See ya in another life, brotha.
September 22, 2014 9:48 AM   Subscribe

 
Waaaaaaaalt!!!
posted by Fizz at 9:52 AM on September 22, 2014 [4 favorites]


Who knew it was so meticulously unplanned right from the beginning to its final disappointing anger-inducing ending?!?
posted by blue_beetle at 9:53 AM on September 22, 2014 [52 favorites]


This must be nostalgia week because Slate just put together its Friends 20yr anniversary piece.

In other news: jesus h. christ I am old.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 9:54 AM on September 22, 2014 [9 favorites]


The creators of LOST still don't get it, storytelling consists of two parts:

1. Setup
2. Resolution

Amazing setup is only amazing if it is followed with some sort of decent resolution. It's easy to get the audience to say "Oh wow! That's amazing, I can't wait to learn how this all fits together!" when you have no intention or ability to even attempt to resolve all the threads you setup.

FAIL.

(great, now I'm mad again)
posted by Cosine at 9:54 AM on September 22, 2014 [47 favorites]


It was earth all along!
posted by Damienmce at 9:58 AM on September 22, 2014 [7 favorites]


Who ever said network television was supposed to be storytelling?
posted by crashlanding at 9:58 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


Oh, I should say that I HATE Season 6, with the exception of "Dr. Linus", which I think is just a bit brilliant.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:59 AM on September 22, 2014


Lindelof's self-satisfied smirk in the Unresolved Mysteries clip encapsulates everything that went wrong with the series. It's not fucking funny, asshole.
posted by aught at 10:00 AM on September 22, 2014 [12 favorites]


The show's (and Lindelof's) legacy:


A terrible Star Trek sequel

A terrible Alien reboot

A terrible adaptation of World War Z

Cowboys & Aliens
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 10:02 AM on September 22, 2014 [20 favorites]


Well, I guess the one good thing about the ending of LOST was that no one was clamoring for more LOST.
posted by yeti at 10:02 AM on September 22, 2014 [20 favorites]


Never has a show been so frustrating and eyeroll-inducing yet so insanely watchable at the same time.
posted by naju at 10:03 AM on September 22, 2014 [14 favorites]


I still don't know what happened to walt.
posted by Panjandrum at 10:04 AM on September 22, 2014 [4 favorites]


It was so weird how that show was canceled midbroadcast in its third season. I'd have thought they'd have kept it on the air, what with the ratings.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:04 AM on September 22, 2014 [30 favorites]


It was earth all along!
posted by Damienmce at 12:58 PM on September 22 [+] [!]


"You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!"
posted by aught at 10:04 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


I never saw Lost. But I've had many times this decade watched a movie and come away with a sense of existential dread and profound disagreement with the very fundament of the film. And every time, the name lindelof or abrams comes up in the credits...
posted by kaibutsu at 10:05 AM on September 22, 2014 [15 favorites]


10 years ago???

We are all hurtling towards our mortal end; time mocks us.

As so did the writers.
posted by Windigo at 10:05 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


Dude.





OH GODDAMIT I CANT HOLD BACK LINDELOF YOU FATUOUS SELFREGARDING HACK YOU STILL CANT ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOUR UTTER FAILURE TO STICK THE LANDING NOW SERVES ONLY AS AN OBJECT LESSON TO SHOWRUNNERS EVERYWHERE ON HOW NOT TO WRITE AN ENDING TO A SERIAL DRAMA INSTEAD OF AN EXAMPLE OF AN EVEN HALFWAY SATISFYING FINAL EPISODE THAT WOULD AT LEAST PROVIDE A STRUCTURALLY SOUND DENOUEMENT THAT MIGHT JUSTIFY REWATCHING THE SERIES INSTEAD OF WRITING IT OFF AS MAYBE NOT THE WORST WAY TO HAVE ONCE PASSED THE TIME BETWEEN COMMERCIALS FOR CREDIT CARDS AND LIGHT BEER!!!!!!!
posted by Doktor Zed at 10:06 AM on September 22, 2014 [15 favorites]


The Island by The Millenium.

They made a whole show about that song, I am convinced of it.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 10:06 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


Just wait until LOST nostalgia kicks in hard for teenagers who "discovered" it through Netflix but never actually saw a broadcast. And then they reboot it.
posted by codacorolla at 10:07 AM on September 22, 2014 [8 favorites]


I'm so glad that I followed my instincts and gave up on that show halfway through the first season. It seemed obvious at that point that the showrunners had no idea where they were going.
posted by octothorpe at 10:07 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


I saw parts of the first 2 seasons abroad in a language I wasn't wholly comfortable with viewing media in yet at the time and it was remarkably frustrating and made me feel shitty about my language progress for a while. When I got back to the US and watched the same episodes again in english WOW WAS I MAD because they didn't actually make any more sense at all so Lost made me feel bad for NO REASON THANKS LOST U JERKS
posted by poffin boffin at 10:08 AM on September 22, 2014 [15 favorites]


A terrible Star Trek reboot

Although Lindelof had a writing/producing credit on ST '09 and STID, I place their script problems more at the feet of primary screenwriters Bob Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who have a much longer record of writing incoherent screenplays for horrible movies.

I won't disagree with you on Prometheus, though.

I still don't know what happened to walt.

Here ya go.
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:08 AM on September 22, 2014 [7 favorites]


Wait you people are still mad? Haha
posted by naju at 10:08 AM on September 22, 2014 [8 favorites]


We all thought Michael was screaming Wallllllllllltttt!! but it turns out that he knew the ending of the show, and was just screaming Whaaaaaaatttttttt!!! at the horror and frustration he knew was coming for the audience.
posted by sockermom at 10:08 AM on September 22, 2014 [15 favorites]


I think if you look at it as a show about plot, it does leave things unresolved - but if you look at some of the character arcs, it's satisfying.

Or maybe I'm just talking like a big ol' Hurley fan, Dude.

Incidentally - Jorge Garcia's blog, which he started while on the show, is hands-down adorable in an "I'm a boring person who rambles about the mundane details of my life and poses for jokey photos when out with friends except that once in a while Michael Emerson is in one of those photos" kind of way. He slacked off a lot in recent years, but if you go back to the beginning and read it's cute.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:09 AM on September 22, 2014 [8 favorites]


"You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!"
posted by aught at 10:04 AM on September 22 [+] [!]


*long pause, steady gaze*

"So?"
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 10:09 AM on September 22, 2014


(Can't recall if is was "so" or "so what?" but either way it was chilling.)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 10:10 AM on September 22, 2014


I have such fond memories of watching Lost. It overlapped a really memorable couple of years in my life (kids, job) and I'll always associate it with that. I also fondly recall rushing off to Lostpedia (gotta be one of the most exhaustive show wikis ever) after each episode and staying up way too late exploring all the latest theories.

Also, this is still one of the best scenes of television ever made, IMO.
posted by jbickers at 10:11 AM on September 22, 2014 [7 favorites]


Amazing setup is only amazing if it is followed with some sort of decent resolution.
I'm not sure about that. Considering the uniformly damp-squib nature of every "mystery" that was "resolved" in Season 6 ("So that's what the smoke monster was. Er."), I think they would've been better not resolving anything at all. The scariest monsters lurk in the shadows and provide only glimpses of their form. Similarly, the most evocative narratives conceal far more than they resolve. And the best way for a series like Lost, whose writers evidently weren't anywhere nearly as talented and imaginative as they thought they were, to seem better than it was would have been to heed that wisdom.* Don't. Reveal. Anything. Then you'll look like a bunch of Gnostic geniuses in possession of arcane secrets. Resolve the mysteries in a series of cheesy, Scooby Doo-style unmaskings and you'll just look like doofuses. Unfortunately, Lindelof et al. took the second path.

* See also: Donnie Darko: the Director's Cut.
posted by Sonny Jim at 10:11 AM on September 22, 2014 [12 favorites]


The 108 Best Episodes

Hold on, there were only 121 episodes total. Are they just throwing out the whole front half of Season 3 (I don't blame people for bailing out then, although I enjoyed the show on the whole) and the awful one-shot with Jack getting tattooed by Bai Ling?
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:11 AM on September 22, 2014


Just wait until LOST nostalgia kicks in hard for teenagers who "discovered" it through Netflix but never actually saw a broadcast.

I do actually have a lot of LOST nostalgia but only for the wild free for all Ongoing LOST Posts that we used to have on LJ, because that was a community of giddy and rapturous enjoyment from start to finish.
posted by poffin boffin at 10:12 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


And then they reboot it.

…with Lindelof and Abrams at the helm. After all, they've done so well adding lens flare and narrative incoherence to all the other idle franchises that they keep being given the keys to yet another one. Everything comes full circle, setting up the final big reveal: the studio system wakes up and realizes it was all just a terrible nightmare taking place in the moment before its death.
posted by RogerB at 10:15 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


I was upset about the "Lost" finale. But, at worst, it was just a confussing, anticlimactic mess. It didn't undercut the whole premise of the series like, say, I don't know...

HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER

/Still bitter
posted by MrGuilt at 10:15 AM on September 22, 2014 [5 favorites]


This will always be my favorite summarization of LOST, personally.

I gave up shortly after the introduction of the fish biscuit, personally. I have never understood how people could be so angry at the conclusion after hanging around through what led up to it. Why would you expect better by that point?
posted by phearlez at 10:15 AM on September 22, 2014 [21 favorites]


LOST would have been great if it had only ever been about mystery and it had never even pretended to answer most of the big-ticket questions. That show could have been such a great "screw you" to everyday logic: at the very least, it could have been a more noble failure.
posted by Sticherbeast at 10:15 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


I'M VERY DISAPPOINTED.

*sweeps arm around*

IN ALL OF YOU!
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 10:16 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


Don't. Reveal. Anything. Then you'll look like a bunch of Gnostic geniuses in possession of arcane secrets.

This is exactly why I was so excited about the show through its run. Like many people I was convinced they were just making up most of the stuff as they went along. But I felt certain that the ever-branching series of unknowns was just going to keep expanding uncontrollably until there was no possible way to resolve anything, and from there on out it was just going to get weeeeeeeird as fuck on a level that even Twin Peaks would be envious of. Alas.
posted by naju at 10:16 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


It's nice to suggest that we should just enjoy the good parts, but when you find out that there were never any answers or plans, it's like trying to hold on to the "good parts" of a relationship where you find out that your late partner never had to take "business trips" because it was always another family on the side.
posted by tyllwin at 10:16 AM on September 22, 2014 [12 favorites]


and that other family was an awkward hamfisted jesus reference
posted by poffin boffin at 10:19 AM on September 22, 2014 [33 favorites]


I think what pissed me off so much about the show--other than the flailing painted into a corner no way to get out place the writers put themselves in--was that there was an amazing core of a story hinted at in the first two seasons.

And where they seriously fucked up was the supernatural bullshit. A far more interesting story could have been, e.g., the zombie corpse of the Dharma Initiative still lumbering along, which has engineered a wildly disparate group of people to have their paths cross, and then go "oh, shit" when they wind up crashing on the island by mistake. World-DI is collectively shitting itself--major plans have been upset (think less-competent Bene Gesserit going whoopsiefuck after Paul is born); island-DI is splintering away from the original purpose and just knows they have these people, so time to do something with them. And the castaways, stuck between two conflicting forces and having no idea what's going on.

Still wouldn't have saved them if they didn't have an ending planned, though. Can we just download Straczynski's brain into every asshole who thinks they can write a TV show?

PLAN AHEAD

and from there on out it was just going to get weeeeeeeird as fuck on a level that even Twin Peaks would be envious of

I'm not normally a huge fan of Lynch, but I'd be onboard with him rebooting this show in ten years.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:19 AM on September 22, 2014 [8 favorites]


My wife and I postponed our honeymoon by one day so we could finish off the last keg from our wedding while watching the lost finale. Still worth it. It's about the same fucking ending as Battlestar Galactica.

**spoiler**

God did it.

**/spoiler**

BOOOOO!
posted by schyler523 at 10:19 AM on September 22, 2014 [4 favorites]


Lost gave me many hours of viewing pleasure, even if it didn't go anywhere, what a journey.

This was due to, in no small, the incredible world-building that went on, both with the scripts and with the special effects (didn't they disguise Hawaii as Reykjavík? damn cannot recall but it was snowy and did NOT look like Hawaii at all). The sets were pretty magnificent.

