LOST: What a freakin' waste....

[Fenris]

@VarlosZ

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.

I disagree here VarlosZ–for me, shows like Babylon 5 and even Fringe do it in the form of overlapping story-arcs. You do story arc A, and as it’s reaching it’s peak, introduce story arc B, so that when A ends, B is in full swing, when B is starting to peak, introduce C and so on.

They did that a little in Lost with the first season or so. The mystery with The Hatch resolved nicely with a few chats with Desmond. Those opened up new mysteries with the Doomsday Computer, the Swan video etc.

The mystery of the “Numbers Broadcast” resolved with the Crazy French Chick and the Aussie Guy and the Crazy Guy who Hurley got The Numbers from. Those mysteries were never resolved.

They could have kept doing that and frankly the show would have (to me) seemed less padded–they could have spent a half an ep. resolving stuff instead of just piling on more stuff.

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

1. retroactively tying all of that together in a neat, airtight bow was never a realistic hope, and

Part of the problem is that the writers promised from day one that everything WOULD be resolved --they swore that they knew the explanation for every! Single! Mystery! and everything would all be explained if we were only patient.

If you didn’t go in with that expectation, that might have made a huge difference.

2. 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).

They gave an outside of the show explaination for part of the The Numbers thing. It was touched on early in the show. Remember the guy who got sucked into the engine in the pilot episode? He was some guy named Gary Troupe who’d written a book about something called The Valenzeti(sp) Equation. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, a scientist/mathmatician from some Ivy League school named Enzo Valenzeti came up with an equation that proved that the world would end in the near future (say, 2015 or so). The Numbers are variables(?) in the Valenzeti Equation. Troupe published the book about Valenzeti which explained all that, but all copies and reprint rights were purchased by Alvar Hanso who founded the Dharma Initiative. The purpose of Dharma was to try to change those variables.

To me, knowing even that much made things much better. But I’d really have liked that discussed in-show and some of the Dharma-Whitmore rivalry dealt with. Why did Whitmore want to stop Dharma from saving the world? Why did the Numbers interfere with probability (how about “The Numbers were just numbers until they started messing with them on The Island which warped probability when they were invoked”?) etc.

There were dozens of subplots left hanging, some major (everything about Whitmore for one. Why can’t women have babies?), some minor (why did Smokey obey The Others when they were working for Jacob?) and they had two and a half seasons to resolve some of them.

(PS–I don’t think it’s threadshitting at all to discuss stuff like this that was a great post!–I just didn’t want an ‘Anyone who didn’t like the ending is only concerned with minutiae and doesn’t GET it’ vs 'Anyone who liked the ending is overemotional and doesn’t think." debate. )

[digs]

@Red_Barchetta

I’m taking it you’re a Lost fan?

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?

+1

Just thought I’d add another vote for “Started out GREAT!” I loved the first season(s).

And I foolishly assumed J.J.Abrams could resolve a few plot points. But after you paint yourself into your fifth corner, you’d have to realize you’re not even in a room anymore.

[Drunky_Smurf]

@VarlosZ

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.

This is my biggest annoyance with Lost. I started watching from episode one of season one and watched it one episode a week until the end of the season and then had to wait months before it came back and then there was the writer’s strike which we went almost a year? before Lost came back and then when they did they started doing half seasons.

I think I got the above paragraph close to how the episodes aired.

My main point though is my friends and I spent all that time talking and speculating about Lost. We took turns going over to each other houses each week and before the episode came on we talked about last weeks episode and we would play theorycraft about what the hell was going on. Then we would watch the episode and afterwards we would spend an hour or so talking and theorycrafting about what we just saw. Then during the week following the episode we would email each other with theories and stuff we found online. Rinse and repeat through the entire series.

So we invested a lot of time and energy into trying to solve the mysteries and then when the series ended we were all like, “But wait, what about this and that and this thing over here.”

I am fine with the ending and their explanation of purgatory and that the island is a cork holding in the evil but there are a lot of things that got dropped along the way that the show made seem important at the time and then they completely failed to explain later.

Also wasn’t the man in black destroyed at the end of the show? I’m fuzzy on that point but if he was then the island should no longer be necessary.

[Duke_of_Rat]

@Miss_Mapp

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 never understood why nobody except the main characters were much interested in The Hatch, for instance.

You found a place with AC, a shower, tunes, food? Cool, I’ll hang out here on the beach with the sand fleas and BO.

