Ya know, somebody should edit Lost and offer a version without all the pointless flashbacks. Maybe all the flashbacks. I think we could live without those.
I was griping to someone in the office. And, I said, “what about Walt?”
He goes, “are you kidding. Walt is gone from the show.”
WHA!??
You mean, the backgammon stuff, the white/black stuff, the polar bear comic, the “appearances”, the talking through the computer, etc etc etc. . .nothing?
I’m still watching but I’m like Hampshire - just watch, nothing extracirricular.
I tried to get in to the summer Web game but I found it easier just to read one of the dozens of blogs about it once a month or so, and let everyone else do the work for me. The climax of that game was a sort of “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine” moment…nothing worth all the crap people had to go through to get to the end.
I only watch because I hate myself.
Lost has taught me never to make fun of the British sitcoms that only last for 12 episodes or so. Bet they don’t suffer from loose ends.
And at least with the X-Files, they had the opportunity to step outside the overall mythology and do some interesting self-contained shows. Hell, they should do that with Lost. Have a mystery introduced, investigated and solved in an hour.
People would shit their pantaloons.
In the first episode of this season, Henry/Benjamin sends Ethan to the crash site and mentions that he can be there in an hour. So this village is only an hour from the crash site and nobody has stumbled across it at any point in the various wanderings everyone has done?
At the end of the second episode, Sayid mentions that it will take them a few days to walk back from the dock to the camp now that they’ve lost the boat (and why was Henry so shocked by the boat’s existence - didn’t anybody notice it being built for all those months?) Then in the third episode we see Hurley walked back to camp from the same dock in only a few hours.
But the thing that really has killed the show for me was something that sems trivial until you consider the implications. Back in the second season there was a flashback of Jack’s past. In one scene he was examining an x-ray and a screen capture showed a date in 2005. Viewers were very excited by this - it was the first time that a date had been explicitly mentioned on the show. And the date was a surprise - it indicated that the “flashback” was happening in the present not in the past. So presumedly the events of the crash were supposedly going to happen at some future point. This developed into a big theory that the plane crash was supposed to be set in 2009 and there was a big master plan for the show to run from 2004 to 2009 and then all of the secrets would be revealed in the climactic final season.
Then in the second season finale, we were told that the crash had happened in 2004. So the x-ray date was revealed as not being a subtle yet important clue - it was apparently just a continuity goof. So then I realized that people (including myself) had build up this big Theory of Everything based on nothing more than a minor prop screw-up. And that’s when I starting thinking that we were investing too much into this show - we’re just looking for patterns in a bunch of random noise.
I think the “homework” stuff is bogus. I haven’t heard any “revelations” from anyone regarding some important piece of info they found on a website or in a missing scene. I think it’s just extra crap they can sell to people who aren’t satisfied they saw enough in the episodes. I don’t believe there are any legitimate “clues” anywhere besides the show.
They were good and useful for a while. We got back-story, characterization, things that tied into the plot on the Island. They gave the show some depth.
But, starting at some point last year. . .it dawned on me, “that didn’t say ANYTHING we didn’t already know. It was just 20 more minutes, 2 more commercial breaks”. If you don’t want to move the plot ahead too much, give 'em another flashback.
I understand what you’re saying, but this is Hurley, after all. He’s been through the mill; that was just one more suckerpunch. There’s also the matter of Sayid mourning Shannon or not, but he’s also taken some pretty hard hits. And he did have his big scene when he called “Henry”'s bluff about burying his alleged wife.
Overall, there’s never been a real daily routine established against which we can measure a character’s state of mind. Charlie pretty much fills the brooding quota for the cast; beyond that, no one seems to be required to conform to any behavioral standard.
I didn’t make it all the way through the first season. Too baldly manipulative, and too cynical.
For myself, the flashbacks and character revealations were the original reason I watched the show.
The perfect example is “Walkabout”, an early first season episode where we explore Locke’s character, the island badass who, inexplicably, worked in a worthless cubicle job and had to pay women to talk to him on the phone. As the flashback and current times were interwoven, the contrast was more striking, and in the last few minutes where you learn that Locke had been in a wheelchair placed the entire hour in stark relief: The badass you saw on the island was the REAL Locke; life had dealt him a bad hand in a way that his true talents would never be known, and now the mysterious “Island” had given him a chance to prove he was the man he always knew he could be. The episode, IMO, was an excellent balance of character study and the “mystery” of the island.
