Radiation: Geek, annoyed
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Waaay back in S1 the Lost writers claimed they could end the show in one episode if it was ever cancelled. I think the problem was that they never updated that ending as the story evolved.
So instead of bringing in all the cool Faraday science and the Desmond consciousness transferal and junk they just went with the ending the had kept for all these years.
Meanwhile the whole finale was teasing me with the fact that my theory could be correct: super-intelligent dogs! I posited that the dog was running the whole damn thing, especially because his appearance usually meant shit was about to go down.
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Lost set up a situation that invited an over-arching explanation for all the weird goings-on, but the payoff was non-existant.
Oh, to be fair, there's a difference between "non-existent" and "irritatingly unsatisfactory". I actually have a lot of sympathy with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse who, to their credit, gave everyone fair warning that closure-junkies weren't going to be happy. I think Lindelof made the fair point that they could have spent the last half dozen episodes running through a checklist of fan questions, tying up every one in a pretty bow. The only problem is that it would have bored everyone else to sobs.
I don't think so. It depends on the genre. I certainly don't mind dealing with metaphor or whathaveyou, but if I'm watching Hercule Poirot I expect to find out whodunit.
But the funny thing about that, is that we've kind of forgotten how much shit Christie got for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd -- where the narrator turns out to be the murderer, a twist that depends on way too many red herrings and a narrative fudge that (IMO) doesn't quite work.
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So instead of bringing in all the cool Faraday science and the Desmond consciousness transferal and junk they just went with the ending the had kept for all these years.
Indeed. It was like "all that stuff you thought was cool and relevant? It wasn't. We were just filling space with it."
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Does it strike you as something of a failure that even after the show has aired, it takes someone from the production co. to explain what happened?
Their relationship with the production company isn't verified. A failure would have been if no one watched it, or if we weren't talking about it. Flash Forward is headed that way. But I'm finding all this post-finale speculation a lot of fun.
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So instead of bringing in all the cool Faraday science and the Desmond consciousness transferal and junk they just went with the ending the had kept for all these years.
Indeed. It was like "all that stuff you thought was cool and relevant? It wasn't. We were just filling space with it."
That's pretty much my take on it too. No explanations, we're just going to kill off the bad guy and finish it, and do a " Six Feet Under final resolution at some point in the future so it's all done and dusted" style ending.
The disappointments for me were (1) that they had a chance to do some genuinely weird stuff a few seasons ago when they did the first jump forward (off the island), I would have liked to see that continue but with elements of the island starting to show up in the supposed normal world in a Philip K Dick broken reality style, but they wussed out and went for the whole "back to the island" plot instead and then it all went Gilligan on acid.
And (2) the turning of Ben and Juliet into goodies over the last 2 seasons (remember when they were bad asses who appeared to know shit the 815'ers didn't?) just spoke of the producers running out of ideas.
Meh.
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I would have liked to see that continue but with elements of the island starting to show up in the supposed normal world in a Philip K Dick broken reality style
I was still punting for a massive special effect in the finale, depicting the two worlds spilling into each other. Pah. Americans and their deus ex machina religion.
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Indeed. It was like "all that stuff you thought was cool and relevant? It wasn't. We were just filling space with it."
Oh come on, Daniel Faraday FTW -- dude, don't flirt with the little girl you know is going to grow up to be smoking hot. That's wrong. Your parents pushed you into being a boy genius, so Mommy Scariest can kill you thirty years in the past -- there isn't enough family group therapy in existence to work through the issues that raises. He's just a sad little hamster spinning his wheel and getting absolutely nowhere. :)
Free will is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so.
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I thought "that's about as daft as I expected" at the end of the finale, but the more I thought about it the more I like it.
A convergance of the timelines would have been way too contrived and left way more questions.
We played a game on my favourite messageboard to guess who would get off the island alive. The most anyone picked was 2 (out of 6), so at least it wasn't predictable. I only thought 3 would escape (Frank, Kate, Hurley). Should have realised there would be 6 leaving the island (again).