I also recently blasted through the whole series on streaming Netflix since I had no network TV during the original run. At least my misery was limited to about a month instead of several years.

[Aeris]

I watched the whole series in the span of about 6 months so everything was pretty fresh in my mind when we watched the much anticipated finale.

I WAS PISSED!!

What?! You mean everything was meaningless and I just wasted the last six months of my life? What a rip off! I guess they weren’t talented enough or smart enough to wrap it all up.

I guess time does not heal all wounds. Not ones made my J. J. Abrams.

When I hear someone say, “I never watched LOST, maybe I should do that.” I scream “NOOOOOOO! Don’t do it! Don’t make the same mistake I did!”

[silenus]

Between Lost and Star Trek, Abrams has guaranteed that I will never watch anything he is associated with ever again.

I stopped watching Lost after season 3, but returned for the final season. Big mistake.

[VarlosZ]

@Fenris

I disagree here VarlosZ–for me, shows like Babylon 5 and even Fringe do it in the form of overlapping story-arcs. You do story arc A, and as it’s reaching it’s peak, introduce story arc B, so that when A ends, B is in full swing, when B is starting to peak, introduce C and so on.

That’s what mean about becoming a different sort of show. Do it like that, and all of a sudden *Lost *is a show in which the characters correctly identify a problem and then we spend most of our time watching them work towards a solution. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, except *Lost *isn’t that: it’s a show where the characters (and therefore the audience) spend most of their time trying to figure out what the hell is going on and how some new fact fits together with all these other facts that they still don’t really understand.

The comparison has been made to Twin Peaks. It probably is the closest analog to the show, except imagine if Twin Peaks ran for six seasons and they weren’t allowed to solve Laura Palmer’s murder until the end (or maybe they could solve it after three seasons, but then they’d figure out that they’d made a mistake and had to go back and … kill her again … or something). They would pretty much have three options: make the show more episodic (introduce a problem or part of the mystery, solve it, introduce a new one), become sort of a long-form police procedural or detective show, or stay more or less the same while piling up the puzzles and mythology in a way that can’t be totally unpacked at the end. Obviously *Lost *went with the last option.

They did that a little in Lost with the first season or so. The mystery with The Hatch resolved nicely with a few chats with Desmond. Those opened up new mysteries with the Doomsday Computer, the Swan video etc.

The mystery of the “Numbers Broadcast” resolved with the Crazy French Chick and the Aussie Guy and the Crazy Guy who Hurley got The Numbers from. Those mysteries were never resolved.

They could have kept doing that and frankly the show would have (to me) seemed less padded–they could have spent a half an ep. resolving stuff instead of just piling on more stuff.

Possibly, but I’m not convinced that would work too well. As you sort of explain, each resolution led to new mysteries that accumulated in a logarithmic way … or would have, if the show didn’t drop some of them out of necessity.

They gave an outside of the show explaination for part of the The Numbers thing. It was touched on early in the show. Remember the guy who got sucked into the engine in the pilot episode? He was some guy named Gary Troupe who’d written a book about something called The Valenzeti(sp) Equation. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, a scientist/mathmatician from some Ivy League school named Enzo Valenzeti came up with an equation that proved that the world would end in the near future (say, 2015 or so). The Numbers are variables(?) in the Valenzeti Equation. Troupe published the book about Valenzeti which explained all that, but all copies and reprint rights were purchased by Alvar Hanso who founded the Dharma Initiative. The purpose of Dharma was to try to change those variables.

That does actually sound pretty neat, and I imagine they could have done something with it on the show, but if they went around illuminating every single part of the mythology, a lot of the answers would fall flat for a lot of people, and once you got to the end everything was spelled out, you wouldn’t have a big cool mystery anymore; you’d just have some weird story about demigods or space aliens or whatever.

[Clothahump]

**LOST: What a freakin’ waste…
**

Agreed. The trailers had me hooked and the first episode seemed to indicate that it was going to be a worthwhile show. I quit watching after about the 4th or 5th episode.

The Event is the same thing. I have made no attempt whatsoever to follow it; it’s nothing more than LOST: The Clone.

[SenorBeef]

@silenus

I stopped watching Lost after season 3, but returned for the final season. Big mistake.

Well that explains it! If you had watched all of the seasons like the rest of us, the story would’ve made sense and… yeah, nevermind, it didn’t make sense to us either.