Plus all the drank-the-Koolaid stuff with the Dharma Initiative - not since "The Prisoner" have I seen it done so well. I cannot hate on this show...
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 10:21 AM on September 22, 2014 [7 favorites]


and from there on out it was just going to get weeeeeeeird as fuck on a level that even Twin Peaks would be envious of. Alas.

Yeah you have to pick, either you explain things ( planned out or nicely retconed, doesn't matter if it works.) or you go full bore comics horror strange, the end of The Prisinor strange. Don't try to half ass it, commit!
posted by The Whelk at 10:22 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


I've said this before, but the fundamental issue with the final season of LOST was trying to explain too much. The island went from being a character with a bunch of awesome and mysterious attributes to a macguffin.
posted by bfranklin at 10:23 AM on September 22, 2014 [5 favorites]


I remember defending the LOST finale on this site at the time, which was probably at least partially due to sunk cost thinking on my part.

I think that L&A track record after that point has made me dislike the series more and more than I probably would have if they'd just stopped with Jack bleeding out and the stupid fucking church scene.

At its heart LOST was always a soap opera, where you had the characters fuck each other amid an increasingly silly series of events where stuff is always happening but things never really change. Unfortunately, LOST (and Lindelof, from what he said in the fpp interview) always saw it as something more. Unfortunately they didn't have the writing chops to make it into "more" than a soap opera, despite their promises. As I've gotten older I've realized I'd rather have a well done but ultimately silly and inconsequential soap opera than a totally inept narrative that tries for something greater.
posted by codacorolla at 10:24 AM on September 22, 2014







Wait you people are still mad? Haha


WITH MY DYING BREATH I SHALL CURSE THE HOUSE OF LINDELOF

FROM HELL'S HEART I STAB AT THEE
posted by poffin boffin at 10:28 AM on September 22, 2014 [23 favorites]


LOST was the first show I binged watched and I basically did it in one setting. How I didn't kill myself at the end I will never know.
posted by cjorgensen at 10:28 AM on September 22, 2014


The thing that still pisses me off the most about Lost isn't the lack of resolution, it's that it had such a great, diverse cast that literally any other character would have made a better "heart" of the show than fucking Jack.
posted by oinopaponton at 10:30 AM on September 22, 2014 [28 favorites]


God, I hate Jack so much.
posted by oinopaponton at 10:32 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


Y'know what ending I would have liked? If it had turned out Hurley was God.
posted by George_Spiggott at 10:32 AM on September 22, 2014 [4 favorites]


...he wasn't?
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:33 AM on September 22, 2014 [4 favorites]


I have probably told this story before, I'm telling it again -

I saw this glorious one-act play a few years back, by a young actor/comedian/writer. A young actor/comedian/writer named Josh Halloway.

Now he's writing for Jimmy Kimmel, but when LOST was big he was an actor in New York. And a couple months after the show premiered, he started getting all these offers for auditions and even a couple of commercial endorsements - except whenever he turned up to the appointment/claim his thing, the people he met would go a bit pale and say "sorry, we thought you were someone else" and cancel on him. And after a few weeks of this, he suddenly realized - they were mistaken about the way Josh Holloway spelled his name and thought he was "the guy who plays Sawyer."

And what he did with that was to write a whole one-act play where he examines this quirk - it was a whole riff on identity. I reviewed it when it was in the 2007 Fringe festival, and it was a blast.

But the best bit - at some point in the show there was a pre-filmed "dream sequence" he shows, where he is at a psychiatrist's office talking about this crisis of identity he's facing where people confuse him with "the LOST guy" and how LOST is taking over his life. You don't see the psychiatrist at first - but the voice sounds familiar. And at the end of the sequence, they finally show that the psychiatrist is Ben Linus - and Michael Emerson actually did the part in the film sequence.

When I went to review the show, I took him aside after and asked him "how in the hell did you get Michael Emerson for that sequence?" and he just grinned a bit sheepishly, shrugged and said "I just wrote him and asked, and he said yes."

So in short, Michael Emerson is awesome. And that's my story.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:33 AM on September 22, 2014 [68 favorites]


YES WHY WASN'T HURLEY THE FOCUS ALL ALONG ARGH

hurley and vincent
posted by poffin boffin at 10:33 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


Can we just download Straczynski's brain into every asshole who thinks they can write a TV show?

Good grodd, the world doesn't need even more arrogant jackholes.
posted by phearlez at 10:33 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


It does need people who understand that if you're writing long-form television you need to have at least the semblance of an overall plot before you turn a fucking camera on, though.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:36 AM on September 22, 2014 [4 favorites]


Part of what leaves me sputtering (and it's true of BSG as well, though a little less so) is that it would have been so easy to write a decent arc. But to do so at some point they'd have had to stop mystifying and start resolving. And they just couldn't give up the dollar-making formula of "keep mystifying the rubes" until they'd squeezed out every last penny.
posted by tyllwin at 10:37 AM on September 22, 2014 [3 favorites]


FROM HELL'S HEART I STAB AT THEE

There is a really nice poetic justice about cursing Lindelof with great endings. It is a far, far better rest I go to than you have ever known, asshole...
posted by RogerB at 10:37 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


I still don't know what happened to walt.

Here ya go. [12-minute epilogue to the series]


LINDELOF: We did it, everybody! That's series wrap! Give yourself a hand and let's strike the sets and go home!

SOME GUY: What about Walt?

LINDELOF: Who?

SOME GUY: Walt, you know, Michael's son who --

LINDELOF: Shit. OK, everybody, back to positions!
posted by Panjandrum at 10:38 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


From the FA: But the reality is that the people who hated the finale, when I encounter them, I ask them, ‘When did you actually start not liking the show? Were you like totally on board until hour 120 and then the finale just totally and completely screw it up for you?' And then they look at me like they've never been asked this before and then they quietly admit that somewhere early in season two, they stopped liking the show but they kept watching it.

I feel like there is some truth there. Obviously I can't know what is in the hearts of the "FROM HELL'S HEART I STAB AT THEE" contingent, but it seemed to me that the ending to LOST was very much like the rest of LOST. I can understand wishing for more, or more clarity, or a different set of reveals, or what-have-you, but I don't see how (arguably) not being able to stick every aspect of an insanely complicated landing on a routine that was insanely complicated negates the whole thing.

I was a big fan of LOST, I watched nearly every episode as it aired. I defended the finale here and elsewhere, and I am still confounded by the ongoing nerdrage about it. From my perspective there's a critical mass firestorm of showy grumpiness about how the show failed to deliver an ending that, in my opinion, it never gave any indication that it planned to give. The finale was as successful and as unsuccessful, as taut and as broken as the entire run of the show in whole.

It reminds me of people complaining about how terrible Barney is. Why the fuck are you watching Barney if you hate it so much?
posted by dirtdirt at 10:39 AM on September 22, 2014 [9 favorites]


I think the nerdrage is more about them promising they knew what was going on and there was an actual story, and then the utter abject failure to deliver on that promise. They knew they were lying from the get-go.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:41 AM on September 22, 2014 [12 favorites]


The show itself never gave any indication of giving a satisfying ending but the creators sure as hell did, as well as specifically stating that the (restrospectively correct) predictions of the ending were incorrect.
posted by poffin boffin at 10:42 AM on September 22, 2014 [4 favorites]


I did like the deleted scene from BSG in which a thick black rectangular armor plate from the damaged Galactica falls to Earth and ends up sticking straight out of the ground near a watering hole in Olduvai Gorge.
posted by George_Spiggott at 10:42 AM on September 22, 2014 [6 favorites]


But it wasn't just the finale. I feel like from "LA X" on, thing got a lot stranger, but the people in charge just kept asking for our patience. And we were very patient for nothing.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:42 AM on September 22, 2014 [3 favorites]


They should have just tacked on Bob Newhart waking up next to Suzanne Pleshette: “Honey, wake up. You won’t believe the dream I just had.”

Now THAT was a great series finale.
posted by Renoroc at 10:43 AM on September 22, 2014 [6 favorites]


My big problem with Lindelof is that he enjoys the airiness and gassiness of spiritual-ish writing, but he never has the commitment or the audacity to go all the way, either in writing or in apparent belief. Don't just give me gentle buffets of ideas: commit to some kind of worldview, and then write from there. Give me a story as Catholic as The Man Who Was Thursday, or as Buddhist-in-its-own-way as Ong-Bak 3, or even just as distinct as what Philip K. Dick wrote.
posted by Sticherbeast at 10:44 AM on September 22, 2014 [6 favorites]


I have this idea for a a mini-sequel to Lost. You hire Daniel Roebuck, who played Arzt, the put-upon survivor who was always pissed at being excluded.

Then you film him banging on the doors of the church from the ending and bellyaching, "You don't think I wanted to go to the freaking afterlife, too? JERKS."

Fin.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:44 AM on September 22, 2014 [6 favorites]


I watched the first 15 minutes of the first episode, and the last 15 minutes of the finale. Did I miss anything?
posted by Thorzdad at 10:45 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


Lindelof's self-satisfied smirk in the Unresolved Mysteries clip encapsulates everything that went wrong with the series. It's not fucking funny, asshole.

He's probably just amused that people cared so much about some dumb TV show.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 10:46 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


The nerdrage is mostly weird because all the 'AHA! THEY WERE MAKING IT UP AS THEY WENT ALONG' comes from a pretty blatant misreading of one interview where the writers said 'yeah we didn't know exactly what was going to happen to each of the individual characters at the outset, we let that part lead where it did' which someone everyone jumped on as like 'WE DIDN'T KNOW WHAT A DHARMA WAS UNTIL THE DVD BOX SET, LOL'
posted by shakespeherian at 10:47 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


Damon Lindleof explains his creative process:

"It's easy. Every time I think I might need to explain something, I run in the other direction."
"But what about..."
* runs in the other direction *
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 10:48 AM on September 22, 2014 [15 favorites]


LOST was incredible breadth of fresh air that choked on its own grandiose lack of vision.

I lost interest somewhere in Season 2, then caught up in the sixth by watching every season again, but starting from the fifth and working my way backwards. It had some lots of great moments, but was unsatisfying as a whole. Jack was terrible lead character, reminds me of Eph from The Strain. Things would be so much better if both were killed off early, to focus on the more interesting personalities.

A terrible adaptation of World War Z

The movie was much better than the book, as it focused the story.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:48 AM on September 22, 2014


tim you are wrong and i will fight you

we will use those giant foam fingers to poke one another aggressively in the eyes
posted by poffin boffin at 10:48 AM on September 22, 2014


I did not watch Lost on tv and likely would not have stuck with it had I tried. I blew through the entire series on Netflix recently. I could not believe how many breaks for ads and how much repetitious content there was.
posted by maggieb at 10:49 AM on September 22, 2014


The movie was much better than the book, as it focused the story.

I will fight you.

---

Seriously, you couldn't film that book and make a two-hour movie. They accomplished making a very entertaining movie with what they did.

Bonus trivia: World War Z is the highest grossing and most profitable solo-star vehicle Brad Pitt has ever made. Everything else is either an ensemble where he wasn't the top billing or didn't come close to the box office.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 10:52 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


Loved the show, loved the finale. There, I said it.
posted by BlahLaLa at 10:52 AM on September 22, 2014 [7 favorites]


it's that it had such a great, diverse cast that literally any other character would have made a better "heart" of the show than fucking Jack.

But then how could we have gotten that memorable episode about where Jack got his tattoos, a question that literally no one cared about before, during, or after that episode?

(What also pissed me off about it was that, at the end, they killed off all the non-white characters early in the season.)
posted by jeather at 10:55 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


/me sings You aaare everybodeh! You aaare everybodeh!
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 10:56 AM on September 22, 2014 [4 favorites]


The original idea for the film version of World War Z was to make a mock Ken Burns style documentary of the book's myriad, scattered events. If they want to reboot and actually make that movie, I'll buy my ticket in advance.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:56 AM on September 22, 2014 [3 favorites]


Also: polar bears.
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 10:57 AM on September 22, 2014


(What also pissed me off about it was that, at the end, they killed off all the non-white characters early in the season.)

....Sayeed is white?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:57 AM on September 22, 2014


Didn't they kill Sayid off earlyish in the last season?
posted by jeather at 10:58 AM on September 22, 2014


Isn't t "You All Everybody"?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:58 AM on September 22, 2014 [4 favorites]


....Sayeed is white?

Jorge Garcia is white? Yunjin Kim is white? Daniel Dae Kim is white?
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 11:00 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


They accomplished making a very entertaining movie with what they did.

