Previously on Lost (previously)

February 14, 2022 12:00 PM

Nearly a dozen years since the series finale of Lost, the intricate story might seem a little hazy in retrospect. One could always refresh with Lostpedia, sardonic animations, or high-speed costumed re-enactments. Or for longtime fans, why not reminisce by revisiting the show's infamous bookends -- the artfully inscrutable scenes which introduce or conclude each season (plus a few other key scenes)? S1: Pilot - The Monster - Walkabout - Sawyer's letter - Jin and Sun - Parting Words - Exodus - S2: Make Your Own Kind of Music - Rose and Bernard - The Button - S3: Downtown - Hurley's Van - Charlie - We Have to Go Back - S4: Oceanic Six - The Constant - Alex - The Coffin - S5: Mineshaft - Jacob and the Man in Black - What About Me? - S6: Sideways - Underwater - The Submarine - Final Battle - Moving On - The End - Epilogue. Or settle in and watch this 3-hour retrospective labor of love.

The crash of Flight 815 in real-time, 24-style [previously]

The AV Club's classic and original recaps

LostAnswers Tumblr

One Lost writer's treatise on whether they actually knew what the hell they were doing [previously]

roomthreeseventeen's ten-year anniversary round-up

Grantland's oral history of the show's genesis [previously]

Supercuts: Dude... - what. - What did you do?! - sonuvabitch - WALT - Brotha

LOST Symphony - A celebration of Michael Giacchino's score

Footage of Giacchino conducting the orchestra: action sequence - practicing cues (and the Up theme) - the gorgeous finale motif

Unedited footage of the fandom circa 2010

The Lost Breakbeat Remix

A kickass fan-made title sequence

Lost "Showdowns" art - part 2

Lost comics from Nedroid and Kate Beaton (scroll down)

16 secret Lost references in videogames

Lost previously on MeFi: In-universe websites - LOST number theory (debunked) - another theory - The Numbers (almost) win the Irish lottery - LOST according to Weird Al (part 2) - Friday Flash Fun - The Hanso Foundation ARG - Criticism of the show's increasing loose ends - What this show needs is an 80s theme song - LOST as meta-media - WAAALT - Sportscaster Al Trautwig shares his thoughts - Hurley's blog - Damon, Carlton & A Polar Bear - The Flight 815 crash in real time - Recapped by an extended Italian family - LOST: The Sitcom - The "Never Seen Lost" blogging project - A Caltech physicist discusses time travel theories - Creators Explain How They Did It, What’s Going On - Muppets invade the writers' room - Goofy-yet-mournful tribute to LOST - The series finale - The epilogue announcement and discussion - If TV's LOST was a 1987 point-and-click computer game - LOST Answers Tumblr blog - Grantland's oral history - 10-year anniversary - One writer's retrospective

posted by Rhaomi (69 comments total)

[Part of #DoublesJubilee!]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:01 PM on February 14, 2022

NB: You can safely skip this comment if you don't like unhappy noises.

There's only one thing I want from art, or Art, or whatever. It doesn't even have to be "good" or anything, because in matters of taste there can be no argument. The only thing it has to be is not a deliberate waste of my damn time.

I don't think Lost met that bar, and I spent a lot of time watching it and thinking about it. But it turned out to be a bunch of symbolic feces thrown at the wall for money. I think the contempt for the audience was apparent. They put Chekhov's gun after Chekhov's gun in there to lead us on and then never pulled the trigger on 90% of them, because it was all a grift. And they lied and lied about how everything was part of a plan and clearly it WASN'T, unless the plan was to keep getting one more season's worth of paycheck.

Wow, um, I've still got some Feels about it, apparently. I feel the same way about Lost as I feel about my 20s, to wit: so much wasted potential.
posted by Horkus at 12:22 PM on February 14, 2022 [53 favorites]

I think the confusing ending was all of them leaving on a spaceship.

(for a Battlestar Galactica crossover that never happened in this timeline)
posted by sammyo at 12:23 PM on February 14, 2022 [6 favorites]

I have so many problems with this show and was so sick of it by the end, but S2 season intro scene is, imho, one of the greatest cold opens of any show ever (given what is known by the end of S1, of course)
posted by gwint at 12:26 PM on February 14, 2022 [16 favorites]

LOST was my favorite show as a teenager (it gave me my first ever TV/celebrity crush, lol), and I recently revisited it. It’s not a masterpiece, but there are so many characters and moments I love and am moved by, and the music is incredible. It’ll probably always have a special place in my heart and I’m looking forward to rewatching it in another decade to see how my feelings about it evolve. Thanks for these links; I’m excited to check them out.
posted by chaiyai at 12:46 PM on February 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Agreeing with Horkus here.

Lost, in retrospect, felt like the first modern take on how to extend a TV show beyond a TV show. The podcast, which was an official one, was a must-listen for diehard fans. There were myriad discussion boards. There were the interviews, the ARGs. All of it was in place. And it totally hooked me. I loved all of it, hard. It was innovative and smart and creative and entertaining and engaging.

