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Lost Ends
Unless you live in a hatch somewhere, you are probably aware that Lost has ended. If you want a simple, clear explanation of exactly how the series resolved, Lost Untangled will do nothing to clarify things for you. For everyone else, I provide this discussion thread for you to complain/revel in the most spoiler-laden manner you desire.
Note: what follows is my own opinion. Many viewers that were more attentive than I were very satisfied with and emotionally moved by the ending.
... just unexplainable U-turns in morality and logic.
I've always been bicuriously Lost as the show would sometimes give me a feeling that something more was going on that would eventually be revealed. So, having caught a number of episodes early on, I started watching Season Five religiously in order to prepare myself for the ending. But at the end of Season Five with no end in sight and only more questions and more characters (and a freaking reset button that later turned out to be a multiverse splitting mechanism), I gave up. Until I watched the last episode last night in hopes that the island would have some greater meaning. It didn't. Well, it tried to I guess but everyone's got their own interpretation of what they saw last night.
So many questions I have went completely unanswered. Questions about Walt, why Faraday never recognized Desmond (the guy that unexpectedly gave him the constants to time travel one day) when Faraday landed on the island, the properties of the multiverses (some people seem to care about the futures of the other multiverse even though they shouldn't know about it until they're dead), why the black cloud killed who it did and left others (especially now that we know more about the black cloud), the list goes on and on. The worst of it is if you take each character individually and reassemble their timelines in sequential order that the episodes slowly piecemeal it out to you -- everyone is a goddamn psychotic sociopath. No rhyme or reason to the actions of half the characters. And it's not even Lord of the Flies neurosis
The show started out very concrete, real and physical and slowly absolved into symbolism with last night being such pure symbolism that you cannot say for sure when they died or what the afterlife was or what the church represented or where they went at the end when the doors were opened. It reminded me of a few anime series I watched in this respect where the shows digress into absolving themselves of anything earthly or logical in some sort of ethereal climax of visual and auditory sequence or cues. Problem was that none of Lost's resolutions sat well with me.
I sympathize with the writers as they had no idea how many seasons they would get but in the end I must admit I found the writing to be more or less utter drivel. Designed only to get you to keep watching with little if any satisfactory explanations. Everyone was a chaotic actor in the past, present and alternate multiverse. Writing that many flash sideways scenes as plot devices is -- quite frankly -- juvenile at best. Also the lead writer had refuted the theory that everyone was dead, in purgatory, in heaven or in hell. Yet, at the end they're clearly in some sort of afterlife.
The series offered closure on what happened eventually to everyone but no closure whatsoever as to what the island was and how its mechanations functioned -- even on a magical fantasy level. I was intrigued with Donnie Darko when the ending was left open to interpretation but Lost takes it to a whole new (unbearable for me) level. I hope other people enjoyed the ending but for me it was a complete indication not to devote anymore time to this series or these writers. Still better than 85% of what you'll find on TV but that isn't saying much.
They could have done a lot of neat things with tying down loose ends, explaining the island and completing their work. Instead they gave us this. And finally I see no further point in discussing it because there's no hope of ever explaining anything. Unlike a finely crafted classic novel, the grand symbolism and allusions are too abstract to nail down. So what's the point? Everyone's going to experience the series differently and for me it was just some guys writing a seria
My work here is dung.
Jacobs Ladder
Guess I live in a hatch then... Don't watch too much TV.
Unless you live in a hatch somewhere, you are probably aware that Lost has ended.
I have never seen a single episode, it the whole series worth watching, now that it is over?
Don't care, too stupid
The subject lines, they just write themselves.
It was just ok. Given that Battlestar was the last finale I watched, it handled similar material in a much better way. Given the terrible ways it could have ended, it was good enough. Some people will be mad that some questions were never answered, and I would have been happier if the last episode focused more on the island than the survivors, but really, given how they didn't have an ending written when they started the series, they did a fairly good job of cleanup.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
It was terrific until the end when we found out that they were all in some sort of limbo in the sideways world. What should have happened was all their experiences on the island transformed and reshaped their real lives in a positive way. Also, anyone who died on the island would still be alive in the normal world. So the sideways world is their new redeemed life based on their experiences on the island. It's a shame that the producers copped out in the end. I still think it was a great series though.
If you want a simple, clear explanation of exactly how the series resolved, Lost Untangled will do nothing to clarify things for you.
If you were expecting answers... you have been watching the wrong show for the last 6 years.
Or did Dr. Smith screw things up again?
"An ABC source reported that the DVD and Blu-ray release of season 6 will feature twenty minutes of additional scenes, some of which will have answers to questions, cut from the storyline due to running time." - Wikipedia
So, if you buy the DVD, MAYBE you'll get some kind of worth-while closure? I highly doubt that. My apologies to all those who wasted 6 years on this show and couldn't see early on that it was like a six-year-old's summer midafternoon make believe story.
No need to watch it, I have just spoiled it for you.
I think the Lost finally was pretty obnoxious and failed to explain any of the interesting mysteries of the show. Their stance seems to be that we shouldn't try to understand the mysterious, and, rather, just let it wash over us. I just say, "No".
I'm tired of hearing you people constantly talk about this steaming pile of ass. Lost is, quite possibly, the most overrated show that has ever been on television.
And yes, I've watched it...a friend of mine convinced me to watch the first two seasons, and even that was almost impossible. How people obsess over this show completely eludes me.
Living With a Nerd
I am not much of a TV watcher but a coworker loaned me the DVDs to watch on the bus during my commute in the Fall of 2008 and I kept up with the show ever since. For the first two seasons I was riveted. The cliffhangers, the mystery, etc, etc, etc. With the first half of Season 3 the show started to fall apart. They came back with a clear vision in the second half, supposedly, but I never saw it materialize.
Yesterday I sat down with my wife (who only started watching it in Season 5) and we watched as nothing in the final episode answered any questions. No, the fucking light at the center of the island didn't tell us shit and that stupid fucking ending with some sort of allusion to the afterlife was absolutely stupid. People had been suspecting that all along and knowing that many people did you would have thought the writers, being paid as much as they were, would have come up with something more shocking than that--but they didn't.
I am glad that I only wasted two years of my life watching that show rather than the 6 many others did. It started with a plane wreck and it ended with one. We were all duped. The least they could have done was provide everyone watching with some of that Dharma beer in rusty cans to help ease the pain.
Can we all agree that most t.v. just sucks big sweaty donkey balls?
Most TV? Certainly. But there are the occasional gems that make it worthwhile. A few examples of current, excellent shows include Better Off Ted (sadly canceled), Dexter, and Gravity (weird show on Starz about a suicide group).
That's just a drop in the bucket. There are plenty of excellent shows if you know how to filter out the noise.
Ending to epic shows like this inevitably end bad in the eyes of some and I would argue it's impossible to write the perfect ending. Lost, Battlestar Galatica, and The Sopranos are a few recently. Too much emphasis is put on the ending, but it's the entire series that make it great.
What is the explanation for the magical black smoke from the first season?
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
'just sayin
"His name was James Damore."
I remember the producers of Lost saying at some point either during or at the end of the first season that the mysteries of the island would all end up being explainable scientifically. Not necessarily pure science, but at least the sort of semi-plausible science-like stuff most sci-fi is built on. For most of the first two or three seasons they were flailing around, but for the most part it still seemed there could be a plausible explanation for everything. The introduction of Faraday and all of his scientific mumbo jumbo lent credence to that idea.
Then, over the past two seasons, the show took a sharp turn into religious territory and it became increasingly obvious they were going to take the easy way out and make it all into some ridiculous religious/spiritual allegory of some kind, albeit one so confused that no one would ever be able to make any real sense out of it. It reminded me of the Matrix, where the first movie was more sci-fi and the second and third were all a bunch of confused pseudo-religious nonsense.
I was primarily disappointed with their complete abandonment of any attempt to explain anything scientifically, and instead lean on a literal Deus Ex Machina by making the whole thing into a spiritual "God (or some other spiritual entity) did it". That sort of thing has been done to death. Hell, Battlestar Galactica was explicitly a religious allegory from the very beginning, and even it explained more stuff pseudo-scientifically than Lost did. Regardless of what they may say now, I think the Lost creators started out with a show that would have been much more scientifically based, but ended up having to extend it beyond what they thought they would. After wandering in the wilderness for much of seasons 2 through 4, they were backed into a corner and took the easy way out by waving the magic religion wand to "explain" everything away.
Lost's writers had no plan and no goals. They just wanted to keep people watching so that they would get their next paycheck. The plot is full of all sorts of inconsistancies that they just quietly gloss over. The writers were hoping that you wouldn't notice, and that you'd just keep watching.
I gave up on "lost", it seemed to be a meandering plot with hints but no resolutions. I am about to give up on "flash forward" for the same reason.
All I can gather from the last episode was that everything that was presented, happened to the characters. It wasn't a dream, etc. They did get stranded on the island, they did get off it and they did return.
The flash sideways scenes had no specific date/time associated with them. In fact, from what I can tell, it was actually some time in the future as it was a type of purgatory where all the dead "friends" meet up to realize they are actually dead and need to move on. So in that sense, it's in the future but really time has/had no meaning there.
So, no questions were answered, except, in the end, they get to spend eternity together and I'm guessing Hugo passed the torch onto some unknown heir. The island probably lives on with more people going there to figure out who gets to protect the place.
I'm still baffled by what the deal with Walt was and what did Juliet mean by "it worked" with her last words (nuke incident)?
Agg.. I suppose if you assume the show had to end last night, I guess they did an ok job. I wasn't left saying "WTF?" but I certainly didn't feel like I was looking at a completed jigsaw puzzle either.
"It was all a dream" Classic final ending plot. The show had too many loose ends to properly tie up.
So Rosebud was the name of Locke's sled?
This awful excuse for a show ought to be buried on that Island with the writers and forgotten.
You would have been better off watching the Sopranos.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
From what I understand they had their own internal Wiki which became where they hashed out a lot of the mythos. That is no way to write a narrative that you can tie together into coherent story arc.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Me, too. Another show that infurated me was I Dream of Jeannie. I mean, under the laws of physics and rational human reason, there's just *no way* that Barbara Eden could fit into that tiny little bottle. The only explanation possible was supernatural mumbo jumbo, which was an insult to Larry Hagman and the rest of the scientific community at NASA.
You left off arrested development, tudors, mad men, dead like me, inbetweeners.... I know I'm forgetting some, anyone want to help me out?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
What the hell was that black smoke thing in the first series? You didn't see it at all through two or three, and I got so bored by then that I gave up.
So, black smoke monster; What was it?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I don't understand how being an athiest would deter you from watching a work of fiction. Clearly the imagery suggested in the show had nothing to do with a particular type of religion that exists. Also, nothing about this series would imply that there was going to be a rational ending to this show. I don't ever recall a scientific or rational explanation to anything.
I think the most revealing part was during the closing credits when they showed the wreckage on the beach with no people. My interpretation is that the entire series existed entirely in Jack's mind as the plane crashed and all passengers died on impact. Similar to the common cliche of one's "life flashing before their eyes" during a near-death experience, but in this case the result was actual death.
Many people who have a near-death experience describe comfort and moving toward a white light. This has been explained by science as the brain flooding itself with dopamine and other pleasure chemicals because it knows that it is dying and might as well go out feeling good. I think the series was an interpretation of that phenomenon - realizing that he had but seconds to live, Jack's brain created this vivid melodrama based on the wishful thinking that he'd actually survive the crash. The islands electromagnetic properties explain the crash, and the hope of reversing the crash and sending his life on a more fulfilling path (flash-sideways with Jack finding love, having a son, etc.) provides comfort.
With that being said, I think the writers took the easy way out and I'm quite disappointed having invested a significant amount of time in the series. I'm sure there will be plenty of post-game analysis and people will find tons of symbolism that was intended and even more that wasn't, so at least the discussion and speculation may fill my need for closure.
Hear! Hear!
(or is it Here! Here!)
My local ABC affiliate in Cleveland, Ohio experienced technical difficulties during the entire broadcast.
http://www.cleveland.com/tv-blog/index.ssf/2010/05/lost_goes_out_on_symbolic_note_but_finale_is_lost_for_many_channel_5_viewers.html
I am a DishNetwork customer, and I was quick to try and blame the weather shifting the position of my dish. I also have an over the air antenna connected to my DN DVR. After stepping outside and noticing the air was calm and not a cloud in the sky, I went back and compared the Standard Definition signal from DN, the High Definition signal from DN, and the HD signal over the air. All feeds were experiencing extreme pixilation, then picture loss and drops in the audio feed. This process of pixilation, video loss, and audio loss would happen between every 1 to 4 minutes. My DishNetwork DVR has a meter which gives me a measure of the over the air signal strength. Throughout the entire episode last night the signal read at 100%, and yet I was still experiencing the pixilation and audio drop outs. I've waited six years for this finale, and for four and half hours last night I was cursing like a sailor at my TV. I thought it was funny that the local ABC affiliate was encouraging viewers to join their online chat while the show aired. I checked out the chat log, and it was riddled with complains on the video/audio feed.
So I wish I could comment on how the series ended. But I can't comment until after work today when I'll have time to watch the episode at abc.com.
This experience proves to me that far too many concessions have been made for local HD channels to put up a poorly broadcast signal. Cleveland Ohio is rated 18th in market size in the United states. Why is it they are able to get away with substandard performance you'd expect from Green Bay with a market rank of 139.
I hate all sigs, even this one.
I've never seen the show either, but I imagine most shows with a "story" would run into this problem.
If you have the most awesome story, and make it a TV show, it could be great... until the story is over, but since it was successful "TV", more shows get ordered... but the story was already told, so you have no choice but to make stuff up. (And you have to do it on a schedule, whereas the first one might have taken years to conceive.)
Same reason most movie sequels suck too.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I don't think they knew how to end the story when they were starting. For that, it was a decent ending.
However, if they had fully planned out the entire story arc from the start, it could have been spectacular.
The writers promised us sci-fi explanations for everything in the second season.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Riverworld
I don't understand why other Lost fans haven't liked the last season of the show. The big questions were answered, but they seem not to like the answers provided. I've been a fan since the beginning, and I thought the end was beautiful.
The one part that left me wondering was the shot of the fuselage in the credits. The best explanation I read was that it's the final remains of the 815 crash after all the Losties died. It's the mystery that other people brought to the island in the future will wonder about, like we wondered about the hatch, the statue, Henry Gale's balloon, and so on.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I never watched the show that much but from what I did see it made me wonder why people thought it was a hard show to follow. It seems rather straight forward but poorly thought out. From the recap show I saw and the finale it looks like the show was written for thrills and twists that made the writers really work to try and tie things together (much like "David Copperfield"). Based on the show last night it looks like the writers are all fans of destiny and fated lovers tropes (or at least think we all are). Ironically, it looks like they had a hell of a time keeping everything moving in a way that seemed fated and destimonious.