@VarlosZ

That’s what mean about becoming a different sort of show. Do it like that, and all of a sudden *Lost *is a show in which the characters correctly identify a problem and then we spend most of our time watching them work towards a solution. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, except *Lost *isn’t that: it’s a show where the characters (and therefore the audience) spend most of their time trying to figure out what the hell is going on and how some new fact fits together with all these other facts that they still don’t really understand.

That’s part of the problem, though - the characters did almost nothing to try to figure out what the hell is on and how some new facts fit together with all of the other things they don’t understand. They never discussed the weirdness logically and tried to put it together. They never demanded answers from anyone who knew them. They accepted 6 years of “it’s complicated, look, something shiny”

The characters were just randomly strewn about the island constantly doing random mystery mongering busywork, completely serving the mystery plots, never actually doing anything a reasonable person would do to try to figure things out. Which is why it amuses me when people get all smug and say “oh it’s not about the mysteries, it’s about the characters” - the characters changed their personalities and motivations on a whim when it served to aid the mystery-making or mystery-dodging in the plot. None of them acted rationally or consistently, the entire show was about the characters serving the mystery plots, and then the mystery plots adding up to nothing. In the end nothing was worthwhile and it ended up being a 100+ hour meaningless piece of shit, almost a shaggy dog story.

[Red_Barchetta]

@SenorBeef

Which is why it amuses me when people get all smug and say “oh it’s not about the mysteries, it’s about the characters” - the characters changed their personalities and motivations on a whim when it served to aid the mystery-making or mystery-dodging in the plot. None of them acted rationally or consistently, the entire show was about the characters serving the mystery plots, and then the mystery plots adding up to nothing. In the end nothing was worthwhile and it ended up being a 100+ hour meaningless piece of shit, almost a shaggy dog story.

Nailed it. The characters were little more than slaves to the plot, changing to the writer’s whims for when a particular outcome is desired, whether it makes any damn sense or not.

Dammit, I’m getting angry just thinking about that show again.

[VarlosZ]

@SenorBeef

None of them acted rationally or consistently, the entire show was about the characters serving the mystery plots, and then the mystery plots adding up to nothing. In the end nothing was worthwhile and it ended up being a 100+ hour meaningless piece of shit, almost a shaggy dog story.

I do get why a lot of people were unsatisfied (or even angered) by the way the show ended, but even if one feels that way I hardly think that means nothing was worthwhile. Most of the folks in this thread are people who watched the whole series from beginning to end, which implies that they enjoyed it at the time (if they were just hooked in by the desire to find out the answers, reading episode synopses would have been a lot easier). There were 121 episodes of Lost; even if the last, say, half dozen or so didn’t provide the kind of closure you hoped for, and even if that fact legitimately pisses you off, how much damage can that do to the worth of the 115 episodes that came before it? Just because the *Matrix *sequels sucked doesn’t make the first movie retroactively worthless (I actually liked the second one as well, but whatever).

I do think it’s *possible *for an ending to ruin everything that came before, but I think that’s a lot easier to do in a book, or especially in a movie – it’s supposed to be a cohesive whole, and it’s just 2 hours long. *Lost *provided about 89 hours of air time; something like that is much more about the journey than the destination, and it was *fun *to watch the show explore, expand, and reveal its mythology … even if it never quite finished.

[Red_Barchetta]

@VarlosZ

Just because the *Matrix *sequels sucked doesn’t make the first movie retroactively worthless (I actually liked the second one as well, but whatever).

Here’s the difference: the first Matrix was not contingent on having sequels. Every episode of Lost but the finale was. Huge difference.

[SenorBeef]

@VarlosZ

I do get why a lot of people were unsatisfied (or even angered) by the way the show ended, but even if one feels that way I hardly think that means nothing was worthwhile. Most of the folks in this thread are people who watched the whole series from beginning to end, which implies that they enjoyed it at the time (if they were just hooked in by the desire to find out the answers, reading episode synopses would have been a lot easier). There were 121 episodes of Lost; even if the last, say, half dozen or so didn’t provide the kind of closure you hoped for, and even if that fact legitimately pisses you off, how much damage can that do to the worth of the 115 episodes that came before it? Just because the *Matrix *sequels sucked doesn’t make the first movie retroactively worthless (I actually liked the second one as well, but whatever).