Fixed that for you. World War Z was basically "Brad Pitt and his Mullet Keep Getting People Killed, but He Figures Out the Virus Thing, So It's Sort of Okay: The Movie". I give it points for the army-ant zombie visuals and the actually genuinely tense sequence in the lab towards the end where they're trying to stay quiet and sneak past the infected workers, but apart from that it was decidedly meh.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 11:02 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


One drop rule.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:02 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


I did totally forget about Hugo. But Jin and Sun drowned together. I don't remember what happened to Sayid.
posted by jeather at 11:02 AM on September 22, 2014


Sayid was blown up by a bomb (of course) midway through the last season.
posted by oinopaponton at 11:05 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


Didn't they kill Sayid off earlyish in the last season?

--

I did totally forget about Hugo. But Jin and Sun drowned together. I don't remember what happened to Sayid.


Sayid was around until the 14th episode of the last season. He was mostly dead early on, but got revived after a couple of episodes (I think Hurley did.....something?) and then he was the one who sacrificed himself towards the end of the season when everyone was trying to escape on a submarine but there was a bomb on it, and they tried to defuse it but couldn't figure out how so Sayid finally said "fuck this" and grabbed it and left the sub.

I think that was the same episode where Jin and Sun died; still late in the season, though.

Jorge Garcia is white? Yunjin Kim is white? Daniel Dae Kim is white?

I thought Sayid was hot so he was the first person I thought of.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:06 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


Amazing setup is only amazing if it is followed with some sort of decent resolution.

Radiolab recently did a show where they tried to figure out the secret behind a famous, decades-old magic trick, and went to Penn Jillette for help. He had a really good explanation about how some tricks have a beautiful secret to explain them, but others only have an ugly secret. The enjoyment we get out of learning the secret only happens if it's a beautiful one, something simple and clear that lends itself to an "Aha!" moment. If it's just a handful of lies and some duct tape, it's an ugly secret and you'll enjoy the trick so much more if you just never find out how it was done.

Radiolab gave listeners the choice of whether to find out the secret to this particular trick, once it had been revealed that it's of the ugly variety. They didn't put it in the podcast, they just listed the URL where you could go to find out if you wanted to basically ruin it for yourself.

The problem with LOST is that we were promised a beautiful secret explanation, and it turns out there was only an ugly one.
posted by vytae at 11:07 AM on September 22, 2014 [36 favorites]


I think that was the same episode where Jin and Sun died; still late in the season, though.

Well, offhand, Sawyer and Kate lived, Jack died in the last episode, Claire lived, Charlie died earlier, Desmond lived, Ben lived. I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of other major characters who made it to the last season.
posted by jeather at 11:11 AM on September 22, 2014


I cancelled my HBO subscription just as The Leftovers was starting. I was really drawn in by the (copious) previews before and after Game of Thrones, but I don't see the point in committing myself to an ambitious show that will just disappoint after however many seasons.

And I didn't even watch LOST (I was too burned by the X-Files to get into a show that I didn't know had a decent ending), I'm mainly just burned about Prometheus.
posted by sparklemotion at 11:16 AM on September 22, 2014


I have seen every episode but the last and I have fond memories.
posted by shothotbot at 11:18 AM on September 22, 2014


Why, why, it's like someone re-wrote The Empire Strikes Back without any Ewoks....
posted by y2karl at 11:20 AM on September 22, 2014


Charlie died earlier

Charlie died like thirty or forty times, if memory serves.
posted by shakespeherian at 11:22 AM on September 22, 2014 [8 favorites]


I was too burned by the X-Files to get into a show that I didn't know had a decent ending

X-Files is actually a good example of walking the line between having A Plan and Rolling With It. Listining to the X-Files Files Podcast has been pretty interesting when Kumail interviews people involved with the show. One of the big crystallizing events was Gillian Anderson's pregnancy - it set things in motion waaaayyy before they were ready for them. This picked up the pace of the mythos and, imo, added to the creative burnout you see in later seasons. The show should have ended after the first movie, but dollars were in the air.

Creators do not have a sense as to how much time they have to tell their story. It's a problem with TV shows with big mythic arcs - you're not only juggling the story you want to tell, but also the story the audience (and the network execs) want to see. Too far in one direction and you have Carnivale which was cancelled before the story ended. In the other direction, you have Supernatural which lumbers on to this day years after its heroes defeated the devil and the archangel Michael and saved the universe.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 11:27 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


In the reboot I want to see Claire's baby stolen by a dingo.

Say it Claire.
SAY IT.
posted by Kabanos at 11:28 AM on September 22, 2014 [7 favorites]


I agree with those who are saying that the problem with LOST/BSG isn't that they didn't have a resolution, it's that they half-assed the resolution.

The writers would've done better leaving the mystery intact instead of resolving it into a mess of contradictions and banality.

The Leftovers has been mostly strong, so far. One can only hope that the freedom HBO provides will permit Lindelof et al. to not feel pressured into resolving stuff that doesn't need to be resolved.
posted by xigxag at 11:30 AM on September 22, 2014


I was in love with Sayid, and with Jin and Sun, and with Hurley. I thought the show in general was a ridiculous mess, which I enjoyed because it was a ridiculous mess. I was mad about the finale because it made no sense. Aaaaand I don't remember why anymore. There was some big plot hole that it was ignoring. But it was years ago so I don't remember.
posted by joannemerriam at 11:35 AM on September 22, 2014


Please do not unearth that turd.
posted by Berend at 11:39 AM on September 22, 2014


Rose and Bernard survive til the end, don't they?

nnnnhhghgh now I have to read the wiki article about the finale I guess
posted by poffin boffin at 11:43 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


im excited to be mad all over again
posted by poffin boffin at 11:43 AM on September 22, 2014 [6 favorites]


The most important thing I learned from Lost is that I want to see a series starring Naveen Andrews as an international troubleshooter / assassin.
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:43 AM on September 22, 2014 [20 favorites]


YES more scenes where he kills assassins using only his ankles, or the knives in an open dishwasher plz.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:45 AM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


I've said a few times here on MeFi, but Lost ending up being thinking man's TV for dumb people, which was a shame, because it started off with (and periodically was punctuated with) vignettes of really engaging mystery and wonder. The polar bear, or the numbers, or finding the first base at the end of whatever season that was. All of that was great, engaging TV. And, personally, I think I could have lived with it if there had never been a grand explanation--but instead the heapings of Cliff Notes metaphysics and mumbo jumbo just ruined the experience. It always felt like they were writing themes based on a quick review of Wikipedia articles on philosophy and time travel.
posted by Admiral Haddock at 11:46 AM on September 22, 2014 [6 favorites]


(Also an episode of Doctor Who in which he plays another Time Lord. Like maybe The Corsair, who isn't dead after all. And he has a really badass TARDIS configuration.)
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:51 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


Watches FRINGE instead.
posted by Fizz at 11:54 AM on September 22, 2014 [5 favorites]


WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?

Lost was mostly great; have you all forgotten how much fun it was following it week to week? And how much fun it was marathoning it in huge chunks? Have you forgotten the hatch? Have you forgotten Desmond hitting the emergency switch? Have you forgotten Ben Linus? Have you forgotten the reveal of the Others' village? Do you not remember "WE HAVE TO GO BACK" and "NOT PENNY'S BOAT"?

But no, you didn't like the ending; and it wobbled mid-series with the Nikki and Paulo stuff; and with Jack's Thailand interlude; and so that's poisoned the entire experience for you and you're going to persecute Lindelof for it for the rest of his life.

Gah. Me, I'll take the good with the bad; and celebrate the good.

(Also: SO INFLUENTIAL. The strong serialization; the cliffhangers, the musical stings. The entire current series of Under The Dome has pretty much been assembled out of old Lost scripts.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:54 AM on September 22, 2014 [21 favorites]


God the ending to BSG retroactively ruined the rest of the series for me. It was so dumb and poorly thought out that all I could think of was these idiots lucked into something good for the first few seasons and that every piece of goodness that was there was either due to the actors or that they couldn't find a way to screw it up. I just don't understand the sheer arrogance it takes to write such things and then act like oh no some people loved it whats your problem.
posted by Carillon at 11:56 AM on September 22, 2014 [8 favorites]


We had a deal, Kyle, I agree that there was some amazing stuff. "Ji Yeon" is one of my favorite hours of television ever.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:57 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


and you're going to persecute Lindelof for it for the rest of his life

yes in fact i plan to burn him in effigy later today
posted by poffin boffin at 11:58 AM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


yes in fact i plan to burn him in effigy later today

Do it everyday. If you don't, the world ends.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:03 PM on September 22, 2014 [7 favorites]


I'M STILL WAITING FOR MY BUDDY COP TELEVISION SERIES STARRING SAWYER AND MILES!?!

I believe that show was actually called "Spirit of The Law"
posted by ericbop at 12:06 PM on September 22, 2014


Carillon: "God the ending to BSG retroactively ruined the rest of the series for me."

Same. I rewatched the series relatively recently (insomnia) and I found I could only really enjoy it if I made myself not think about how it all ended. When anyone had a vision I skipped to the next bit because I knew exactly what all that stuff added up to (nothing).

I even enjoyed some 4.2 episodes more than I expected, but I didn't stop being mad about Gaeta.
posted by ArmyOfKittens at 12:09 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


The best part of S6 was that Jacob Pellegrino and Titus Welliver were concurrently playing Lucifer and War on Supernatural which of course by fandom law makes both shows take place in the same bizarre and unfortunate universe.
posted by poffin boffin at 12:15 PM on September 22, 2014 [4 favorites]


Lost was mostly great; have you all forgotten how much fun it was following it week to week?

No, but it stopped being fun after about 3 seasons, and for a strongly serialized story, the destination matters, not just the journey.

I do watch Once Upon A Time, which is in a lot of ways very clearly a successor to Lost, though they just close up the stories and restart new mysteries every now and then, so you don't have these trailing questions for 6 years that cannot possibly be answered both surprisingly and well. I have never been able to quite define how it's similar, but it does now and then really scratch the same itch.
posted by jeather at 12:15 PM on September 22, 2014 [4 favorites]


I'm really glad I bailed out somewhere in Season 2. For a while there, I was totally obsessed, I absolutely had to know what the fuck was happening on that island. And then I realized....no one knows what's happening on that island. No one will ever know what's happening on that island. This show is going to go 5+ seasons and things will make less and less sense and the story will be stretched out beyond all comprehension and REMEMBER THE X-FILES?!!? REMEMBER THAT?!! So I bailed. I have no regrets.

Seriously though, I am just so. frustrated. with the US network TV model that stretches shows past their natural lifespans. Procedurals can continue indefinitely as long as there are murders to solve and people to operate on, and sitcoms reside in some universe where time doesn't really work the same way, but serialized dramas HAVE TO HAVE AN ENDING. And I don't mean some bullshit ending that limps past the finish line after six seasons of increasingly diminishing returns and dozens of abandoned plot lines. I mean an ending which you have planned from the very beginning, an ending that requires at most five seasons to reach, an ending that does not spit in the face of the audience. Networks, LET SHOWS END.

But of course we can't do that because $$$$$$.
posted by yasaman at 12:16 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


AND THEY HAVE A PLAN

IT'S A SHITTY PLAN. IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE.

BUT STILL. THERE'S A PLAN.





BY THE WAY, WE KNOW THAT ONE OF THE CYLONS LOOKS LIKE A YOUNG KEVIN SPACEY.

IT'S NOT KEVIN SPACEY. IT'S JUST A COINCIDENCE.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 12:17 PM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


the show failed to deliver an ending that, in my opinion, it never gave any indication that it planned to give

The show didn't really hit "Twin Peaks" levels of "this is never going to be explained" - it was reasonable to assume there would be an ending.

But far, far more damning, and something that Lindelof has conveniently forgotten in every single interview since the ending of the show, is that there were a thousand fan theories about the mysteries, and while the showrunners wouldn't confirm any of them, they would occasionally shoot them down (for instance: the theory that it was purgatory and they were all dead was explicitly shot down in the first couple seasons), and they loved to say that fans were "close to figuring it all out". For instance, here's an article from 2006 (the end of Season 2, for reference), which quotes Lindelof: "Some fans are "surprisingly close" with theories, Lindelof says, but don't have "enough information yet to totally get there." Which, you know, pretty strongly implies that there is a "there" for fans to get to. SPOILERS: There's no "there" there.