This is why I think TV stories would work better if they stuck with single season shows with planned story arcs that complete each year. Reboot or tell totally different stories each new season using only characters and places from the old series in the new. Continuity is a bitch.
[signature]
I didn't leave off any shows, I just only listed a few.
Coupling (UK), Arrested Development, Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Charlie Jade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Babylon 5, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Band of Brothers, Hustle, Sports Night, NewsRadio, Veronica Mars, ReGenesis, Futurama, Rescue Me, Carnivale, The Wire, The Big Bang Theory, Californication, Entourage.
I'm sure there're more, that's just all I can think of off the top of my head.
so I don't really have anything to add to the discussion. Still, on another note, 24 will be ending soon. Will CmdrTaco have a thread for us to discuss what we think of that?
Never heard of such a thing, but sounds appealing. Anyone know where I can get one?
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Actually, I suspect the problem was that they wanted to stick to some generic "mysticism"** that didn't offend anyone. If you didn't expect the show to have some kind of "mysticism" in the conclusion about what was going on, then you weren't paying attention to what the shows writers and producers were saying about the show. I think the show would have been better if they had picked some worldview that would have offended some of their audience. If they had picked a specific religious view or a explicitly materialistic view, while those people who disagreed with the worldview would not have liked the show's answers, most people would have found the ending more satisfying.
** I used the word mysticism in quotes because it is not quite the right word for what I am talking about, but the other words I can think of at the moment are all worse ("religion" implies a specific belief set of one kind or another and this show was going for a "there's more going on than can be explained by strict materialism, but we can't understand what it is" sort of mysticism).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Heaven is a pub run by a jamaican dood, and the elevator to hell REALLY is red! oh wait .. wrong show. THAT was a spoiler for the really good british one.
Locke killed Dumbledore!
((Contains slight Ashes to Ashes spoilers))
I am quite intrested in the feedback between Ashes to Ashes which just concluded and from what i've read about the lost finale has a similar sort of motiff but managed to give a very satisfying conclusion to Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes explaining the world, the charactes and motivations and just what has been happening.
Contrasting this with Lost which sounds very much like they were trying something similar but didn't dedicate enough time to make it forfilling and as rewarding as the final for Ashes to Ashes which even after watching a second time left me feeling drained but satisifed.
At least when St. Elsewhere ended, we were left with a series of wonderful performances and truly creative plots and characters, even if in the end it was all some autistic kid's fantasy.
This time we don't get anything. And seriously, how many times did the writers/producers swear up and down that they werent all dead, that the island wasnt purgatory, that they werent pulling those cheap, easy outs.
Goddamn liars.
I think from the quality of the first couple of seasons and the hints at a larger story arch just beyond the horizon in each of those seasons.. they did have an idea of where they wanted to go with the story at first.
The problem is they became a massive hit, got renewed for a few seasons, and then made up the rest as they went along.
Season 6 basically disregarded almost everything that had happened previously and tacked on a completely separate ending.
Battlestar Galactica fell into the same trap even though they had a shorter run. Both degenerated into a bunch of symbolic quasi religious/spiritual nonsense.
The writers promised us sci-fi explanations for everything in the second season.
They were "moving on" to the mother ship. There, now it was Sci-Fi.
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I've never seen a single episode of Lost, ever. But, I want to. I generally wait for shows to release on DVD and watch them over a few weekends.
With Lost closing up, is that still recommended? Everything I hear is about the bad story arcs and plot lines that go nowhere. If it worth watching from beginning to end? Are there rehash episodes that would make more sense to watch?
Up until their catch up preshow last night I wondered how they would tie up all the loose ends but then I realized I was over thinking it. The ending was obvious and would eliminate the need for any explanations. The entire six seasons were Jacks hallucinations brought about by his death. This has been done before, the movie "Jacob's Ladder." That was a 2 hour movie not a 6 season tv show.
sci-fi != scientific
Sorry, I'm an Atheist and the ending for me was like watching the crew of the enterprise meeting Santa Claus at the North Pole.
That sounds like an excellent story idea to me! A real hoot and a half!
I wouldn't be surprised if some of the Star Trek writers considered that in a brainstorming session.
The closest they got was having Kirk and Spock meet Abraham Lincoln and being forced into a fight between good and evil.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
If this was where everyone meets up to go to heaven, why isn't Nadia there for Sayid? Why aren't Boone's parents there? Okay, so if it's just Jack's party, and everyone else was already in heaven or whatever and just "came back" for Jack's party, then why are there many scenes of them remembering each other, apart from anything Jack (in that reality) witnessed or experienced? Why isn't Jack's MOTHER there?!
Why would a "waiting area" have Jin and Sun not married and being assassinated? What kind of test or journey is that?
Such a bad ending, even if they did a fair job of stringing together the altiverse in the last season. But to find out what it was and what it meant is annoying.
MANY topics have remained unsolved. And beyond "happy endings" and such, THIS is what people wants, minimal justifications. Among other:
-Pregnant women
-Richard immortality
-Dharma initiative
-Polar Bears (WTF?)
-Egiptian Iconology
-That lighthouse
-Libbie and the mental institution staff
-ESP capable people (Hugo, Miles... Why?)
-Who are the ones/the others/the other others/the other others ruled by a japanese guy (COSMIC WTF)
-Original people (Jacob's mother people)/Jacob's stepmother
-MANY more things that don't come to my mind...
More than furious, 6th season has been a BIG Deux ex Machina.
Lost peak was the impasse between 3rd and 4th season, where the first flash forward appears. Since then, it's been a slow and steady freefall...
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Both The X-Files and Twin Peaks used this formula of just throwing more and more weird riddles and sci-fi mysteries at the viewer with answers always seemingly to come in just a few more episodes. I never saw Lost, but it sounds like a repeat of that. The Matrix series was a condensed movie version of this phenomenon. I wish writers would just come up with a story that has an ending and tell it. Joss Whedon seems to be the only TV writer who can actually manage to do that.
[citation needed]
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Lost is merely the logical continuation of the "Gilligan's Island / Seven deadly sins" theory. I mean, let's look at the evidence:
-Purgatory: The Island. (Duh.)
-The fat lovable guy ends up in charge.
-Since Gilligan is of course Satan, and the island's personification of evil is the "magic smoke", and we all know that Bob Denver, aka Gilligan, was a fan of, ahem, 'Magic Smoke' himself, we can draw the logical conclusion that The Smoke Monster is the spirit of Gilligan himself, keeping people on the island permanently....
Feel free to continue the argument ad nasuem.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
So, everyone on slashdot is too smart to have fun. I loved it. The whole series. It was excellent storytelling, and it was massively entertaining.
however, from what the lost-obsessed people told me, i understand the material is ripped off from a lot of esoteric and spiritual resources, including the ra material. i'd rather have original than meshed up shit that passes, for some godforsaken reason, entirely in an island. great way to cut the set costs btw.
Read radical news here
Breaking Bad.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
generic "mysticism"**
How is it generic, the guy who opened the door for them was "Christian Shepard", for fuck's sake!
I liked it until Jack's father turned up alive. Or dead, rather. And they were all dead. And nothing that happened on the island really mattered anyway. So the ending seemed kind of cheap and rushed. A lame way to get away from all the loose ends and stringing along for all these seasons.
Clever signature text goes here.
I watched the first season, and was absolutely totally hooked by the polar bear. I thought "Wow. Just wow. These guys have the balls to throw COMPLETE curveballs at us and turn the whole story upside down."
Acting was good, ensemble cast was good, setting was of course beautiful, and simply put: I like shows that surprise me. I was all in.
Then...it got LOST. Or I did.
There's a point at which you stop looking for some sort of fantastic storyline that was behind the episodes the whole time, and realize: there isn't one. As Penny Arcade aptly put it (http://www.penny-arcade.com/2006/11/1/): "...he's come to conclusion that there's no story actually being told. He no longer believes that events are happening according to some overarching plan. Watching the show now is apparently awful, because where he once perceived a carefully revealed structure he now just sees a couple guys out back beneath a tarp, flashlights held under the chin."
After season one, they'd run out of stories and were just making shit up, throwing in random disconnected stuff. I believe that they were actually hoping that the internet community might sew it all up with one of their ceaseless speculations.
And that's precisely it. I lost faith that the writers would make sense of it all. There's an investment going on. I give you my time and my attention (after all, it's really just bait to get me to watch the commercials anyway), in exchange for a STORY. It can be happy, or sad, or something in between. But a rather essential part of any story is that it ends. It has some sort of conclusion.*
* well, ok unless you're one of those goofy postmodern writers. But that's another rant.
With Lost, it felt like someone just kept slipping pages into the back of the novel, and the plot - such as it was - became more threadbare and tattered as it was stretched to cover more characters, more plot devices, more 'ooh spooky' stuff.
No, I don't watch soap operas for a reason, and by the end of season 2, it was increasingly evident that Lost was merely that.
-Styopa
I live in one (as per TFS). I've actually not even heard of this. I assume it's a television program. that's what I get for not having a TV.
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I never watched Lost (or seinfield for that matter - bunch of whinging idiots), but from what I read about Lost, it had ended up being a show about nothing.
[*] - I have no idea what clever adjective should be inserted here. Perhaps someone with actual knowledge of Lost can suggest a valid desciption
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I can safely say the only episode I've ever watched, and will watch was last night's finale.
My take...
They all died in the crash,
The island was purgatory.
Removing the rock from the island was akin to "pulling the plug" on the series and would send them to hell and cancel all hopes of future syndication.
The multi-religion church at the end was symbolizing a positive afterlife which we all know means eternal life in syndication.
Personally, I'm just glad this shit is over. Now we can get back to watching reality TV, b/c using actors is overrated.
Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
For some reason USA is soo obsesed with religion, that has to add a (final) religion layer to everything. What could look fun in politics (with a president thanking Cron or Thor or Kratos or other god ), is really out-of-character in science-fiction.
My particular pet theory is that a good % of the USA residents have supernatural feelings. Since is something that is shared by a soo big group of people, summining a supernatural concept in a vague way, can get you credits. Something like fanservice, but for a broad number of people. Of course, It also excluse these withouth supernatural feelings, but that seems a minor-minority even on science-fiction (?) and fantasy.
I make me angry to have supernatural entities like ESPers in Star Trek, or in Silverberg books, but I have learned to live with it. If you want to read the production from USA, you have to tolerate some intense level of supernatural feelings. At least is somewhat vague... is not like Iran, that probably have a urgency real about how you must think and what you have to wear.
-Woof woof woof!
It seems to me that a series is *so* much better when the writers KNOW what the ending will be BEFORE the series airs. This way, the entire series can work towards the ending, with the result being much more satisfying.
The subject above lists three series I felt were fucking epic, because the ending matched what the series was all about from the very first episode. It wasn't just "make shit up as you go along", and then after you've run out of material stringing your audience along for as long as you can, write up some mish-mash of an ending that really doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the series.
The Star Force got the Cosmo DNA and got back to Earth, The Alliance accidentally created the Reavers by trying to make paradise, and Sheridan kicked some Shadow ass (and paid the ultimate price, twice!).
I've never watched LOST, but I knew from the begining they had no plan to really end the series, so, I never bothered to even try to get into it. I'm sorry if you did. Next time, choose more wisely.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
If you're looking for a LOST type of show, just grab Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes (no .. please don't even bother with the painful american remake). Very similar in substance, much better writing and an amazingly good finale (well ..T wo, if you count LoM's awesome ending).
Or if you want something "Heroes"-like that doesn't suck, just grab the first season of the british show "Misfits" which, despite its ludicrous story, is amazing.
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
Well, darn, I missed it. Did the Jupiter-2 finally get to Alpha Centauri?
I think The Wire might be my favorite show of all time. It has a great storyline, and great writing. You know and understand the characters really well. And it didn't end like the Sopranos. You get closure for the story, but it also leaves a few things open so you know their lives go on.
Does this mean everyone will stop licking JJ Abrams asshole?
It was just a gag by David Copperfield, using smoke and mirrors. It got way out of hand and he sends his apologies.
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
Saihd was ressurected by the coca cola only to serve evil, but in the end he became good again by taking the bomb away from the candidates and saving the day ! So the islamic guy died for the other losties :'( . What a nice guy !
> Unless you live in a hatch somewhere, you are probably aware that Lost has
> ended.
Not really. But then, I know just enough about it to know that I don't need to know any more.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
You're being cute I realise, but there is a HUGE difference. I Dream of Jeannie was a comedy, and obviously such, putting "magic" next to science was done for comedic effect. I also adored that show.
I watched only 2 episodes and only watched the second one because a person a work begged me to. They lost me in the premiere. A plane breaks apart from 40,000 feet, and there are SURVIVORS... okay, I'm willing to suspend belief, so I kept watching. There's a guy who wakes up on the ground. He starts wandering around, and comes up to a bunch of other survivors and a jet engine, inexplicably, continuing to run. Okay, I'm willing to suspend belief, but how the FREAK is a jet engine still running after a crash like that? Where is it getting its fuel? No matter, belief suspended. But I say to myself, "why do they need a jet engine running?" So someone can get sucked inside I say to myself. Of course, the guy wanders around a little more, and the engine is still running, and of course, someone walks over to the front of the engine and gets sucked through. Saw it coming 10 miles away. That's when Lost lost me. Watched the next episode out of obligation and never looked back. For 6 seasons, I've felt I dodged a bullet. Glad to find out that I did.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
Well now I feel good about the decision I made 6 years ago to not watch a single episode of this show when I attempted to watch the first episode and failed 4 times. Even from the first episode it looked like it wasn't going to go anywhere and that a good 50% of the stuff in it would never be explained.
I was either going to be horribly wrong and miss the best written TV show ever, or be correct.
The producers and writers NEVER promised rational explanations for everything that happened on the island. In fact, they explicitly said there were a lot of things that definitely didn't have them. I don't know where you got your information to the contrary but, if while watching the show you really thought there was going to be a 'rational' explanation for a sentient cloud of black smoke that travels the island offing people...well, i'm flabbergasted.
To be fair, it is more like Ambrose Bierce's Incident at the Owl Creek Bridge, in that Lost was sometimes (oft times in the first couple seasons) worth viewing, even though it all ends up as drivel.
... that I never watched a single episode.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I watched them and shrugged. Something about a plane crash and a bunch of survivors - thanks, but that's all I needed to know next channel please. If they hadn't trailed the programme every new episode and every new series, I might have been tempted to give it a try. Luckily nothing I saw during those short clips gave any impression it was worth spending time on. Thank you to however produced them, you did me a favour.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Ever since I watched Babylon 5 and have seen an entire series setup and resolve expectations over a number of seasons I thought that other shows would follow. I thought that Lost, and Battlestar would follow B5's example as they led me to believe. In the end I'm just left felling mad. I NEVER want to watch an episode of Lost or BSG again. It just feels like a lie.