I think this is where you have a fundemental misunderstanding of my dissatisfaction. It’s not that the last few episodes were bad - it’s that in order for the setup of most of the show to work, you needed a payoff. A lot of why the show was interesting during those first seasons was because it created an interesting world that you wanted to learn about - you were anxious to figure out how it all fit together. If you knew from the start that it would never fit together, that they’d never bother to try, that they were just trying to string you along the whole time and had no more idea what was going to happen with that world than you did, you wouldn’t have enjoyed the previous episodes as much. So much of the value of the story at every stage comes from the implicit (and actually explicit, as pointed out upthread that the producers said they had a plan) promise that there would be a payoff to all this setup.

If a new viewer came into the series and you warned them ahead of time: you think this will all make sense at some point, but it won’t - shit will just get weirder and weirder until they can’t sustain it and make a meaningless copout ending - do you think that person would enjoy the early seasons as much as you did when you were under the impression that there would be a payoff? Would they enjoy the ride as much if they knew it was just going to go off the tracks and never reach anything?

[Red_Barchetta]

@SenorBeef

If a new viewer came into the series and you warned them ahead of time: you think this will all make sense at some point, but it won’t - shit will just get weirder and weirder until they can’t sustain it and make a meaningless copout ending - do you think that person would enjoy the early seasons as much as you did when you were under the impression that there would be a payoff? Would they enjoy the ride as much if they knew it was just going to go off the tracks and never reach anything?

Indeed. Lost is like religion: enjoyable as long as you have faith. And like with religion, I lost faith pretty damn fast.

[VarlosZ]

@SenorBeef

A lot of why the show was interesting during those first seasons was because it created an interesting world that you wanted to learn about - you were anxious to figure out how it all fit together. If you knew from the start that it would never fit together, that they’d never bother to try, that they were just trying to string you along the whole time and had no more idea what was going to happen with that world than you did, you wouldn’t have enjoyed the previous episodes as much.

Maybe, but presumably you *didn’t *know that, and so were still able to fully enjoy 85 hours of television (or whatever).

If a new viewer came into the series and you warned them ahead of time: you think this will all make sense at some point, but it won’t - shit will just get weirder and weirder until they can’t sustain it and make a meaningless copout ending - do you think that person would enjoy the early seasons as much as you did when you were under the impression that there would be a payoff? Would they enjoy the ride as much if they knew it was just going to go off the tracks and never reach anything?

I don’t know. As I mentioned previously, I started watching the series after hearing that the ending was a big cop-out and expecting only the vaguest of resolutions, and managed to enjoy it quite a bit.

And there *was *a resolution, an explanation – it was just (a lot) less detail-oriented than most people expected. Obviously that approach runs the risk of alienating a lot of fans – “I thought we were getting all these questions answered, but they didn’t even try!” – but we should weigh that against the risks of the opposite approach. Explain every little detail, tie every mystery together, and what you’ll inevitably have at the end is a huge chunk of the fan base which thinks the resolution you came up with is pretty lame and makes everything that came before seem less cool; if you don’t come up with something really good, it could easily be a majority of the fan base.

I also wonder if there aren’t meta-concerns with writing everything with an eye towards perfect revelation at the end. Remember FlashForward? I read one review which theorized that one of the reasons the show sputtered and failed to work was that it famously had a fully fleshed-out plot bible which tied every arc together over the course of (I think) 5 seasons in a cohesive way. Obviously that’s a good way to address the kinds of concerns that we see in this thread, but it’s artistically problematic. When you’re married to a plan like that, you don’t have the freedom to abandon characters and sub-plots that have run out of steam, or just never worked to begin with. You can’t change the plot in a way that *allows *you to move on without unraveling the whole tapestry. The same kind of concern applies to *Lost *-- it may be that we’re not better served by having them stick to a mystery that has worn out its welcome, or to revisit it at the end in a clumsy attempt to retcon it into a fit with where the plot wound up.

Or perhaps not – I’m just speculating, of course.

[MsWhatsit]

For me, Lost was like reading a mystery novel, full of twists and turns and suspense about whodunit, and getting to the final chapter only to read:

“Half of what happened was a dream and the other half was never meant to make sense anyway! The end.”

I doubt very many people would feel satisfied with that, even if the characterization was brilliant throughout.

[BlackKnight]

@VarlosZ

Maybe, but presumably you *didn’t *know that, and so were still able to fully enjoy 85 hours of television (or whatever).

