Lost wasn’t like that - they had like 3 seasons notice that they were definitely going to end it on the season that they ended it, specifically to avoid the “keep churning until people stop watching problem”.
I agree with most of the other posters, although I didn’t think the final episode itself was all that bad - the problem was the whole last season they screwed around with their worthless “purgatory” world instead of doing any resolution of earlier season mysteries at all.
And flashforward doesn’t belong on the list of shows like this, IMO - they were doing a decent job resolving things week by week but the “finale” clearly was meant to be a season not a series finale and wasn’t and shouldn’t have been written to wrap up everything given what the writers knew at the time. IE flashforwards problem was being canned early rather than not having any idea how anything fit together.
I really wanted to like the show but they continually broke the unwritten rules of TV suspense shows and that is to resolve stuff on a regular basis. Every time I watched they added more things I didn’t understand without explaining earlier stuff.
I don’t watch TV with 100% of my attention and I’m not taking notes.
Much of the show was really like that. The ridiculous dialogue – and the constant narrative buildup/letdown structure observed by SenorBeef – made it difficult for me to enjoy most of the series, and I’m always a little baffled by the love heaped upon it over its run.
Lost is the reason a lot of new arc-heavy shows get cancelled due to low ratings. After that betrayal nobody is willing to take a chance on getting burned again. The writers and producers should be flogged for what they did to the viewers.
In my case, it’s because I was suckered in. The first two seasons didn’t follow that patter SenorBeef observed. For instance–we found out about what the black rock was. We saw what was inside the hatch. Granted those led to new stories/questions (Why was a pirate/slave ship in a tree in the middle of the Island? What was with the numbers/countdown? How long had Desmond been there? What was he injecting himself with) but stuff was moving forward. Even if the answer to question 1 opened up the door for 2 or 3 more questions, they at least answered the original question. After season two, nothing really got answered adn they just started piling mystery upon mystery, but the first few seasons were so very good at moving things forward that you kept expecting things to get better in seasons 3-6.
You missed one but yeah, after the first two seasons especially.
The one you missed is
Character A: My GOD–I’m glad to see you! You have all the answers to the mystery I’ve been trying to unravel. Let me ask you…what the hell is up with such-and-such?
Character B: You must come with me now.
Character A: Ok. I’ll never ask again.
Just once (and it never happened in all six seasons) I wanted to see a character say “Fuck that. I’m not budging until you answer these three (four, five, whatever) questions with meaningful answers. Once you do, we’ll talk on the way and you can explain more.”
I watched and read and complained here during the show’s run. One of my favorite beefs was the way one character would ask another character, who presumably could shed some light on something, a question and was frequently told, “There’s no time for that now” or “It’s complicated”. This usually happened when they were hiking for many miles, with plenty of time for the “complicated” explanation to be given. We could justify this as the writers’ sloppy way of keeping us hooked. But it implied that the answer was forthcoming, eventually. But no.
Edited to add: I see Fenris and I were typing the same thought at the same time. How could this be? A mystery that will never be explained.
I remember Jacob’s “mother” smirking in response to some question, “If I answer your question it will only lead to more questions.” At that point I’m pretty sure the writers were pretty much thumbing their noses at us.
I came in here to post my opinion but SeniorBeef and MsWhatsit both beat me to it, and said it better than I could myself.
The only thing I can add is that when I was younger I loved horror, and read a lot of Stephen King as a result.
I so got burned on his very similar “I’ll just let my imagination take me wherever, and then cram an ending onto it in the last 75 pages” approach to novel writing that my BS detector was starting to sound around halfway through Season 1 of Lost.
I’m very glad I bailed out when I did.
LOST was lost when the polar bear showed up.
I watched Twin Peaks. That show was no Twin Peaks.
I agree. I know a lot of people want to compare the two shows, but, other than having some element of mystery and a serious fanbase, I don’t see it. Whatever questions TP left unanswered (which I can’t think of many) was probably because it was cancelled after 2 seasons.