Note to writers. You don't have to do the big mystery thing, you don't have to setup expectations of how its all going to end. Just do a simple episode by episode series (Like ST:TNG, DS9, and Voyager) it works fine, and I'm not left feeling mad.
Carnivale was pretty kick-ass too. I'm still bitter about that one being canceled. (okay, okay... mildly peeved...)
I'm not sure they actually did. Got an actual quote?
Clever signature text goes here.
No. The show is an empty promise, leading people on without any plan to resolve it. If you watch the first 3 seasons, you'll see weird things that you assume get explained later, but it never happens, and then in the 4th-6th seasons they're clearly just making stuff up as they go, and hoping that you'll forget prior mysteries. The show is all setup and every time you think it has gotten to Act 2 or even Act 3, the writers lose interest in the plot and decide you're in Act 1 again.
Lost is bad.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Bottle is bigger on the inside as it consists of 3-dimensional space folded over the 4th dimension.
How does she get in and out of the bottle? Teleportation.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The term we're looking for here is Willing Suspension of Disbelief, which itself is quite dependant on the fact that while the author's work may not be realistic, it is at least internally consistent.
However, if you break this internal consistency, turning your work into a mashed goop of misdirected literary intent, convoluted cross reference, stretched idioms, and outright lameness, you end up with a Wall Banger. It's my understanding that this is precisely what happened to Lost. It also happened to BSG. It will basically happen to any story arc centric show in which the writers make shit up as they go along. For some reason, TV producers seem to think this is a good idea. Personally, I would have fired the writers and cancelled Lost in pre-production the moment I found out the writers did not have even a basic narrative plan from day one.
An example of a show this didn't happen to was Babylon 5. Apparently the writer had a good outline of the entire series mapped out before any shooting began. That's how you tell a long story in television, or anywhere else for that matter. This is pretty basic stuff, usually figured out by most people at around age six when their favourite make believe fairy tale world of swords and sorcery is finally ruined by someones suggestion that the party destroy the orbiting space dreadnought by sabotaging its reactor core. The Lost writers need to take a basic course in how to a) write and b) how to be a GM.
May the Maths Be with you!
Never has that tag been more appropriate.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
As far as i can remember Lost was planned for one season and 3-4 shows before the grand finale they decided that they could not kill the cash cow and had to make things up on the fly. That was the point when i stopped watching. Guess i didnt miss much.
and forgotten.
Damn, you gave it away. FORGOTTEN is to the spin-off...
And it had a pretty similar ending, in that they were all dead, but it worked and was emotionally and logically satisfying.
are those who have to show up in a thread about lost and bash the show
i never got the show, but obsession with the show is completely harmless. i don't hold it against anyone
what bother me is people who don't like the show... but have to come in and shit all over someone else's harmless enjoyments
we all have our quirky likes and dislikes that are easy to ridicule or put down. so what? most socially well-adjusted folk don't have an irrational need to pick on others. if you do have such a need, this reveals nothing about lost, it reveals something about yourself: a poverty of character and some sort of unresolved self-hatred and self-loathing. lose your pathetic need to go out of your way to menace other people's harmless hobbies
oh who am i kidding... this is the internet. mindless negativity seems like that's what the internet was created for
carry on then, aggressively ultranegative losers. the internet is yours, unfortunately
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No, you see a magnetic harmonic resonance explains how a BIG CLOUD OF FUCKING SENTIENT BLACK SMOKE roams around. Really, it's all science. Atheists rejoice!
My user number is prime. Is yours?
Suddenly the dungeon collapses – you die.
Parent is absolutely right. Shows like these succumb to their own success.
This is the problem that faced Lost from season 2 onward. It was never -meant- to be as many seasons long as it ended up being. But when you get such high ratings, the stations pretty much force you to produce more content (read:filler), dragging the story on and on, and eventually you end up having so much going on in the show, that the ending you had envisioned by the time you wrote the pilot, that the ending will no longer work and you've got just a few shows (if being abruptly canceled. Hi, Heroes) to try and tie things up - which is, invariably, a mess.
( Let's see how Heroes fares with their cancellation. )
Sadly, hardly any station would allow you to specify in the contract that the show will be N seasons or episodes long with key plot elements from the pilot to the finale, with little room in other (filler) episodes for the station managers to get their egotripping time. The only way to get -that- is with a miniseries.. 2-4 episodes ..which aren't well-suited for shows designed as a series.
I stopped watching mid-way through season 3.. don't bother telling me it gets better in season 4; after reading the short summary in the top post here, it could be the most brilliant made-for-TV work of our generation.. and I still wouldn't care to see it.
As an atheist myself, I have to agree with linzeal. It's not that the show promoted any particular religion (okay, maybe Catholicism), but most atheists don't believe in ghosts going on to a better place filled with light and happiness after they die. Not believing in an afterlife makes the last two hours of the show rather ridiculous. The show had in the past given rational explanations for events, even if they were of the type: for some reason, the island's strange electro-magnetic properties allow it to travel in time. That's scientific -- just far fetched, hypothetical science.
Yes, it is a work of fiction. But there are different places at which viewers of fiction suspend their disbelief. I would have no problem watching a show whose premise was: a group of strangers find themselves in purgatory, and they they must work through their past deeds together to find piece. That is different than what happened hear. Even if you accept everything that happened up until the final episode, it is a huge leap to "explain" it all with the supernatural as if it were the most natural explanation possible.
Let me weigh in with my two cents. I feel justified in commenting because this is the kind of show I would have watched and enjoyed and ultimately been annoyed by had I not been warned off.
Make-it-up-as-you-go storytelling with the writers acting smug that you never figured it out as it went along. Lax, lazy, ignorant work that was not immediately apparent because of likable characters, superficially interesting storytelling, and an intriguing premise.
X-Files really set the gold standard for this kind of thing. Chris Carter intended for the show to be episodic and tossed in the hints of a larger conspiracy as a bit of fluff. The fans latched onto that and thought these were breadcrumbs leading to a larger mystery, a great big crusty loaf of bread. And by the time we finally got to the end of the series, all we had was a large pile of stale bread crumbs and no bread! No cake, either.
BSG was the biggest disappointment since X-Files and for pretty much exactly the same reasons. Fortunately I gave up on it early on and so didn't experience the wall-banging frustration of Space Hendrix and All Along the Watchtower, of that final episode with Mitochondrial Eve and the smug inconclusion. I mean I read about it and saw people raging, obviously, but it wasn't personal for me at this point.
All of the Lost followers I know are looking exactly like me back when Phantom Menace came out, going through the five stages of fan grief when they realize it's all been a big waste of time.
First there's denial, insisting there was nothing wrong with the movie/show and that how it resolved was how the creator(s) intended from the beginning.
Second comes cognitive dissonance as the fan realizes what they were handed was a pile of shit and that does not square with their expectations.
Third is rationalization, trying to explain that while some parts might have sucked, taken as a whole the work still has merit.
Fourth is realization where the fan admits to himself that it looks like shit, smells like shit, and tastes like shit because it is, indeed, shit. Even if the work started out well like a large multi-volume fantasy series, early seasons of a television show, the original movie before the purposeless sequels, all merit is gone at this point, leeched out the moment the word "franchise" was used. Some say the work will end in fire, Some say in ice, but now we've seen the end of it and it's naught but shit. This is about the stage where one's childhood feels anally violated, usually by a man with a beard and no neck.
The fifth stage is anger and that's where any fan's sentiments will remain. Some will remain seething for the rest of their days but most of us will cool to a feeling of loss and regret for what might have been.
So, Lost fans, while I don't share your loss, I feel your pain.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Does any one else think that the writers were making up even the finale as they went along? Personally, I think the explanation of the flash sideways = limbo was something they tacked on at the very last minute. In fact, if you re-examine the last season, I think it’s clear that the flash sideways was originally intended to be a true parallel reality of sorts.
1. A submerged/sunken version of the island was shown in the flash sideways world.
2. Kima, a murderer that everyone on the island hated, was present in the flash sideways world.
3. In the beginning on the flash sideways, it was implied that it took something like a near-death-experience to catch glimpses of the other timeline. By the end though, apparently any strong emotion was enough.
4. Faraday in the flash sideways specifically thought that the flash sideways was the result of something they had done with a nuclear bomb.
5. When Widmore put Desmond in the magnet shack, the impression was given that Desmond was able to jump between both realities.
6. Some of the Lostaways had pretty harsh and painful lives in the flash sideways which would seem weird for a group created dream world.
7. When fake-Locke cut Jack's neck on the island, his neck in the flash sideways began to bleed as well.
8. Eloise didn't want Desmond messing with things in the flash sideways.
Now, I'm sure if you try hard enough, all of the above can be explained away, but taken as a whole, I think its obvious that the writers created the ending of the flash sideways world completely on the fly, and I would go so far as to say there's good evidence that they didn't even figure out what they were going to do until quite a ways into the finale itself. In fact, it’s entirely possible that even during the concert in the finale the writers still hadn't figured out how they were going to end things. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't figure out what to do until the point when they were trying to figure out what Jack would find inside his dad's coffin.
P.S. And I get so sick of people defending the show by saying "Its about the characters." That's like defending a Michael Bay movie by saying "Its about the FX." A good show should be about the story, of which characters, plot, and presentation are all a part.
Damon Lindelof: [speaking to Yossarian...I mean Jack] All you have to do is be our pal.
Carlton Cuse: Say nice things about us.
Damon Lindelof: Tell the folks at home what a good job we're doing. Take our offer Jack.
Carlton Cuse: Either that or we'll cast you in our next show.
The BBC series "Ashes to Ashes" also finished up over the weekend, and it was a far more satisfying conclusion to both that series and its predecessor "Life on Mars." Well done, and a great send off for DCI Gene Hunt. I highly recommend both BBC series to folks who enjoyed Lost. Avoid the American remake of LoM though...
I knew from the begining they had no plan to really end the series, so, I never bothered to even try to get into it. I'm sorry if you did. Next time, choose more wisely.
You knew nothing of the sort. We were told time and time again that there was a plan, it was all plotted out, and it would all come together and questions would be answered. We were lied to.
Well, thanks for coming by and wasting your precious time to comment on a show you "dont [sic] give 0.5 shits]" about...
This whole series was a nighttime adapted version of daytime soap dramas with "edgier" theme and bigger budget cinematography. The writers obviously had no idea where to take the script anymore and had to extend the whole series beyond it's intended life. Seriously, compare LOST to any of those ridiculous "days of our lives" or "as the world turns" dramas that have lasted for eons with outlandish plot twists and you'll find the writers must be moonlighting for LOST. It's sad, the whole series could have ended in 3 seasons but Hollywood wanted to milk as much out of this cow as they could before people found out milk doesn't do the body good.
Thought for sure that in the last episode they would find Gilligan.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Of the entire series?
na, it's there there
I don't event think that was the real finale. If one thing really defined the show this season, it was the ever present and really fucking obnoxious big red "V" that kept showing up in all the wrong places, like over subtitles, etc. Clearly, this could not have been a real episode, since there was no "V" intrusion.
The Wire.
I don't live in a "hatch" (wtf is that?) and I had no idea the series had ended. My media intake is not one of TV series that I have no interest in.
While I'm usually the first to defend some of the more edge of "nerd" articles, this is just stupid.
Offend me and then attempt to spark a conversation about something I don't know anything about. Nice one CmdrTaco.
It's about time it ended. I managed to tune in almost halfway into season 2. One day It's not safe to walk into the forest the next the danger just disappears. No explanation. No reason. I can write like that.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
I can't hear anything, I was blown. - Tobias Funke
I didn't watch the show, but if they were going after the Christian market, they failed miserably. None of the people that I know are professing Christians ever talked about Lost (not that none of the people who I know who talked about Lost are professing Christians, just that if they are, I am unaware of it). However, almost all of the "mystical" stuff I heard people talking about from the show was incompatible with a Christian worldview.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Complete scientific explanations are great, and sure it would have been interesting to get a few more of those out of Lost, but the Island was NEVER what the show was about: it was about the people. Every moment of the show was about the people; how they reacted to the stresses they faced (plane crash, mysterious monsters, evil island residents, lack of rescue, pressing button on a short timescale, uncontrolled time shifts, loves lost, loves gained, etc, etc, etc.) Why do you think we got all the flashbacks/flashforwards/flashsideways!? The Island was just a strange, mysterious setting in which to put the characters and watch them react.
Personally, I love the fact we actually don't know what happened to Ford/Kate, etal. on the plane that did leave the island. According to Christian, they may well have gotten back to civilization and lived long lives. I love the fact that Ben was STILL conflicted, and even though forgiven, not yet ready to move on. I don't yet know what to make of the fact that Michael and Walt were missing, yet the dog was there with Jack at the end.
If a show answers ALL the questions, what is the point? Lost gave us something to think about long after the show has ended. I am grateful it was here, shining brightly in the current wasteland of mindless, idiotic, juvenile reality tv!
VASIMR to Mars!
Jacob's Ladder did it much better.
story arc centric show in which the writers make shit up as they go along. For some reason, TV producers seem to think this is a good idea.
That reason is money: Short term profit is the ONLY thing that matters to TV producers.
Long term? Who the hell cares, they'll be working at another studio by then, a better one if they make a lot of short-term money in the interim.
You can't take the sky from me...
So the afterlife was more ridiculous than all the other ridiculous concepts like smoke monsters and time travelling islands just because you are an athiest? Come on. I'm an athiest and I just considered the whole series as rather outlandish fiction. I don't particularly care if they present a religious aspect because to me it's the same thing as any other fictional plot device.
As others have pointed out, Lost at some point reached a point where the series outlived its intended story arc and the writers scratched their head and said where can we go from here? The plot became more and more outlandish until it broke out of my suspension of disbelief and to be honest I stopped caring about the island as much. Personally I think the writers were smart to just discard the convoluted, steaming pile of dung they created and focus on wrapping up the characters. I don't think there was any way they could tie up all the loose ends with the island in a way that would satisfy people because it would clash with what they had built up in their imagination. People connected emotionally to the characters so it was a smart alternative to tie up a few loose ends and then give the characters closure.
Hypocrisy rocks, dude!
Clever signature text goes here.
I don't understand how being an athiest would deter you from watching a work of fiction.
When B5 pulled the "OMG alien angels!" crap, I stopped watching. You know why? Fuck that hack writer, angels aren't a universal image of good, they're from one part of the world, and I'm offended. I don't mind Ancient Astronaut storylines, but cultural imperialism like that is icky.
I tried watching it again later on: The captain was beaten and tortured, he jumped out of a tall window in a deep hole while his broke the dome, let in the toxic atmosphere and asploded with three space-nukes. That was a season finale, and I stopped watching again when I realized that all of that had failed to kill the guy. Bleark.
You can't take the sky from me...
Lost untangled will not be on my list as the sponsor is none other than M$ trying to push their drug, Vista 7. M$ will do whatever it can to push their DRM infested non free software, even use astroturfers on multiple accounts to shill for M$. Even $lashdot is now shilling for M$. Once M$ dies so will all non-free software. Even $lashdot will die once M$ is dead.
