36 replies to this topic

[John Paul Fitch]

2 years ago this week (give or take!) LOST ended.

What is your abiding memory of the series?

Were you a fan, or was it unbearable to you to watch a show where there were more questions than answers every week?

Personally I was an avid Lostie and couldn't get enough of it.

I know ABC blew the ending for our American cousins by showing shots of the burning wreckage over the end credits of the last episode (which totally changed the meaning of the ending for half the viewers!), but for me the ending totally worked and was a fitting send off for the characters.

How did it make you feel?

[Sanjay]

What do you mean Lost ended?

Spoilers:




Just last week we saw that the white smoke monster was actually Jack - and in the meta flash-sideways, it looks like faux-Hurley got those numbers from a screenwriter called 'Damon Lindelof', while he was writing a TV script about an airplane crash on a mysterious island.

[John Paul Fitch]

What do you mean Lost ended?

Spoilers:




Just last week we saw that the white smoke monster was actually Jack - and in the meta flash-sideways, it looks like faux-Hurley got those numbers from a screenwriter called 'Damon Lindelof', while he was writing a TV script about an airplane crash on a mysterious island.

What? I've been misled for 2 years?! It's still going?! NOOOOooooooo....

[Ogul]

I enjoyed the series as a whole, but it definitely did drag in places. My strongest memories of the series were the "dinosaurs" stomping through the forest in the first ep, the revelation that "Henry Gale" wasn't who he claimed to be, the reveal of "the bunker" and then what happens when you drop the ball, the reveal about Jacob's backstory, the "several years later" skip-forward reveal, and the final episode. I really did enjoy the big picture, but the series probably could have had about a season or tow fewer episodes in there.

[Peter Singer]

I remember having loads of discussions with people about the ending and how to interpret it.
And dang, I loved it!

[Christian U]

Just last week we saw that the white smoke monster was actually Jack - and in the meta flash-sideways, it looks like faux-Hurley got those numbers from a screenwriter called 'Damon Lindelof', while he was writing a TV script about an airplane crash on a mysterious island.

I still say faux Hurley is actually the resurrected black smoke monster in disguise. Lindelof is using it to get at Abrams and his white smoke monster - Jack always trusted Hurley, after all.





As for the first six seasons... it was always incredibly impressive TV. Sure, the overarching plot turned out to be a bit shite, but that's pretty much as expected. Doesn't change how great the individual stories and performances were.

[Martin Smith]

I watched the pilot episode, was mildly intrigued but not interested enough to watch it weekly. Thought vaguely about watching it in boxsets later on, but by that point it was clear from listening to people who were watching that the show-runners were winging it, so I didn't bother.

[John Mosby]

Biggest chain-yank in tv history.

I've come to detest shows that claim to have some great pattern and inner workings when it becomes clear that they are wholly making it up as they go along and collapse under their own mythology. There's a reasonable need to meander a bit and make tweaks to long-running shows, but the fact is LOST never had a game-plan. I heard from someone on the show way back in the second year that while there was a very vague idea about what the last episode might be, they didn't even know the significance/contents of the bunker when they penned the last S1 episode. It was just another 'add this, decide later' things.

Like a certain film Lindelof is currently involved with, it's actually quite easy to ask deep questions. It's not remotely deep to never intend to answer most of them.

[Robert B]

I really miss Lost. Not so much the show specifically, but the excitement and the discussions and all of that. And some of the characters.

I didn't mind that the destination was a slight disappointment because the journey was so fun.

While I understand why some people were disappointed, it's a shame they remember the disappointment moreso than the six years of joy they experienced prior to that. But I guess that's how life works sometimes.

Edited by Robert B, 04 June 2012 - 03:12 PM.

[Jim Ohara]

People shitting on Lost really bothers me. It reminds me of Louis CK - things are amazing and people just bitch about them. Lost was a spectacular series, with a cast of characters you got to know better than maybe any other on TV. It's easily one of the top 30 TV shows of all time, and week after week it was gripping to watch. It generated conversation and hype unlike anything before or since. And parts of it were really quite beautiful.

Sure the plot didn't link together as well as it should have towards the end, and yes they made decisions that hurt the groundwork they'd laid in place - it felt like they'd caught a tiger by the tail and towards the end the tiger got the better of them. But to me it's like bedding Kelly Brook and complaining that she had bad breath - there was so much good it made up for any minor problems.

