I watched half an episode somewhere around S3 and knew it had nothing to offer me except Dominic Monaghan’s pretty face and that wouldn’t be enough.
Youre really funny on the internet
From my perspective the time wasn’t wasted, because the show entertained me while I was watching. That the ending sucked ass and ultimately makes the story as a whole virtually pointless is annoying and probably ( I haven’t tried ) makes the show unwatchable a second time through.
But, it still mostly entertained at the time. For me the infuriating ending didn’t cancel that out, it just left a bad taste in my mouth when I was done.
I didn’t watch more than 10 or 15 episodes of Lost, so I can’t comment on it specifically, but this is a perspective I think more people should adopt. If the final chapter of a thing can make the entire work useless, I would question how good the rest of it really was, and if you’re hanging onto a mediocre work in hopes of a great payoff at the end, well, you oughtn’t be surprised if it doesn’t materialize.
If you look very carefully in the beginning you can see two pairs of legs sticking out from under that jet engine. One pair of a very short man in white pants and one of a very tall thin man in white pants.
Thats what cause the magic to go all apeshit.
That’s what Alan Sepinwall says, based on interviews with the writers. He goes into detail about the show in his new book, The Revolution Was Televised. But I gotta admit, even after reading his explanation of the ending – the flash forwards/backwards and sideways – I still don’t get it. 
I felt cheated at the end, sure.
I bought the DVDs after each season and rewatched each season prior to the start of the next season.
I spent too much time on just one of many LOST-centric message boards, along with thousands of other folks.
I Googled Fibonacci and Ancient Egyptian deities and countless other inanities.
But I was gripped, as many of us were, and though I felt cheated by the way everything ended (I will NEVER watch those DVDs again :mad:), the journey truly made the shitty destination worth it.
Anything that introduces the world to Evangeline Lilly can’t be* all* bad, can it? 
+1 
[QUOTE=Hampshire]
Before the final season started I remember thinking I couldn’t wait till the whole think wrapped up so I could happily go back and watch the entire series again to see how all the pieces and parts as well as character motivations that seemed so meticulously and crytically presented would all fall neatly in place.
Ha! ROFLCopter!
[/QUOTE]
That is exactly how I felt. I started the final season looking forward to buying and watching the previous seasons over the coming summer. Curious to see what tells there were, and how well crafted or not the early episodes were with regard to the overall story arc.
HA!
After the letdown of the finale I had zero interest in ever watching an episode again.
“You broke my donkey wheel!”
I’m with the minority decision on this. I was okay with the ending. Sure lots of stuff was left unanswered, so what? It’s a story made up for TV that entertained me. I knew it wasn’t real, and I didn’t invest myself emotionally in it
I also like The Walking Dead, but I really using expect them to come back before the end and wrap up all the tangents and story lines. Realistic expectations go a long way.
that showed jumped the shark with the polar bear.
I may be one of the few people in the developed world who has never seen a single episode of Lost. Am I to take it that I shouldn’t bother?
Oh you should definitely watch it. It’s the best show there ever was. If your definition of best is several seasons of, “Pay attention to this! This is very very important! Pay attention to this!” and then later, “Hey what was so important about that thing?” “What? What thing? Forget about that. Now pay attention to this thing! This thing is very important!” Rinse. Repeat.
The show was fun to watch at the time even when it had its stupid moments but the way they would just abandon a thing that they spent the entire last season hyping and taking the new season in a different direction was maddening.
I agree. But the show jumped the shark with the time-traveling.
It depends on the nature of the work. Look at The Sopranos for example. A lot of people thought the ending of the series was bad. But that doesn’t take away from the quality of earlier episodes because those earlier episodes weren’t dependent on the ending.
But compare that to a murder mystery. The whole story is tied to the ending and finding out “who done it”. If the ending is bad (it was the butler) it retroactively ruins the whole story that led up to it.
So you can’t judge a work like this until you see the ending. A great ending would have made Lost a great series.
I only hung on about a season and a half. Then read about it here and there and read about the ending.
If you like some good acting, interesting personal back stories, and plenty of WTF? is going on moments its a fun watch as far as I could tell. If you want anything actually answered then don’t watch. Imagine a good Sherlock Holmes mystery cranked up to 11. But the crime is never solved and Sherlock retires to Belize or decides to start a Deli or something at the end.
**Can we all PLEASE agree that LOST (TV Show) in the end, WAS A LOAD OF TRIPE?
**
In the end? I thought that after about the 4th or 5th episode.
I remember the threads we had on the show here, when the show was first run. By the time an episode finished on the East Coast, some of those threads were well over 100 replies, and a bunch more followed as the show aired in the Western time zones. And there were whole websites devoted to obsessively noting every reference on the show to the Dharma Initiative, to the numbers, and so forth. So it was fun while it lasted even if the ending was less than satisfying.
There were a lot of things that LOST did really well.
There were good characters, very well constructed episodes, and they wrote some amazing cliffhangers. They did some interesting things with narrative formats. The dialog and acting were consistently above average.
Where they totally failed were the story arcs. While the writers knew exactly how to plot a 42 minute story, they didn’t have the foggiest clue how to plot out a 20-something episode season, much less a 121 episode series. So there were episodes that were good in a vacuum, but in the context of the series didn’t forward the plot at the right pace for that point of the story.
At first, they blamed it on not knowing how much time they would ultimately need to fill - but even after that problem was solved, they still couldn’t figure out the long view and never really understood why the audience cared about it. It wasn’t their focus, they couldn’t figure out why it was anyone else’s or how they were (according to them, inadvertently) feeding it.
Still, the show was very good to great in many ways, it just handled one aspect badly.
For those of us who became involved in the Experience, the ending was just an embarrassment. It was truly awful. But my niece just watched the entire series not long ago and had no problem with the ending. I wonder if we weren’t so disappointed because the writers claimed early on that our ideas were all wrong, and this had nothing to do with the afterlife or purgatory. The show made no sense because we kept saying, “Yes but the writers said it wasn’t purgatory…!” and there at the end, that’s what it really was. I mean, they tried to say it wasn’t, but clearly that’s what it was.