--
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Friends do assist M$ addicted friends in committing suicide.
I gave up on Lost during the second series. Actually, probably about half way through. I thought, 'these people are taking the piss'.
I agree. They threw in a stained glass window with many religions' symbols to try and make you think they were being all-inclusive, but the name was a dead giveaway.
Most TV? Certainly. But there are the occasional gems that make it worthwhile. A few examples of current, excellent shows include Better Off Ted (sadly canceled), Dexter, and Gravity (weird show on Starz about a suicide group).
Ted is gone? Shit! I knew it was inexplicably too good for network TV. I know! Let's bring on another police procedural!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Ok, I'll give you all the point that the series was unnecessarily twisted and drawn out. It could have benefited from being 4 seasons instead of 6. Also, it's true that we didn't really learn anything about the island, the light, or the significance of many things that seem, in retrospect, to be plot devices. The Slashdot audience should not be expected to forgive these errors. But, while this show did have a flimsy skeleton there was plenty of emotional meat attached to it. Lost gave us a host of deep and compelling characters that network television almost never delivers. We loved and hated them (and sometimes both ...) so strongly that despite the achingly twisted, suspenseful, drawn-out plot, many of us kept tuning in to see what happens to them.
In fact, I think what we have witnessed is that the Lost writers pulled off a Reverse Lucas. There were almost no compelling characters in the Star Wars prequels and plot was a device upon which to hang special effects and all in service of telling a story with a well-known conclusion. In Lost, the story almost never makes sense. There is no conclusion. Everyone dies and essentially nothing happens. But the characters kept many of us coming back.
In that way, I think that the ending was completely appropriate. There were no real answers. Any fan of the show knew there never would be answers. But any fan who stayed on for the entirety of the series loved the characters and it was gratifying and entirely appropriate to see them reunited at the end.
Me, too. Another show that infurated me was I Dream of Jeannie. I mean, under the laws of physics and rational human reason, there's just *no way* that Barbara Eden could fit into that tiny little bottle.
Damn, it all makes sense now! Jeannie was a Time Lord!
Exactly why her TARDIS's chameleon circuit decided an Arabian(ish) lamp was the ideal disguise for the time is still baffling, though...
Another one of those over hyped shows that goes out with much publicity and paid for frenzy. I see this topic on the NEWS, in all the magazines, even here on Slashdot. And all for some show that people have mistaken for being full of depth when like every other show it just threw itself up there and invented itself as it went along. Good for those guys for tap dancing as long as they could and suckering suckers. That's the show I enjoy watching.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
I never really got into lost, probably because I figured out how JJAbrams makes plots.
Every show he does has this thing I call the "JJAbarms box". Basically, Imagine you're in a room with a guy and a big box. the guy says there's something special in the box. your mind goes nuts trying to figure out what that special something is. Finally once your mind is in this "whatsinthebox!whatsinthebox!" loop, he opens the box to reveal another box saying that theres something special in that box. rinse and repeat.
I find it ironic that the last box in lost was in fact a pine box with nothing inside it.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Wow, so many haters and only one comment worth reading:
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1662826&cid=32322712
As for the show itself, it had excellent music, actors, and writing. Sure, there were some boring moments, and there will always be some unsolved mysteries, but the overall show was very satisfying and entertaining.
How can this be mod'ed as a troll? Seriously. Is there a moderator out there that _doesn't_ think that most TV sucks big sweaty donkey balls?
And if so, I'd like to lock him overnight in a storage container with one of those smug 'Well actually, I don't even own a TV' fuckers.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's clear the writers started with a clear concept: a glorified episode of "The Ghost Whisper" touching the still-raw grief of 9/11 with its plane-crash imagery. But between the pilot and the finale, they had to generate a lot of X-files-ish filler to keep the air of mystery - and that's where the hype and mythology sort of ran away on them.
You could not be more wrong.
"Darlton" wanted to tell a sci-fantasy story set on this island about good battling evil. It started to drag in season 2 because they didn't know how long they had to go, and felt they needed to stretch things out. They negotiated a specific end date because they didn't want to pad the story. And from the moment they negotiated that end date, the pace picked up.
The best thing about Lost is that they struck a deal to remove the filler and focus on telling a very specific story with a very specific end date.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Hopefully a good GM, otherwise the series would have ended with a cow or Thor-shot wasted on the group.
What the audience wanted : answers
What the writers wanted : to make more episodes of Lost
The two being pretty much mutually exclusive until the point that the series was scheduled to end is what made it such a frustrating experience.
We just started watching BB, and we're hooked. If Joel & Ethan Coen had to produce a TV show, this would be it. It's the darkest comedy ever made for TV.
I've watched the series in it's entirety and I enjoyed the finale. I don't understand the vitriol here though. I feel like the writers did have a plan and the last couple of episodes felt like they were cramming too much stuff in because they paced it wrong. It was a little bottom heavy, but not BAD or AWFUL. They followed the Abrams formula of hyping the mystery and trying to give answers without being super concrete while implying the truth. This approach is an alternative to midichlorians, and is most definitely on purpose. Lost, just like any other good show, was character driven. The sci-fi aspects were just the setting. The finale gave some closure to the characters and some good implications on what created the electromagnet forces (hint: a volcano). If you enjoyed the mystery and characters of the show and are SO ANGRY that the ending wasn't up to your expectations. You may have have a hard time being happy in life. Enjoy the fucking journey babies.
Lost is like sticking yourself in the eye with a needle in order to change your view. A few jokes: Q: If you use GPS on Lost how do you know where you're going? A: You don't, because you're already there. Q: How many Lost characters does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Zero, the island does it for you. Q: What do the writers of Lost do in their spare time? A: They define how something can be Lost and then lose it...then spend the rest of the time trying to find what was lost only to discover that what was lost now is found...wait that wasn't a joke, but the cruel reality that Lost was, is, and will be a time-suck in re-run form; though is that even possible? Oh, please stop this mental torture...I'm going back to "Who wants to be a millionare?" In fact I would create a show called "Would you like a million bucks?" and then just ask a person if they wanted say $100 and go up to $1 million. At the end the person would need to decided (gulp)...if they wanted $1 million dollars...oh the suspense!!!!!
...es war Art klein...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I don't know what's better, that or Keeping Up With The Kardashians. Gems, SON.
For six years I've heard people bitch incessantly about how this show will never reveal answers. They said you wouldn't see the monster for six-seven years. Then you see the monster in season 1.
The show provided answer after answer after answer.
Still people bitched and said they hated the show. But for some crazy reason they continued to watch for years.
Lost had the most perfect finale I've ever seen for a show (topping ST:TNG). This was a rare case in which they did have a clear idea for a story from the beginning. So many concepts hinted at early had massive reveals later. They told the story they wanted to tell. If you truly hated it, then no one forced you to watch it for six years. Not a soul.
So why did you watch it? I suspect deep down you did really love it. And if you think you were cheated, then you're not really thinking clearly. What more did you want? Did you want "midichlorian" explanations?
"Across The Sea" demonstrated how simply spoon-feeding you answers isn't particularly entertaining. If you didn't enjoy the show, you should have stopped watching. But personally, I thoroughly enjoyed the fuck out of it. It was the most intelligent and in depth story I've ever seen told. The problem with so many other complex stories of this scope is that they fall off the deep end and don't end well (Dark Tower, Neon Genesis Evangelion, The Prisoner). Lost broke the mold is actually giving you coherent answers and a great finale. Seriously, name another story on this scale that was told better.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
only the authors said many times in public, at comicon, during interviews that there WOULD be scientific explainations, that it would add up.
They sure found a way to add things up :
0 + 0 * 0 = 0
nothing happened, ever. Nothing to prove, or explain.
(yeah, I'm pissed off)
I don't have TV, so have never seen the show. Yet, friends and coworkers talk about in incessantly. All I hear is how awful it is because it never explains anything. My response "why the hell do you watch it then."
Also, living in Ohio, I wonder the same thing about Cleveland sports. You know it is going to end in a disaster... why waste your time watching it?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
LOST, was a human drama about relationships, faith, betrayal and redemption. Other shows like Battlestar Galactica were also human dramas with similar themes that just took place in a different place and time.
The island and all of the weird things that happened there was just window dressing for the main story which was about the survivors of that oceanic flight, the man in black, Richard and Jacob.
I hope that one day, you will wake up and realize that the point of life is to have meaningful relationships with the people around you placed there to guide and nurture and with the god that created you. Every thing that happens, happens for a reason. Each of us only has a short period of time on this planet so use it wisely.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
So you're an expert on a show that you never watched?
You're offended by people acting smug? Look in the mirror.
This was not X-Files or BSG. This really was the exact opposite. This was amazingly enough a well thought out show that didn't drag on too long. They had a specific arc for X number of episodes and told the story they wanted to tell in that time. They had the end planned from the beginning, and it really shows. It is amazing how consistent the show is, and how well everything paid off that they set up earlier.
Don't try and judge something you know nothing about.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, Dharma, etc. I assume that giant statue represents some mythology. That asian dude in the temple probably represents something as well. Jakob & his brother are probably Tao or something (I don't know much about that, just making something up). This show was all over the place, borrowing from everywhere.
I too am very dissatisfied with LOST. Some things were just badly written. To me this goes back at least to when Charlie died, even though water physically could not have filled the room above the broken port hole, and continued through the final episode, where suddenly Jack, Kate and the rest were traveling across vast stretches of the island in hours or minutes when it had previously taken days to cover so much ground. And even things that were supposedly explained this season made no sense if you look at the whole story. The smoke monster was revealed to have caused the appearance of several deal people, including Jack's father. But we also know that smokey could not leave the island. Yet Jack also saw his dead father manifested while he was in L.A., before returning to the Island. How can a viewer even hope to figure out anything in a story when they do stuff like that?
There were many many story holes, far too many for me to list here. But one that really needed some sort of explanation was the Darma food drop that happened shortly after the crash and saved Hurley from a much needed diet. Why was there a Darma food drop if all of Darma had been killed years earlier? Who did it, and what else are they doing? How did they even make a food drop on the Island, the mysterious nature of the Island should have made it unreachable by air, Darma had to use a sub to get there other times. But the message to viewers who were trying to actually figure out the story and make some sense of it was "screw you, the writers don't care about such things, we just want to have melodramatic deaths and church scenes with the major cast (but curiously none of the extras who also died).
And the ending made no sense at all taken with the departure of Kate, Sawyer and Clair on the plane. How does Kate end up at the funeral dead if she managed to fly off the island alive? Why even bother to get that group to the plane, if it is meaningless if they reached it or not?
The writers of Lost promised that they had a full story in mind when the series started, that they were not just making it up as they went along. That either wasn't true or they were some of the worst writers in history.
Some shows are just entertainment. The viewer knows not to spend any time trying to figure out much of anything, because it would be time wasted. But Lost presented itself as something different. It claimed to have an underlying logic behind it. Viewers were encouraged to try to understand the riddles of the island. In the end the loyal viewers were betrayed.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I have no idea what Lost is. Should I feel bad about that?
The shitty TV show by the war criminal who made the most recent shitty Star Trek movie...
(I was going to say "the shitty Star Trek movie", but, I mean, come on...)
Bow-ties are cool.
Or do I have that backwards? I found the characters as annoying as you did, and I think people's affinity or lack thereof with those schmucks^Wcharacters is basically what makes them like the show, or wish it would get lost. Which of course, now it has... except they made enough of of it to likely make a movie next.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I can name that show in one word... "Riverworld".
[Fry]I get it![/Fry]
As in Christianity.
[Fry]Oh! Now I get it![/Fry]
Except that they made it very clear (both from the beginning and in the final episode) that the island was not purgatory. The flash sideways was purgatory (only revealed in the last episode).
I don't care whether the explanation is the most plausible or logical. All I'm saying is that the final episode asked people (especially people who do not believe in an afterlife) to take another huge leap in suspension of disbelief beyond what we had already accepted. Honestly, I would have been fine with that if they didn't make it so obvious, is if we should have all gone "oh, of course, why didn't we think of that." To posit an afterlife is a weighty claim, and it sits poorly with me when it is used as an explanation of less weighty mysteries.
Hah... Buffy? Big Bang Theory?? Coupling??? You'll watch any old drivel it seems.
Every long running successful show on television (LOST, BSG, the various Star Treks) were human dramas first and sci-fi second. Why is that? Because, other than the terminal Asperger syndrome sufferers, normal people respond to stories about human relationships and struggles. Those shows were successful because they attracted not only obsessed people looking for sci-fi but regular people looking for a good human drama.
The season finale wrapped up the main plots of the story quite nicely and ignored much of the windows dressing. The Island was not important. It was just a plot device and the real story was about people like Richard, Ben Linus and the survivors of the crash. All of the main characters learned some important lessons and/or redeemed themselves from a previous fall into selfishness/sin.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Shut up and die
I watched both the X-Files and Twin Peaks when they were originally broadcast (what can I say, I'm a sucker for mysterious shows). I think Lost ended much better than either of those.
The X-Files was hamstrung by its desire to remain on the air indefinitely. Thus the mysteries got more and more ridiculous, convoluted, and unexplainable. In the end it went off the air with a whimper, and produced one ok movie and one absolutely terrible movie. I think Lost did it better by setting an end point and structuring 3 seasons to get there. Besides, the "mythology" of the X-Files was really a tail that started wagging the dog...the show was originally conceived to be episodic, and the mythology sort of grew out of fan reaction. Lost was always intended to be one continuous interconnected story.
Twin Peaks was also intended to be one continuous story, but it was canceled and thus had to wrap up rather abruptly. They did the best they could (I actually love the last scene), but again--I found Lost more satisfying because the storyline was structured over multiple seasons toward an intended ending.
IMO a lot of the complaints online are from people who are simply facing a mismatch between their desires and the product. Some people love sci-fi and are pissed the story ended on a metaphysical/supernatural note. Other people are unhappy that some mysteries were left unsolved...Silmarillion readers, if you get my drift.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
it does nothing for the viewers who were sold for 5 seasons on the concept of the mysterious island with shitloads of secrets which give rise to even more questions that would eventually be answered.
I never got that expectation from the show. From the first episode it was clearly structured as a character-driven story...the story of these people, what happened to them, and where they came from. The mysteries were things that happened to them, and we participated through their eyes. We almost never step outside their perspective. In fact I can only think of one time in 6 seasons--at the beginning of this season, when they show the island underwater in the first "flash sideways."
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
WHOOOOSH
That word, I do not think it means what you think it means...
Bow-ties are cool.
So you're an expert on a show that you never watched?
You're offended by people acting smug? Look in the mirror.
This was not X-Files or BSG. This really was the exact opposite. This was amazingly enough a well thought out show that didn't drag on too long. They had a specific arc for X number of episodes and told the story they wanted to tell in that time. They had the end planned from the beginning, and it really shows. It is amazing how consistent the show is, and how well everything paid off that they set up earlier.
