about "The End"... As two and a half hours of television - as an extra-long episode of "Lost" - I thought most of it worked like gangbusters. ... But as someone who did spend at least part of the last six years dwelling on the questions that were unanswered - be they little things like the outrigger shootout or why The Others left Dharma in charge of the Swan station after the purge, or bigger ones like Walt - I can't say I found "The End" wholly satisfying, either as closure for this season or the series. ... There are narrative dead ends in every season of "Lost," but it felt like season six had more than usual. | ||
| 60 | People | Tom Gliatto |
| The very long finale to ABC’s Lost was deeply touching, quite ridiculous and, in its very last seconds, so infuriating I erupted like the Smoke Beast and did a few cloudy charges around the perimeter of my apartment on the island of Manhattan. | ||
| 50 | The New York Times | Mike Hale |
| When the entire island story line we had been following for six seasons turned out not to matter very much within the internal organization of the show’s narrative — to be largely disconnected from that final quasi-religious resolution of the plot — it was deflating, despite the warm feelings the finale otherwise inspired. ... As it so often had been, “Lost” was shaky on the big picture — on organizing the welter of mythic-religious-philosophical material it insisted on incorporating into its plot — but highly skilled at the small one, the moment to moment business of telling an exciting story. [Hale's initial comments are available here.] | ||
| 50 | Televisionary | Jace Lacob |
| I found it to be sentimental and cliched, as Lindelof and Cuse offered up the very plot contrivance that they fought so hard not to fall into in the island-set storyline. ... I found the ending to be so heavy-handed, clunky and maudlin at the same time, that I couldn't give in to the post-life love fest going on in those final scenes. [Lacob has even more comments at The Daily Beast.] | ||
| 40 | Boston Globe | Matthew Gilbert |
| The mixed episode offered an abundance of emotional resolution and vague metaphor, some of which was compelling (Sawyer and Juliet’s reunion, Jack and Desmond's farewell) and some of which was quite hokey (the cork?! the light? Locke becoming human again?). | ||
| 40 | Variety | Brian Lowry |
| Despite the emotional wallop of the finale -- there were just too many unanswered questions for that to be wholly satisfying. ... I can't escape the feeling the flash-sideways arc was a waste of time. | ||
| 40 | The New York Times | Ross Douthat |
| I was by turns moved, engrossed, and deeply irritated. But mainly I was irritated, because in the end I’m a plot-centric person, and “Lost” was a densely plotted show, and the macro-plot turned out to be … well, a big nothing seems like an awfully strong way of putting it, but it was certainly close to that. | ||
| 10 | Baltimore Sun | David Zurawik |
| If this is supposed to be such a smart and wise show, unlike anything else on network TV (blah, blah, blah), why such a wimpy, phony, quasi-religious, white-light, huggy-bear ending. ... Once Jack stepped into the church it looked like he was walking into a Hollywood wrap party without food or music -- just a bunch of actors grinning idiotically for 10 minutes and hugging one another. | ||
| 10 | Gawker | Max Read |
| We learned nothing from two-and-a-half hours of slow-motion bullshittery backed with a syrupy soundtrack. ... How great is it to get all these characters back? Not very great at all, as it turns out. | ||
| Episode | Score | Episode | Score | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Episode 1/2: LA X | 89 | Episode 10: The Package | 72 | |
| Episode 3: What Kate Does | 64 | Episode 11: Happily Ever After | 93 | |
| Episode 4: The Substitute | 88 | Episode 12: Everybody Loves Hugo | 83 | |
| Episode 5: Lighthouse | 71 | Episode 13: The Last Recruit | 73 | |
| Episode 6: Sundown | 82 | Episode 14: The Candidate | 92 | |
| Episode 7: Dr. Linus | 92 | Episode 15: Across the Sea | 58 | |
| Episode 8: Recon | 76 | Episode 16: What They Died For | 89 | |
| Episode 9: Ab Aeterno | 93 | Episode 17/18: The End | 74 |
One more thing
If you happened to miss the past six seasons, here's a handy recap:
What did you think?
What did you think of the finale? Was it a fitting end to the series, or were you hoping for something different? Join the conversation below.
