The whole Abrams-Lindelof modus operandi is writing like six- year olds: just pile a bunch of stuff that sounds cool to you. never thinking about the ending, and then, once you’ve reached the end of the page, wrap it up with some non-explanation, like the *“it was all a dream” *thing, or a deus-ex-machina like *“it was god / aliens / extradimensional beings who did weird stuff because, well, because mysterious ways and all that, and if you don’t get it that’s because you are dumb” *cop out.
You all need to watch Alias. Imagine a TV show so erratic that it literally reads like they had a new writer for every episode, and every new guy was forbidden from having watched a previous episode ever. That’s Bad Robot in all its glory. Everything else will forever be a pale imitation.
Of course, that’s what the writers of HIMYM did - and that didn’t work either. Even if you have an ending, you have to revisit it at regular intervals to make sure that it still works for the show and be willing to change when it doesn’t.
It’s really, really hard to write a coherent narrative of 100ish or so storytelling hours and have it come out making any sense. Even more difficult when you’ve decided to write a mystery. They set themselves up for a huge challenge and totally failed at it. They even had some of the normal difficulties of US TV taken away - they knew when it was going to end and weren’t working with possibly being canceled at any second, they had a supportive network, they had plenty of time to figure out what to do and either didn’t or couldn’t.
I know, right? Seriously, my husband and I were burning through it on Netflix it before the show was over with, and after the first couple of episodes in the second season, I realized I really hated all of the characters and only cared about the mysteries of the plot. I mean, really, if I’d stuck it out because the show’s creators promised they’d wrap it all up in an interesting way… well, you’d probably see something about an insane woman arrested for stalking Abrams and/or Lindelof.
(BTW, Lindelof can go pound sand with a funnel for what he did to Prometheus, and so can Ridley Scott for allowing it. I read about the earlier script treatments which were much closer to the original Alien mythos, and which actually fucking made sense. I’m hard-pressed to think of another script that made ostensibly-intelligent people act in stupid fashions related directly to their **jobs **and not always forced by stressful situations.)
Sir Alexander Dane: Could they be the miners?
Fred Kwan: Sure, they’re like three years old.
Sir Alexander Dane: MINERS, not MINORS.
Fred Kwan: You lost me.
No, it didn’t. Something that crushed trees appeared in the first episode. You don’t find out the very stupid explanation that it is actually an invisible tree-crushing monster until much later.
But the “mystery” on shows like How I Met Your Mother or Veronica Mars wasn’t the whole point of the show. It was more like a macguffin. But on Lost, the mystery was the plot.
I agree with the OP’s claim. And an example of a show that (at least so far) sets up crazy mysteries and then actually ANSWERS them at a reasonable pace is Sleepy Hollow.
There’s a meme, of sorts, on some more loosely-moderated message boards. Someone starts out talking about something related to the thread topic - say, meeting famous people. They weave a compelling, lengthy story about this famous person, then, as it gets a little hard to believe, the famous person might say they left their wallet in the cab, and need to borrow $3.50. The story usually wraps up with something approximating, ". . . right about then, I realized that this baseball player was 30 feet tall and resembled a giant lizard out of the Crustacious period. “Damn you Loch Ness Monster!”, I said. “I ain’t got no tree-fiddy for you!”
LOST “tree-fiddy’d” us. I laugh at a good “tree-fiddy”, as it’s the internet and the implied contract with the reader/viewer isn’t there. Also, it only takes maybe 2 minutes out of my life, instead of, say, SEASONS.
I watched the first three-four episodes of Lost, and it seemed pretty interesting. But I began to suspect that they would keep piling up mystery upon mystery without any resolution ever.
Since it was broadcasted in France long after the USA, I began reading the synopsis of the episodes to come, and noticed it was following the same trend in season 2 (maybe also 3, can’t remember) : more mysteries, no explanation. And it had become so weird I couldn’t see any possible way to resolve this. At this point I was pretty certain there was no real story, and that they would just add random weird stuff until people would stop watching at which point they would just interrupt the serie. So, I quit watching.
So, in fact, I’m surprised that there even was a finale, regardless how bad.