And it was ultimately squandered by a weak ending.

I've tried to go back and watch episodes, but almost have no desire to do so: it was an enormous investment of my energy that didn't pay off significantly. So it's almost painful to rewatch. In the end when the showrunners kept coming back to, "It's about the characters!"... well, that was a poor excuse to introduce 817 different devices and follow up on about 8 of them.

I still wish it had been a spaceship, or purgatory, or something.
posted by hijinx at 12:47 PM on February 14, 2022 [6 favorites]

Wow, um, I've still got some Feels about it, apparently. I feel the same way about Lost as I feel about my 20s, to wit: so much wasted potential.

I'm still really confused at this whole era and why so many people that I knew and respect who where into this show like they found a new religion and went all in on it.

But I feel that way about a lot of TV series shows both vintage and modern.

I mean if you were going to sit around and watch TV you could do worse than, I don't know, watching Taxi reruns or having a nice nap during an Attenborough documentary or something, but that's just me.

On the other hand I tend to melt my brain on weird dumb shit like Smiling Friends, Solar Opposites or, ugh, Rick & Morty, so it's not like I'm clean.
posted by loquacious at 12:52 PM on February 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

I wanted to like LOST - but life and circmstances interupted my ability to watch it as it was originally aired.

Then - over time, I saw the angst and eventually anger over the ending and was glad that I did not get sucked into it's vortex. In fact - between LOST, The X-Files, Millenium, Harsh Realm, Space: Above & Beyond, Strange Luck and a few other TV series of the same general era, I eventually made a pact with myself... A series would have to come to a complete and satisfactory (publically) conclusion before I would "buy in" - then - and only then, I would watch it. (My later mistake and affirmation of that pact was... Dexter... OTOH, I never wasted any time on Game of Thrones and now I don't have to...)

Just finished "The Leftovers" - and, while it does not explain everything (Let the Mystery Be!), the LOST experience was clearly a training ground - but, the payoff of "The Leftovers" was well worth it.
posted by rozcakj at 12:57 PM on February 14, 2022 [12 favorites]

The appeal: this show offered a puzzle that looked like it was going to be a lot of fun to solve. Most shows don't bait their watchers like Lost did. We didn't realize it was unsolvable because the makers kept saying it was. I don't wonder at all why so many people say they felt tricked. They were tricked.
posted by heyho at 12:59 PM on February 14, 2022 [16 favorites]

This 13 year old sketch (featuring a young Adam Conover) sums up my feelings about watching Lost. And goddamn I watched all of it.
posted by wemayfreeze at 1:00 PM on February 14, 2022 [7 favorites]

I think the contempt for the audience was apparent.

This is exactly my feeling and why I will never, ever again watch anything Damon Lindelof is involved in.
posted by dobbs at 1:06 PM on February 14, 2022

wemayfreeze, I'd somehow missed that parody sketch. It's brilliant and quite hilarious!
posted by heyho at 1:06 PM on February 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm still really confused at this whole era and why so many people that I knew and respect who where into this show like they found a new religion and went all in on it.

The plotlines were absurd, but the characters were compelling. That's at the heart of the show's appeal to me. And there was a fair bit of fun in the absurdity because they served it up with style and high production value.

J.J. Abrams has a lot of flaws as a moviemaker and show runner, but I think his greatest talent is for casting roles well. That talent comes through in Lost and later on in the Star Wars sequels.
posted by cubeb at 1:11 PM on February 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

LOST just wasn't really relatable what with the guy living alone in the same place where he works by tapping things into a computer all day while worrying about "quarantine" and "lockdown" punctuated by occasional deliveries of groceries.
posted by Chef Flamboyardee at 1:27 PM on February 14, 2022 [35 favorites]

I always thought it had way too many unsolved mysteries and annoying cliffhangers, but I thought it was a great show, and the ending was fine. I thought they explained enough eventually, even though the explanations were not always satisfactory.


If it was a show done in the streaming era, those complaints would be much less, but waiting a week to figure out what the heck was happening enhanced the mystery and the annoyance.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:40 PM on February 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

Having rewatched fairly recently: a lot of Lost is great. The pilot and the S1/S2 cliffhanger/cold open is amazing; the Locke reveal; the numbers; Hurley driving the van; "NOT PENNY'S BOAT"; the Dharma flashback season; they totally lucked out with a lot of their casting, more than sufficiently so to compensate for Matthew Fox being a kinda soggy leading man; HENRY FRICKIN' GALE; it wobbles a lot in the middle/late seasons when they were trying to keep the plates spinning without an end in sight; Nikki and Paolo weren't that bad and did give us Billy Dee Williams guest-starring; the weird obsession at the time with whether Néstor Carbonell was wearing eyeliner; Frank "Chesty" Lapidus; "I'll take you"; I like the ending but oof, that last season is a bumpy ride that does Sayid wrong.