Don't try and judge something you know nothing about.
Third stage, rationalization.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Jean Higgins is actually a friend of my family, and let slip about two years ago that the writers never really had a plan, and that the whole show was basically going nowhere. After hearing that, I decided I could pass on ever watching the damn thing.
the authors said many times in public, at comicon, during interviews that there WOULD be scientific explainations, that it would add up.
Jack, upon observation "Dad's coffin is empty again; I remember a different life; wait, there's Dad, alive!", created a hypothesis "I'm Dead", tested his hypothesis "Dad, am I dead, are we all dead?", and repeated the experiment by entering the sanctuary and experiencing more. Seems people in the afterlife can scientifically study the afterlife. Ta Da! The writers never said their science wouldn't involve things outside observers can't measure, did they? ;D
It is simpler to be complex then simple. Take the shortest sci-fi story: "The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door..."
It is very very simple but could you have written it? Probably not.
There is another, although this is more of an intro, close to the classic Star Wars into: "That morning the sun rose in the west."
In one sentence we establisch that this is a different world then we know, just as when Luke Skywalker gazed at two setting suns. This is HARD, we have seen countless sci-fi movies that try to create elaborate imaginary worlds and going totally overboard. Compare the difference between Star Wars Cantina and any music scene in Star Trek TOS. The latter tries to hard, tries to introduce to many fancible objects that in the end just looks like somebody is playing a bicycle wheel.
And for story telling, much the same applies. If I was a really good writer, I wouldn't need this rambling rant, I would have been able to make my point in a single paragraph.
Lost is the product of a writer commitee that didn't know how to write a REALLY good mystery, so they just kept ladling things on and called confusion mystery. Twin Peaks did much the same thing although that was more confusion being mistaken for depth.
And its commercial success works like the emperors clothes. Surely you are not going to say that you "don't get it" when everyone who says they are really smart claims to get it? You got to watch it even if deep down you think the plot was created by taking every b-script written and jumbling the pages, because else you are just one of the plebs that don't get good tv.
Well, I am calling the emperor naked. I can see his dangle and it ain't anything special.
But there will forever people trying to claim there is more to it, because else they would have to admit they watch 5 seasons of the emperors dangly bits. Sometimes there just isn't any depth in a story. Do those same people wonder about the shortest story and look for hidden clues in the two lines as to what might be going on? Here is a hint: NOTHING. Whatever you imagine is going on and at the same time nothing. That is the brilliance of the "story". The author doesn't need an ending because you make up the ending and that is the ending for you.
Ah well, lets see, we should have another decade or two before the next "mystery" show gets aired. Should be about time for another program about a strong independent woman who sleeps with every man she meets and has no other dream then getting married while bonking the navy.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Is summed up nicely by this short, entertaining, and philosophical book: http://www.amazon.com/Illusions-Richard-Bach/dp/0440343194/
The simple explanation to the ending is, in my mind, the right one. "Sideways" was the afterlife - there's no sense of time, and the characters all eventually "awaken," remember their real lives, and reunite to take the final journey. Everything that happened on the island was science-fictiony, but it was real. The bomb didn't trigger the flash-sideways, it was always there and we just hadn't seen it yet. The bomb didn't even explode in the traditional sense, it just triggered a time-travelling incident (which, again, really happened - it's a sci-fi show).
The ending hit an emotional high note - if you had anything invested in the human drama of the characters at all, you're lying if you say that wasn't cathartic to see them all reunite in the afterlife, dressed to the nines, rejoicing and ready to take the final step. However, the good-vs-evil storyline, even though it only really appeared this season, ended up living fully on the island, and so we got a lame little tussle and an ignominious kick-off-the-cliff of the unnamed and unexplained "bad guy." With a few tweaks throughout the season and a rewrite of the last half of the finale, it could have been epic.
When not-Locke said "you're too late" before being killed, and then Locke woke up in the hospital after surgery and said "... it worked," I thought "Oh hell yes, this is it. He never had to *physically* escape - he's transplanted his malevolence into John's body in the other reality." If they had put a little more writing into the purpose of the island and making Mr. Black the devil/evil incarnate, they could have moved the "this is the afterlife" reveal and a few other events to the middle of the finale, and we would have had a hell of a final hour with the special-effects-laden showdown the fans were denied: the devil has escaped his prison and is just this side of breaking into heaven, and Jack, who could have retained his protectorship into the afterlife to chase him, has to stop him. We get to see Mr. Black shape-shift and retake his original body, see John re-inherit his body, Mr. Black becomes the smoke on-camera, big battle with Jack, the other characters still have their emotional reuniting and then are there with dear old dad and even Jacob to cheer Jack on. Jack wins and is horribly wounded, but hey, it's the afterlife, and they still all get to go to heaven.
only the authors said many times in public, at comicon, during interviews that there WOULD be scientific explainations, that it would add up.
They sure found a way to add things up :
0 + 0 * 0 = 0
nothing happened, ever. Nothing to prove, or explain.
(yeah, I'm pissed off)
Or maybe it's more like this...
(1 + -1) + (1 + -1) + (1 + -1) ... = 1 + (-1 + 1) + (-1 + 1) + (-1 + 1)... = 1 + (1 + -1) + (1 + -1) + (1 + -1) ... ... = 0 - so...
(1 + -1) + (1 + -1) + (1 + -1)
0 = 1 + 0
Bow-ties are cool.
The first two, maybe three, seasons where some of the best TV I have seen. After that, like so many other shows, it was ruined. In the end the whole became just another pile of crap which will be utterly forgotten in short order.
It is very sad. And you would think people would want to make it better. But the problem is born of the way TV shows are created. You get a pilot. You don't know if it's going to take-off so you haven't put too much energy into the "whole". If it does take then you find yourself scrambling to come up with a couple more seasons, but still you don't put too much effort into a whole story because it might be canceled, so why bother. The whole effort therefore becomes nothing more than a series of enticements and cliff-hangers designed to get you back next week with little thought about how this will all sit with the viewer as a totality when the curtain finally draws closed.
Rather than a revolution in TV, as the TV execs would have us believe, I think they are in for a sad about face. If others feel anything like I do, the stations are about to loose a lot of viewers. After BSG and now LOST (not to mention Heros, Jericho, Bionic Woman, and many others) I feel betrayed one too many times. And I will not give them my valuable time and energy any more.
:T:R:A:N:S:
No, we need to make room for a medical drama!
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
Check my Twitter feed. I've loved Lost from the very first episode, and I really loved the finale last night.
I don't really watch other TV shows because they tell incomplete stories. Writers just want to get picked up for another season, and they never know how long they're going. They are told that episodes can't require viewers to have seen previous seasons.
(A friend of mine was talked into finally watching Big Bang Theory, and the first episode he watched was basically a flashback episode that filled in gaps in the backstory. Every joke required you to know everything that came before it. Because of that, he was decided to never watch the show again. And before the internet, DVRs, etc. you could never do that sort of thing).
Most shows also aren't serialized at all. Everything needs to be wrapped up from episode to episode with largely no growth or development.
Lost is the antithesis of that. It takes all the flaws of the television model, and spins it on its head. It is weird how people complain about Lost, assuming it must follow the same model. They assume it too must be made up as they went along. They assume it too was dragged out by the network.
Like Babylon 5, this is a rare exception where a specific concept was negotiated for a specific number of seasons. We should be celebrating the insight of a network to agree to tell a complete story like this.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
but I realised that 'Lost' had obviously ended because I gave explicit instructions not to let me out until after the series finale.
and forgotten.
Damn, you gave it away. FORGOTTEN is to the spin-off...
I thought the follow-up to "LOST" was "KEEP IT TOGETHER"?
Bow-ties are cool.
I watched the first couple of episodes of lost years ago, and gave up.
It was clear, as you noted, that this was one of those series where "the truth is out there (just around the corner)" but in fact there is no truth and nothing is going to be resolved.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Lost: The TV Series was meant to lead to Lost: The Board Game and then Lost: The DVD. Put your favorite characters' life in proper order. Amaze your friends, be a leading cause of Biker Bar fights, or as a source for WWF personalities.
That giant sucking sound was all the viewers getting amped for the final episodes.
The big questions were answered, but they seem not to like the answers provided
For the first three seasons the numbers were a huge question. The same numbers kept popping up everywhere, but why? Then the writers just dropped the numbers, in their typical ad-hoc story-telling fashion.
I think the plane crash at the end was were Kate, Sawyer, and Richard, died.
But what about Aaron? Why was Aaron dead? Did the Kwon baby die also?
Enough seeds were planted last night http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs327.snc3/28962_1394349472816_1654586325_941861_440731_n.jpg Fantasy Island, smokey free since 2010.
I didn't watch "Lost", but all these comments about the ending remind me of the ending of the Harry Potter books.
The shots of the fuselage camp on the beach were simply nice reminders from the producers and/or ABC of where the story began. In nerd-speak, they're not "canon." The story of Lost ended when Jack's eye closed.
The best explanation I read was that it's the final remains of the 815 crash after all the Losties died. It's the mystery that other people brought to the island in the future will wonder about, like we wondered about the hatch, the statue, Henry Gale's balloon, and so on.
If you watched the show from the beginning you'll remember that in the story, most of the fuselage camp washed away from an unusually high tide a few weeks after the crash. So it won't be around for future island inhabitants to wonder about.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Avatar: The Last Airbender
I explicitly release the above into the public domain.
In a moment of "away from home for two weeks" with nothing but some pets I was supposed to feed and an entire library of DVDs, I found myself working through LOST.
At first the J.J. Abrams stench ("See? Torture Works!") episodes were stupid and disgusting, worth writing the show off entirely for. But early on he went off to "greener" pastures and left the show in the hands of the emotionally/spiritually squishy Damon Lindelof and Jeffrey Lieber. I don't know what either of those two light-weights feel about torture, and it probably doesn't matter because I'm sure you could convince them either way and back again over lunch. That's the impression I got from them; Open and easily convinced and bearing few opinions strong enough to resist change, but deep down, good people with positive intentions who play the long game; they'll get there eventually and know the score. And in the end, that's what made the show strong.
They were channeling some pretty extravagant ideas, and by the time the last season rolled around, they had recognized that evil is evil and that it is a choice, not a default setting. That by itself was surprising, and a nice reward for sitting through far too many hours of that show all by myself in the middle of nowhere when I really expected Hollywood to just do its regular bullshit thing where it supports greed and empire and whatever flavor of propaganda happens to be in vogue. (Which, don't get me wrong, LOST did its share of, but without lasting effect because every other message was allowed air time as well.)
How many stories in popular media explore multi-dimensionality, time loops, the soul, science and human behavior? I mean, without bible-as-fact idiocy, without dogmatic "science" as king? Just doesn't happen. I mean, the show visited the inside of laboratories, lunatic asylums and religion and didn't pronounce any of them as correct; just facets of awareness and our striving to understand the great mystery of creation. That's what we call openness and a willingness to explore, and you just can't get anywhere in life if you don't explore with your eyes open. So yeah, LOST is going to piss off those who simply cannot work up the courage to live in a world where we simply aren't going to have all the answers, ever; who refuse to look or even consider beyond the confines of whatever artificial system of explanations they use to pretend control over their personal reality.
But the best part. . . My favorite character; Hugo. . , man, he was the one guy who trusted openly, who didn't engage in all the paranoia and violence and manipulations. They put the guy in a crazy house for it, (well, the writers did, anyway), "You have to be crazy if you trust the universe!" And I was shouting, "But he's the only one who has a clue!" But by the end, holy smokes! They made him into a minor deity because he'd figured out the secret of Karma. I really didn't think the writers were sophisticated enough to do that, but what do you know? A show that started off with Abrams torture episodes managed to shed that crap, choose between good and evil, and evolve.
How often does that happen?
But sorry, it's true, the characters never really rose above 2-dimensions for me. The creators and actors tried hard, but it was still very thin on that front. But then, most real people walk around in a state of "Flat", so it's not like they weren't being accurate.
All in all, LOST was a pleasant surprise and it planted some ideas which are vital to understanding what is going on in the world right now. Nice job!
-FL
I had memories of Millenium when I found out Terry O'Quinn was on there. Lots of promise, but it kinda fizzled. Mystery is always more exciting than what it turns out to be. I hear songs on the radio, which absolutely captivate me until I understand the lyrics, or how to play it, or even just figure out that the complicated chord structure is really just the nature of the instrument (like Breaking the Girl - just move the same chord around).
Mystery is simply not sustainable for long enough for a television show. At some point you have to reveal something, which is either explaining the mystery or adding more mystery. Lost apparently just added more mystery without really resolving anything. I watched 13th warrior last night ("Eaters of the Dead"), and I was impressed by each revelation making a new mystery. but you always felt forward progress. Since it's an old movie I hope I'm not ruining anything, but you have the unknown, a "fire snake" which is initially confused with a dragon (obviously it's just a dragon, which exists, not a snake made out of fire, duh). Then the mystery is bear-like creatures, then it's just people, and so is the fire snake. But how/where do they live, what is their culture like? Then the movie retains the plot, but focuses on the new mystery. Lots of movies do this properly.
Anything which evolves over several seasons has to have an overall story arc - which is not possible to plan since the series can be cancelled when few people watch it. the series is about to be cancelled, so you reveal some things in the last 2-3 episodes of the season, and people watch the last 1 or 2 episodes and the ratings save it.
bottom line, the yearly renewal option is going to make shows like this impossible to pull off with any quality, unless you make each season fairly self-contained. Build on the previous ones, but you have to change the focus on the mystery. Not just resolve small points and leave the big ones open. That changes the direction of the show, now what initially hooked users is completely different.
Once you launch, you're changing the plane mid-air. You can only change it so much before you have to re-launch.
I know they intentionally didn't answer a lot of stuff but there was one thing I wondered about. Did they ever answer who was flying those planes that were doing the food drops and why? Did someone on the mainland think Dharma was still kicking?
Is this like a television program or something? Sorry, gave that waste up in '89 and found time for a whole 'nother life. If I find myself strapped into a wheelchair or some such, can always catchup. Dementia will make it all the more enjoyable.
Welcome to my Hatch, won't you climb inside?
you are what you is -- FZ
That ending has forced me to swear off of serialized TV for good. TV has been keeping me too far away from World of Warcraft.
Sorry, I'm an Atheist and the ending for me was like watching the crew of the enterprise meeting Santa Claus at the North Pole.
What if the crew of the Enterprise met Abraham Lincoln in space? Oh yes, a powerful but mysterious alien being reincarnated him and other historical figures to learn about good and evil. Yes yes, perfectly rational. Because, you see, it's in space. :-)
I do not believe in an afterlife but I enjoyed the ending of Lost because I thought it was a story well told. I also, for instance, don't believe that a person today could invent and build an immensely powerful and artificially intelligent exoskeleton, but I liked that story too.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I never watched even one episode of Lost. Maybe 60 seconds or so, once. So I haven't been suckered into it.
