Honestly, I would’ve been cool with anything - anything - that took some sort of chance. A Universe controlling race that uses it to QA a predestined outcome that provides the best possible outcome for our race. God, but he shows up and / or isn’t that great of a guy, ala Frailty. Zoom out and it’s a Snow Globe. Zoom out and it’s one of those Terrariums like you made in Grade School. Have an alien put his Earth marble back in his bag of marbles, ala Men In Black. Have the scene turn into text and it’s Locke writing a book. Or it’s Vincent’s doggie dream.
But no, it’s just another timid Purgatory-like state that offends nobody and takes no risks. And now he wants me to get into his new HBO show? HAH!
Fuck that guy, and his new show. I usually check out HBO’s offerings, but I won’t view this one. I didn’t mind the show as much as the show runner’s deception in the press about having some actual idea of where it was going. Forgive me for not being fooled a second time, Mr. Lindelof.
Yeah. . .fuck Lindelof. In his heart, he still thinks he did a good job on ‘Lost’, and I won’t waste another second on one of his shows. Shit, I think a lot of shows with a central mystery introduced in the last several years have suffered because of ‘Lost’, with people avoiding them out of fear of it being another waste of time. Now Lindhoff himself is doing another show? Seriously, fool me once. . .
There really wasn’t any ending that could have worked IMHO. The show became so convoluted with all it’s weird mysteries, unexplained phenomenon, omnipotent or prescient characters, shady all-powerful organizations and time loops that it basically painted itself into a corner of one (or more) of several possible standard “twist” endings:
They were all dead
They were all kidnapped by aliens
They were all clones
They were trapped in a VR simulation
It’s the same problem they had with ending The X-Files. The show only really worked when it hinted at some vast conspiracy involving shady forces just visible below the surface. As soon as you show what the mystery actually us, then it’s just cheesy and stupid.
The last few minutes of the series finale, we see the characters gathering at a diner. They all come in on by one and chat over an order of onion rings.
Jack drops a few quarters in a juke box to play a crappy Journey song, while Kate struggles to parallel park a car in front of the diner. We see her rush to the door to meet her friends, and as she opens to door… Cut to black.
I was satisfied with the ending at the time. I didn’t expect to be. There were just too many crazy things happening that I didn’t think there was any way they could wrap it up.
But the more I hear people complain about it the better the ending looks. I’ve never heard of an ending from anyone else that would have been close to being good.
Well, at least Lost took the time to craft an ending and didn’t just stop when they ran out of film.
No. That isn’t just dismissive, it misses the point. And it maybe misses the fact that purgatory episodes only happened in the last season and even that season had plenty of thrilling time travel, magic, monsters, fights on cliffs and the world about to end.
The ending of Lost deals with the fact that everybody dies. People that live long adventurous lives die. People who’s lives were cut unfairly short die. People that have lived far longer then they deserve die. And everybody in between dies. And it had a message that you can cope with that without being horrified.
This goes against just about all other tv shows or movies that have a hard time acknowledging that anyone ever dies and that you can always Kobayashi Maru a way to avoid it. Or if people do die it’s one person or some kind of horror movie.
So I would say they did take a big chance with their ending.
If they wanted to play it safe they could have made a list of all the unsolved mysteries and explained them one by one. Then we could be here complaining about how boring that was.
I must point out as always how annoying it was that in the afterlife, Sayid reconnected with the horrible Shannon (was that her name?) - like they were mates for life after their island hookup, cruelly separated for years, and now reunited.
My thinking in that last season was that they had prevented the crash and that the “no crash” timeline was now real but that the people still on the island had to stay there because if they left it would all collapse back to the prior reality. (Desmond could go back and forth somehow in his mind without causing that collapse because he was “special”.) This would set up a dynamic where Sawyer, grief-stricken over the loss of Juliet, would be determined to leave and Jack would have to stop him. In essence, they would become the new Jacob and man-in-black.
Oooh! That’s very close to my own private explanation for Lost - I was thinking that a crashed alien starship with a reality-warping FTL drive. The smoke monster was a collection of nano-robots that served as the starship/island’s protector, sampling humans from time to time and destroying some due to miscommunication, saving others because it thinks they might be able to pilot/communicate with the ship or help repair it. Occasionally the insanely advanced alien ship’s medical systems do weird things, like re-grow Locke’s leg. The Others and Whitmore are attracted to the unusual abilities shown by the island, but don’t know it’s true nature…
And then the writers junked my nice Sci-fi theory for some stupid Eternity Water and brotherly hate.
Or Juliet wakes up in her bed, hears the shower running in the bathroom and sees Sawyer and we learn that it was all a dream.
Or Jack marries some girl he’s been alluding to for six seasons, only to have her die of cancer and he shows up at Kate’s window with a blue French horn with a Dharma logo on it).
Or possibly the survivors are charged with the deaths of everyone who died during the course of the show. After a parade of witnesses consisting of past guest stars, Jack, Sawyer, Kate and Hurley are sentenced to jail.
Right, and that’s the only ending which would have satisfied all the "WTF? people.
Still, they made some bad choices. Time travel and changing the past is *always *bad.
In any case, he’s not suckering me into his new show, I watched the first epi, had dozens of WTF? moments, saw people acting totally irrational, and the stupid fucking cult was just plain bad.
I have said it before- before I watch another “Lost” like show, I need to know all the answers have been written down and sealed into a mayonnaise jar on Funk & Wagnal’s porch. And that if the show is canceled, they reveal all.
I’d forgotten all the details but I swear to god everything you just said is part of what I thought as well (except the reality warping FTL drive)!
It’s so nice to hear I’m not crazy. This would have made a genuinely satisfying explanation IMO. And at the end, some people could choose to go with the ship, others to be left behind, that kind of thing. Oh it would have been so nice.
I agree with msmith537 - they wrote themselves into a corner (actually, twelve or fifteen corners). There was no way to resolve the dozens of loose ends.
They never resolved it because when they came up with all of their plot twists, they had no idea what it was all in service of - it was just “here’s another mystery to distract you from the fact that we never resolved the last mystery”.
Shaggy dog stories aren’t any fun after the third season of one.