It was not at all a waste of my time.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 1:42 PM on February 14, 2022 [28 favorites]

METAFILTER: The plotlines were absurd, but the characters were compelling.
posted by philip-random at 1:52 PM on February 14, 2022 [12 favorites]

This is exactly my feeling and why I will never, ever again watch anything Damon Lindelof is involved in.

Watchmen the TV series was fine--streets ahead of any previous efforts that DC/Warners made to adapt or extend the graphic novel--and I've heard good things about The Leftovers. That having been said, Prometheus and Star Trek Into Darkness were awful, and the reaction that folks have had to this show's resolution or lack thereof made me glad that I didn't invest in it.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:45 PM on February 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

For me, LOST was a fun ride to a lousy destination.
posted by mikelieman at 2:48 PM on February 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

All I remember is Michael wandering around the beach for fifteen episodes calling for Walter, and then Walter wandering around the beach for sixteen episodes calling for his dad, and then both of them I think for pretty much the rest of the series were wandering around the beach calling for Vincent the dog.
posted by turbid dahlia at 2:51 PM on February 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

Summing up the disappointment in a few words: you got the impression that the show had a plan and a destination from the beginning. Then you got the impression that they were making it up as they were going along, and that you had been misled.

Pretty sure I still have a homemade box of Dharma Initiative breakfast cereal somewhere, though.
posted by gimonca at 2:53 PM on February 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

>METAFILTER: The plotlines were absurd, but the characters were compelling.

And now you're making me miss Quonsar.
posted by kimota at 2:54 PM on February 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

I loved Lost. I wasn't especially satisfied by the ending, but it certainly didn't ruin the entire experience for me. Maybe it's just me, but if a weak-ass ending could ruin a work I've thoroughly enjoyed up to that point, I'd have to hate the overwhelming majority of science fiction and fantasy that I've watched. And I guess I'd rather savor the parts that I've loved.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:57 PM on February 14, 2022 [6 favorites]

Nope, still mad.
posted by Area Control at 2:58 PM on February 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

HENRY FRICKIN' GALE

I'll agree that Michael Emerson needs to be in more things--if you want to point to great casting in Lost, he's exhibit A.
posted by gimonca at 3:04 PM on February 14, 2022 [9 favorites]

Don't forget Sawyer's voluminous nicknames.
posted by zardoz at 3:08 PM on February 14, 2022 [7 favorites]

I feel like you could do a lot of comparisons between "did Lost have a plan" and "did the Cylons have a plan" and to some degree, the actual plan of How I Met Your Mother.

I continue to think that Babylon 5 had the best planned out show, and as has been said a bunch of times. JMS engineered a lot of trapdoors and substitutions and the like to deal with cast changes, and even he had to speed up and then slow down on the 4th/5th seasons since they got canceled and then un-canceled (or whatever it was). But overall, I really admire what he did there. I don't know if that's doable or not these days.

TV has to deal with the changes of life, and it's hard to plan ahead for a set ending. HIMYM did that, engineered it from the get-go, then became TOO MUCH of a hit and ran nine seasons, during which things evolved enough to make the planned ending kind of suck, BUT clearly the creators felt that they still needed to use it anyway. The Cylons, well...I don't think they ever had a plan, they just made it sound that way :P (Did ANYONE understand the Opera House thing?)

Lost seems to me to be somewhere in the middle of the extremes: some things were planned, some things eventually got some kind of ...something (polar bear), but in the end they just kinda..."I give up, it's purgatory, Jack" about it all. Mostly I just remember the showrunners saying that the episode showing how Jack got his fugly tattoos was the nadir of the show on having to just kill and waste time, and that was when they started advocating that they get an endpoint to the show so they could start pointing things in the direction of the exit. I feel like they tried, at least. But in the end, the purgatory thing just kinda seemed like what happens when you end up writing yourself into a hole and they didn't really have any better option by then, I guess.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:21 PM on February 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

It was an "and then he woke up" kind of ending and it made me so angry. I actually came up with an alternate ending that would have only required the last two episodes to be different - I forget all the details now but in my ending, the idea was that they were all superheroes who were sent to the island to prepare them, and then back to their lives, in order to fight the smoke monster, so in the penultimate episode, the smoke monster would have been attacking a bunch of places all over the world after escaping the island, and then in the final episode they would have banded together to defeat it.
posted by joannemerriam at 3:29 PM on February 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

Years ago, the National Lampoon had an article called How to Write Good. One of the tips was for when you didn’t know how to finish a story. Just end it with, “Suddenly, everybody got run over by a bus.” After spending those years watching Lost, and slowly realizing that they didn’t know where they were going, and now reading all the stuff here, I now realize that they took that advice from that article. Except “everybody” was the audience.
posted by njohnson23 at 3:35 PM on February 14, 2022

I agree that LOST was a bait-n-switch show. So many great weird plots that mostly came to nothing. And when people called foul the writers and producers (and not a few fans as well) cried “Well just let the mystery be mysterious! Why does everything need to be explained?” Which I can understand to a degree but LOST is a special case. So very many subplots were just ignored altogether.

