The problem with "Lost" wasn't the finale, it was the entire show

Cafe Society
41

That’s not a random example - it’s the best episode of the show, and it peaked there and it was all downhill from there. And even then, the premise that there’s something mystical about the island needs some payoff - it’s integral to Locke’s transformation. Walkabout worked mostly as a standalone episode, and it was so early in the run (4 episodes in) that it still looked like we were going to be treated to a coherent story. Later seasons devolved into stringing along all the mysteries - juggling dozens of plates - and having our characters act in new irrational ways every week.

So yeah, if you want to say that the first few episodes are enjoyable on their own, fair enough. They’re still enjoyable mostly on the premise that we’re scratching the surface of a much bigger mystery, but even so - there were few episodes after the first season like Walkabout, because so much of the time was served juggling all of the mish mash of mysteries and mythos that we rarely had time for independently cool stories.

42

…which is where I stopped watching, after episode 1 of season 2. It was clear they were just winging it - it had been growing apparent during the foot-draggingly glacial ‘hatch’ storyline towards the end of season 1.

After that (I read the synopses for a while), it seemed like they were just trying to keep the hooks in people with intriguing developments, but painting themselves further and further into a corner at the same time. I kept imagining the writers having exchanges like:

Writer 1: …and then they find a giant statue’s foot, with four toes! Bam! Tune in next time.
Writer 2: Huh. But what does it mean?
Writer 1: Who cares? Giant foot! Four toes! It’s awesome! This episode’s done, now let’s go grab a beer…

43

stpauler is correct - it’s a shaggy dog story, a joke without a punch line. I should have realized it, because they never explained anything. Just add more random occurrences without any effort to fit them into a coherent whole.

I don’t think the writers ever had a cohesive back story, and they were making it up as they went along. At least after the second season.

Meh. “It could have been great if it were better written” is true of most TV.

Regards,
Shodan

44

Yes, definitely not a random example, but the most clear example I can think of for what I’m trying to say. If it needs some later payoff, then the failure is in the episodes that fail to provide the payoff, at the end of the show’s run. They could have done things differently after Walkabout to provide a great, coherent story, without changing anything that came before.

Walkabout is a very early example, but I would make the same argument for the season 3 and season 5 finales as well.

The thing that has always amazed me about this is that it really seems like they didn’t even try to wrap up the story. Even though they didn’t have it planned out from the start, they should have done something. People might have thought it was stupid, but as it is people think it was deceitful.

45

I’m afraid that Lost set (or extended) a precedent that other shows are now following, shows that have “hooked” me and I am now following. (was turned off in Lost by the smoke monster.)

Resurrection and Under the Dome. I’m aware of the book Resurrection is based on, and my meager knowledge of it does not give me
any great hope that the show will be providing anything by way of explanation.

There also does not seem to be much in the way of characters actively seeking explanations of what is happening. There seems to be
a lot of focus on characters’ emotions (so the actors can act, don’cha know) and their varying reactions to the returned loved ones. Doesn’t bode well.

In Under the Dome, characters are at least actively seeking explanations, but much like the mysterious machinations present in Lost,
I do not see there being any, dare I say, reasonable expectation that the dome can be explained.

The problems SenorBeef and others have mentioned in this thread seem almost to be a new paradigm of series creation.

There are plenty of places where I can see characters act, react and emote.
When you put mysterious stuff like this onscreen, I want some explanation.

(5 variations of “explain” in this post. Guess I made it clear where my interest lies.)

46

Some of the writers of Lost went on to work on Once Upon a Time, though rather than creating mysteries that they can’t solve, they just create new adventures that have to be completed to make the world better/worse/find their love/whatevah. And just as a character is finally about to succeed in his quest, they throw something in to make him fail and force a new quest to get around the new issue. No one is ever allowed to actually succeed at anything.

Unlike Lost, it doesn’t make any promises, so it’s a better viewing experience, but it does get a bit tedious knowing that above all other things the Status Quo will always rule, no matter how much deus ex machine must be utilized.

Anyways, for anyone looking for a good mystery series, you should try watching Key: The Metal Idol. Unfortunately, the series was supposed to be 2-3 seasons long, but ended up not getting renewed, so they made two movie length episodes to wrap it up where one is two hours of exposition to explain all of the mysteries and the other is what would have been the finale for the show. But I’m pretty sure that every mystery is well-explained and it’s very satisfying.

47

True dat. A trilogy in which each movie wasn’t quite as good as the one that came before.

48

jimbuff314 says “When you put mysterious stuff like this onscreen, I want some explanation.” - That can be done. ‘Fringe’ did it. I didn’t particularly care for their explanation of their mysterious stuff., but at least they gave something back to the loyal viewers.

“Lost” represents so much wasted potential. So many interesting characters, so much interesting backstory, so much good acting, emotion - all wasted in that horrible last season.

49

I will confess to being a “lostee” at the time the show aired. I was more than willing to give them room to operate. To me, the big mistake was the writers not knowing how to manage the conversation about the show. The launch of Lost somewhat coincided with shows having a larger than life online following, and the writers/creators/show-runners did a horrible job managing that newish reality.

No one should have ever given in to the pressure to commit to a “oh my god, it’s not going to be an X type ending” in the first or second season. When they came out and said it would not be a supernatural ending, or whatever they exactly said, THAT was when they put themselves in a box.

The Walking Dead does a much better job of this, and they have an entire aftershow that airs immediately following each episode!! They never give anything away other than a few teases for the next episode.

I agree there were some (understatement I know) threads of the story that never got pulled back into a coherent resolution. I did like “parts” of the ending, mostly involving some of the character relationships, but there were holes in the overall plot that were big enough to drive an alternate universe through.