Contrast that with last night’s episode. Sawyer’s a con man, and we’ve already seen him con or be conned in several flashbacks. This same basic exposition–con in the flashback mirrors con on the island–was seen already in “The Long Con”, where Sawyer manipulates the other Losties so he can get possession of the guns. There was no new character development; we already knew that Sawyer had a soft spot for the people around him despite his gruff exterior, and having Henry point that out to him was utterly superfluous. Even the attempted link using “Of Mice and Men” was ham-fisted.
Originally, the mystery of the island was used to leaven the character exposition. Now the mystery has taken center stage at the cost of understanding the characters. The Others, IMO, have no plausible motivations; they exist only to screw with the Losties and add another layer of mystery when the incongruities of the present layer become too unbearable.
I am giving it until the end of the current run (before its return in January), and am basing my decision to continue watching on 4 key points:
[ul]
[li]What are the Others doing? What is their goal? I don’t need every last scrap of information explained, but enough so that I can put their actions into a framework and not expect to have that framework blown apart three episodes later when the writers need some new twist.[/li][li]The Losties need a basic and agreed-upon target they are aiming for. A way to get off the island would be one idea, and if that involves confronting the Others in some way, so be it. This isn’t the only possibility, and I don’t necessarily want this to be something particular action everyone agrees on, but at the very least a general recognition on the Losties side that there is something most of them want.[/li][li]No new overarching mystery revealed or hinted at; I’m willing to bend on this if the new mystery definitively closes out some other long-standing mysteries, but reduction of unknowns is the key here.[/li][li]Presence of a potentially season-long storyline that peels a character apart; I thought the high point of season 2 was the gradual revealation that Locke was not the leader he thought he was, that it wasn’t just life’s bad breaks that prevented him from being a great man, but personal character flaws. There is some promise of this with Desmond’s newfound gift (but this could also go horribly, horribly wrong, so I’m still skeptical).[/li][/ul]
Satisfy all of these in the next two episodes and I’m happily back on board. None means it is unceremoniously deleted from my Tivo’s “To Do list”.
I am getting boared with the show. The first season I was addicted, spent time on the internet figuring out stuff. Now I’m usually ready a book durung the show.
I look forward to and enjoy every single minute still and find it just as exciting as the first episode.
I never did get into the online stuff, just an occasional peek at The Fusie board. I never registered so I don’t get spoilers. It makes it all the more special when I notice little things like last week at the very beginning when John Locke was laying on the ground it was just like Jack was laying in the very first minute of the pilot.
And the wall mural…I have it as my desktop background and last night I started looking at it again and it’s starting to make more sense now.
Or I could be crazy. 
Was anything really “figured out” on any of the internet sites? Or was it just peoples theories and speculations? I don’t think any mysteries were solved anywhere besides being revealed on the show.
Heck, they lost me in the second episode when Gilligan ate the radioactive coconut.
Well, now we have a proffessor building a lightning rod out of bamboo and a golf club!
We watch it much as Hampshire stated… DVR’d, skip the commercials, and I don’t do homework… didnt do it in school, not doing it for a tv show.
I was hoping that after the lightning struck, the camera would follow the wire and we’d see it leading into the flux capacitor.
I was never a huge fan, but they lost me with the hatch and computer that needs to be coded every 14.3 seconds or the world is torn apart by whatever. I am sorry, but you can’t get more contrived than that.
Bingo.
I said it last year: If they have an exit strategy to end this show in a set number of seasons it will be one of the greatest TV shows in the history of the medium. If they don’t have it written out, it will become like the X-Files, which for its last two or three seasons was unquestionably one of the WORST TV shows to remain on the air for longer than a season.
I never at any one time decided to stop watching Lost, but I’ve missed the last two weeks and I find I don’t care, because I simply don’t think that explanations for all the mysteries exist. We are never going to find out why the polar bear was there, or why the four-toed statue was there, or most of those things, because, regrettably, the writers don’t really know either.
I’ll keep watching. I’m easy. The mystery isn’t the attraction for me, it’s the characters and their stories.
I can understand why everyone’s upset though. Hard to see how they’ll ever tie it all together satisfactorily, without a bunch of “clues” that don’t mean anything.
I gave up last season when I realized that I hated all of the characters and had started hoping they’d die horribly. That seems like a bad way to spend an hour.
My husband is still watching, though. I sorta wish I had stuck with it, and then I watch a little bit and just want to scream.