The craft involved in putting together each episode. When you watch them back again it's incredibly well directed, and the music just excels. I think raised the bar for TV like little else, and as a result we're getting new shows that have that same level of dedication and craft.

Strangely I miss the characters. I miss Sawyer and Hurley and Jin and Sayid and John Locke. The only other TV characters I really miss (like they're people) are the Father Ted cast, the DS9 and Enterprise teams, Frasier and Niles, Josh Toby CJ and Sam, and the guys from Spartacus.

[garjones]

What Robert and Jim said.

Truth be told in the modern age whatever clever plot you come up with someone will have guessed it, the internet speculation threads are like the infinite monkeys typing the works of Shakespeare. They openly confessed to changing direction if too many people guessed, which is something Jonathan Ross confessed to with AGP the other day and will happen increasingy in the modern age.

They way they treated fan reation to Paulo and Nikki I thought was a stroke of genius that made it looked like it was planned all along.

I miss Lost, the characters were great, the plot twists amazingly daring for mainstream TV.

[Robert B]

I wonder if somebody watched it now, they would like the ending better. When we watched it as it originally aired, the ads and interviews all promised "answers," which got people expecting a finality that was never going to be delivered. It was a bad move on the part of the producers and advertisers, although the audience was shrinking and they no doubt wanted everyone to stick around to the end.

If you saw it without any of those promises, I wonder if you'd be more satisfied with how it turned out.

Frankly, I wasn't terribly impressed with many of the "answers" they did reveal, such as the whispering and Adam & Eve. The questions were just a lot more fun than the answers ever would have been.

[garjones]

I think a lot of fanboys wanted a scientific or pseudo scientific answer. It was clear to me that when Ben moved the island and Locke was reincarnated that had gone out the window but many held on to the hope.

I'm less bothered by those things. I also think Lost paced the ending a lot better than BSG that farted away a lot of the final season on side issues and then crammed everything into the last episode.

[Christian U]

I wonder if somebody watched it now, they would like the ending better. When we watched it as it originally aired, the ads and interviews all promised "answers," which got people expecting a finality that was never going to be delivered. It was a bad move on the part of the producers and advertisers, although the audience was shrinking and they no doubt wanted everyone to stick around to the end.

If you saw it without any of those promises, I wonder if you'd be more satisfied with how it turned out.

Frankly, I wasn't terribly impressed with many of the "answers" they did reveal, such as the whispering and Adam & Eve. The questions were just a lot more fun than the answers ever would have been.

That's exactly the point, though, isn't it? It wasn't just the ads at the end, the whole series was geared towards answers to mysteries. And all the answers they actually had were pretty crap. The last episode was pretty pointless, since it turned out that whatever happened in the alternate reality didn't really matter at all; that was very dissatisfying.

[Robert B]

I'm less bothered by those things. I also think Lost paced the ending a lot better than BSG that farted away a lot of the final season on side issues and then crammed everything into the last episode.

A lot of people thought the "flash-sideways" were farting away the final season, but I didn't mind. I think at the point it was clear to me the show was "about" people and relationships moreso than "what is the island?" And the flash-sideways were a nice exploration of that.

The last episode was pretty pointless, since it turned out that whatever happened in the alternate reality didn't really matter at all; that was very dissatisfying.

You posted this at the same time I did, but I wanted to respond that I thought the final episode was quite lovely and I think it's too bad that it let people down (although I understand why it did!)

[Jim Ohara]

Truth be told in the modern age whatever clever plot you come up with someone will have guessed it, the internet speculation threads are like the infinite monkeys typing the works of Shakespeare.

I don't know what the right answer to that is. If the writer uses something everyone guessed will the fans be disappointed? If they don't and have to use some trickery it seems to piss the fans off. Ultimately the writer has to be smarter than a room full of monkeys, and that's impossible (except for Stephen Moffett). Can you imagine if Lord of the Rings were to be written today? Or Star Wars?

The long term mystery TV show is a relatively new thing. I guess you shouldn't really drag the suspense out for multiple seasons - answer the questions that season and set up new ones for the next. LOST ultimately never answered the question from the first episode satisfactorily - guys, where are we? - and I think people never got over that. And it generated all these speculations.

Some of the mysteries were amazing though. The bit in the first season finale when the light on the hatch comes on? I mean, just watch this! Chills!

[Arjan Dirkse]

You know what pisses me off? People who bitch about people who bitch about Lost.