Same deal with The Sopranos. The mass hysteria surrounding these shows is sort of an indication it's not going to end well for the viewer.
Seinfeld I watched religiously, so its irresolute finale was a bit annoying to me. But that show's value was purely episodic, so they could have just done another regular episode and walked away, and the last was just a bad one, not necessarily a devaluation of the entire series.
Best finale of a TV show, ever? St. Elsewhere. Too bad for you if you didn't get a chance to live through that.
Someone needs to go back and watch Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. The Force was entirely and adequately explained by Obi Wan to Luke. Lucas felt it needed further explanation in his more recent cinematic abortions.
I was left high and dry with the unsatisfactory ending of Blake's 7. Why would I invest my time in another series that was likely to do the same thing? I dodged that bullet.
Evil people are out to get you.
Lost is a "what do you think it means" show. That is its function, it allows you to discuss what you think happened with others. This is a recognized form of story telling, a slight variation on the "pan out" before the final ending that is often used in horror. I remember one movie about the world being overrun by spiders, it ends with the survivors locked up in a house and you pan out and see the entire world covered in a webbing. What happens next? That is up to the audience.
The problem is that story genres are way to limited to truly catogarize stories. A mystery ala The Orient Express is totally different from a mystery like Columbo (who done it vs how does he find out). Lost is a mystery in that it creates mystery and then leaves it to the audience.
A manga version of it is Yokohama Shopping Trip if you like. A world that is ours but with lots of differences and we the audience are never told why or what it means. Why is there a plane flying forever in the sky? Why were robots created. Why do they carry weapons when people do not. Why is the world ending? In YKK this sense of mystery is not meant to be solved, in a way it is like the question "What can change the nature of a man" in Planescape Torment. Whatever answer you think is right, is the correct one. Because it is the answer you choose after following the story.
In YKK you could imagine a nuclear war having taken place. Or global warming or an asteroid/vulcano. Whatever you come up with, that says something about you and that is the story. Your own imagination adds to the story.
The problem with Lost is that it tries to do both. Create a mystery world where your own mind fills in the blanks and that forms the story for YOU a single viewer AND create defined answers that you got to accept as the truth. It provides mystery but then doesn't seem to know how to deal with it. Leave the audience wondering or give them answers.
On the whole, if you didn't feel the need to watch it so far, I wouldn't bother. If it had stayed true to either solving mysteries or leaving people wondering it would have been great, but right now it is just a mess and you can't escape the feeling that confusion is trying to pass itself of for depth.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I don't live in a hatch.
I've got better things to do.
Feel free to call me an elitist.
I'll call you a tv zombie.
The multiseason arc in X-files wasn't just fluff. It was a 5-year plan that got derailed when the network asked for a 2-year extension about the middle of the story. Instead of sticking to the plan, Carter took the money and cannibalized the arc. Ruined the show, really. Like stretching wine by pouring water in it.
After watching endless previews of this show all over the TV networks, media, and everywhere else I finally decided to reward the show's producers and watch it. I sat down down and started watching the show from the beginning and continued on through till almost the end of season 4. Watching the 3rd season was painful because I just stopped caring about the show's characters due to all the personality flips that they underwent and their illogical choices. By the 4th season I was so bored and uninterested in the characters, the mysteries, the objects that I just wanted someone to trigger the hatch device again and kill everyone on the island to be done with once and for all.
The single scene that broke my interest in the show is when Charlie (short, skinny British musician with a brother) was killed in the underwater laboratory when he could have easily opened the door and walked outside before the flood water got him or floated up to the top of the room where there would be an air bubble, wait for the pressure to equalize and then slowly swam up through the large porthole window (where his small shoulders would fit) and left the station. He had two chances to save himself and the writers made him take none and instead dumbly sacrificed him because they couldn't think of a way to continue his plot line.
When they started introducing the post-nuke flash-sideways stuff I said to myself "oh $#!+, they are going to do a damn ghost whisperer/jacobs ladder/riverworld saccharine-fest at the end of this."
The series would have stood on its own without the ENTIRE sideways arc and its preachy-teachy allegory. The sideways arc just detracted from the main "really happened" island story. Maybe it wouldnt have if it had actually been an alternate timeline and the writers had come up with an interesting way to recombine them, but the "now you're all dead and its time to go to the light" stuff?
*puke*
Just skip over every single bit of the flash-sides when you watch it on DVD.. That superfluous allegory in the metaphysical swamp just chews the legs off the story and isnt worth your time.
I had a
Lost, at least thematically, was mapped out from the beginning. If you watch the pilot, the thematic elements of the finale are right there. The story and ending in the last 3 seasons were mapped out in much more detail when the writers were able to negotiate a set end date for the show. You can watch any episode from the first 5 seasons for free on Hulu and I'm finding it interesting to go back and do that.
It's my understanding that this is precisely what happened to Lost.
If you haven't actually been watching the show I have a hard time understanding why you're commenting on it. For example, I watched several episodes of Babylon 5 in its first season and thought it was laughably bad and cliched trashy sci-fi. Based on that, I have to admit I'm surprised to see posters today citing it as a good show. But I have to admit I didn't watch it, so what do I know.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The creators were definitely making things up as they went, but using managerial fit-it-together round table script planning sessions to help themselves make sense of the stuff coursing through their open channel.
In the end, though, it was just a show. Fiction.
But it was a fiction which paid homage to some primary truths about reality. . .
1. Reality isn't linear and it s far weirder than many allow, but there are rules and maths.
2. Gods are just people who know more of those rules and maths than the rest of us.
3. Karma works. If you punch people, you'll get punched. Trust and the Universe will trusting. But don't be stupid.
4. Magic and science are just tools to understand and work within creation. Basically, Instinct and Logic each have their use.
5. The soul is what matters.
The show was self-explanatory by the end. The only question we were left with was, "What was the source of the light and who put it there?"
That's a metaphor for the most basic of basic questions, and there are answers to it, but I've not met anybody who can do anything more than mouth the words, "God's Breath" or somesuch; nobody who really understands. We've got a ways to go before those rules and maths make sense.
And there's no rush.
-FL
At the end of the fifth season and the beginning of the sixth I got the impression that the series would wind up with some science fictiony parallel universe conclusion where the island would turn out to be some sort of portal through which everyone would get off. But when last night's finale finished I felt like I'd spent six seasons watching something akin to a very, very long version of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" with a little "Poltergeist" thrown in for good measure. I found myself saying "Go into the Light..." at the finish.
And those insipid "Final Communications" (or whatever they were called in the pre-finale rehash) could have been left out altogether. Along with the "Lost" ads from Target. I expect there will soon be "Lost" action figures available at a store near you. (Note: If these are going to be available or already are, please, please don't tell me.) The series was interesting at best once every few episodes but ABC was playing this up like something of historic importance was leaving the airwaves. The worst part of "Lost" ending is that another so-called reality show will probably take its place. You just cannot have too many of those, you know.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Shame on you. The bottle is clearly Time Lord technology! It's bigger on the inside. Getting into the bottle merely requires teleportation, something done to death in sci-fi.
We watched the LOST finale last night. It was good, and I was satisfied. I'm definitely going to buy the Blu-ray set for season 6 and watch everything again. Yep, still a fan.
The ending was really confusing, though. Here are my thoughts:
I think everything that happened on the Island was Real, the flashbacks/flashforwards were Real throughout the show, but the season 6 Flashsideways was the "much later after they all died" construct. That's how I interpreted Ben/Hurley's "You were a great #1"/"And you were a great #2" exchange.
I think the writers were trying to wrap things up for the fans, get everyone together that we've wanted to have together (Sayid & Shannon, etc.) The only way they could do that was in some sort of "afterlife" thing, which is what Christian and Jack were talking about. All that was unnecessary. I think the fans would have preferred not to have the happy ending, anyway. What happened, happened - right?
Having watched it to the end, I wish they'd managed the Flashsideways differently. It really should have been an alternate reality, and MiB should have been in that coffin instead of Christian, showing he made it off when the Island sank with the Swan bomb. And all the happy people in the church would have been his followers - like Sayid and Claire in Season 6 - taking over the world, person by person. The Flashsideways should have been MiB's construct - but when Jack defeated him on the Island in the Real timeline, that should have broken the Flashsideways.
In my mind, I think that would have been way cooler. Would have worked with Jack's bleeding neck injury, too, since what happens on the Island would show to affect the Flashsideways.
I guess I was satisfied with the finale, but not as satisfied as I wanted to be.
(A friend of mine was talked into finally watching Big Bang Theory, and the first episode he watched was basically a flashback episode that filled in gaps in the backstory. Every joke required you to know everything that came before it. Because of that, he was decided to never watch the show again. And before the internet, DVRs, etc. you could never do that sort of thing).
That's insane. If you're starting a new show you start at the beginning. You don't see what you think of a novel by starting at page 200. Only crazy people do that.
But this is instructive. Some things are objectively awful but other things are subjective; they might be well-done for that sort of thing but that's the sort of thing you don't like. Someone dislikes the same things you dislike, likes the things you like, their subjective opinion might be very valid; if there's little overlap, they can't probably tell you anything of value and neither you them.
I think Big Bang Theory is great. Anyone who disagrees with me on that probably shouldn't bother following my advice on comedies. If you like BBT, too, then let's sit down and chat.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Really it was on the air this long...I though it had been canceled after the first season.
Why bother
I didn't watch Lost.
Now that's its over, and based on what I am hearing from other people in my office and here on Slashdot, I am not going to!
Ha Ha to all of you who watched that crap and got baited in. What did you expect from TV these days?
Most of the people in my office are totally bummed because so many mysteries went unexplained and basically the last few seasons made it out to be a whole lot of NOTHING. They wasted YEARS on that stupid show and will never get their time back. I guess they were entertained though.
Some people have interpreted the ending to have been "all a dream" sort of thing. The important thing is that even if it wasn't, it might as well have been, because nothing was resolved and that's how the ending made you feel.... Lost.
All that time you Lost watching.
All the hopes you had for a great ending.
Your faith that the producers would end it well.
Lost.
No, we need to make room for a medical drama!
The doctors, will they be hot and have lots of sex? That's so crazy it might just work!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
"It claimed to have an underlying logic behind it" != "There will be answers to everything mostly spoonfed to you." Being a sci-fi nut, I'm painfully aware of unintended plot holes and inconsistencies. Every show has them. Well, every show that networks let last longer than three episodes. But just because a few things aren't explained or even (gasp!) don't make sense over the course of six years doesn't make it a terrible show. It makes the writers human and (gasp!) sometimes a little overambitious.
If you want, you can sit there and dwell on every single nitpicky little inconsistency, and yes, if you choose to do so, the show will likely suck for you. Or you could accept that there will probably be some things that you're going to have to imagine some rational explanations for yourself and even some (gasp!) continuity goofs and enjoy the show for the things that do make sense.
For the record, this was one of the things that was explicitly explained. It's been explained here. If you still don't understand, that's not the writers' fault; you must have missed it somehow.
...Or they're just like almost every other writer that has ever existed. They knew how they wanted the story to start, they knew how they wanted the story to end, they had some major plot points in mind along the way, and they knew in detail some key elements of the story. The rest was just filling in the spaces, fleshing out the details. Sometimes in doing so, some minor details got escalated and merited their own development. Sometimes in doing so, some minor continuity errors were introduced.
Any writer who tells you that they know the "full story" six years in advance is exaggerating, and not necessarily in a bad way. I'm pretty sure what I'm going to be doing at work next week, but stuff comes up and plans change, sometimes a little and sometimes a lot based on interaction with others (e.g. the writers think of something new and interesting to pursue) or outside influences (e.g. a old writer leaves and a new writer is hired).
The best thing about Lost is that they struck a deal to remove the filler and focus on telling a very specific story with a very specific end date.
And utterly failed at it.
Well, I'm glad I never got hooked on "Lost". It sounds very PKD-ish, and I find him completely insufferable in general. (I did think "The Man in the High Castle" was OK.)
(The inevitable "If you don't think PKD is the greatest writer in the history of the universe, you're an idiot" screeds happily sent to /dev/null.)
Jay Leno, on (I think) the Friday 5/21 episode, had a quick video summary of the series, which I thought was pretty funny, even though I'm sure I missed a lot of the jokes only knowing about "Lost" second or third hand. (It was a mashup of "Lost" scenes mixed with a number of other "castaways, generally on a beach" scenes from other movies and TV shows, or anything with "Island" in the name. As if the cast of Lost wasn't big enough...)
I once heard that The Unit switched attention away from the military operations of the men to the lives of the women left behind at home, as a result of focus group studies. Soon thereafter, it tanked in ratings and was canceled.
I can't help but feel something similar must have happened to Lost somewhere within the last 6 years. When the show first started out, I got the distinct feeling that the many mysteries had meaning and rational explanations. (I believe that the writers themselves even said so.) Sure, the Dharma Initiative was a peculiar operation, but it explained some things. But this ending, I don't know... It smells as if the ending that was originally planned was scrapped because it offended too many focus groups. Perhaps the original story promoted that all mysteries are only a lack of scientific understanding? (Sufficiently advanced technology, and all that) Perhaps it promoted predestination? I don't know.
All I can say is that with this ending, something changed somewhere. The carpet doesn't match the drapes.
since 9/11 now all of the world air traffic are well monitored and any aircraft this sized will be found with all of world resources at it disposal to prevent another occurrence of 9/11. If there was "hidden" island in the world they will find that airplane and it all people (alive or dead) and as many pieces of the plane to ensure they have found the plane so the aircraft won't be used for ill will.
This show started to have a "good" idea then went off the deep end of reality so I stopped viewing awhile back.
I don't understand how being an athiest would deter you from watching a work of fiction.
Actually, we atheists are used to listening to and talking about a work of fiction (religion) with our less-grounded fellow humans on a near-daily basis, so it's just more of the same. All equally preposterous.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
I would appreciate answers that are supported by the story, not just made-up theories.
1) What is the deal with the numbers? The numbers were a huge part of the first few seasons, then just seemed to get dropped.
2) Did everybody die at about the same time? Or did they die many years apart, and then just meet at the same time?
3) Were the people in L.A. dead? Or just their counter-parts on the island?
4) Why would Penny, and Aaron, be dead? Or were they?
5) If the nuke destroyed the island in 1977, then how did the characters, on the island, live? Or even if the nuke did not destroy the island, then how did the characters live? Or did the characters on the island live?
6) If the nuke did not destroy the island, wouldn't oceanic flight 815 crash because of the electro-magnetic interference?
7) Did the flash sideways stuff in L.A. happen, or was it just a bunch of dreams?
8) Jacob told Richard that the island kept all the evil in the world corked. Wouldn't Desmond uncorking the island be a bad thing? Why was it important to uncork, then re-cork? How did that save the world, or whatever?
9) What was the point of the Richard character?
10) Why did Jacob not just use Richard as a replacement?