I don't hate on Lindelof because he's incompetent and doesn't know how to end a show. They gave me a great show with a lot of cool stuff and some great performances of great characters, with a terrible ending, but my headcanon ending is far better so the version of the show that exists in my head is doing just great, thanks. No, I hate on Lindelof because he was all too happy to deliberately mislead his fans and sometimes outright lie to them, in podcasts and interviews and con appearances for all the years that show was on, and then blame them for being pissed off about it afterwards, like he's the victim. Fuck that guy.
posted by mstokes650 at 12:19 PM on September 22, 2014 [13 favorites]


I don't really hate Lindelof, I just think he's a bad writer who inexplicably continues to get work. Against my better judgement I've actually given him another chance on Prometheus, which was an absolute turd, and on The Leftovers, which was at least bad in an interesting way.
posted by codacorolla at 12:23 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


ArmyofKittens, I am so with you on Gaeta. What a ruining waste.

I gave up on Lost when Mr Eko died. He was my favourite.
posted by minsies at 12:25 PM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


(for instance: the theory that it was purgatory and they were all dead was explicitly shot down in the first couple seasons)

Shouldn't it have been?
posted by shakespeherian at 12:28 PM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


I don't really hate Lindelof, I just think he's a bad writer who inexplicably continues to get work

It's not inexplicable, most of the stuff he's been involved with has made money. That's what tv and movies are about, making money!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:29 PM on September 22, 2014


OMG ALSO I just remembered that the 100th episode aired on what was also the 100th day of Obama's first presidency and for at least 10 whole minutes I was like WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN before I realized that I had gone terribly terribly astray in a timecube sort of way.
posted by poffin boffin at 12:30 PM on September 22, 2014 [3 favorites]


LOST had such potential to be an awesome spin-off video game, too. Via Domus was released too early in the show's life to really matter to the plot, and the player controls one of those never seen, never heard other crash survivors who weaves around the main TV plot without impacting it. Imagine if the LOST game had been released during Season 5. It'd have been great in the right hands.

Or they could have just made "Candidate Fighter" and been done with it.
posted by Servo5678 at 12:33 PM on September 22, 2014


The best part of S6 was that Jacob Pellegrino and Titus Welliver were concurrently playing Lucifer and War on Supernatural which of course by fandom law makes both shows take place in the same bizarre and unfortunate universe.
Huh. I have decided retrospectively that Titus Welliver's character in Lost is the same one he plays in The Good Wife. Which means every time the smoke monster comes out, it's just Childs getting pissed off about losing a case.
posted by Sonny Jim at 12:40 PM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


Too far in one direction and you have Carnivale which was cancelled before the story ended.

For which crime someone must burn in hell for all eternity because that show was the BEST.

But no, you didn't like the ending; and it wobbled mid-series with the Nikki and Paulo stuff; and with Jack's Thailand interlude; and so that's poisoned the entire experience for you and you're going to persecute Lindelof for it for the rest of his life.

People are bitching about the ending because it was of a piece with the rest of the aimless flailing in the dark that the writing team did for several years. Straw that broke the camel's back and whatnot. It's not like we're complaining that the show was PERFECTION ON TV up until the final episode. Quite the opposite: the writers had not one clue where they were going, and that matters when you're telling serialized--as opposed to episodic--stories. The only rational way to approach a serialized story is to look at it as a 120-hour movie; you need a beginning and an end, and beats that have to be hit along the way. If you don't know where you're going, you're just playing that old improv game where people tell a story, one sentence at a time. It might be amusing, it may well be entertaining, but it's only entertaining in tiny bits.

When you're demanding that your audience look at the big picture, you need to actually have one, rather than dropping ever-increasing heaps of handwavium and distractite onto the screen.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 12:41 PM on September 22, 2014 [4 favorites]


Huh. I have decided retrospectively that Titus Welliver's character in Lost is the same one he plays in The Good Wife.

all things serve the beam
posted by poffin boffin at 12:42 PM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


The only way LOST could have been saved is if, at the end of the first season, instead of finding a hatch, they'd pulled aside the undergrowth to reveal the words:
BEWARE OF SLEESTAK
(My wife and I watched the first season, after which I bailed out because it was clear they had settled into permanent-jerkaround mode. My wife kept asking when we were going to start Season 2 until I finally told her to go ahead and watch it without me, and if the whole series really did have an amazing ending full of satisfying answers, I'd go back and watch it. Dodged a bullet there.)
posted by The Tensor at 12:42 PM on September 22, 2014 [4 favorites]


Yeah, S1 and (most of) S2 were some great, taut storytelling for the most part. Relatively everyday folks were dropped into a terminally weird situation--interesting story to be told there. By partway through S3 it was incredibly apparent the writers couldn't find a clue with both hands and a map and I gave up in disgust. Frankly, the story could have been more interesting--and I would have bought some sort of high-concept 'it's all meant to be a mystery' thing--if they'd just left it at the end of S1 and never continued.

I'll admit that when the final season finally rolled around I shotgunned the whole series to bring myself back up to speed, just in case they'd pulled something approaching a resolution out of their asses... and nope. Still disgusted.

Point being, it wasn't the finale where they stumbled. It was turning on a camera in the first place without knowing where they were going, and then just throwing increasingly large handfuls of shit at the wall and hoping they'd somehow reach some sort of TV singularity where everything would collapse back on itself and reveal some underlying purpose and order. Instead...
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 12:51 PM on September 22, 2014


For everyone complaining about the writers not knowing exactly where the story was going to end years in advance, I have a counterpoint: How I Met Your Mother
posted by crashlanding at 12:58 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


How is a terrible show full of grotesque sexism a counterpoint?
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 1:01 PM on September 22, 2014


Carillon: God the ending to BSG retroactively ruined the rest of the series for me. It was so dumb and poorly thought out that all I could think of was these idiots lucked into something good for the first few seasons and that every piece of goodness that was there was either due to the actors or that they couldn't find a way to screw it up. I just don't understand the sheer arrogance it takes to write such things and then act like oh no some people loved it whats your problem.

I wrote a huge comment about this a long time ago, I'll never remember in what thread... But basically what bugs me about both of these shows(and true detective, but that's a whole other can of worms and a lot more people seem to be ok with it) is disrespect for the audience.

No, seriously. Good writers/filmmakers/etc all have it. And if they don't, they at least understand the mechanics of crafting something properly in such a way that the end result respects it's audience anyways.

But no, these shows are mean spirited in that sense. They taunt you for ever caring, trying, or thinking. And that just really chaps my ass.

Its not just that they didn't know how to end it or didn't try very hard, it's that they just didn't give a shit and made a point of poking you with a stick and laughing for paying attention to any of the hints they dropped of something more throughout the show.

I will second what was said above though. These were hugely fun shows to watch when they were mid-cycle. BSG was like, the game of thrones of it's time. I remember waiting with baited breath to either watch the next episode live, or download it and watch it on my crappy CRT monitor. Talking about theories with people between episodes, etc. It was just a fucking blast, and it really felt like it was building up to something totally awesome. I remember there being some really really cool fleshed out fan theories too, most of which would have made a pretty solid ending if they just picked them up and ran with them in any way.

I think the worst thing to come out of it though, was that I have trouble trusting any new Big Show. It's like I dated a couple people for several years, who broke up with me out of nowhere in really shitty ways. I knew they were moving away in a couple years to go study abroad or chase a job after they graduated or whatever, and I was fine with it from the outset... But then they managed to globetrotter up that explosion and make it an im-plosion! and make it all extra shitty out of nowhere.

And as such, now I just have trust issues with Game of thrones and other shows. I started panicking as soon as I heard they plan to just run the show ahead of the books when it gets to that point, having flashbacks of lost and battlestar.

I also still say true detective follows the same "mythologize>don't deliver" ark as BSG and lost, but I think it was short enough that not many people got offended. I still say that was a dumb ending after all that fluffing though. It was just a dumb ending to a couple month long relationship, not a several year one.
posted by emptythought at 1:08 PM on September 22, 2014 [13 favorites]


How is a terrible show full of grotesque sexism a counterpoint?

Because they had a plan for the series the entire time, but the show lasted much longer than they figured and they stuck with their very specific plan even though it no longer made sense and was also terrible.
posted by jeather at 1:10 PM on September 22, 2014 [3 favorites]


There are two shows here promising a grand all encompassing resolution, Lost and HIMYM. Both had disastrous finales. One is criticized for not knowing where it's going the other for ignoring where it went to stick to a plan that was decided on and filmed years earlier. Sorry for thinking that there was some comparison to be made when there is 'grotesque sexism' to derail things.
posted by crashlanding at 1:12 PM on September 22, 2014


I'm still pissed about the ending of Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated.
posted by ckape at 1:13 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


I found I could only really enjoy it if I made myself not think about how it all ended

Here's how to contintue to enjoy BSG.

They never got off New Caprica. All that "adama maneuver" gung ho stuff? That's a book Lee is writing to deal with his depression, and as he gets worse the story suffers until he feels compelled to put in a happy ending that doesn't explain shit cause he doesn't know anything going on.

Boom.
posted by The Whelk at 1:16 PM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


aaaah I just read the episode summaries for all of season 6 and i am all emotions at once help
posted by poffin boffin at 1:17 PM on September 22, 2014


My wife has been making me watch Outlander for the past several weeks and every time she gets eager for a pay off moment, I waggle my fingers and say "I am the ghost of Ron Moooorrree... Don't get your hoooopes upppp..." and then she will counter with "but it happens in the book!" to which I reply, "I am the ghost of Starbuck's penissssss... Don't get your hooooopes uuuppppp..."
posted by robocop is bleeding at 1:17 PM on September 22, 2014 [4 favorites]


Just fyi, emptythought..."bated breath..."
posted by xigxag at 1:19 PM on September 22, 2014


I was 100% convinced that Lost was probably the best thing I had ever seen on public television, through Season 3. In fact I distinctly remember thinking that somebody at ABC screwed up and accidentally let Lost air - because nobody could have thoughtfully allowed something that good onto their network. And yeah, I'm disappointed that they appear to have had no real idea where stuff was going - but! -

didn't the show shut down mid Season 3 due to the writer's strike?

My (conspiracy-esque?) theory was: after seeing the rest of the show after mid Season 3, that what happened was that during the strike time, they got a bunch of uncredited scab writers to write the next X # of episodes, and somehow prevented the original writers from saying jack about it. This would have allowed them to produce episodes as fast as possible when they started back up again.... but the sub writers just jacked it all up so badly that the original writers could not correct for the terribleness, even making shit up on the fly as they supposedly were.

(Yes I know this sounds kinda weak but I just couldn't figure out how it tanked so miserably after that, imho.)
posted by bitterkitten at 1:21 PM on September 22, 2014


These hiccups in moving from a syndication, get as many episodes as you can, model to a serialized model is to be expected. Lost really gained some focus and improved in quality following the announcement of an end date which I think was unheard of at the time for a network show.

The only real complete success of a show that took this multi-season arc style that I can think of is Breaking Bad. Vince Gilligan along the run of the show only had a general sense of where he wanted the characters to be but did not tie himself to a point by point plan. This led to a somewhat organic feel to the developments in the show and it was able to stay true to its characters. Now that there is a true success story to this kind of storytelling it should be more likely to happen again in the future. Add to that the increasing popularity of the anthology format (True Detective/Fargo) and it's less likely we'll have these disappointments in the future. (Game of Thrones fans I fear for you still)
posted by crashlanding at 1:23 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


Because they had a plan for the series the entire time, but the show lasted much longer than they figured and they stuck with their very specific plan even though it no longer made sense and was also terrible.

You don't need to stick slavishly to a plan (though HIMYM had the issue of the children to deal with), you just need to know what points to hit in order to finish the journey--exactly as how JMS wrote B5, including escape hatches to deal with contract disputes, pregnancies, deaths, whatever. A framework with a beginning and an end. Voyager would have benefited from the same kind of treatment. You still have room for episodic stuff, you still have flexibility to deal with unforeseen circumstances and fan reactions (e.g. even if Germ wanted to kill Tyrion off sometime in the next two books, HBO simply will not), but there is an arc to the show that, when taken as a whole, makes sense. Or on preview what crashlanding said: have a destination, but allow things to develop organically. Think of what I'm saying as structured improv, if that helps?

HIMYM screwed up because it got too popular and didn't have an 'auteur' to keep it glued to its original premise and length; Lost screwed up because it didn't have an end goal at all, just increasingly bizarre complications they had no hope of resolving.

