I watched the first four episodes of LOST last night, on the Sci-Fi channedl. I think it will be the same each Monday, four episodes.
I’d never seen a single episode, all I knew was a lot of folks seemed to like it, and it has the reputation for being weird.
It wasn’t all that impressive. Mostly young people(not all). A number of convenient stereotypes, especially the pregnant girl. Obviously there’s some kind of conspiracy going on behind the scenes.
And some ridiculous errors. I’ve seen them hunting for food and collecting water, but there hasn’t been any discussion of digging toilets. Yet, anyway.
They’re on a tropical island and they waited *four days *to burn the fuselage with the dead bodies? The fuselage that is right in camp with them? Geez, after twenty-four hours in that heat the smell and the flies would have made it unbearable.
There’s been a token attempt to make some of the characters look a little scruffy, but where will they bathe? After what they’ve been through I’d have expected more BO comments.
So, will it be worth my time to invest a few more Mondays at least watching LOST?
It’s not realistic. They never dig toilets and the food gathering you’re seeing now is as complete as it gets. No one bathes and they all stay gorgeous.
In every episode there is one mystery solved and twenty more introduced, so you never have a handle on what is going on.
Ahhh. I remember when I first asked that question. I was so innocently naïve. So cute. That was September of 2004. Now look at me. LOOK AT ME!!! I’m a fuckin’ addict, with no fix in sight until February of 2009.
If you want a realistic portrayal of airline-crash survivors ekeing out an existence on a deserted tropical island, then you should give it a pass.
If you want a whacked-out portrayal of airline-crash survivors encountering all sorts of weird shit on a not-so-deserted tropical island after all, then you should stick with it.
I rented season one, and was fairly into it, but the trend described above is right: instead of resolution, all you get is more complication. By the middle of season two, I realized that the show’s creators were winging it to a large degree, and that when I “lost” interest.
It’s a character story, it isn’t a story about how to survive on a desert island. If you can’t suspend a bit of disbelief there, then you’re not going to enjoy it.
Having said that, I highly recommend seasons 1-3, with a bit of patience required in season 2 that really pays off in season 3.
IMO the series should have naturally ended at the end of season 3. Season 4 was unnecessary and disappointing.
Its annoying at first because they keep introducing new mysteries but stick it out because this last season they starting answering a lot of the mysteries. They have a definite plan to end the show after the fifth season and answer all the questions.
I didn’t think so since I gave up about the point where you are, but Baker, you’re never going to get caught up by watching on Scifi. They are forever promising to show a series, but it never lasts more than a month before they get bored and drop the show for something else. If you get into it, you might want to think about needing to rent dvds eventually.
Only about the first half of the first season is any good, though I stuck with it faithfully, like a sucker, until the mid-season break in season 3. I just couldn’t take it anymore. They fuck with you. They fuck with you and fuck with you, and then shakes their butts in your face and sing little songs about how fun it is to fuck with you. You will have questions within the first few episodes that STILL haven’t been answered. Introducing new mysteries and plotlines is much more important to them than solving old ones. I’d say it’s not worth it unless they somehow magically resolve all the plotlines at some future date and you rent the dvds after the whole thing is wrapped up.
Wow, that’s bad luck on the timing there. Totally understandable place to stop, but that’s exactly the point where they picked the quality back up; the rest of season 3 is as good as anything they’ve done.
Like a lot of TV ( all TV? ) it really does much better watched on DVDs than in real time. In real time it’s possible you’ll get frustrated and bog down as happened to Cisco and prr. It certainly happened to several other friends of mine. It’s basically a mystery series and they really drag that mystery out in the first couple of seasons , probably due to network uncertainty about how long it would go and concerns about keeping a ratings leader drawing in audiences for as long as possible. Reveals are slow coming and twice as much mystery was often piled on for every tidbit you got. However as borchevsky noted the slow accumulation of information starts to become a flood from about the middle of the third season and the story starts to really take off.
I’ll disagree with Cosmic Relief and say I thought the fourth season was pretty interesting. Now that they have a definite endpoint nailed down, I’m really hoping it can all be pulled to a satisfactory close, with a less of the “winging it” feel of the early episodes.
However as everyone says you must be willing to suspend belief on a number of fronts, like any other SF-ish show. If that sort of stuff annoys the crap out of you…well…this show may annoy the crap out of you :D.
I rented it from Netflix, and my husband and I slogged through the first season and started on the second. I took it off my queue after the first DVD or the second season, when I realized that I still hated every single character and I’d be just as happy to see them all die horribly. Just about everyone kept vitally important information from others, seemingly just for the convenience of the writers to set up situations rather than out of any understandable motivation, or perhaps for any motivation I could bother to care to understand.
Wow, that is almost exactly what happened to me, except that I was watching it over the air. Every episode of the first season got me more and more annoyed and less and less interested in ANY of the characters or what was going on. I decided to give it one last try and watched the first episode of the second season and then wrote it off. I absolutely, totally did not care the slightest about what was going on or what might or might not happen to any of those completely stupid, boring, unrealistic characters.
To the OP: Seriously, if you are having that level of difficulty suspending your disbelief over those trivialities in the first four episodes, you’ll never make it through the rest of the series. The absurdities, complete impossibilities, abject unrealisms, and characters behaving the way no real people would ever behave in a million years just get piled on by the mountain-full.
If you want a far more realistic portrayal of people forced to survive on their own on an island after a plane crash, try Flight 29 Down. It’s a show for and about teenagers, but the characters in it are far more mature and believable than anyone on Lost. And the stories are, for the most part, much more interesting, too.
Really, I like this sort of weird mystery thing normally, but realizing I had a few seasons of putting up with those yutzes if I wanted to get to the end was daunting. I figured I gave it a good chance.
Plus there was the talk about whether the writers were pulling it out of their asses and whether we’d ever see any real wrap-up to the storylines was depressing, but (last I heard) that seems less likely, though I’m sure they won’t explain everything.
Incidentally, the entire series is available on ABC.com, largely commercial free (three 30 second spots per show). So you can watch at your own pace, and, if you’re so inclined, get through things relatively quickly. With a show like this where there are often cliffhangers, this is a good thing.
Huh. Really? I found season 2 to be the worst, yeah, and the first 6 episodes of season 3 were pretty painful too, but I think the second half of season 3 and all of season 4 was some of the best of the series.
I fully recommend it, but you have to be able to turn off the nitpick side of the brain. Focus on the story and the characters and not the implausibility of what’s going on. A lot of things don’t make sense unless you can stick it through all the way. The payoffs for suffering through some episodes (the boar episode and Jack’s tattoo come to mind) are worth it, in my opinion.