11) Where characters on the island dead the whole time?
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There is a good series with good writing and A good end or what may be an end. Lotta boobs and blood! Some splashes like a 300 clone but who really cares! Spartacus Blood And Sand YEA!
I can think of lots of stories that involve magic, but still have a coherent story line.
Just because magic is involved in a story does not mean that you have to have a 150 major unresolved loose ends, and a cop-out ending.
I Dream of Jeannie although silly, at least had a coherent story line, which is more than I can say for Lost
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Season 1 was ok. The fact that after season 1 it got rediculas, repeatative and plain out there is crap.
I can't believe people like this shit. It just just like the new battlestar gallactica, it was crap. Now Sci-fi, or scyfy for those illiterate assholes are killing a great running series with their BS (battlestar) bs. SGU should die and SG Worth while needs to be raised from the dead. Bring life back to a great series instead of killing it with this mindless crap that appears to a small group of brainless imps.
My dad and I are minor sci-fi fans, and we sat down together to watch the first episodes of "Lost". A show or two into it I pointed out the poor directing/scripting ('Why are you bleeding?' 'Even though I saw the thing in the woods that attacked me, I'm not going to describe the incredible sight that I saw, I'm only going to say to you that something attacked me.'). After a few scenes like that, I bailed. I figured that if the creators were so inattentive to the details of what a real person would say in a given situation, that they were themselves, lost, and would eventually write their way into a confusing, unexplained, contradictory mess. And from the posts I read here, it sounds like they did just that. I'm so glad I saved so much of my time. My dad, I'm afraid, wasn't so lucky.
When B5 pulled the "OMG alien angels!" crap, I stopped watching.
You sadly missed one of the best sci-fi shows around. The whole angel business is explained quit reasonably in that the Vorlons manipulated the humans to see the Vorlons as angels, other aliens saw them not as angels but as something else that they would consider good. Not sure if humans from a different part of the world saw some differently as well, but that is really getting nitpick. The point is simply that Vorlons programmed into the race that they wanted to be perceived as something good and I don't need a atheist character proclaiming that he saw Carl Sagan with a jetpack to get that point.
That was a season finale, and I stopped watching again when I realized that all of that had failed to kill the guy.
It didn't fail to kill him, its just that he got resurrected later on. Its all explained in the show.
B5 is one of the very few shows which was planed from the start to the end before they started filming the thing. So there is no "make shit up as we go"-style story writing and mystery building, pretty much all mysteries that get build up get explained later on.
There really is not much of a religious theme in B5, at least not in the Christian sense of the word, its basically the same as you get in Childhood's End from Arthur C Clarke or in Stargate with the whole ascension stuff.
I do!
Aww, hit a nerve did I?
Clever signature text goes here.
I don't get the critics that say "I wasted six years of my life . . ."
I mean, is that all you did for the entire six years? Up until today, I would watch Lost for - at most - one hour a week.
I loved the show, and most of the final episode was incredible writing. But in the end, I think they made the classical mistake of writers: they got too attached to a clever piece of work and could not diminish or delete it.
It feels like they had to top the change from flashbacks to flash-forwards of previous seasons, and they came up with a clever idea: flash-sideways and the Alt. Which took on a life of its own and twisted the show from something deeper than Friends, Scrubs, or MASH into basically a serious Seinfeld with guns. And the last few minutes of the show turns into a train wreck.
They turned the events and mechanisms of the show into Friends-like escapades that only served the purpose of allowing bonding to take place, or perhaps created baggage that needed to be handled in the Alt. And in doing so, they pulled out the legs from under themselves: the island was a circus, or perhaps a TV show within a TV show, with the cast and crew going out for beers after the final wrap, and deciding to move together to a commune. It was all a dream, in some sense, like the Wizard of Oz, intended only to make the heart grow fonder so they could be reunited in the afterlife.
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea that it's not what you do, but how you do it and what you become that matters. I personally do believe in an eternal afterlife, and in light of eternity, 80 years of life are like a dream or like your first day in the 5th grade: very important at the time, but condensed down to a few memories as an adult. But they needed to land the plane, as it were, on the Island/physics side of the equation as well, and they did not.
They let the tail wag the dog, and thus broke their contract with the viewers. Yes, yes, leave unanswered questions so people are still espousing theories 10 years from now. No, don't try to explain how the energy feeds life. But do give more insights into the extensive Egyptian construction on the island -- including symbols on the "cork" at the island's heart. Do give a few screen seconds to Eloise and her son and perhaps Desmond (and Walt) to address a little about "specialness". Do delve a bit into Jacob's choice of rules, his use (or not) of machines like the Lighthouse, and what effect the island -- and its uncorking -- actually had on the world. (Not just words, which don't carry much weight in light of the revelations we have gotten.) Drop a hint about how Hurley's reign and rules differed form Jacob's, and perhaps how far back the line of guardians went. Did Jacob actually bring people to the island, or simply see that they would come? Did Jacob create the pre-Island overlapping in people's lives that we saw in the flashbacks, or was that a higher-level "fate" that had already entwined them and Jacob simply took advantage of this? Let us know that the island's guarding was still a serious and ongoing responsibility -- that it mattered at the time and still matters, in this world. Etc, etc.
Really, 5 minutes less of flash sideways per episode this season and 5 more minutes of flashback could have grounded the island and delivered on the major island questions, while allowing for the Purgatory Alt to seem a reward for a significant, good fight. As it is, Frodo has sailed from the Grey Havens and we still don't really know what the One Ring did and why it was important to destroy it, we have no idea what might follow, or if this big war was even necessary or if it was simply a mysterious skit.
TV is full of shows about "human relationships". So full of them they don't even bother to write scripts anymore, just shove randome people into a box with cameras and watch the "human relationships" develop. It would be nice to see something more than that from time to time - a show about exploring a mysterious new land where no one even knows what the basic rules are, and figuring it all out - you know, good SF. That clearly wasn't what Lost was.
Every thing that happens, happens for a reason.
Now that's frightening. Are you sure it isn't this god of your that has Asperger's syndrome?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
9/10ths of the comments posted so far can be summarized as follows:
Babylon Galactica made me cum much harder than this did.
(Just let me post the frigging line, you're cramping my style now /.)
That, IMO, is also where Prison Break went wrong. I thought the first season was great. Season 2 was pretty damn good too. But by S3, it was getting into WTF territory, and after that I was yelling at the TV to put the show out of its misery.
I never saw Lost, but based on the comments, it sounds like it, like PB, was a great show that dragged on too long.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Are you taking everything so literal? I hope you know what they are trying to say, no?
Or just really don't care about TV in general....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Disappointing way to end a great series. Key things I REALLY want to be explained..
1.) The Polar Bears.
2.) Why were there bodies of babies inside the random cave?
3.) The Shack
4.) How were people able to see Walt when he was still alive, yet not on the island?
5.) Ben, you were pinned underneath a tree. How did you get out?
6.) In the cave where the "heart of the island" was, 2 bodies were inside. Not just one (with one obviously belonging to the dark man).
7.) Richard and his future?
8.) Why did they make a huge deal out of Echo's brother, disappearing from the plane when it burned?
9.) Why did the whispers stop?
...its been long enough since my last view and after this I'm ready for something with a bit of long term planning and a more or less complete story arc that doesn't end me with staring at the TV going WTF? (Agreed, the last season of B5 wasn't awesome, but at least they had a decent excuse, they dealt with it reasonably well and we had an exec producer/writer that took the time to explain things to the fans).
Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed Lost terribly after picking it up mid-season 3 on abc.com (I think last night was the first Lost ep I actually watched OTA). Its been a great deal of fun, so thanks to all involved for that. And thanks to ABC for putting up a decent quality video on their web site, I'd have never seen the show otherwise. Flash Sideways? Ya, I know, but just go with it, eh? Its a TV show.
Still, I was expecting quite a bit more explanation of things. For example, perhaps I missed it but I thought there was to be some explanation as to why the Dharma food drops were coming. (pointer, anyone?) I guess as long as it ends with Happily Ever After, I shouldn't complain too much.
And now... It was the dawn of the Third Age of mankind, ten years after the Earth-Minbari War...
Anyone else going to join in?
I believe they had a limited story in season 1 and it was different enough that people said "Hey, way cool!"
Season 1: Hey lets make this island no one understands with WAY bizzare STUFF and see what the audience thinks. And oh yeah, we should do things like throw in a polar bear, some "other" people (well come up with a name later), and make the whole jungle shake to get people really scared and give them a purpose to stay together.
Season 2: Hey it WORKED, were still employed... Now what, lets do it again. Add some more weird stuff, the audience imagination is going wild. We might even be able to skype an idea or two.
Season 3: We should really start to try and tie some of this together. Lets do the easy ones.
Season 4: Im starting to get dry, anybody got an idea where this going yet? Ive got so many loose threads my mind is like an angora sweater. Lets hit the web for some weird ideas.
Season 5: Hmmm... looks like its going end next season. Lets just blow the whole thing up and then we can do what we want next season.
Season 6: Anyone know how to tie this ball of yarn together? Hmmm... me neither. Lets do some weird dream/purgatory/lifeanddeath stuff and the audience will make some stuff up and tie it together for us. Just remember we need to sing kumbayaa at the end OK?
And for me that about sums up the what the writers were thinking about as they drank beer in group think sessions.
Someone who has nothing better to do should grab all the flash forwards, flash backwards, and plot and re-edit them into chronological order. That would be an interesting watch. You know what? I'd even like to try watching a version of the series with no flash-anywheres. Just the people on the island. Sure, the whole series might only last 2 hours that way. But I would watch it.
Just face it, you wasted a lot of time on nothin' but smoke and mirrors.
When you think about it, all mysticism is really generic. Sure the names change, but it all boils down to "explaining" things by saying "oh, the magic thingamajig did it through magic thingamajiggery."
All metaphysics is generic.
This space available.
What the fuck are you talking about freshman? You insult me and people with autism, awesome sauce. My atheism is not a side effect of a mental disability or is your belief in God the side effect of your pedophilia? Maybe I have it in reverse?
Human drama is cheap as well as readily available on a reality show all the while being far more engaging than 70% of the filler they used for LOST, if I wanted to watch everyone die slowly I will watch a war movie. Hell, I can go down to my local pub and get human drama by buying the right girl a few drinks and ask her how her day was. The point of LOST was that it was trying to be more than human drama and it failed.
You clearly don't understand television the prevalence of TV mediocrity and how that effects syndication and DVD sales value. Mediocre sells because people can relate to mediocre. I'm assuming that includes you ?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Being an atheist doesn't preclude a person from enjoying fantasy-themed fiction, even if it's "spiritual" fiction. But with Lost it became clear very early on that the writers didn't have a clue about their own storyline, much less where the line that separates scifi from fantasy actually runs. Being annoyed at that has nothing to do with Atheism, it's just a common human reaction to being screwed over after a long con. As an Atheist myself, I didn't even have an issue with the afterlife ending, I actually liked the way those characters were sent off. I did take issue with the inept and clueless way the audience was treated from the second season on, but I decided to keep watching it because there were some decent moments in there. But really, at this point it shouldn't surprise anyone that there just was no answer to most of these "mysteries".
On a side note: wishing for an afterlife is not at all incompatible with Atheism. An afterlife would be the coolest thing ever. So would world peace and the option for every human being to live a happy and fulfilling life. I can wish for many things, that doesn't mean I have to postulate they exist simply because I would like them to be true. It does mean, however, that in order for something to change, we need to do it ourselves instead of sitting around and praising the divinity of the status quo.
TV is full of shows about "human relationships". So full of them they don't even bother to write scripts anymore, just shove randome people into a box with cameras and watch the "human relationships" develop. It would be nice to see something more than that from time to time - a show about exploring a mysterious new land where no one even knows what the basic rules are, and figuring it all out - you know, good SF. That clearly wasn't what Lost was.
Every thing that happens, happens for a reason.
Now that's frightening. Are you sure it isn't this god of your that has Asperger's syndrome?
From the tone of your response, you seem to equate "human relationships" with people getting physical. Unless if you only tuned into the last episode or were completely obliviously to what was going on because you were so enthralled with the minutia, you should have understood that the central themes of the show were faith and redemption.
The main actor of the show (Matthew Fox) appeared on Jimmy Kimball Live last night and confirmed that the main plot of the show centred around Jack who started out a skeptic but ended up believing in a destiny where he would have to give up his life to save the lives of the other people on the island. At one point, he tried to resist that destiny by leaving the island but he eventually accepted his path in life. There were other stories of other characters going through a "fall", change in direction and redemption.
Everything really does happen for a reason and sometimes when we are in the thick of things, we cannot understand it but it often comes clear when you look at it in hindsight. I cannot understand why you would try to anthropomorphize god to the extent that you would expect human emotions from a creator being. If you were in god's shoes, you would have to sometimes put aside the love that you feel for every one of your creations and do what is best for the bigger picture. As humans, we really cannot fathom what that would be like and such a concept seems totally alien to us. As high minded as a person's ideals may be, we still tend to love those who are closer to us more than strangers and would never think of sacrificing those most dear to us to save total strangers or even an enemy. That is how different we are to god because that is exactly what god would do.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Oh I dunno. The show was a great vehicle for exploring big questions, philosophical, scientific, and interpersonal. And it had a lot of emotional truth in it. The show may have pulled people in with its mysteries, but its truer value lies in the conflicts, resolutions, and journeys of the characters. Every episode is A-ffective if not always E-ffective, and as a whole it has a lot to say about the human condition. That said, the show has so many repeat phrases and in-jokes that it comes off with a very tongue-in-cheek feel as well. Add to that the "Official LOST Podcast" and Jorge Garcia's "Geronimo Jack's Beard" podcast, and the show formed an unprecedented level of dialogue and interaction with the audience. Perhaps because the central theme of the show is "letting go" I'm relieved to be able now to let go and be satisfied that I had some years of being thoroughly engrossed in a reflective and creative work.
-- thinkyhead software and media
A TV actor believes the show was really all about his character? Shocking!
You must have an odd religion where you feel the need to make excuses for God without feeling the need to Capitalize His Name. I might believe in a caring god, or an all-powerful one, but the two concepts combined simply don't fit the world we live in. Some of the world's smartest people have tried to rationalize this for 1600 years, without a single compelling explanation. Capricious gods of ancient polytheisms were consistent with the evils we see in the world (not to mention natural disasters and so on); an omnipotent caring god - not so much.
Engineers design systems with trade-offs that give the best result within rules they can't change. That becomes a poor excuse if you get to make all the rules.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
WHO CARES!
http://www.annarbor.com/entertainment/lost-former-writer/
Javier Grillo-Marxuach - he left at the end of the second season because of "creative differences". Which now sounds like he actually wanted these story ideas to go somewhere.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
Sad that I've seen no references to this on /.
The end of season five was that experiment: is the cat alive or dead? When they "left" the island via a successful explosion, they all had to die w/o the island's grace. They had to find grace in themselves and their actions, w/o the island to act as a mediating force.