Y'know, there was a British Invasion of music half a century ago. Could some enterprising Britons please sail the wide accountant-sea take over American TV? Write a story! Tell that story! Move the hell on when the story is finished.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 1:25 PM on September 22, 2014


bitterkitten, the ending episodes of Season 3 are among the best in the series. It's the first half of that season that's crap.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:25 PM on September 22, 2014


i hate these fights over LOST. I wouldn't trade those years with that show for anything. It was a phenomenal cultural experience, much like what I think Twin Peaks was like. I think Lindelof is anything other than an asshole. So his story didn't land well, big deal. Welcome to the real world where not every story ends up being perfect. George lucas had some great fortune with his original trilogy and not so much with his second trilogy. But if the price of the original trilogy was that second trilogy, well that's a no brainer. Same with LOST. Lindelof and Crew pulled off the improbable -- TV shows get canceled before they are even shot. He is constantly fighting against market forces, changing opinions, changing insider crap at abc no one understands all to keep a fairly complex project employing hundreds of people off the ground. The sequels to the matrix also struggled for many of the same reasons I bet which is no one is sketching out everything they they'll do after on the off chance, the improbable event, that the first project is successful. The first project probably won't even get made, but if it is, it probably won't be completed let alone halfway popular. But lost blew the doors off. So he makes a story on the fly. That's an incredible achievement and guy needs to feel good about that. I loved those episodes. I mean good grief, Hurley, Jack, Sawyer, Kate -- remember when the hobbit wrote on his hand that it wasn't the right boat? Holy crap I lost my mind. You can't produce that without real talent. I was disappointed with the ending but hell, when I have I not been disappointed? Seinfelds ending also disappointed me. They don't always work, but man that show as a whole was fantastic.
posted by scunning at 1:32 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


They never got off New Caprica. All that "adama maneuver" gung ho stuff? That's a book Lee is writing to deal with his depression, and as he gets worse the story suffers until he feels compelled to put in a happy ending that doesn't explain shit cause he doesn't know anything going on.

No, depressed Lee would have written something where Starbuck decided he was her one true love and taken care of him and then the birthed humanity on New Earth or some such.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:32 PM on September 22, 2014


The finale was as successful and as unsuccessful, as taut and as broken as the entire run of the show in whole.

I dunno. My problem with it is that the finale, in one stroke, turned it from a science fiction / science fantasy show into a religious fantasy show. Not being religious, that ruined at the very least the last season for me.

For all the science versus faith chatter between Jack and Locke, I didn't think they really would go all the way to "God set up purgatory for these lost souls" as a major part of the show's story. Particularly given how the producers said "no way!" so many times to fans who claimed that's what the show was about early on in the series.
posted by aught at 1:33 PM on September 22, 2014 [3 favorites]


It was a phenomenal cultural experience, much like what I think Twin Peaks was like

I watched TP when it originally aired, and was a diehard LOST fan as well, despite my increasing unease in the 5 and 6th seasons. But I'd compare the intensity of my interest in LOST's first few seasons with that for TP (which tailed off a bit toward the end too, though the last couple TP episodes were great, as I recall, and the ending still haunts me).

One big difference in my experience of the two is the presence of the internet -- my interaction with other TP fans was when fellow grad students would come over to my house to watch episodes, versus web site discussion boards for LOST.
posted by aught at 1:39 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


For the record, the WGA strike affected Season 4, which was only 14 episodes compared to the previous three seasons' 22.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:39 PM on September 22, 2014




The one thing I really loved about being a LOST fan was the LOST ARG with the art posters/Gallery 1988, and the nationwide clue hunt. I went to several of the reveals, and have several posters as well, including one in my office.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:41 PM on September 22, 2014



No, depressed Lee would have written something where Starbuck decided he was her one true love and taken care of him and then the birthed humanity on New Earth or some such.

that was the PLAN but he got worried about Dee reading it (it's so obviously Starbuck, he just changed her hair color) and in his resentment killed off the Dee expy for no damn reason.
posted by The Whelk at 1:41 PM on September 22, 2014


Battlestar Galatica essentially broke me as a fan. Not just for the ending (though that helped a lot) but for the stone cold realization that the "and they have a plan" was complete bullshit, dreamed up to draw eyeballs.

Which is fine! You don't have to know everything about how a multi-year series end when it starts. But to essentially troll your audience and then just do such a half assed job that the phrase "phoning it in" is at least something you at least wished happened...man, that was some deeply cynical shit.

Which makes me deeply cyncial about GoT and is part of the reason why I pretty much read every spoiler about the show. 'Cause fuck getting mocked like that again. I can't even rewatch the series, because now I know how badly I'm being fucked with every time the "...And They Have Plan" line comes up.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:42 PM on September 22, 2014 [6 favorites]


My problem with it is that the finale, in one stroke, turned it from a science fiction / science fantasy show into a religious fantasy show. Not being religious, that ruined at the very least the last season for me.

TBH, the only arguable religious elements in the finale were the notion of an afterlife and the apparent interfaith chapel at the end. Other than that, it wasn't pushing any particular religious metaphysical worldview. I'm not religious either, to the point of being a basically an atheist with occasional twinges of an agnostic nature, and I was still able to accept the flash-sideways "waiting-room" dimension as another SF element on the show, just like time travel and super-magnets.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:49 PM on September 22, 2014


Which makes me deeply cyncial about GoT and is part of the reason why I pretty much read every spoiler about the show

YES THIS Lost destroyed me ever ever again caring about spoilers for anything, I need to be prepared in advance for shit going down.
posted by poffin boffin at 1:49 PM on September 22, 2014


Seinfelds ending also disappointed me.

The difference is that almost every episode of Seinfeld still holds up despite the ending. The first Star Wars trilogy is still great because it's possible to ignore the prequels.

On the other hand, the entire premise of LOST is that it is a mystery series about unraveling the island purpose and workings. You can't watch it without realizing it is going to fail to deliver and threads will go nowhere.
posted by deanc at 1:49 PM on September 22, 2014 [13 favorites]


YES and also the jesusy taint retroactively ruins so much of it omg

i both hate and love this thread forever

like lost in a way
posted by poffin boffin at 1:50 PM on September 22, 2014 [3 favorites]


BETTER WAYS TO END LOST:

"But Jack, we were never on an island. We were never on an island at all. Instead...we were on...a peninsula."

(Jack panics as the camera zooms and zooms and zooms out to reveal that he has been on a peninsula this entire time.)

(dramatic sting)

(TITLECARD: PENISULA [sic])

(roll credits over footage of everybody in the entire world applauding and smiling and then cheerfully shooting themselves in the mouths)
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:52 PM on September 22, 2014 [8 favorites]


But basically what bugs me about both of these shows ... is disrespect for the audience.

Why do you feel as if you're owed respect? Or owed anything at all?

Don't get me wrong. LOST's ending sucked giant throbbing donkey schlong.

But it's a peculiar sentiment of modern genre fandom that the audience feels as if its personal participation and agreement is vital to the artistic creation process.

This classic painting is ugly. No one would consider it "beautiful," in the same way these are beautiful.

You could look at Goya's painting and think, well, this isn't even any good as a work of art -- after all, he's done better.

But I don't feel owed anything. No one's walking out of a museum going, "I feel so disrespected."
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 1:52 PM on September 22, 2014 [3 favorites]


I have decided retrospectively that Titus Welliver's character in Lost is the same one he plays in The Good Wife.

Titus Welliver is awesome, I have loved that guy ever since Deadwood. Sometimes I wonder though, do you think he ever gets annoyed that all characters he plays have names that are way less awesome than his real name?

Point being, it wasn't the finale where they stumbled. It was turning on a camera in the first place without knowing where they were going, and then just throwing increasingly large handfuls of shit at the wall and hoping they'd somehow reach some sort of TV singularity where everything would collapse back on itself and reveal some underlying purpose and order. Instead...

Yeah, like someone said upthread, I feel like Mr. Eko's err, abrupt end is where they first stumbled, and it became clear that they were making up, at the very least, substantial portions of it as they went along.

But I really could forgive all that; I mean, X-Files and Millenium remain amongst my favorite shows ever and both got lost (no pun intended) in rambling subplots that killed time and went nowhere, neither one ended nearly as strong as it started, nor did the explanations they ulimately gave live up to the mysteries they had built up by then. But I don't remember Chris Carter constantly saying, even right up to the end, hey trust me guys, I know exactly where I'm going with this! (whoops!) Nor did either one end in a way that was, as emptythought notes, basically totally disrespectful to the fans who had tried to figure things out. It's not just "the ending was bad", it's that the ending is the abrupt about-face at the end of an elaborate multi-year bait-and-switch. There's no intellectual payoff in the last episode, only emotional payoff (which is why it's folks who were emotionally invested in the show, but not intellectually invested, who are fine with the ending or even like it.) But being intellectually invested in the show was encouraged by the showrunners and the ARGs and the constant little clues left here and there and then to have no payoff at all? I have to ignore the ending to like the rest of the show, because that ending is what makes the rest of the show the bait in the bait-and-switch.
posted by mstokes650 at 1:55 PM on September 22, 2014 [7 favorites]


But I don't feel owed anything. No one's walking out of a museum going, "I feel so disrespected."

That's a terrible comparison.

Like it or not, audiences tend to feel emotionally in stories, especially when they've spent a considerable amount of time following the story. To have negative reactions to story isn't odd, it's pretty much the exact opposite.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:57 PM on September 22, 2014


But I don't feel owed anything. No one's walking out of a museum going, "I feel so disrespected."

"Herp, derp, fooled you, it was never about the story in the first place, we didn't really care about the plot!" can't be excused with, "it's art! I was making an ARTISTIC STATEMENT by screwing with the audience." Sure, sometimes confounding audience expectations CAN be art, but this wasn't one of them.

(Count me as someone so burned by the X-Files that I knew LOST would disappoint, so I only kept aware of its development from a distance and watched the recap and finale. I felt justified in my decision)
posted by deanc at 1:59 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


I clicked on this thread knowing it would mostly be Lindelof hate and a lot of sputtering about the finale. Sometimes I feel like one of the few Lost fans who enjoyed watching the show more than bitching about it.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:02 PM on September 22, 2014 [8 favorites]


Sometimes I wonder though, do you think he ever gets annoyed that all characters he plays have names that are way less awesome than his real name?


I was just thinking that myself- what's it like to have a more authentically 19th-century name than "Silas Adams"?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 2:02 PM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


To have negative reactions to story isn't odd, it's pretty much the exact opposite.

Yes, but feeling disappointed ("the ending sucked") is quite different than feeling disrespected ("this show's ending insulted me").
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 2:03 PM on September 22, 2014


"Your favorite band to hate doesn't suck."
posted by nobody at 2:06 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


Yes, but feeling disappointed ("the ending sucked") is quite different than feeling disrespected ("this show's ending insulted me").

Sure, but it sounds like you're glossing over the intense feelings a person can have to a story. Or trying to say they're wrong for such intense feelings. Not sure what your point here is, other than "those people are different from me".
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:10 PM on September 22, 2014


Confounding audience expectations in a smart way is respectful; it's trusting the audience to get what you're saying.

Confounding the audience while loudly and frequently promising that you are not is just saying "fuck you, I made my money."
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 2:17 PM on September 22, 2014


Why do you feel as if you're owed respect? Or owed anything at all?

If you went to see a Van Gogh exhibit and there was Saturn Devouring His Son randomly thrown in there with the Van Goghs and when you asked about it the museum curator said "Yeah we figured most of you people wouldn't even be able to tell the difference," would you not feel disrespected?

Because Damon Lindelof doesn't think I can tell the difference between intellectual payoff and emotional payoff (or maybe he genuinely can't tell the difference himself, but he seems like a smart guy). He promised me one and thinks I should've been fine with just the other.
posted by mstokes650 at 2:18 PM on September 22, 2014 [4 favorites]


Sure, but it sounds like you're glossing over the intense feelings a person can have to a story.

I'm asking why there's an intense feeling of personal disrespect, as opposed to disappointment.

But, look, nevermind...

Not sure what your point here is, other than "those people are different from me".

Wow, dude. Way to step on the jerk accelerator. Suddenly I'm othering people?

/ignore
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 2:18 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


Why do you feel as if you're owed respect? Or owed anything at all?

It wasn't directed at me, but I'll answer. I don't.