Also. It’s the entire last season leading up to the big finale, in which it’s revealed (spoiler alert) that the main characters (everyone?) are all dead and living in a kind of limbo/afterlife. Something. Which is a lame ending in and of itself, but not the show’s biggest crime.

The crime is that the limbo/parallel world storyline ate up half of the entire final season. Each episode would feature the real world storyline and flashover to the limbo storyline, so it was about 50/50 for each storyline. That’s half a season in the limbo world, which not only had zero impact on the real world plot lines, but by spending so much time with what was essentially extraneous story, the writers wasted hours and hours of airtime that could’ve been spent wrapping up all those loose ends. Not everything, sure, but man there was a lot left just undone, unfinished. It was lazy and cynical writing, and they were justifiably criticized for it.
posted by zardoz at 3:40 PM on February 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

I started watching the boxed set of the first season of Lost when I was temporarily sharing a place with a houseguest and finished when I was on my own. I tend to sleep little and my guest, much. As my hearing is not the best, I therefore watched part of it with the subtitles on and playing in silence. Subsequently I finished the season in a more conventional fashion and went back to see some of the earlier episodes. I spotted something that might have evaded the notice of viewers who saw it in the usual way.

The music does all the heavy lifting. The composer (Stephen M. Davis?) is using some great music cues that put some shading on a lot of crayon-obvious dialogue. If you watch it sans music, it is a pretty threadbare viewing experience.

I never bothered to go back for Season 2. I reckoned it was the bottom of a pretty shallow barrel the filmmakers had nearly breached already, so no need to continue. I gathered I missed little by bailing out when I did.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:50 PM on February 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

I'll agree that Michael Emerson needs to be in more things--if you want to point to great casting in Lost, he's exhibit A.

Have told this story before, will tell it again -

Back when the show was on the air, I was doing occasional theater reviews for a local blog, and was assigned to cover a one-act show with a goofy concept. The guy who created the show said he'd based it on something that actually happened: he was named Josh HALLOWAY, and when the show aired he suddenly got all kinds of audition invites, offers to endorse various products, and all kinds of opportunities for things - but when he showed up at these various appointments, people would frown and say that sorry, they'd been confused and turn him away. Finally he figured out that they had him confused with Josh HOLLOWAY, who played Sawyer.

That was the basis for this whole free-for-all examination of names and identity and fandom, some of it in the forms of monologues-to-the-audience and some of it in the forms of scenes with his LOST-fan girlfriend or his bemused roommate. He also had a few pre-filmed segments here and there.

One such pre-filmed segment was a dream sequence, where "Josh" dreams that he is in a psychiatrists' office on the couch and talking about how this mistaken identity thing is messing with him. We don't see the psychiatrist at first - we just hear a voice. And that voice starts to sound....familiar. Finally "Josh" in his dream turns to look at the psychiatrist - and the camera pans over to reveal that the psychiatrist is Michael Emerson. And - they actually got the real Michael Emerson to do this.

I loved the show - it was an affectionate nod to the show, it had some funny things to say, and while the writer was definitely a little green, he was also definitely a talent (he's since gone on to become a writer for Jimmy Kimmel). And even though I knew I probably shouldn't, I broke protocol and introduced myself to him after, and asked "how in the HELL did you get Michael Emerson to do that bit?"

He just grinned a little sheepishly and said, "I just wrote him and asked. That's....it."

So Michael Emerson is cooler than you thought he was.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:02 PM on February 14, 2022 [21 favorites]

He just grinned a little sheepishly and said, "I just wrote him and asked. That's....it."

That will sometimes do it.

In my misspent youth in the seventies and eighties, I spent my share of time paying D&D. Along about 1984, a small company called Iron Crown Enterprises landed the license to produce a role-playing game based on Tolkien's Middle-Earth. ICE was a very minor player in the field, and many people wondered how they could have wound up with such a recognizable and potentially lucrative license. Turns out that although the hobby was a decade old, they were just the first ones to ask.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:23 PM on February 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

Summing up the disappointment in a few words: you got the impression that the show had a plan and a destination from the beginning. Then you got the impression that they were making it up as they were going along, and that you had been misled.

For Dobbs and everyone else who won't give Lindelhoff another chance: as others have stated above, I think he's learned his lesson. Particularly with The Leftovers. In that one, a big, world-changing thing happens. It's unexplainable. And where with Lost you would be lead to believe that the characters will go solve the mystery, with The Leftovers it becomes apparent very early that it doesn't matter what happened. It just did. Maybe it's God, or aliens, or a space warp wormhole or something. It doesn't matter. What matters is how people deal with the aftermath.