Juliet's "It worked" can now be seen to be her becoming aware of the afterlife as she died, but misconstruing what she was seeing.
But she actually said that in the sidetime when Sawyer unplugged the vending machine and plugged it back in again and his stuck candy bar popped out. Another sly 'Nelson Ha-ha' to the fans who have been speculating on that line since Juliet's death.
Also, Desmond & Jack 'got their snack-bar' by unplugging the island and plugging it back again. Cute.
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Indeed. It was like "all that stuff you thought was cool and relevant? It wasn't. We were just filling space with it."
Indeed. I never really watched Lost, but I kept up with what was happening online so I knew what other people were talking about. From what I can gather, Season 6 perfectly wrapped up the plots that were started in Season 6/end of Season 5. Everything else... quick, look over there! *legs it*
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Oh, and some of you might get a laugh out of this short skit by Dana Carvey (Wayne's World's Garth).
I love it.
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Or they could have had everyone walk into the light and end up greeting a somewhat bemused CGI Bruno Lawrence...
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Also, I have the DVD set of Carlton Cuse's earlier show, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. (Bruce Campbell's finest hour). There's a DVD extra where Cuse and all the writers are sitting around discussing the show, and one of the writers says "so Carlton, what was The Orb again?" referring to the mystical object introduced in the pilot that was the MacGuffin for a lot of the show. Cuse looks a bit embarrassed and says "yeah, it was a... thing, with.. ah..."
In other words, the guy threw a gratuitous mystery into his show, with the intention of making up an explanation later. Hmm...
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I only watched the first season, but I've had a pretty basic review in stereo, between my boss and my boyfriend.
"there's so much they didn't address... not small stuff either - the dharma initiative were like running the island for a whole two seasons"
" 'focusing on the characters'... proof positive the writers have run out of ideas"
"they started out as science fiction & then turned it into a fucking fantasy series in the last six episodes"
"there was a door! A door with a bright fucking light behind it!! A FUCKING DOOR WITH A BRIGHT FUCKING LIGHT!! THAT'S HOW BAD IT WAS!!!!"
"117 HOURS OF MY LIFE I CAN'T GET BACK"
I caught about 5 minutes' worth on saturday, & was quite surprised at how indiana jones it had turned since I last saw it.
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but they wussed out and went for the whole "back to the island" plot instead and then it all went Gilligan on acid.
I'll have you know that they went back to the Island on Gilligan too =)
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One of the kings of making shit up as he went along was George Lucas. (Though it kinda went Rebo shaped after ESB).
The first draft of Empire has leaked online in the last month or so, written by Leigh Bracket using George's notes.
It's an interesting read (link at bottom of the newspost.
Brackett's script would have created an entirely different series from the Star Wars saga we know today. Most notably, the draft envisions a world where Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker are two separate people: Luke meets his father's Force ghost while training as a Jedi knight, and then goes on to duel Vader in Cloud City.
Also, Luke has a twin sister who is referred to--but it's not Leia. Instead a girl named "Nellith" is said to have been separated from Luke at birth. Although spoken of, she is never actually seen in the film, setting up a plot thread for future sequels.
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I wasted six years of Wednesdays on that show. ( Lost debuted in the dark ages between owning a VHS and MySky, so keeping up meant cancelling a lot of stuff for my entire late 20s).
[WARNING: Litany of complaints follows]
1. The redemption/purgatory/flash-sideways storyline had nothing to do with the preceding five/six seasons. Sure, the choices they made, the lives they lived etc were important to their moral status in their afterlives, but the fact of the afterlife is completely extraneous to the magical island (ie the island didn't make purgatory; the castaways' souls did. They all met up there just because it was the most important time of their lives - for other souls, purgatory would presumably be full of their friends from university, or war buddies).
