I just fell upon a trailer for a documentary on the tv show Lost on YouTube and as I glanced at the comments the black hole opened up. ”Great show, terrible ending.” ”Worst ending of a show ever.” ”The creators should be sent to prison over the ending.” (Yes, that was an actual comment.) And so on, and so forth.

I was really into Lost when it started and I kept watching up until season four, I think, then I stopped and later got back into it via the DVD box sets. A year or two ago I rewatched two or three seasons but it’s been quite some time since I’ve watched the whole thing, so this is not going to be a post about details of Lost. I’m going from memory here so things are inevitably colored by the bit rot the mind. Regardless, in my opinion whatever problem Lost had was not the ending. It dragged in the middle but the very end, in particular the last episode, was great.

But arguing whether the ending was good or not is sort of pointless. What I do want to argue is how much I think we keep missing the point of the art, yes, art, of stories when we keep coming back whether the plot was all tied up, whether there where any ”plot holes” or not, and only judging it by what can be summarized in a wikipedia plot synopsis. If that is all that matters, why even read books? Why watch movies and tv shows? Why not just read the wikipedia page and have time to consume so much more content?

I took special note of a comment from someone who was so mad that the show demanded an ”English major” to understand. Why not just spell it out plainly? At first I wanted to reply to that comment but I quickly realized that that would be pointless, so I started writing this instead.

Maybe I’ve become that artsy fartsy, high brow person that I despised when I was nineteen, but these days I care much more about how a story, regardless of medium, makes me feel and the journey I took with the characters than I do about exact plotting. Because again, if I only care about plot why even spend the time engaging with the story when there are so many great summaries to read online?

Maybe me changing my opinion this way over time is something I should be ashamed of. Maybe I’ve let my past self down. Or maybe it’s a natural part of growing and evolving – after all, nineteen years have passed since I was nineteen – and it’s much worse that so many people seem stuck in their teen mindset. Maybe that mindset and single-mindedness stops stories from being art and instead turns them into more content, more slop for us to consume.