In my view, he owes me nothing. I owe him nothing. But still, if he hands me respect, I'm likely to give it back. If he's contemptuous towards me, I'll hand that back as well, and then avoid his future works.
posted by tyllwin at 2:23 PM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


I've never seen Lost. I came into this thread to find out if I should watch it, but after reading the comments here I still don't know if I should.
posted by orange swan at 2:30 PM on September 22, 2014


I'm asking why there's an intense feeling of personal disrespect, as opposed to disappointment.

Let me give you an example of confounding audience expectations that worked: the film "Death Proof", which was part of the "Grindhouse" double feature. It starts off as the buildup to a thriller, and then basically 3/4ths of the way through turns into a 1970s-era car chase film. Brilliant execution. There's something amazing when an artist leads you towards a place where you didn't know where you were going and then get impressed when you arrived to experience something you didn't even know you wanted (or was possible).

The flip side is when the artist leads you and you follow him all the while being told, "we are going to a place like this. I know it seems weird now, but trust me there's a payoff, it will be just like this" and so on, and then you end up in at Applebee's and told, "well, the journey was the reward, don't you think?" I mean, if you had told up the destination was going to be a family-style dining place, we likely wouldn't have wasted time following you in the first place. Well, now that we have been mistreated, we know for next time.
posted by deanc at 2:31 PM on September 22, 2014 [3 favorites]


Not sure what your point here is, other than "those people are different from me".

Wow, dude. Way to step on the jerk accelerator. Suddenly I'm othering people?


No, not at all. To clarify: More like it sounds as though you're seeing the world through your eyes and not understanding why others would feel personally involved (and feeling disrespected) by a particular story's ending.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:32 PM on September 22, 2014


Just wait until LOST nostalgia kicks in hard for teenagers who "discovered" it through Netflix but never actually saw a broadcast.

Sounds exactly right to me. In ten years LOST is going to survive the first-wave backlash and be an enormous cult thing. As it fully deserves to be (well, it was a cult concern from the pilot on, but... cult in a different way.) The catastrophe of the final season will just be part of the kitschy appeal, not something that ruins the series, because future generations are not going to experience the show like we did.
posted by naju at 2:38 PM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


I feel like there is some truth there. Obviously I can't know what is in the hearts of the "FROM HELL'S HEART I STAB AT THEE" contingent, but it seemed to me that the ending to LOST was very much like the rest of LOST. I can understand wishing for more, or more clarity, or a different set of reveals, or what-have-you, but I don't see how (arguably) not being able to stick every aspect of an insanely complicated landing on a routine that was insanely complicated negates the whole thing.

I think I actually still like Lost, all these years later, but I would say that not everyone who hates the ending is someone who really should've fallen off the wagon several years prior. I count myself as someone who watched the whole run as it aired. My enthusiasm fell off around the middle of the run—yes, Nikki and Paolo, but also a lot of hand-wringing over the Others that didn't feel like it amounted to much except Eko was kinda cool. And then they stuck Sawyer and Kate in monkey cages and showed Jack the Red Sox winning the World Series and it felt a bit like the writers didn't know what they wanted to do—never mind everything even making sense, it just felt like a bunch of people on an island with no particular purpose except to occasionally fuck with each other.

But for some reason, once they introduced the time travel bits, I was completely, 100% back on board. Finally, something interesting again! Something that felt like it had lasting consequences rather than "just another day on the fucked-up island." That might also have been around the time Lost started doing flash-forwards instead of flashbacks, and though they weren't very subtle about it they didn't ever explain why they made the switch in the show, or even tell you outright the switch had been made; you were left to put the pieces together yourself.

And so by the time we get to the last season, there's been plenty of ups and downs, but anyone who's still around by this point is in for the long haul. Call it a sunk cost fallacy, whatever. But even if the show had abused you in the past, it clearly hadn't abused you enough to drop it altogether. There's plenty of wiggle room in there, then, for someone to watch the whole show and then decide the finale was awful, awful tripe. Which it was. It doesn't ruin the entire series for me, obviously, but I do still have the sense that six (eight? I forget) seasons of Lost were basically filled with red herrings so we could get to the purgatory ending that the writers tried to deny way back in the first season.

More importantly, though that finale may not have ruined Lost for me, it may have done something worse (along with the finale for BSG): ruined television in general. I mostly stopped watching television shows after that, partially because it felt like such a huge investment of time. And frankly, though Lindelof said the best thing about Lost was the six days in between episode airings, I think I realized that I don't really want to deal with that kind of thing anymore: the conspiracy theories, the complex plotting requiring diagrams and flowcharts to decipher what might happen next, the obsession. I just don't think I can do it anymore.

I watched the first season of Homeland a while back, the first serial I really got involved in in a long time, and it was fantastic. But at the same time, I got to the final episode, saw the hooks for a second season, and unconsciously decided, "nope." I still haven't watched the second season—apparently a wise choice from what I've heard. And since then pretty much the only show I've bothered watching has been Orphan Black, and that's got its own significant issues too. It's hard to love again once you've been burned that badly, I guess. But Lost and BSG, by representing at points the pinnacle of complex, intricately plotted serial television dramas, have also brought about the downfall of that model for me.
posted by chrominance at 2:49 PM on September 22, 2014 [9 favorites]


Could some enterprising Britons please sail the wide accountant-sea take over American TV?

I have a similar hope and mine might be slightly more realistic. Even though its still far from mainstream in the US, there's a growing number of people who are obsessively consuming KDramas. Hopefully some of those people are ambitious teenagers who will grow up one day to take over Hollywood. And then we'll get 24-54 episode shows which will have beginnings, middles, and ends. And by end, I mean really end and then everyone moves on to the next thing.
posted by honestcoyote at 2:54 PM on September 22, 2014


Anyone who thought even by Season 3 they could possibly explain it all in a remotely tidy or satisfying way was deluding themselves. But I don't mean that in a bad way! The show was the SF version of Twin Peaks -- a maddening dreamscape masquerading as a normal piece of plotted fiction. As with Twin Peaks, that masquerade was progressively dropped as the show went along, but what made both shows great was that it was never dropped altogether -- there was always that promise, but one that was more self-deception than deception. I think of these shows as akin to BDSM -- we enter into the illusion with the producers that promises are being made, that promises are believed, and those promises will be kept. We knew that wasn't true, but as long as you didn't make the mistake and believe in it all entirely -- as long as you kept that suspension-of-belief latent in the background -- you were fine. Surprise: none of it made sense in the end! Most have said they weren't really shocked to learn that, so the only foolish thing is those who were genuinely disappointed. Speaking for myself, I loved it. The experience of the first N-1 episodes (or N-22 or whatever) was independent of what came afterwards, but even looking back, the unraveling of the conclusion was no more truly destructive of the previous story than Lucas's prequels were of the first Star Wars trilogy.

Thinking more generally, I think the requirements and artistic experience of serialized drama is different from novels, movies, and other short things. For me, the second and later seasons of a show are already akin to fan fiction, something like a sequel, reboot, or extension of a project that, in the vast majority of cases, was initially written to give at least some sense of closure should it not be renewed. This is obviously the case in shows where the showrunner is fired -- eg, West Wing or Community -- but even when not, there is always the sense that the later seasons are in strange relation to the earlier ones, part of the trajectory but not part of the whole in the way that chapters in a novel are. And that's a good thing! It lends a lovely open-endedness to even the most stringently plotted show, and if you enter into the spirit of the thing, it gives rise to a structure and experience that allows you to both look forward to surprise and resolution, yet not be disappointed when the show fails to realize it or takes a sudden right turn.

And I think writers of high-end TV are increasingly realizing this -- for instance, The Americans or The Leftovers both ended their first seasons with elegant mixtures of closure and openings, mixtures that have rarely existed in narrative art before. Lost was obviously more on the open-ended side, carooming from plot twist to plot twist; but again, welcoming such an open-ended experience as the heart of the serialized artform is, I think, a positive thing. Regardless of Lindelof's intentions, he produced one of the great experiences in TV over a series of years. Whether you expect that final season to tie it all up should be independent of the joys of the previous years. On the one hand, of course, you really shouldn't have expected it. But on the other, even if you did, and were crushingly disappointed -- such is life. The skater falls in the final pirouette, but that doesn't kill the beauty of the dance. Life is a serialized drama. Crazy stuff happens -- storylines fail, writers leave, actors get fed up and must be abruptly killed off by smoke monsters or roadster collisions. Yet we continue to delude ourselves that it's all part of the "plot". And that's a good thing!
posted by chortly at 3:00 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


I've never seen Lost. I came into this thread to find out if I should watch it, but after reading the comments here I still don't know if I should.

I definitely think you should! So much of it is awesome and so much of it is ridiculous, and yes, a lot of it is infuriating drivel. I will totally be varying levels of outraged about the finale UNTIL THE END OF TIME but I still think it was a worthwhile ride.
posted by poffin boffin at 3:01 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


The first couple of seasons of LOST were breathtaking. I still get chills when I think of a few of the key moments - like when Sun reveals her secret, when the golf course is built, and basically every scene involving Desmond and Penny. Sigh. D + P 4 EVA.
posted by joan_holloway at 3:12 PM on September 22, 2014 [3 favorites]


Look at LOST as a heavily flawed serial with some excellent moments, frontloaded in he first few seasons. Think of it as a TV show having a dream.
posted by Sticherbeast at 3:19 PM on September 22, 2014 [3 favorites]


Also any parts which seem unimaginably horrible will be vastly improved when you imagine how the Animaniacs would parody it.
posted by poffin boffin at 3:21 PM on September 22, 2014 [4 favorites]


LOST is basically just the tragic love story of Nikki and Paolo and their crazy spider friends.
posted by Sticherbeast at 3:25 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


It's not inexplicable, most of the stuff he's been involved with has made money. That's what tv and movies are about, making money!

Obviously so. The inexplicable part are the people, and I would include myself, who continue to give him the ratings and tickets sales to make that the case.
posted by codacorolla at 4:16 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


I think the unstated but underlying criticism of the show is not that it was poorly written, but that both the script and the meta-script (the implicit information given and promises made through interviews, etc.) were exploitative of the TV audience's expectations in a very particular, modern way. I think an argument could be made that LOST was a type of storytelling designed to maximize viewership at too much of an expense of providing a "decent story" for human beings to watch. It is not clear whether Lindelof/Abrams are cognizant of the role they play in this, which further adds to the resentment amongst some viewers. As to the forces (e.g., economic) that encourage and reinforce this kind high-production-value, low-quality-story output show little sign of diminishing, it should be expected that even more subtly exploitative media will be observed in the future.
posted by polymodus at 4:56 PM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


I've never seen Lost. I came into this thread to find out if I should watch it, but after reading the comments here I still don't know if I should.

You could watch every season except the last, and spend idle hours - if you can avoid spoilers - for the rest of your life wondering how it all turned out, coming up with creative possible solutions, and have watched many, many hours of exceptional television. Although inevitably somebody would casually ruin it for you, I suppose.

I wish I would have taken this approach (but how could I have known?) with Battlestar Galactica, stopping my viewing with the Pegasus season 2.0 cliffhanger, which was the high point for that series (and what a great cliffhanger it was!)
posted by Auden at 5:08 PM on September 22, 2014


It is worth watching a few episodes to see if you want to go on. The same way all of us did.

I understand peole's disappointment with the show, and even understand the feeling of betrayal (though I don't share it). The vehemence is a bit weird, though, I feel - it's not as if Ben Linus came to your house and loomed over you staring creepily after pissing in your Shredded Wheat.

Then again, I wonder if the "they ended it like THIS and now it's ALL RUINED" isn't the same mindset as those who learn that someone whose music/writing/acting/etc. they've loved for years is, like, a Scientologist or something, and then they're suddenly "omigod it's all ruined now".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:19 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


Well in the case of someone like OSC I think that would be 100% valid, so, uh.
posted by poffin boffin at 5:31 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


You know what would redeem it all? If the next season of Person of Interest had each major actor guest star each episode.
posted by sammyo at 5:32 PM on September 22, 2014


I was thinking more about, like, Beck or Neil Gaiman.

Who is "OSC"?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:32 PM on September 22, 2014


(orson scott card, grotesque homophobe)
posted by poffin boffin at 5:37 PM on September 22, 2014


aught: I dunno. My problem with it is that the finale, in one stroke, turned it from a science fiction / science fantasy show into a religious fantasy show. Not being religious, that ruined at the very least the last season for me.

And this is like, the central reason that i feel like you can't talk about lost falling flat without talking about BSG. They both did this, hardcore. I mean lost might have done it a bit more explicitly, but they were laying that on thick at the end of BSG.