And it is so good.
posted by nushustu at 5:18 PM on February 14, 2022 [8 favorites]

*(Didn't matter why it happened. Not what happened.)
posted by nushustu at 5:49 PM on February 14, 2022

The Leftovers was amazing. But very, very dark. It's well worth it, IMHO. But be prepared.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 6:03 PM on February 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

Lost was great, and speaking personally I don't understand the ending complaints. By which I mean, I understand them in the sense that yes, the ending was terrible, as were the later seasons, but I personally have no feeling that the first seasons are retroactively tainted by the later ones. X-Files just got worse, and the later seasons made no sense, and the movies were dumb, but none of that changes how excellent many of the original episodes were. And that's not just the stand-alone stuff, the lure of the grand conspiracy was a great hook even though it was always doomed to collapse, just as Lost's promises were impossible from the outset. If David Lynch in his dottage were to make another Twin Peaks sequel that was complete garbage and answered all the question in idiotic ways, that would in no way affect the value of the original series for me. Likewise for The Prisoner. None of these shows can stick the landing any more than Philip K. Dick could in any of his great novels -- that's the nature of the genre. You hold on to hope that there's a magnificent reveal, but that's mostly just another type of suspension-of-disbelief. Despite being a something of a deception, it's more of mutual one and not a really a problem as long as you don't have some genuine belief that you are owed a payment on these ridiculous promises. The impossible promises of Dick, or Twin Peaks, X-Files, or The Prisoner, or any of those things are part of the genre, another type of conspiracy anyone who is familiar with the genre enters into with the writers. And part of that genre is that at some point they are cancelled, or some disaster happens, or they just run out of energy (or the author runs out of drugs) and the whole thing collapses. And yeah, sometimes they either pull it off -- like The Leftovers -- or are smart enough to end it quickly before it collapses -- like Watchmen. But those are very few and far between, even if you extend it out to serialized fiction, and more a shocking delight than anything that can be expected. So for me, at least, what happens in distant sequalae where the whole thing degenerates and falls apart has no effect at all on the joys and wonders of those early seasons. I always in my heart of hearts knew the treasure box was empty, but Hitchcock is great even after you know what a MacGuffin is.
posted by chortly at 6:37 PM on February 14, 2022 [8 favorites]

I have such a fondness for Lost that rarely aligns with those who watched it as it aired. Lost was the first show I binged, like truly binged in modern-TV fashion, and I think it holds up better without the agony of watching it unspool in real time. I was in a weird liminal space of having finished my undergrad internship weeks before official college graduation, and then a summer of recovery before starting grad school, and I was bound and determined to watch all 5.5 seasons before the finale aired in late May 2010. I think I must have missed the series finale deadline by a week or two, but I remember hustling hard and doing nothing for hours every day except watch Lost while the world turned around me. In that context the series highs stand out at such a loud volume, while the clunker episodes really faded away.

In contrast, I watched Battlestar Galactica in real time and remember being similarly wrapped up in that mythology. Even as that series began to drift quite noticeably, I believed wholeheartedly that the magic of the early seasons would return because "they have a plan." I distinctly remember reading an interview with Ronald D. Moore that assured everyone the ending of BSG would definitely not be the ending that they definitely chose in the end and feeling so betrayed.

Both shows showed a peak into the modern TV era without really understanding the power they'd somehow harnessed. A few years ago I tried explaining to someone what an accomplishment it was to watch all of Lost in a month... before realizing that's just what people do now. I wish people would be kinder to this wild-ass nonsensical series because it is such a vibe, but then I also become irrationally angry every time someone even mentions Battlestar Galactica and it's been just as long since that series ended, so I suppose I understand.
posted by lilac girl at 6:57 PM on February 14, 2022 [9 favorites]

Okay, I guess I'm alone here, but: I watched it in real time and enjoyed the hell out of it (though not every single episode/plotline).

And here's the biggie: I loved the ending, found it thematically sound and massively emotional, and thought it answered all of the questions that needed answering.

10/10, would watch again (even in real time, with those horrendously long breaks between seasons).
posted by BlahLaLa at 7:04 PM on February 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

Just finished "The Leftovers" - and, while it does not explain everything (Let the Mystery Be!), the LOST experience was clearly a training ground - but, the payoff of "The Leftovers" was well worth it.

Maybe it's time that the Leftovers gets its own FPP, because it really is an excellent three seasons of television (once you've endured the dark and crushing first season, which is excellent in a dark and crushing way). As is the case with Lost, most of the mysteries are not solved, but it's a show about dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty and living with the mystery. If Lindeloff was trying to redeem himself or atone for his sins, it worked.
posted by vverse23 at 7:09 PM on February 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

Watched it every week as it aired, and recently did my first full rewatch along with Joanna Robinson and friends over at The Storm (Formerly the Game of Thrones-focused Storm of Spoilers podcast, which decided to switch gears and cover another show with a controversial final season). The rewatch reinforced my feelings when the show ended a dozen years ago, that it was a wonderfully rich and weird shaggy dog story that managed to flummox the portion of its audience that was bizarrely focused on getting hard scientific answers to every last question, instead of finding an emotional payoff for its major characters, which IMO it absolutely delivered.