Imagine you go into a restaurant. The chef comes out and says, “I’m going to cook you a fabulous meal. You’ll love it.” He returns a few minutes later with salad, which is indeed rather good. You eat it. You like it. He opens the door to the kitchen just an inch, and you smell delicious odors emanating from it. He grins and say, “You’ll LOVE what’s coming next.” Minutes go by. He opens the door slightly and once again you smell something wonderful. He tells you it’ll be ready any minute now. This goes on for about an hour. Your stomach is growling. You are salivating. But every ten minutes or so, the chef will let you smell something wonderful, or will describe in detail the wonderful creations that will, any minute now, be coming from his kitchen. But eventually, you begin to wonder if he really has any food back there at all. Just when you can’t take it any longer, he comes out and slaps a bologna-on-WonderBread sandwich on your plate and kicks you out.

But hey - it was a pretty good salad. Sure, you could have gone to another restaurant. If you’d have known the outcome, you would have. But you didn’t, so you didn’t. Surely that means that you got enough enjoyment out of the smells and descriptions of the food (and that pretty good salad) that you have no right to complain.

… but we should weigh that against the risks of the opposite approach. Explain every little detail, tie every mystery together, and what you’ll inevitably have at the end is a huge chunk of the fan base which thinks the resolution you came up with is pretty lame and makes everything that came before seem less cool; if you don’t come up with something really good, it could easily be a majority of the fan base.

The opposite of what they did is not to explain every little detail. The opposite of what they did is to write a compelling story with an interesting resolution (among other things). This is like arguing against murder being bad by saying, “But we should weigh that against the opposite - everyone living forever. Clearly, things would get very crowded and everybody would complain about the lack of space.”

[Harmonious_Discord]

I stopped watching it half way trough the first season. Pfftttt! I don’t know the ending, and don’t care to or how it got there.

[VarlosZ]

@BlackKnight

Imagine you go into a restaurant. The chef comes out and says, “I’m going to cook you a fabulous meal. You’ll love it.” He returns a few minutes later with salad, which is indeed rather good. You eat it. You like it. He opens the door to the kitchen just an inch, and you smell delicious odors emanating from it. He grins and say, “You’ll LOVE what’s coming next.” Minutes go by. He opens the door slightly and once again you smell something wonderful. He tells you it’ll be ready any minute now. This goes on for about an hour. Your stomach is growling. You are salivating. But every ten minutes or so, the chef will let you smell something wonderful, or will describe in detail the wonderful creations that will, any minute now, be coming from his kitchen. But eventually, you begin to wonder if he really has any food back there at all. Just when you can’t take it any longer, he comes out and slaps a bologna-on-WonderBread sandwich on your plate and kicks you out.

But hey - it was a pretty good salad. Sure, you could have gone to another restaurant. If you’d have known the outcome, you would have. But you didn’t, so you didn’t. Surely that means that you got enough enjoyment out of the smells and descriptions of the food (and that pretty good salad) that you have no right to complain.

I hate to fight analogies like this, but during all that time leading up to the finale we weren’t just being given the promise of more food to come: we were actually being fed in the interim. It’s more like going to a fancy restaurant for a six-course meal and getting five delicious plates, all the time being assured that the desert is exquisitely revelatory and will complement the other five courses in an amazing way. But then the desert kinda sucks, or maybe never even shows up. Ok, you can be disappointed about that – even pissed – but it doesn’t make the the first five courses less good than they were at the time. At worst, it makes them less good than you expected them to become once you had this desert that would complete the experience.

(Yes, I know this isn’t perfectly analogous either, the relationship of deserts to main courses is different from that of etc. etc. But, well, *you *brought it up. :))

The opposite of what they did is not to explain every little detail. The opposite of what they did is to write a compelling story with an interesting resolution (among other things).

Well if your objection is just that the ending generally sucked, I don’t feel the same way, but I really have no call to comment. I’m merely talking about the objection that the ending sucked *because *it left all of these little mysteries from the show’s run unanswered. And even *that *I don’t have a real problem with, actually; I just don’t think a disappointing ending negates how much fun the rest of the series was.

[The_Controvert]

I bailed around season 2. I wasn’t surprised a show named Lost eventually lost its footing.

If you want to compare Lost against a long form series, it helps to give more than 1 example.

Bad: Twin Peaks, X-Files. No payoff.
Good: Buffy, Angel. Consistent BuffyVerse rules, characters who behave (mostly) consistently, planned seasonal arcs and series arcs.

Heck, even Buffy Season 8 followed the rules and was a better payoff than Lost. Conclusion: Whedon knows how to write and the Lost writers are hacks by comparison.