I had a hard time putting my finger on it in the past, but this is definitely a big part of why it felt like a slap in the face, yea.

Brandon Blatcher: Battlestar Galatica essentially broke me as a fan. Not just for the ending (though that helped a lot) but for the stone cold realization that the "and they have a plan" was complete bullshit, dreamed up to draw eyeballs.

I have no idea how this is possible, but my brain just selectively chose to not remember that line. I think the fact that they never followed through with it made me forget it actually.

Midway through the shows run, this line was a huge deal. It absolutely made it seem like the ending was going to be epic. It made how monotonous and loop-feeling some middle parts of the show got with "oh the convoys in deep space, they get attacked, other stuff happens" stuff happening over and over seem like it was worth it, because it was you know going somewhere and it just built the anticipation up even more.

I had never actually seen that ask, or the interview it quotes. But holy shit that makes so much sense. That line just sounded good, and they just ran with it.

That's fucking shameful honestly.

I actually blame these shows for making me into way more of a cynical asshole too. They both hit like, right when i was in highschool in my "formative years". These shows pulled this routine, at the same time i was going through all that teenage ennui. It was like "the entire world doesn't respect you as a person who actually thinks with their brain".

Cool Papa Bell: I'm asking why there's an intense feeling of personal disrespect, as opposed to disappointment.

Because there's absolutely an element to it of "and you were an idiot for thinking there was more going on here, or getting at all invested in trying to figure out the hints and threads we dropped for years.

Like go read the response, in that ask linked above to the "and they have a plan" thing and tell me you don't get how that's disrespectful.

It's like, a shitty prank an older sibling would do. Or one of those hand buzzers that zaps you when you shake someones hand. You're an "idiot" for thinking they were being honest and "falling for" the prank.

The same attitude is presented here, in both of these shows.

The artist is essentially, blaming their own shortcomings on the audience, by saying that expecting it to be something more which they presented it as, but couldn't deliver, is the audiences fault. And that they shouldn't be disappointed because ???.

These are both cases of over-promise and under-deliver. And if you can't see how someone would view that, even without the other facets, as disrespectful, then i don't know how i can help you understand it better.

It's like a "don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining" sort of thing. People are upset for the same reasons that they get upset when they buy something with a promise of an upgrade to more features later and it never happens, in addition to being invested in the story. The story was writing checks its ass couldn't cash, and even promoting itself as something it ended up not being.
posted by emptythought at 5:56 PM on September 22, 2014 [5 favorites]


Anyone who thought even by Season 3 they could possibly explain it all in a remotely tidy or satisfying way was deluding themselves.

Except that there are mountains of meticulously-crafted fan theories that went into painstaking detail to explain everything. Literally all Lindelof and Cuse had to do, if they wanted a way to explain everything, was pick one of those theories and run with it.
posted by mstokes650 at 5:59 PM on September 22, 2014 [9 favorites]


(orson scott card, grotesque homophobe)

Still not sure who that is. But i'm thick and this is a tangent so let's skip it.

Something fun - some of the behind-the-scenes filming of one of my favorite scenes of my favorite episode, Tricia Tanaka is Dead.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:01 PM on September 22, 2014


You know, a lot of people I know were after me for years and YEARS to watch LOST, and I always declined-- to the extent of leaving the room and/or apartment whenever it was on. It just seemed like a such a gigantic timesink, and I didn't want to invest any of my time in such an enormous series unless I knew the ending was worth it. So I would pretty much tell all my Lostophile friends and relatives that I wasn't going to watch it unless the ending was any good. Because I really hate shitty endings. Like, really, really hate. It usually kills an entire story for me.

And then, lo, the series finale happened! and it was as underwhelming as I inwardly suspected it might be from the beginning. So now I have a cast-iron excuse for not wasting any of my life on this show. Thank you, Damon Lindelof, for making my life so easy!
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 6:39 PM on September 22, 2014


I didn't have a lot of deep thoughts about Lost. It was an enjoyable way to spend many evenings in front on the TV. I also enjoy how JJ Abrams makes sure someone gets hit by a bus in all his series. But anyway, watched the whole series and went on to something else.

And then a few months later, I had to make a transAtlantic flight, my first flight since watching the show. COULD NOT STOP THINKING ABOUT LOST THE WHOLE WAY TO HEATHROW.
posted by Tandem Affinity at 6:59 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


The most important legacy is definitely shorter intros to TV shows. Thank Jebus.
posted by flippant at 7:27 PM on September 22, 2014 [5 favorites]


BSG's problems remind me of the episode I lost faith in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

(Spoilers for season six of DS9.)

So the show keeps piling on the bad news: the war is going badly, the enemy has control of DS9, the combined Federation and Klingon fleet is constantly getting shredded by superior Dominion numbers, and the only reason the whole quadrant hasn't been overrun already is that the wormhole to the gamma quadrant is mined with Very Clever Mines that replicate themselves so the Dominion can't easily dismantle them and bring even more ships through. Everyone is dejected, frustrated; various characters bang desks and kick chairs and talk about how they can't keep taking losses like this, dammit!

They need a win. So Sisko pitches the idea of throwing a huge chunk of their forces at DS9. Taking back control of the station means taking back control of the minefield and the wormhole: a strategic victory as well as a symbolic one, just what the fleet needs.

Then comes the news that the Dominion is preparing to take down the minefield and the race is on for both the fleet and the members of the resistance still on DS9: can they retake the station before Dukat can reopen the wormhole and welcome thousands of new Dominion ships into the alpha quadrant?

This is a great setup! And it mostly delivers, with some great proxy-hatefucking between Sisko and Dukat via the medium of fleet movements.

And then the minefield gets taken down, and the Dominion ships are on their way, and the Defiant is the only thing between them and the alpha quadrant.

Hi, mysterious wormhole godlings. What's that? You can just make the enemy ships go away? By extracting a very vague sort of price from Sisko? He doesn't get to find any rest on Bajor? Well that sucks for him because he was going to build a house there but if it comes to that or the alpha quadrant going down, Sisko's got a whole fucking list of planets you can do that to! The Sisko will find no breakfast on Risa; the Sisko will lose his shirt on Romulus; the Sisko will get stomach cramps on Mars.

They could have had the Defiant reach DS9 just in time, and they could have had Rom successfully disable the station's weapons so it can't take down the minefield, and that would have been a reasonably satisfying conclusion. But they had to up the ante one last time and shove the story into a place where only gods could save it.

And the gods step up and suck all the tension out of the story, taking the drama the show has been building up to for either several episodes or several seasons, depending on how you want to look at it, and chucking it into the wormhole. From this point on I couldn't trust anything that happened in the show, because if it could disappear an entire invasion fleet for no very good reason, what else was it going to do?

(It turned out that the other things the show would do involving the wormhole aliens were also bullshit, and by the time the seventh season started the writers obviously realised they had to put in a justification for their continued presence in the story, so Dukat got alien ghost religion and quietly skipped along in his own completely separate plot arc that would do nothing for the rest of the show except suck in Sisko at the last minute for a quick Poignant Sacrifice.)
posted by ArmyOfKittens at 9:02 PM on September 22, 2014 [6 favorites]


and what happened to Tora Ziyal was shit shit shit.
posted by ArmyOfKittens at 9:03 PM on September 22, 2014 [3 favorites]


LOST should have been presented as a Twilight Zone-type show, where each episode is explicitly a stand-alone story, packed with mystery and weirdness. The twist would be that each of these "short stories" just happens to relate to The Island in some way, and features at least one of the main characters of the show. Any new characters introduced could be re-used as main characters in future episodes. This would have left the writers free to explore all kinds of strange threads, while still being anchored to the island and the core group of characters. It would almost become a sort of meta fan-fic. It would simultaneously free the writers from the burden of having to tie all the loose ends together, yet also still allow for the speculation and debate among fans (a big part of the fun) about how these pieces could conceivably fit together.

Some of the best episodes of Lost actually did work this way (as self-contained little stories), but then we'd always be dragged back to a soap-operaish and tired narrative.
posted by Kabanos at 10:13 PM on September 22, 2014 [5 favorites]


Whether you expect that final season to tie it all up should be independent of the joys of the previous years.

Yeah I agree with this. I was as annoyed & disappointed as anyone by the show finale and all the loose ends left loose, but I have to say that clicking on the links in the FPP (and some in the thread) I feel nothing but happiness. It was a fun ride, that's all. With generally amazing finales every year (I mean the buh-LOOP when the Island disappeared was kinda mind-blowing, and who could possibly not love Faraday?).

LOST had two things going on. One, it was a soap opera. The mysteries that were really compelling had to do mainly with the characters--e.g. would Sun ever get back into the same time as Jin, what was Ben Linus's real relationship to the Island (big disappointment there), wtf was up with Jacob and Esau (or whatever his name was), why was Richard showing up all-over-the-time, what was going on with Kate & Jack that made all her freckles disappear. Would Penny ever find Desmond, what happened to Claire, was John Locke a genius or a dupe, and was he really dead? And then you had some really great character arcs with Hurley, Shannon, Michael, Sawyer, Juliet.

And then two, you had the sci-fi stuff, the time-travel and the polar bears and the numbers and the hatches and Dharma and that goddamn TEMPLE? And the smoke monster being a PERSON, whose motivation was never really clear? That part was great as it was unfolding, and it fueled the soap opera part--i.e. you could only care so much about people relocating on the island (and off it) and hooking up in different ways, without the sci-fi stuff to keep it going.

The lack of resolution on so much of the second part was stupid disappointing. Enough so that I could never recommend the show to someone who'd never watched it. But for those of us who did? I don't know, I can't regret that time spent--it was fun--really great when it was great. And I would normally never follow a gq link to the "manliest moments on lost" or whatever (??!) but I do love those clips! So, thanks roomthreeseventeen.
posted by torticat at 10:22 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


DAMON: Hey, so I hear that you like science fiction and puzzles. Well, I've made this incredibly elaborate sci-fi jigsaw puzzle just for you! Wanna give it a shot?
AUDIENCE: Sure.
DAMON: Well, I won't give you all the pieces at once, but these should be enough to get you started.
[AUDIENCE starts to piece together the puzzle]
AUDIENCE: Ok, so with the pieces I have, I've been able to make an island with a plane crash. But I'm not sure where this smoke monster and this polar bear are supposed to fit in. Do all the pieces get used in this puzzle, or are there some red herrings?
AUDIENCE: Amazingly, they all fit! It's an incredibly devious puzzle. Have some more pieces.
[AUDIENCE works on the puzzle some more]
AUDIENCE: How may pieces total are
DAMON (interrupting): Have some more pieces
AUDIENCE: but these pieces really don't seem like
DAMON: MORE PIECES
AUDIENCE: some of these aren't even the same size as
[DAMON sweeps the fractionally completed puzzle and loose pieces into a bin]
DAMON: It's time to put that part away. Work on this part now.
[DAMON dumps a pile of completely different pieces on the table]
AUDIENCE: Is this even the same puzzle? Are these pieces eventually supposed to connect with the ones you put away?
DAMON: Yes. Maybe. Look, it'll all make sense in the end.
AUDIENCE: Are you sure? Because these pieces don't appear to be quite the same size, or have the same art style, as the previous ones...
DAMON: Just wait and see! In fact, you're really close to finishing it!
[110 hours later]
AUDIENCE: Now I'm convinced that this puzzle does not fit together.
DAMON: That's, uh, because you're missing crucial pieces.
AUDIENCE: Really. Reeeaaaaally.
DAMON: Totally. I'll, uh, be back in a minute.
[20 minutes later]
DAMON: Here you go. The critical pieces.
AUDIENCE: Uh, you've handed me a greeting card-- it's not even a puzzle piece. On the front there's a cartoon devil and angel, and inside you've scratched out whatever terrible pun was originally there and written "JACOB" in crayon.
DAMON: Yes.
AUDIENCE: Ok, I give up. You have bested me with your puzzle. Show me your amazing solution.
[DAMON starts pulling pieces out and random and crudely jamming them together]
AUDIENCE: Those pieces aren't meant to go together
DAMON: Hold on
AUDIENCE: The images on top don't remotely match
DAMON: I'M WORKING
AUDIENCE: I saw you rip the tab off that piece!
DAMON: IT'S COMING TOGETHER TRUST ME
DAMON: THERE. It is finished.
[DAMON has placed the angel and devil greeting card in the center, and cobbled pieces together underneath it to spell out "GOD"]
AUDIENCE: I can't believe I wasted over a hundred hours on this bullshit.
posted by Pyry at 11:56 PM on September 22, 2014 [36 favorites]


This scene from The Constant always makes me cry. I'm not exactly sure why, or what's happening.
posted by heathkit at 1:40 AM on September 23, 2014 [2 favorites]


Yeah, it's the bait and switch element that annoyed me. Except that, like naju, I thought we were getting an essentially open-ended piece of story telling in which there would be ample space for the viewer to fill in the gaps in the narrative. And that it'd stay gappy. And what we got instead was two and a half seasons of what looked like open narrative, followed by a brutal retrofit to make it into a linear, detective-novel-style story with definitive "answers." Because, I guess, a large part of the audience wanted "closure." But that was never going to work, because the pieces laid out in the first two seasons (to use Pyry's metaphor) were never going to fit together without significant violence to the underlying narrative structure, and the show's writers turned out not to have the story-telling skills necessary to do even start performing that task.