I loved it then and I still love it now, even through the eyes of a more sophisticated TV watcher who is able to see every seam and retcon and obvious change of plans with brutal clarity. It makes me sad that there's still a large chunk of the viewing public that's nursing hard feelings about the show, when it did so much to blaze a trail for the unabashedly novelistic SF/fantasy genre shows we have now, like the recently wrapped Station Eleven or Westworld or Legion, or Lindelof's own The Leftovers and Watchmen. I really think some of the naysayers need to take a second look, in the context of what the showrunners and writers and actors had to navigate in terms of the realities of late '00s TV production, which I think more than adequately explains some of the rougher patches and makes it all the more incredible that they overcame them in the end.
posted by Strange Interlude at 8:36 PM on February 14, 2022 [7 favorites]

Watching all of Lost is as close as I’ll ever get to investing in a pyramid scheme.
posted by q*ben at 9:12 PM on February 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

I loved LOST, it was so fun to watch and talk about every week. After a few seasons I stopped expecting a coherent explanation for everything but just really enjoyed it as an entertaining experience. To me it was like a rollercoaster: unremarkable ending but I don’t care cause the fun is the wild twisty ride.

Thanks for these links! Nostalgia!
posted by Emily's Fist at 9:27 PM on February 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

I wanted to add that I’ve seen a lot of people say the show ends with “everyone was dead all along” but that’s not true. The characters are alive for most of the show. The last season just follows what happens after they die. I can understand the misconception as a result but I wonder if that has a lot to do with the ending’s bad reputation.
posted by Emily's Fist at 9:34 PM on February 14, 2022 [11 favorites]

LOST was a great hang with friends to watch and speculate and I will treasure that but still they endlessly heaped mystery upon mystery and made it clear that everything was going to be explained. The mediocre finish coupled with the endless stakes raising that it was going to all fall into place lead to the profound disappointing.

A digression: I never see it mentioned but I really loved all the ways the island character's lives intersected in the flashback seasons. Sometime it was textually obvious and other times there was Hurley in the background doing something unrelated to the current plot.

While X-Files also ended up disappointing, it gets more of a pass for me because they never raised the stakes as high. It too was a good friend's hang show and the over-all arc episodes only came occasionally (often with the end of the title sequence being altered slightly). That was a great hook to keep tuning in because you never knew when you were going to get more of the big plot. Sure it fell apart but you really can't keep doing 20+ episodes a season for many seasons before you loose the thread.

re: The Leftovers. I must be one of the few people who loved Season 1 the most. I loved the characters and the high concept and I loved the mechanics of people trying to deal the aftermath (like the nihilistic cult and the newly formed government bureaucracy). I was so-so on Season 2 and almost didn't watch Season 3 which I ended up enjoying more than 2 but it was more surreal than 1 and 2. But oh my, the ending is by far one of the most impactful and affecting things I've ever seen.
posted by mmascolino at 9:42 PM on February 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

I never watched it, but in a little over 8 years I will definitely check out the 20th anniversary oral history. By that time, everybody involved's careers should be set enough that (hopefully) they'll be able to be honest about wtf.
posted by rhizome at 2:12 AM on February 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

I watched it in the beginning -- the pilot was strong -- but I'd seen the second season of Twin Peaks, and I already knew too well what it looked like when creators throw a lot of shit at the wall and have no idea where they're going with any of it, lol. You can't bullshit a bullshitter. I got bored fast and was not surprised when people got irritated, and then furious with this show.

I didn't watch The Leftovers, did watch Prometheus (shit screenplay), saw "Watchmen." Similar to Lost, a stew of good ideas mixed with a general sense of purposelessness; some great scenes, but less than the sum of its parts. He reminds me a little of Ryan Murphy, who brings a similar kitchen sink approach to his projects, as well as a similar indifference to whether his stories are coherent. But I like Murphy better, probably because his interests are gooshy horror, weird sex, and cool aesthetics, and Lindelof is interested in...Jesus? I guess? I don't know. I will never really get this guy's whole deal.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 3:39 AM on February 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Speaking of The Prisoner, J. Michael Straczynski has been claiming for a few years that he figured it out, and had his solution confirmed by an unnamed cast member.
posted by WhackyparseThis at 3:54 AM on February 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

"Speaking of The Prisoner, J. Michael Straczynski has been claiming for a few years that he figured it out, and had his solution confirmed by an unnamed cast member."

Was it "I don't want to do another season of Danger Man?,I'll nuke my entire spy genre from orbit, 'Fall Out' is the only way to be sure."?
posted by ewan at 4:58 AM on February 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Lost really helped me understand the britishism of "lost the plot" because they did and I also did and it was the first time I abandoned a show I had formerly enjoyed and where felt zero compunction to try and figure it out. It was when I started formulating my theory that all shows should have to post a completion bond to ensure they have a proper ending and compensate the audience if they do not. My belief in this has only gotten stronger after HBO's GoT hurtled to its hastily done demise.
posted by srboisvert at 5:20 AM on February 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

J.J. -- Carrier of contempt for the audience
posted by filtergik at 5:24 AM on February 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

I also become irrationally angry every time someone even mentions Battlestar Galactica and it's been just as long since that series ended, so I suppose I understand.