50

I watched the first six episodes of Lost, actually quite enjoyed them, and then never watched another episode because it was clear as day to me that the writers did not know where the story was going.

I said this about LOST years ago. If you want to tell a good story then you need to know the start, the middle and the end, everything else in between is just detail. The LOST writers only had the start, they didn’t know the end. And so they failed.

51

I agree completely with the root complaint, extending it to all such shows. I love the long story arc. But DO NOT!! waste my time if you aren’t going anywhere with it.

Good counterexample of the OP complaint: Veronica Mars. The whole first season was supported by the long story arc about the death of Veronica Mars’ best friend Lilly. They weren’t kidding: the little fragmentary new info she finds gradually does add up, and we get to see the resolution of the mystery, and it’s quite satisfying. Series goes on to solve the mystery of her rape-via-roofies at the party as well. Good job.

So yeah, they can do it.

52

That’s the whole point. You don’t write a series like this and then come up with a final episode that pulls it all together. That’s virtually impossible.

You have to write the final episode first and then lock it away in a drawer. Then you write the rest of the series so every other episode leads to that final episode you’ve already written.

My personal theory is that the writers did have some original finale in mind when they started. But when the show became a hit and fan speculation was all over it, their big finale was one of the theories the fans came up with. So the writers threw out their original ending and just kept churning away while they tried to think of a new ending.

This is the reason that works that depend on a surprise ending work better in novels and movies than they do in television series and webcomics. You give an audience time to work on a story and they’re going to pick it apart and come up with every possible ending.

53

I agree with the OP and admire the clarity of his argument.

This has me wondering about the phenomenon of what might be called What The Hell Is Going On Here? television series. I can think of only two that were resolved by something other than the supernatural; what might I be missing, here?

Twin Peaks had the demon/ghost/whatever Bob, who could jump from person to person, and who liked to murder people as the solution to the show’s central mystery.

Lost had, as mentioned above, some sort of Purgatory for the dead characters who only thought they were alive. The progenitor of the Character Only Thinks He or She Is Alive plot is, of course, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: the 1890 Ambrose Bierce story that inspired a million modern stories. That story contained no overt supernatural elements. But to explain how more than one person could have the same shared experience (of thinking they were alive when they really weren’t)–well, that might well necessitate an introduction of a deity or some other mystical explanation.

The UK Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes had deity/heaven/angels/purgatory/etc. as the explanation of What the Hell had been Going On.

The first season of American Horror Story had ghosts who could kill people (because they wanted them to join them) as the explanation of What Was Going On. (I haven’t seen the other two seasons, but assume that the supernatural was involved in them, too.)

The *'What’s Going On Here?" *series Quantum Leap, Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and Carnivale, all had supernatural explanations (or elements, in the case of those that didn’t fully explain what had been going on). The same may turn out to be true for currently-in-production series such as Under the Dome.

The two shows I was thinking of as being those that explained the odd goings-on in some way other than the supernatural:

The Prisoner (could have been mental breakdown or could have been actual government actions) and the US Life on Mars (pure science-fiction explanation, plus ‘coma-dream’.)

Keeping it just to television series: does it seem to others that the supernatural is resorted to more often than any other explanation, for “puzzle/mystery/mind-screw” shows?

54

My thoughts when I quit watching, and which I still hold, are that they may have had a finale in mind…to take place after a season or three.

Then Lost got so popular, they had to keep writing. And once they kept writing and having to include more and more mysterious shit, there was no way they were even going to write their way out of that hole.

Off-topic…when Boone calls on the plane radio and says they’re the survivors of Oceanic 815, the reply is what sounds like “There WERE no survivors of Oceanic flight 815…” Was he really talking to somebody who was alive? Was that person hearing a Boone ghost?

55

I have one question because it comes every six months when this topic gets posted, is there any cite for “The writers said it wouldn’t be a supernatural explanation in the end”? People say it over and over but I’ve never seen anything from Cuse or Lindelof to that effect.

56

Actually I joke that were I ever to produce a show, I would consider doing just the opposite. I would start by putting out all of the weir mysterious stuff, polar bears, smoke monsters, visions of the dead father, with no idea how any of it fits together. Then I sit back and read all the fan sites as they try to figure out what it all means. Once I’ve crowd sourced for the best explanation I go ahead and put it down for the final season, leaving a few lucky fans feeling satisfied that they managed to guess the answer correctly as opposed to realizing that they were in fact unpaid writers. :smiley:

57

He was talking to Bernard, who crashed on a different section of the island. What he was actually saying was “We’re the survivors of Oceanic 815!”

58

http://web.archive.org/web/20090228234352/http://www.scifi.com:80/scifiwire/handheld/30246.html

Basically Lindelof was full of crap and had no problem lying to the viewers on repeated occasions. I can find more examples if you want.

You are all my people in this thread. I have no patience for the “but it was a good ride!” people. No, it wasn’t a good ride. It was a mystery story with no solution. Sometime around season 3, I started to get the feeling that this was going to be the X-Files all over again, but stupidly I decided to stick it out and see what happened. What happened? A big pile of shit.

And for the record, I totally agree with Stranger on a Train’s criticisms of the J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot, too.

59

I gave up at the start of season 2 when I realized I didn’t give a damn about any of the characters. Literally the only reason I would have wanted to follow the show and all the outside-the-show clues was because of the promise of it tying all together in some grand explanation.

I probably would have gone off the deep end, had I stuck around.

60

Yes, but that’s like saying you set of from Chicago to get to New York and you start walking West. For 6 years, it’s great, lots of pretty scenery, fun adventures but on the last day, you hit the Pacific Ocean which is not New York and you’re disappointed. The disappointment is not from the last day, it’s that you went on a different journey than you thought you did and the blame for that rests on the first day.