Ok–I understand that there’s a split fanbase thing going on with LOST and if you’re part of the “O, the ending was so spiritual! I loved it!” crowd, please form your own thread. I don’t denigrate your feelings–but I strongly do not share them.
This thread came about because a buddy of mine wanted to see what all the fuss had been about and asked if I’d watch some of the early episodes of LOST with him. He wanted me to pick about 5 episodes in the first season or two (or three) to give him a feel for what it was all about.
I tried to choose semi-self contained episodes and picked:
Pilot (parts 1&2)
Walkabout
Raised By Another
Numbers (my favorite episode)
The first 3 eps of Season 2 (I freakin’ LOVED the “Hatch” stuff)
And…my god, what wasted potential. All that atmosphere. All that mystery. All those “clues”…and what did they all come down to? An idiot “You’ve got to forgive yourself” message in a church with a COEXIST (where the C is a cresent moon, the O is a yin-yang symbol) stained glass window in heaven.
They didn’t answer any questions, nothing was really resolve and blech. Watching those early episodes just drove the point of how very, very bad the last few seasons were.
My buddy, after seeing those episodes said that he really enjoyed them and asked if I’d recommend him watching the whole show–I had to say “No”, especially based on the questions he was asking me [ul]
[li]“Why is the little black kid able to astrally project?” (answer: Dunno. Never explained). [/li][li]“What’s up with The Numbers?” answer: Dunno. Never explained in show but out of show, they’re variables(?) in an equation that predicts that life on earth will end…um…Real Soon Now.[/li][li]“Follow-up–so why did they make Hurley and the Aussie guy super lucky and cause bad luck around them?” Answer: Dunno. [/li][li]“What about Locke-why was he healed? HOW was he healed?” Answer? Dunno.[/li][li]“What about Claire’s baby? What was up with the creepy psychic?” Answer? Dunno.[/li][/ul]
and on and on and on.
One that I had was "If Smokey was the Man In Black all along, how’d The Others have a bat-phone that could summon him any time on demand? Smokey was clearly not a person in the first 2/3ds of the series.
It’s a shame because the first two, three seasons are just so very good.
Anyone else still bugged by how much good stuff was just ignored/forgotten?
Actually, the MiB was around the whole time. He took the shape of people like Christian (Jack’s father in the first episode).
Frankly, I expected to be so excited about how it ended that I’d wanna watch it all again to really see how the pieces fit. I haven’t and maybe in 5 years the interest might get back up again, but as for now: meh.
Yes, I share your feelings, OP. The first season of Lost was spectacular. As the show went on, the writers really painted themselves into so many corners, there was no option but to ignore half of what the audience expected to be resolved. When people who have never seen any of the show aske me, I tell them I would not recommend the series. The first season or 2 will suck you in, but after that…
It’s the sequel to “Battlestar Galactica Sucks”, but at least some thought.
I guess when I see these threads, I never understand their purpose. We’ve already discussed Lost extensively(episode by episode, in fact) and we already know everything in the OP.
Yup. Terrible ending. Hell, terrible last few seasons. My favorite part was when they would still use that ‘mysterious’ musical clip just before a commercial break in the later seasons, even though the “mystery” was either something extremely lame or extremely dumb by that point. The show became an embarrassment, and in retrospect, was a massive waste of time.
Sometimes it can be fun to bitch about something; there’s nothing forcing you to click on the thread. Or were you fed a truth serum and couldn’t help it?
This is the CS analog to all those thread in GD where some atheist thinks he’s found the ultimate contradiction in the Bible, and will suddenly make all the believers realize the error of their ways.
I was very much a LOST fan during its run, and I will admit to liking the ending. However, I watched every episode as they aired, and rarely went back to revisit them. I have convinced myself that, yes, there were unanswered questions, but ultimately the unanswered questions weren’t important.
However…this may be selective memory. My interpretation of what this thread is about (although I can’t speak for the OP) is when you go back and review some of the earlier episodes, what questions are there that seemed VERY significant at the time that were never addressed again? And are there any scenes, sequences, etc. that, given what you know now, don’t make much sense at all?
That’s an interesting question to me. As I said, I haven’t rewatched any of the episodes, but I’ll be following this thread to see what comes up.
Tragic waste, and not just of the great atmosphere and characters. But also a waste of what has to be the most invested I’ve ever seen an audience in a television show. It stands out as being the show you couldn’t wait to talk about with friends and coworkers precisely because of the great mysteries and how some clue come to light in this week’s episode might fit in to the big picture. Then it turns out there was no big picture.
I watched the entire show as it ran, and then came here to read the threads dissecting each episode. It was great fun at the time, trying to understand the mysteries. But yes, in retrospect, the show never did resolve many of the questions. (I think the biggest unanswered question was what exactly the island was.) It might be a cliché, but the experience was more about the journey than the destination.
I had a very negative view of Lost after the series ended, and time hasn’t softened that any.
Basically, it’s easier to build mystery and suspense than to resolve it. The writers were good at making you think “woah, that’s… really strange, it’s going to be really interesting when I find out how this all fits together” - that’s the central implied promise to the audience. We’re telling a cohesive story here and we know what we’re doing, sit back and enjoy. But they broke it - they had no idea what they were doing. They only knew that the mystery building was keeping people hooked, so they just kept stacking mystery upon mystery, making things weirder and more inconsistent, until no one knew wtf was going on, the writers or the audience. Making this kind of show without having an overall plan, without knowing where you’re going, is kind of fraudulent in a way - it breaks that central implied promise you have to your audience. So in a way, I feel ripped off for having wasted my time.
This is pretty much exactly my experience. Loved the show, liked the ending, thought the last season was good enough though a lot of the “solutions” were, to me, hokey and off-the-cuff. That’s all good.
But the show really REALLY does not stand up on a re-watch, IMO. There’s so much stuff they make SO significant, or that gets brought up in a really exciting way that just… poof. Never heard from again. Or heard from again, but never ever resolved. It’s just all very sloppy.
Lost was such a huge let down. It had such great potential in the first 2 seasons, and then Mrs Clue showed up (seriously, Mrs Clue???) and entire episodes would air where NOTHING interesting happened (remember that episode where Jack went to Indonesia and got caught up in a tattoo cult?). The show finally got on track again around season 5 when the scientists showed up, and we were given the brilliant The Constant, but the last season was fucking HORRIBLE, and the final episode was such an insult.
I would never recommend the show to anybody - I tell them that it starts out good, but you are going to feel like you wasted 100 hours of your life if you watch the show all the way through, so don’t.
At least they did an epilogue episode which SORT of answered some of the questions we wanted to know (Ben & Hurley travel around the world shutting down all of Dharma’s offices), but since they didn’t air it until the summer, I’m sure most Lost viewers never even saw it.
Actually, I was wrong - the shapes don’t actually form letters. There is a stained glass window with multiple religious symbols, very similar to those “Coexist” bumper stickers / t-shirts, but in the show it was just a stained glass window with the multiple symbols. Scroll down a bit here to see it