I quit watching BSG probably halfway through the last season because of the overwhelming sense they were just throwing shit at the wall.

After the way Game of Thrones ended, I’ve become very cynical about TV shows and will bail out if I feel like they’re wasting my time. Lots of other stuff to watch.
posted by Fleebnork at 6:13 AM on February 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

I could write 10,000 words on Lost, but it boils down to one thing: they were constantly tugging at both metaphysical and scientific threads, hinting they would tie them together in an amazing way... but in the end, they tossed aside the scientific and went straight metaphysical. They treated the characters with respect in the finale, but not the mystery.

It wasn't a total shock, not after they'd used what amounted to a Thomas Kinkade painting as a set/plot point. I'd even had time to dread it happening. But it sucked.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:25 AM on February 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

I think I started watching Lost at the end of the 3rd or 4th seasons, and just did recaps online to catch up. I'm kind of glad I did. When this show was able to pull off a twist it was brilliant, but there was so much filler. The scene with the bomb and the rock was just jaw dropping though.

>I didn't watch The Leftovers
I'd say don't. But if you do, skip the first season entirely. It's rather dour, there's a bunch of nonsensical supernatural stuff that is dropped, a fantastically boring cult, downright maudlin theme song. Then the second and third season they open with an Iris Demint theme song and the entire mood of the show lightens up until it has a terrific last episode. (Though still I hope that Damon Lindelof is kept from any sci-fi adjacent projects forever.)
posted by Catblack at 6:30 AM on February 15, 2022

X-Files just got worse, and the later seasons made no sense, and the movies were dumb, but none of that changes how excellent many of the original episodes were.

If you mean the 'later seasons ' with the Terminator 2 guy then I agree, but if you mean the reboot later seasons, featuring the almost wordless episode with the date between Mulder and Scully and the blobfish and the angry technology -- that was great.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:35 AM on February 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

"Speaking of The Prisoner,

the genius of how The Prisoner wound up is that it didn't even begin to bother to try to do anything lucid. It ascended into madness and went for a walk into town. It was 1968. Reality was different then.
posted by philip-random at 7:44 AM on February 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

I know the exact day that the Lost finale aired because my wife and I postponed the first day of our honeymoon to watch the finale (while finishing off the last of the kegs left over from the wedding the day before.) We didn't hate it.
posted by schyler523 at 7:47 AM on February 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

I think Lost suffered from being on network tv. This meant two things: first, you couldn't binge it. At the time, you got 45 minutes of content a week that was filled with puzzles and confusion, and then you had to parse all of that with everything that came before, prior to getting another 45 minutes of content. People upthread have suggested that it works much better binged, and I believe that. Having to wait a week for 45 minutes was too much buildup. Which brings me to the other point:

Being on NBC it was six seasons with TWENTY-SIX EPISODES EACH SEASON. That is A. LOT. of content for the writers to have to make. I would argue that it's too much. WAAAAAY too much for a non-procedural, each-episode-is-self-contained show. And you could tell. By the end, the writers really were throwing any old shit at the wall, but I suspect it was because they had a story that was 10-12 hours of content per season, which they had to double every year.

That just doesn't happen any more. A long season of tv is 13 episodes. Most are 6-10. And it turns out that's a pretty good length for a serialized story. Honestly 26 hours per season would be like if every hollywood film was 4-5 hours long. That's nuts.

Maybe somebody should try to edit it down to half as many episodes, the way somebody edited the Star Wars prequels down to two movies, and see if it makes a better story.
posted by nushustu at 8:53 AM on February 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

One Lost writer's treatise on whether they actually knew what the hell they were doing

Along with Damon, JJ had also recruited Alias producers Jesse Alexander and Jeff Pinkner to help develop many of the elements that made it into that fateful outline. Though they were on Alias full time, Jesse and Jeff would occasionally return to Lost over the first season to consult on stories and concepts, and help with story breaks -- later on, Alias would also lend us Drew Goddard to break and write an episode.

Yeah this is a little bit too much of a look into the sausage-making process for me. Coupled with all the excessive resentment against the ending being vented in this thread, it's almost enough to ruin the illusion for me when I no doubt find myself watching the series yet again.

It is really discouraging to realize that writing in commercial breaks is such a fundamental part of the TV scriptwriting process. Of course it's obvious but it's just not the kind of thing I want to give too much thought to. Otherwise it seems that the script was largely the result of a corporate committee process. Ugh.

The casting is what made the show though.
posted by viborg at 9:05 AM on February 15, 2022

Being on NBC it was six seasons with TWENTY-SIX EPISODES EACH SEASON.

Point of pedantry: It was on ABC, and helped revive the network's fortunes in the hour-long scripted drama department in the face of the reality television boom of the mid-'00s. NBC did greenlight several LOST imitators, including Heroes, which now seems like a highly-buggy early prototype for Marvel's Disney+ shows.