Edited by Arjan Dirkse, 04 June 2012 - 04:38 PM.

[Ogul]

People shitting on Lost really bothers me. It reminds me of Louis CK - things are amazing and people just bitch about them. Lost was a spectacular series, with a cast of characters you got to know better than maybe any other on TV. It's easily one of the top 30 TV shows of all time, and week after week it was gripping to watch. It generated conversation and hype unlike anything before or since. And parts of it were really quite beautiful.

All true, and personally I agree, although I can see the other side of it. Lost promised a lot of great stuff that it never delivered on, or did so in a haphazard and substandard way. To borrow your analogy, it was like Kelly Lebroch promising sex with you, but then instead you get her sister, who is not in the same league, but still out of yours. Might be fun in its own right, but still a disappointment due to the downgrade, and it's human nature to focus on the disappointment.

I wonder if somebody watched it now, they would like the ending better. When we watched it as it originally aired, the ads and interviews all promised "answers," which got people expecting a finality that was never going to be delivered. It was a bad move on the part of the producers and advertisers, although the audience was shrinking and they no doubt wanted everyone to stick around to the end.

If you saw it without any of those promises, I wonder if you'd be more satisfied with how it turned out.

This is also true. A promo should never promise to resolve anything that it doesn't actually resolve within that episode. It's just bad form. I hate shows that promise to resolve things that instead they only hint at, or don't even do anything with in that episode. Smash did that all last season, for no apparent reason, constantly promoing scenes for "the next episode" that didn't air for several episodes after, or in some cases were never actually part of the show.

The long term mystery TV show is a relatively new thing. I guess you shouldn't really drag the suspense out for multiple seasons - answer the questions that season and set up new ones for the next. LOST ultimately never answered the question from the first episode satisfactorily - guys, where are we? - and I think people never got over that. And it generated all these speculations.

And that's also part of the problem, the long term mystery show can't work. It just stretches the core plot too thin to hold up even in the best case. Any show that tries a plot like Lost's should aim for a finite conclusion within a few seasons, or at the very least a plan to wrap up 80-90% of the core plots from season one within seasons 1-3, but in a way that allows them to start completely fresh plotlines, rather than retaining a lot of the original mysteries well into the 5-6th seasons. That way people feel a constant sense of closure.

[Robert B]

Thinking about it, the flash-sideways really just expanded on what the show was REALLY about, which is empathy, community, forgiveness, giving people second chances, stuff like that. Right from the start, the show was about all these lost souls coming together and getting a new chance to find community, to find love, to find comfort and spriritual peace, to re-discover what is good within them. Even the title "Lost" has numerous layers to it, and implies that these are the themes (the people aren't "lost" on the island....they're "lost" in their flashbacks).

"Us vs. Them" was a major theme from the first episode to the last, but the show also slowly broke down those concepts, and basically just showed that needing other people, and being needed yourself, to share and experience love, is the most important thing.

That the fact that this theme was filtered through this crazy sci-fi lens is part of what was so brilliant and subversive about it. And if you missed out on appreciating those themes because you were hungry for "answers", then that may have been part of the point, as that's what the characters did too. If you go through life chasing for all the bullshit answers and fighting these bullshit conflicts, then you risk missing what is most important: the people that you're sharing this experience with. Rose and Bernard laid these themes out explicitly in the last season.

So, I don't know, I loved the "flash sideways" and the final episode as it really stuck the landing on all of this. It was beautifully done.

[garjones]

The long term mystery TV show is a relatively new thing. I guess you shouldn't really drag the suspense out for multiple seasons - answer the questions that season and set up new ones for the next. LOST ultimately never answered the question from the first episode satisfactorily - guys, where are we? - and I think people never got over that. And it generated all these speculations.

In essence it's a flawed creature. The pre-planned storyline is entirely impossible without knowledge of length and tenure.

I was listening to Jason Isaacs about his Awake TV show and he said in UK TV he gets the entire series scripts, in the US you get the pilot and take a jump of faith that the next one will be any good.

Lost had the benefit of the second half knowing the duration, which is extremely rare, and I think most of the interest dropped off at the end of the second season and start of the third where they were clearly treading water.

Even with Moffat and his 3 episode Sherlock I heard him interviewed on Radio 5 the other day and I think a listener worked out at least one part of how Sherlock faked his death. The answer was very convincing and had clues in the episode.