I can explain that.
So how is it that Fenris and rand had the same thought at the same time?
Look, a polar bear!
You must hike with me on a 4 hour trek across the island. And while we’ll have nothing but time to talk while on this trek, we must remain completely silent, lest plot progress happen.
And even though it’s in your best interest to tell me the freakin truth in detail (because you need me for…um…some reason) you don’t tell me, guaranteeing that I’ll puncture your kidney (bladder? liver?) when I’m operating on you rather than trying to save you.
How much easier would it have been for everyone if someone had just said
“Jack, we kidnapped you so A) you could save Benjamin B) because Jacob has you listed as a candidate for taking over for him and C) because Whitmore is going to send a crapload of goons up against us to take us out within a season and…even you have to admit that something is unique about this island–and whatever you think of us, you know Whitmore is worse. So…work with us, and we’ll fill you in on everthing, ok?”
The thing that they never, ever established is why no-one in the Lostverse asks questions or demands answers.
In the early days, I thought that their lack of normal curiosity, as well as their rash choices and inability to think through the consequences of their actions, was due to the Island having some sort of strange effect on them. But then the flashbacks established that, no, they were pretty much like that before.
I don’t even know I required it to be all that logical. The most disappointing aspect of Lost is they that copped out in the end. They went with the theory that if you couldn’t find a completely satisfying way of resolving everything, it wasn’t worth trying.
One of the major focal points of early Lost was that the Island was a character. For that character, the most interesting one of all, they gave no satisfactory back story and resolution to.
Because otherwise they’d run out of plot really quick, of course. I mean, several people here have complained that they kept piling mystery on top of mystery, but imagine how bad it would have to be if the characters ever really talked to each other about important things. Either they’d have to drastically accelerate the introduction of fresh mysteries (to compensate for the characters’ new “talking about things and solving problems” power), or, more probably, they’d have to make it into a different kind of show, one in which there’s more “action” (for want of a better word). But *Lost *isn’t a “doin’ stuff” show, it’s a mystery show.
All that said, yes, it’s pretty annoying that no one on the show ever talks to each other.
Anyway, I was perfectly satisfied with the level of explanation we got in the last season. Part of it may be the expectations game: I didn’t start watching *Lost *until after the end of the series, and had already heard everyone kvetching about how you don’t get any answers. I was therefore pleasantly surprised when they (to my mind) gave a mostly full and satisfactory explanation of the island’s central mystery. Yes, there were roughly a million loose threads from six seasons that they left dangling, but:
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retroactively tying all of that together in a neat, airtight bow was never a realistic hope, and
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it would have been awful if they had tried. Sometimes a cool mystery makes for a pretty boring fact. For instance, can anyone think of an explanation for the mystical significance of the number sequence which would be more interesting or dramatically satisfying than just having it be mysterious? Maybe you can, but I suspect that any firm answer the writers could have come up would have been thought of by most people as kinda dumb (in part because, like so many of the unanswered mysteries, it would probably have to boil down to either “a wizard did it,” or some new-agey “harmonic convergence” pap).
Hopefully I’m not thread-shitting here. God knows there were things I didn’t like about the show: the aforementioned lack of meaningful discussion, the dialogue is frequently clunky, they were in some areas far too reliant upon cliché (everything having to do with Charlie’s band, for example, was just terrible), the lead was dull as dishwater with exactly one character trait (yes, Jack has an over-developed sense of responsibility, we get it), the practice of ending every single commercial break on a cliff-hanger could get really annoying if you didn’t turn that part of your brain off, etc.
I still really enjoyed the show, however.
I’d also add that they way I watched the show might be coloring my opinion. I blew through the whole series in about a month, and so was moved from one thing to the next pretty seamlessly and wasn’t bothered when they dropped a thread (if I even noticed). If you watched the first run episodes, OTOH, you lived with all the little mysteries for 6 years, and probably spent that time discussing them with other people and spinning theories. I’d probably be more invested in getting answers if I was watching from the start.