The first three seasons did average about 24 episodes per season, until Lindelof/Cuse managed to get ABC to commit to a definite end date towards the end of Season 3, and also bargained them down to a lower number of eps for the last three seasons. The fact that they no longer had to write to an endless "middle" of the story, and now had the freedom to spend more time plotting each episode worked wonders for the show, and definitely brought it back from those third-season doldrums.
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:17 PM on February 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

I just remember being disappointed and a little angry at Lost.

BSG, however...don't get me started.
posted by RakDaddy at 7:56 PM on February 15, 2022

Having to wait a week for 45 minutes was too much buildup.

I'm glad to read this. I watched Breaking Bad only starting during the last season so that I'd be up to date by the last episode, and one of the biggest things that occurred to me as a viewer was that it was SO AWESOME not to have to wait a week (or months!) between episodes and seasons.
posted by rhizome at 8:02 PM on February 15, 2022

In contrast, I watched Battlestar Galactica in real time and remember being similarly wrapped up in that mythology. Even as that series began to drift quite noticeably, I believed wholeheartedly that the magic of the early seasons would return because "they have a plan." I distinctly remember reading an interview with Ronald D. Moore that assured everyone the ending of BSG would definitely not be the ending that they definitely chose in the end and feeling so betrayed.

I know what you mean lilac girl. I never really got into Lost to begin with, though I've since watched the whole series I guess 1.2 times. Battlestar captured me in a big way but near the start of the third season I realised it didn't know what it was doing, and that made me very sad.
posted by turbid dahlia at 8:44 PM on February 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Oh Lost. Definitely a heartbreaker - I fell in love, and got hurt. I recall the highs of Season 1 / 2, amazing character sketches with tantalizing, dark secrets; reading the blogs to figure out the symbolism; having to wait a week - a whole week - to find out what happened next like a real life marshmallow test. And the lows - realizing about Season 3.5 that this shit was just going to keep going, and they weren't really going to be able to explain "everything", but holding that sliver of hope that *at least* they'll give us some kind of explanation, even if the smoke monster and time travel and the Dharma collective and the thousand side characters don't get much expository... and then watching the finale, in a crowd - literally bought tickets! to a cool bar in Manhattan. I only have vague memories of getting home that night, I was so mad about the ending I drank myself into a stupor.

I realize this screed says more about me than a TV show, but yeah that show pissed me off.
posted by RajahKing at 6:23 AM on February 16, 2022

and then watching the finale, in a crowd - literally bought tickets! to a cool bar in Manhattan. I only have vague memories of getting home that night, I was so mad about the ending I drank myself into a stupor.

I did something much the same in a bar in Brooklyn. I don't think anyone in the crowd was completely satisfied with the ending, but there was one point which did go over well: when Jack makes Hurley the Guardian of the Island, there was a dude two tables over from me that completely and totally flipped his shit with joy.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:17 AM on February 16, 2022

The Bell House in Brooklyn would have amazing season finale spectaculars featuring rum, leis and performances by Previously On Lost (it sucks that their amazing song about the Oceanic Six seems lost to time, if anyone finds it please send it to me). This was when I was still fairly new to the city and partied like I was permanently on shore leave. The hangovers after these Lost parties were unreal.

The ending of Lost obviously sucked, but I have never had as much fun with a show as I did with this one. It was a really special moment in time where I felt like so many people were strongly vibing to the same thing and trying to figure it all out together. It honestly doesn't matter to be that it didn't go anywhere. It was the journey!
posted by cakelite at 9:30 AM on February 16, 2022

It honestly doesn't matter to be that it didn't go anywhere. It was the journey!

True enough, the first time around. But with seemingly every longform TV series made since following that same template, there's only so many "journeys" one can go on before one wants to get to a destination.

In fairness, comic books are much worse for this.
posted by turbid dahlia at 2:03 PM on February 17, 2022

The music does all the heavy lifting. The composer (Stephen M. Davis?)

The composer for LOST was Michael Giacchino. He won several awards!
posted by Dokterrock at 11:38 PM on February 17, 2022

Even after a week I haven’t had a chance to go through all the previouslys, but in case it isn’t already surfaced in one of those: I’m forever unable to think about Lost without remembering “You Uncurious Motherf*ckers,” John Rogers’ gently needling lampoon of the show’s early dynamics as a fan and working screenwriter. It also features Rogers’ friend Tyrone, the source of The Crazification Factor political meme (um, previously). Rogers would later briefly blog about the season 1 finale and season 2 opener from a similarly inside-baseballish POV, which in broad strokes holds up for the arc of the series and beyond:

I firmly believe the writers struggled valiantly against network-order bloat, but in the end were defeated.
This is a tricky moment for the show – genre shows create rabid audiences, but once you lose them, they don’t just go away – they frikkin’ turn.
I look forward to second season, but I hope they’re working on the bible even as we speak.

posted by structuregeek at 5:41 PM on February 20, 2022