Yes, it's a sad reversion to Judeo-Christian ethics. Such is the way of Hollywood sentimentalism.
Otherwise, it mostly works. Except for fixing high-pressure hydraulics w/ duct tape. Oh, and jets can't taxi backwards w/o a pushing force.
That was a season finale, and I stopped watching again when I realized that all of that had failed to kill the guy.
It didn't fail to kill him, its just that he got resurrected later on. Its all explained in the show.
Yeah, I know, an alien wizard did it. I was not impressed.
BTW that was back in the days when it was on tuesdays at 12:05 am, so these irritating moves were enough to make me give up on a show that required too much effort to watch to begin with (stupid local TV station... can't wait for the internet to kill it).
You can't take the sky from me...
Dexter
Can someone explain this to me? I watched the whole series and I still don't get it. Maybe I forgot something.
In the final episode in the waiting room flash-sideways in the hospital we find out that Jack's ex-wife and mother of his son is Juliet. I don't remember Jack and Juliet ever being together or mentioning being separated while on the Island. How then are they somehow together in the waiting room? I thought that the waiting room corresponded with what their lives were like as if the Island never happened.
Is Colon Detox Hype?, P90x, and Paid Programming.
except I always keep missing Paid programming, my DVR won't let me record it.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I hate "I agree" posts, but... I totally agree. Breaking Bad is one of the best shows on TV. Between that and Mad Men, AMC has really started to show some great innovation in TV writing and production.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Anyone who's ever seen TV writers at work should have recognized from the start that Lost was basically a shaggy dog story.
What's amazed me as someone very outside the show (I half-watched one episode) is the longevity of the show - that the writers were able to weave a story over five seasons in order keep audience interest this long.
Bottom line: to the writers, producers: - kudos, you earned the recognition, $$$.
To anyone who expected a payoff involving a truly cohesive meaningful meaning. You're looking in the wrong place - this is and was never a "Babylon Five". For Lost, the journey *was* the destination, and if you had some fun trying to dissect the meaning with friends and peers then that is the reward.
With Lost being so successful, there *will* be successors. Where will the writers go? What will be "Lost II" and will it be better/worse? Will it attract an audience or will people who have watched Lost never watch a similar show again? Those questions are bound to be more interesting than the finale.
Nanobots would have been rational enough for me.
I'm guessing that the melting of the polar ice-caps was the reason why we see the island underwater at the start of Season 6 :)
We know that by uncorking the island, it crumbles to pieces, yet all the stuff underwater was preserved.
So maybe it took place well into the future where Hurley and Ben figured out a way to protect the island and die (and thus meet up with the rest of them in that fake-LA-afterdeath world).
It's bigger on the inside than on the outside, alright?
no, you're just an obnoxious little faggot who likes to gossip about his little high school girl television shows like "lost"
where did the bury the survivors?
After the finale ended it occurred to me that in beginning of the pilot episode Jack woke up in the woods with a penetrating wound in the side and now in the end Jack was dieing of the same kind of wound possibly in the same location. Does anyone remember for sure whether it looked like the same bamboo woods and/or the injury was the same? If so it would appear the writers are leaving the idea open for interpretation that Jack died on day one and the whole series was just a dieing vision.
The difference may be that I Dream Of Jeannie did not spend its first three seasons specifically playing up the mystery of how the mechanics of fitting into the bottle worked.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
And Doctor Who.
OK clothes were different and his wound was on the other side, so nevermind I guess...
I liked it.
However, the Fringe finale completely owned it.
Was it just me or did it all end with the fate of the universe resting on the changing of a prehistoric stone light bulb? In fact, it must have been a Christmas light bulb, because if one went out, they all went out...
Hatch who?
One thing I took from BSG and that I think applies to Lost is that good television is like life; appreciate each new episode 'cause the ending's gonna suck.
Dear Will, the plums were poisoned. -- Cheese Club
I for one welcome our new sentient subject line overlords.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
In the flash forward/purgatory timeline, Ben at least had the good grace to apologize to Locke.
Back on the island, Ben--murderous, deceitful Ben--was hanging out with the good guys and no one seemed to have a problem with it.
The Ben in that timeline never had any sort of transformation that I noticed. Did I miss something? Was there a time when he said, sorry about all those people I killed, but I'm all better now?
Instead, in the last season he mostly just looked surprised and off-guard. A nice change, to be sure, from his previous fat head. But he survived by keeping a low profile, not by EVOLVING. Not to sound like a screenplay writing textbook, but I wanted a redemptive character arc if he was to survive. Or, I wanted him to be a total bastard. That would be fine too. Better even!
At the end of the day, he was neither.
I was hoping very much that towards the end of the show, when they were going to try turning the light back on, that Jack would realize they had a serpent in their midst. "Ben," he'd say, "I've been an idiot to let you live this long," and he'd shoot him.
Such a great character, and well played... but he did not get the ending he deserved. He simply ceased to matter, which was sad.
Surely Lost is simply a fictionalisation of Survivor that got out of hand?
I want my 2 1/2 hours of life back. This bunch of mumbo jumbo drivel was with out a doubt the worst example of incompetent writers, greedy materialistic actors, and executives driven to make a buck off their customers, with no thought to any real value provided. By the end of the show, I was so mad that I nearly threw something at the TV screen to express my utter frustration with it all. I couldn't be bothered to watch the credits, so someone please post the names of the execs and the writers, so I can make special note of their participation in any project will convince me to not ever watch their spoils any more.
What a piece of crap!
I think they missed the mark on finale. I liked the episoed all the way to the last 20 min or so. In my opinion they just failed to create something that would equal the expectations. I am not a hard core fan and never really tried to go deep into all the mystery I feel that I have been let down big time where nothing have been explained. I feel this is especially disapointhing considering they knew when the show will end 3 years before it did. I suppose not all shows/creators can manage to pull of great or even satisfactory endings.
The "lost" Ghost Whisperer episode.
"Go into the light and everything will be well"
There, the entire series summed up - short and simple
I think they should film different alternative endings to the serie :) Like those books where you can jump from page to page or a videogame adventure (in which Lost was very similiar to in the first seasons). They could make a whole new sesons just with alternative endings. In fact, all the multiverse thing brings space for any possible alternative reality ending.
I think my best favourite ending would have been John Lock going off the island and waking up in the Hospital after Jack surgery. Then he would rock the real world.. I know that this would have been obvious with reminiscences to Twin Peaks but I would enjoy this one a bit more..
It never ends, as long as someone makes money from it.
The sequel will be called: Found.
You could say there are 2 types of people: those who enjoy the journey as an end in itself and those for whom the purpose of a journey is the destination. :-)
Most of the time I am in the former group, and I loved the ending to Lost, even though it does not answer all the questions, and even those that are answered I do not understand them all and even though some are unsatisfying.
So after a suitable break I will go back to Series 1 Episode 1 and I will repeat the journey
I thought it was a great prequal to Fantasy Island with Hurley become the N+3'rd Mr. Roark.
Always a #1 and #2. Roark and Tattoo, Roark and the chick who's name no one remembers.
Hurley discards Jacob's methods and uses the Island to help people go through the purgatory catharsis without having to die.
Just needed him in a white suit....
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
No, he died. They did have a reasonable enough explanation for that. Lorien had the power to restore some of his life force.
No, he died. They did have a reasonable enough explanation for that. Lorien had the power to restore some of his life force.
Unfortunately, "a wizard did it" does not rhyme with "good writing".
You can't take the sky from me...
At least in I Dream of Jeannie there was an explanation for the weird stuff, she's a Genie. Same goes for Bewitched and that audio-visual abortion with the blond chick, her aunts and the talking cat in which they're all witches.
In LOST you had a bunch of freaky stuff that, to quote the writers, "will be totally explained in scientific terms" but wasn't even explained at all. They explained the flash sideways creatively, the limbo idea was neat, it would have been a nice season finale, not series finale. I didn't want a wiki detailing everything, but at least a hint of what the frack was going on would have been nice, even if they would have copped out at the end by saying that Jacob was just a Genie. That way I would have been less disappointed.
~Syberz
I was actually hoping they would go for a "fountain-of-youth" or "life force of the planet" angle since they hinted at it. But then they mucked it up with the "corking an evil force" and electromagnetism and time travel and who knows what else.
And why does it create smoke monsters again? To punish people by giving them immense powers that they can use to then destroy the island? What?
I don't think the writers had as clear an idea of what was going on as you are implying they did. The mythology was a mess.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
The entire show was limbo. Every single character in the show was dead from day one. Every single character in the show had something in common: They died miserable with their life and not ready to move on, or they were attached to something they couldn't take with them and were waiting for them to die as well.
The island was the border between the afterworlds. "Heaven" and "Hell" so to speak. Mother, the woman who kills Jacob and Esau's mother (Who I suppose was already dead to begin with) is the original guardian during the timeline we are exposed to the island. She raises them in order to create a replacement for her so that she can "move on" into whatever she moves on into. Jacob makes a mistake letting Esau into "Hell" who comes back with the intent of destroying the border and letting hell into limbo.
Every character in the show spends the entire show looking for something or someone to make being dead bearable, and they all eventually find it. They all move on together into the afterlife except for those who still find "leaving" unacceptable (Ben).
Some people were dead before others. Desmond, Juliet, Ben, Richard, etc; all dead. The plane crash brought new people into purgatory.
The flashbacks in the first season were peoples real lives before they died in the plane crash. Some of them were extravagant and bordered on fantasy (Hugo), but perhaps there is more to him being "crazy" than we would like to believe (As with Libby.)
This is the best way I have come up with to explain the show. I can say that I truly enjoyed the entire ride, and I really enjoyed the ending.
I'm sorry so many of you did not.
The grand finale episode of MacGuffin Island. No real answers, just emotional manipulation. Essentially the same ending as a recent cop show on the BBC, fwiw. J.J. Abrams has a TED talk where he talks about his mystery box. Because he never opened it, he doesn't know what's inside, he prefers the mystery to the reality. It seems like he treats his shows the same way; he doesn't know what the mystery really is, just that mystery itself is interesting.
I don't understand why they bothered to wrap everything in Science Fiction clothes if they weren't going to respect that and instead resolve with a character-driven "spiritual" conclusion. With the ending they gave, the bulk of the series could have been a western, a cop show, a medical show... The LOST writers seemed to have used science fiction trappings only to tell a story in a "weird" way. I would have found the "Bardo church" conclusion much more acceptable, if they had at least _tried_ to address some of the science fiction /mystery aspects first. I think that they really dropped the ball by treating almost everything that drove the characters for the past five seasons as _only_ being a crucible for the formation of relationships. When you have a myth that spans millennia, to have its importance reduced to the relationships between a busload of people does the myth a disservice, as well as being disrespectful to the audience. What made this a "water-cooler" show was not the relationships, but the mysteries.
I can almost picture it... Early on, one of the show runners sticks his head into the writers room and says "We're going to base this partially on that thing by Ambrose Bierce." The writers say "Great!" and then head to the bookstore. The only trouble is that they aren't sure what "thing" the show runner meant, so half of them pick up "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and the other half pick up "The Devil's Dictionary." They'll fix it in post.
The LOST finale was _almost_ like you had been keeping up with Sherlock Holmes stories, but in those Sherlock Holmes stories there was never any resolution to the mysteries contained within. There was a promised extra long finale story that was going to prove that the author(s) knew what they were doing all along. When that finale arrives, you discover that the mysteries had no real solutions, and that the stories were written to get Holmes and Watson laid a lot. If you were only really committed to Holmes and Watson, you found this a satisfying ending, but if the mysteries were much of the reason you were following things, you felt cheated.
It strikes me that they could have explained a couple things fairly easily that would have made for a more balanced myth/character conclusion. Even some expository lump, vague hand waving about the origin of the Dharma Initiative and the relationships between Dharma / Hanso Foundation / Widmore Industries, etc. would have gone a long way, for me. I would have happily traded half the time from the Richard Alpert backstory for some Dharma / Hanso backstory. They've had a few seasons to plan for this, why did it feel slap-dash and rushed?
What's that writing rule? Something like If you see a gun in the first act, it has to be used by the third? The trouble with LOST was that it showed so many "guns" early on, then in subsequent acts those guns turned out to be spears, or maybe fish, and eventually they didn't even matter, anyway. It's funny that almost all the things that fans obsessed over for the last six seasons don't matter, given this ending. Maybe that's the point: let go. Still, LOST was the only show that has been worth talking/thinking about for a long time. This ending only partially makes me regret watching the series.
The Chalkboard from the Simpsons on the same night as the finale: "End of 'LOST': It was all the dog's dream. Watch us." If only that had been true.
The last link was supposed to be this.
I feel justified in commenting because this is the kind of show I would have watched and enjoyed and ultimately been annoyed by had I not been warned off.
Make-it-up-as-you-go storytelling with the writers acting smug that you never figured it out as it went along.
Since you don't know anything about the show, let me fill you in on the show's history. The writers had the story arc planned out from the beginning, and never expected the show to be so popular and go on for so long. By season 2, ABC wanted to pull an x-files/bsg/etc. and drag the show out forever. The writers fought it and negotiated to do 6 seasons, but to have every season be 16 hours episodes instead of 24 hours. Combined with the writer's strike back in the 2nd or 3rd season, the show ended up being around 4 seasons long in total length.
If you watch the show, you'll find there are probably 1 season worth of "bad" filler content, and possibly another 1 season worth of extended content that worked out well. It's hard to know exactly how much of the story was injected into the originally planned story arc. We can guess though, based on what worked well and felt meaningful and what didn't.
Whether you enjoyed the show or not, I think it's pretty hard to deny that the show did answer almost every question it raised. If you look at the first season's "dudes in a jungle" and compare it to season 6, the mythology they built up and questions they answered are very extensive.
For anyone wanting to try the show out, watching season 1 and the first episode of season 2 should be enough to tell whether you'll like it or not. That includes a huge answer to one of the biggest questions from season 1, and is demonstrative of the answers you continue to get for big questions throughout the rest of the show. There are some rocky "filler" patches in season 2 but it's mostly smooth sailing after that.
Oh, I did hit a nerve. Poor child.
Clever signature text goes here.
Just as the writers used Locke in the first 4 seasons to hint they would reveal the purpose of the island, I think they used the Man-in-Black in the last two seasons to warn us they coudn't pull it off. For example, John Locke used to say things like "We were brought here for a purpose, for a reason, all of us." Maybe the writers meant that like the survivors, the show had a purpose too, and it would be explained to us in the end, We just had to have faith. But perhaps they got in too deep and couldn't pull of the miracle. Perhaps the writers knew they were 'lost in the weeds' so to speak. And they used Man in Black to say, "Locke was wrong. He is a fool and he had no purpose", just like the show.
Sounds like the same dissatisfaction some people have after reading the Bible. They want it all spelled out with no mystery.