It would make just as much sense for the Wire's final season to wrap up with Bunk and McNulty having a beer in Cop Heaven with Stringer Bell. It's not contradictory to what's happened before - it is however completely superfluous and tacked on.2. Cuse and Lindoff have apparently (as part of the damping down strategy) been saying that Lost is story about characters and relationships, not ultimately about the mythology. I would have posited this was incorrect. The Corrections is a story about characters and relationships. Crime and Punishment is, too. Lost is a story about castaways on a magic island. If the characters were the main point, it would have been set entirely in the sideways world, and there would be no polar bears.
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While we're aggregating our nerd rage: Guillermo Del Toro departs “The Hobbit”. At least something positive has come out of MGM's fiscal meltdown...
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Glad I mostly gave up after s2. The finale explained nothing.
I think the finale explained itself, and parts of season 6. It didn't really resolve much from the earlier seasons.
Claire having a baby in two minutes annoyed me too.
Someone upthread suggested that looking for explanations misses the point. I don't think so. It depends on the genre. I certainly don't mind dealing with metaphor or whathaveyou, but if I'm watching Hercule Poirot I expect to find out whodunit. Lost set up a situation that invited an over-arching explanation for all the weird goings-on, but the payoff was non-existant.
I think it's helping me to think about it as a story about characters rather than events. Given the massive investment in backstory throughout all the seasons, and then theoretical poststory in season 6, I think that's the best way to approach it. It's not a story about an island, a plane crash, darma, time travel etc, those are just things that happen to the characters. They therefore don't necessarily need to be resolved, as the characters didn't resolve them themselves.
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"117 HOURS OF MY LIFE I CAN'T GET BACK"
Oh well... Anyone really think Lost has tragically deprived the world of cures for cancer, AIDS and the common cold? :)
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>come to realise that Jacob and SOB (Smoky Old Bastard) aren't these all-knowing God-like figures after all.
One of whom is malevolent, and so is of no help in explaining things, the other of whom has some very archaic ideas about free will (I'd say Platonic-esque), so is of no help in explaining things.>Indeed. It was like "all that stuff you thought was cool and relevant? It wasn't. We were just filling space with it."
I wouldn't quite go that far. It was, basically a Grail Quest story, where the what could be seen as random encounters on the way draw out and refine the characters of the questers until one is fit to take the Grail (or two in this case). I'm surprised more people do not seem to have made this comparison.
That said my personal peeve is that they never closed the canoe chase shooting time loop (reportedly it would have been more effort than could be justified to bring back a bunch of people just for that). I would rather they hadn't set it up for being some kind of time loop at all.>A FUCKING DOOR WITH A BRIGHT FUCKING LIGHT!! THAT'S HOW BAD IT WAS!!!!"
I reckon that was one motif that worked particularly badly in a irreligious country like New Zealand. I'd have been happier had the doorway not been lit, and it had finished with a shot of an airport departures board- Oceanic Flight 815 departed LAX with no listed destination.
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While we're aggregating our nerd rage: Guillermo Del Toro departs “The Hobbit”.
Wait: they're making The Hobbit into two films? Oh FFS!
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2. Cuse and Lindoff have apparently (as part of the damping down strategy) been saying that Lost is story about characters and relationships, not ultimately about the mythology.
Personally, I think they're right -- in a weird way, I didn't actually geek out on the "mythology" but the grace notes like Bernard and Rose deciding they were perfectly happy in their cabin in the woods, Jin and Sun's happily tragic ending, Penny and Desmond, Hurley being the only person on The Island who wasn't a wretched douchebag at any point... Even Jack's infuriating martyr complex (and the arse-suckingly boring Jack-Kate-Sawyer-Juliet love polygon of doom) was more engaging than his role in the "mythology".
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Wait: they're making The Hobbit into two films? Oh FFS!
There, and Back Again
(I can't remember where I saw that to credit it sadly). -
Wait: they're making The Hobbit into two films? Oh FFS!
Count your blessings -- they could have done that to The Lovely Bones.
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For fans who stuck with he whole run and didn't like the ending, surely they only wasted 15 minutes of their lives and were entertained by the rest?
'It's the journey, not the destination' & all those cliches?
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