What got me (and still gets me) was the sheer narrative waste that attempt to impose closure generated. There was, as pointed out above, the total disregard for fan theories, many of which were arguably more sophisticated and coherent than the show itself. And then there was the whole Western esoteric tradition, which the show glanced at, but seemingly via Wikipedia summaries, as Admiral Haddock puts it. Theosophy! Hermeticism! Secret Societies! New Religious Movements! The Hollow Earth! All of these could have been rich grounds for allusion, but all the writers were ultimately able to do with these themes was make a weak Foucault's Pendulum reference and then drop it all to spend a season condescending to the shippers. The warning sign, in retrospect, was the Stephen King homage in the first episode of Season 3, where the screenwriters inadvertently let on that they had a much more impoverished range of literary reference than they thought they did.
posted by Sonny Jim at 1:42 AM on September 23, 2014 [1 favorite]


Oh, and to tie it back in to BSG a bit more. I used to listen to the podcast they would put out of the BSG writer room after each episode. I remember them trying to come up with a plot, and just throwing ideas out - "What about the baby? We haven't done anything with that in a while...". And it was clear they weren't even pretending to try to have a consistent narrative.

I think "you're making it up as you go along!" is kind of a daft criticism to level at writers of fiction. But it seems patently manipulative and disingenuous to be constantly jumping to the most evocative, heart string pulling leap for the narrative to get eyeballs in the short term while ignoring the long term consequences for your work as a whole.

Huh, chasing short-term emotional highs while ignoring the consequences to the long-term stability of the show. I guess Lost and BSG really were products of the same decade that brought us the housing crash.
posted by heathkit at 1:55 AM on September 23, 2014 [6 favorites]


I guess I shouldn't still be mad, because, looking back through my Lost posting history I knew what was coming:
macboy: I hope Abrams doesn't lose me with LOST like he did with the fiasco called Alias...

Oh, you know he will.

This has all the hallmarks of the classic Abrams TV show trajectory. (Semi)-intriguing set-up. More and more complicated plot shenanigans, eventually indististinguishable from screen-writers digging themselves into a deep, deep hole.

Next thing, Abrams will lose interest, the network will draft in a whole bunch of new writers who have never seen a TV show before, and these people will then tie the whole thing up with all the cogency of a high-schooler in the last five minutes of a written exam.
posted by Sonny Jim at 11:37 PM on September 29, 2005
posted by Sonny Jim at 2:00 AM on September 23, 2014 [4 favorites]


In my view, he owes me nothing.

Actually, I pay my cable bill regularly, bought several box sets, and set a lot of time to watch the show. Its producers actually do owe me a certain amount of artistic integrity and non-cynicism for my investment.

Yeah, like someone said upthread, I feel like Mr. Eko's err, abrupt end is where they first stumbled,

As much as I liked that character, I'm not sure I agree. The departure of Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as a cast member, as revealed insider-baseball style by the Hollywood press, was weird and not so good. But as a narrative, I think LOST should have been more bold in killing major characters off. The sense Jack and crew were above death and permanent harm may actually have led to the fact of the terrible finale.

In a sense, when the producers / writers decided on the fly not to kill of Jack in the first episode as they'd originally written it - that may have been the true seed of going off the rails - because it was putting sentiment and celebrity above the integrity of story. When I read about that decision, after the series was over, it was a revelation.

but [Lindelof] seems like a smart guy

I don't think he's stupid, but I think he's more ambitious, conceited, and over-confident than smart. ("Hollywood-smart," or "corporate-smart," perhaps.) A truly smart guy (in the writing, creating sense, rather than the business success sense) would have hired a stable of writers who could have made the show what it should have been. In the end he seemed to be deciding based on what he could get away with and still make a shitload of money, rather than what would make the most interesting story faithful to its starting premises.

I've never seen Lost. I came into this thread to find out if I should watch it, but after reading the comments here I still don't know if I should.

Well. I've watched the whole thing several times, and I don't know if you should either.

Or, let's say, go ahead and watch it, but if you somehow, accidentally on-purpose, forget to watch the final half-season or so and find yourself making up your own cool ending to the series and what the alternate timeline in the last season was all about, you'll probably be happier than most LOST fans who saw every episode of the last season.
posted by aught at 6:01 AM on September 23, 2014 [1 favorite]


Damon Lindelof's writing too often reminds me of the old canard about somebody who talks like what stupid people think smart people talk like. I love shell games and McGuffins and empty signifiers and whatnot, but he takes it to a whole new level, and not a good one.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:40 AM on September 23, 2014 [3 favorites]


Just wait until LOST nostalgia kicks in hard for teenagers who "discovered" it through Netflix but never actually saw a broadcast.

I know one of those teenagers already.

Me, I quit when it was revealed that the monster in the jungle was smoke. They said at the beginning that everything would be explained, and none of it was supernatural. The smoke monster was when I realized that Lindelof was a lying liar who lies.
posted by donajo at 8:37 AM on September 23, 2014 [2 favorites]


I almost feel like we should do a Fanfare rewatch of the entire series as a sort of glorious catharsis but we'd have to split it in two like the GoT threads: one for people who enjoy being outraged about it and one for people who eschew outrage.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:20 AM on September 23, 2014 [3 favorites]


Lost was amazing to watch up through about the second-to-last season, but that excitement was predicated on the belief -- since shot down in flames -- that all these fantastic elements were actually part of a coherent whole, that there was a story that was being revealed piece by piece. It is absolutely not worth a rewatch because you simply can't get that excitement back now.
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:35 AM on September 23, 2014 [2 favorites]


I didn't watch or care about LOST at all while it was on. Then, a couple years ago, my friend and roommate Brian was binging on it, and I was like, "Really, LOST? Isn't that show terrible?" And he said, no, it's actually one of his favorites, I should really give it a shot.

Brian and I have this interesting relationship to media, in that we don't always like the same things, but almost universally, if he absolutely loves something, I'm going to love it too (and vice versa, obviously). So I said, ok, I'm skeptical, but I'll be your Huckleberry.

And it was great, and I loved it, and I still think about it from time to time with great fondness, and I have no idea what show everyone else watched, because I found it narratively satisfying and interesting and thought-provoking. I have a theory that LOST is much better as an extended novel from start to finish than as an serial with hiatus, because you only have to wait a couple hours to figure out what something was instead of months or years, and because if an episode sucks, it's not the last memory you have for weeks or months. I think this probably only works if you come to the show fresh, though, because otherwise you're just going to remember how mad you got the first time.

(This is also, I think, why people liked BSG for so long; it plays much better as a serial, because when you binge it, the grimdark and utter lack of human emotion or even a speck of humor becomes quite overwhelming.)

So I guess what I'm saying is, I'll watch it again, and I'll really like it, and I'm sorry you guys didn't. It's unfortunate that I'm basically never going to be able to talk to anyone other than Brian about LOST, because there's absolutely no way to have a conversation about it without everyone piling in to express for the 117th time how utterly loathsome they found the show and taking all of the air out of the room for anyone who might have actually enjoyed themselves, but that's why I hang out with Brian and not with some other people.
posted by Errant at 11:45 AM on September 23, 2014 [7 favorites]


My wife and I started binge watching the show the day the second episode of the last season aired. We only had to wait for the finale (while drinking our wedding keg as mentioned above!)

We talked about this thread and we still have a soft spot for the show. The Deus Ex Machina ending doesn't ruin anything. We loved characters and the characters were done well.
posted by schyler523 at 7:38 PM on September 23, 2014 [1 favorite]


WHY WASN'T HURLEY THE FOCUS ALL ALONG ARGH

Oh, man, another LOST story - I went to a public screening of the series finale at a Brooklyn Bar, and was sitting near a table with a team of about six guys who were obviously fans. The bar had done some corny trivia contest thing to tie in, but mostly people were just drinking and talking amongst themselves as they watched.

But at the very end, when we get to the scene where Jack is making Hurley the island's guardian, suddenly one of the guys at the next table over started COMPLETELY flipping out with ecstatic joy. (I nearly went over and gave him my number because YAY HURLEY)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:42 AM on September 24, 2014 [3 favorites]


It is absolutely not worth a rewatch because you simply can't get that excitement back now.

Actually-- aside from the fact that in the later seasons everyone spends all their time criss-crossing the entire island for no fucking reason-- rewatching is in a lot of ways better, because now that you aren't wondering What Is Going On it's just a great rip-roaring Indiana Jones-esque adventure with magic and crazy science and zany chases and stuff.
posted by shakespeherian at 10:41 AM on September 24, 2014


Errant: to express for the 117th time how utterly loathsome they found the show finale (FTFY; I think you misunderstood the vitrol)

schyler523: The Deus Ex Machina ending doesn't ruin anything.
(no machina, just plain old Deus, is the problem with the finale)
posted by aught at 11:46 AM on September 24, 2014 [1 favorite]


You can talk to me about Lost, Errant! I still love the show. It was pretty much the last network show I watched regularly on a real broadcast schedule. It was a time before everyone was always just streaming & binge-watching everything, but after it had become possible to have endless real-time internet discussions the rest of the week. I loved how complex all of the characters were—it was easy to imagine a lesser show about a mysterious island that might have treated the same range of characters as much more simple stereotypes. But their past mistakes, their fears and decisions, were in fact crucial to the development of the story and their sometimes shocking connections with one another.

That might be part of why I don’t really get the Jack hate. It’s true that any number of other characters could have served the plot the way Jack does, but that’s the point—his character is not really so much the star as simply an organizational need within a large ensemble cast. The reason we can picture other characters doing it better is because they were all sufficiently developed to be individually interesting. As on the island, Jack only serves as leader because somebody has to, not because he wants to, or is even any good at it. He’s at least as flawed as everybody else, and largely not any more important than the other major characters in terms of story.

I didn’t love the ending, but I didn’t hate it either. I think I had different expectations than many other viewers. I wasn’t waiting for the big reveal that would explain everything; I felt as if the answers to the vast majority of island mysteries had already been exposed throughout the run of the show, and it was clear in the final season that there was only so much new stuff they were going to be able to fit in before the finale. It was more important that I knew the characters’ fates than what those fates turned out to be, and when it was over, I felt there was enough resolution that I could say, “OK, that’s done. I can reset the DVR, delete the message board links, and move on.” And I did. I’m pretty sure, though, that if I had spent more time reading creator interviews, and fan story guesses that were sometimes better than the actual story, I would have liked it less. I haven’t really revisited the show until this thread, but I’ve started a rewatch, and am totally enjoying it.

I understand why people didn’t like the Goddish bits at the end, but I saw it more as a small-g god(s) thing, like in Cabin in the Woods—just because there are normal people pulling strings behind the scenes, it doesn’t mean that there’s not also something ineffable/supernatural farther down. It is fictional, after all. But who knows; maybe I’ll get to the end again and become as retroactively dissatisfied as many others.
posted by obloquy at 1:55 PM on September 24, 2014 [4 favorites]


World war Z should have been an HBO series with a different cast & story every episode (a la Twilight Zone).
It could have been an amazing series
posted by wester at 5:30 PM on September 28, 2014


World War Z is one of my few exceptions to my rule about not getting angry about adaptations sucking. It's a different medium, if it blows I still have the original, so who cares? But WWZ had such great potential and now. since they hung something entirely unrelated under that name. it means they can't actually make the good thing that was possible. (Exactly what you imagine, wester - jeebus, that would beat the hell out of that crappo True Blood adaptation of the Dead* books)
posted by phearlez at 7:13 PM on September 28, 2014


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