I didn’t watch x-files regularly, but I don’t think there was an implied promise of anything in x-files. You got a mystery (solved) every week, and the overall story was just an added feature, and I never expected it to go anywhere. A bit like the side love stories of individual cops in a crime show.
In Lost there was nothing besides the overall story, so not solving it meant that the whole show was an empty shell. I found despicable to produce such a show, really. I’m happy I quitted watching it early.
That is correct. What was that thing? Perhaps some sort of advanced sci-fi technology. Perhaps someone with superpowers. Perhaps all some sort of elaborate trick set up by mysterious island inhabitants. Could have been lots of things, and not necessarily supernatural. What it turned out to be was… an invisible smoke monster. Great.
I did watch it regularly up until around season 9 or so, and practically from the beginning there were two types of episodes. One was “monster of the week,” which stood on their own as you say. Then there were story arc episodes, and IMO there was definitely an implied promise that the story in these (who kidnapped Mulder’s sister? what are the grays? who is the Smoking Man working for and why?) would be resolved by the end. But it turned out that, much the same as Lost, the writers just kept throwing a lot of cool mysterious stuff into the show without any real direction or purpose, and without any sense of how it would tie together or end.
But you are right that unlike Lost, at least the Monster of the Week episodes of the X-Files were still fun on their own. I would rewatch one of those if it happened to be on TV. I would rather jam my thumb into my own eye than ever rewatch a Lost episode again.
Poses an interesting question, has LOST ever been re-run anywhere? I can’t see it ever being a popular choice for re-runs, as you say why the hell would anybody want to watch it again.
At least here in the UK and Ireland I don’t recall seeing it listed on any channel for re-runs, though I guess it could be on some obscure cable channel.
Seems to me that’s really the test of whether or not you’ve been “had” by a series - whether you can in future rewatch episodes with pleasure, in spite of a final episode that sucks and doesn’t tie anything together.
For example, The Prisoner has a worthless final epsode (at least, in my opinion), but that doesn’t stop the series episodes from being groundbreaking and rewatchable - even though (maybe because) it was made in the 60s, it still holds interest today.
I can’t imagine people saying the same about Lost, fifty or so years on.
This is the really telling thing for me. I cannot remotely imagine re-watching *Lost *and getting enjoyment out of it. I watched X-Files until I grew disinterested and then stopped, but I still think the bulk of what I watched was fun and would go back and watch it again. To the extent that Battlestar Galactica became focused on mysteries, I was annoyed with how it turned out. But that wasn’t the focus of the entire series, and as a drama about people in extreme circumstances, a reflection on sentient non-humans and ethics generally, and a story about political-religious tensions, it was very good, and I’d be happy to watch it again.
What *Lost *amounted to was Murder on the Orient Express, only where the ultimate answer is space aliens jaunted in and killed the guy for no particular reason, and all the little clues like the depth of the stab wounds and the inconsistencies in the passengers’ stories are completely abandoned.
Actually, I read some interesting thoughts about mystery narratives and what authors owe audiences in this negative review of True Detective.
*Lost *violated the mystery narrative completely by simply not having a revealed plot, ever. And I think that’s **SenorBeef’s **point.
(I can see their point about that show, but for me it is another that might not have had a totally satisfying wrap-up, but that I truly can go back and watch for other qualities, because the mystery was part of what drove the show, but not the whole reason for the show to exist.)
An example I’d use would be House. Nobody really cared what the disease was. The fun of the show was watching House.
An even more extreme example would be Columbo where they’d actually show you who committed the murder at the start of the episode. There was no mystery involved and it was all just watching Columbo work his way through the case.
Yep. I always kind of wished they would do an episode of House where someone in the opening scene (but never the one you expect!) falls suddenly ill and is rushed to Princeton-Plainsboro, only this time it IS lupus (AND sarcoidosis to boot), case solved, and the remaining 90% of the episode is just House and Wilson sitting in the cafeteria and bagging on each other.
That’s exactly where I stopped the first time around. I’m in the group that saw somewhere during the first season that the writers were just making it up as they went along. I forced myself to watch the first two episodes of the second season, but the writers just kept digging, so I stopped and never went back.
Wait, there was actual time travel, not just flashbacks? And alternate universes? Man, I’m glad I stopped.
If your theory is correct, then the writers are even stupider than I thought. What the hell would it matter if someone figured out what they had in mind? Before I read that, I was thinking that the smart thing for the writers to have done would be the exact opposite: Collect the various theories that the fans were floating, take the best (non-overlapping) of those, and weave the final season around/into those. Seems to be that that would have been a lot more satisfying to the fans than what they got.
I’ve recently started watching Babylon 5 again from the beginning. This thread makes me appreciate it all the more. It’s so clear that “the writers” (really the one guy, JMS) have a pretty good picture of where they’re ultimately going. Things are sprinkled around that appear random or unconnected or look like one-offs, but later on they connect and there’s a payoff. You actually see why something happened, or who/what was behind it. Sure, the series is by no stretch perfect, and in my opinion JMS made too many compromises for various reasons. But compared to what I read about Lost, B5 is a much more satisfying watch.
Despite some quotes from the show’s creative staff, there was definitely time travel and definitely alternate universes. If they’re going to stand by any statement that there wasn’t then really the only ending for the whole series is “A plane full of people crashed. One of them suffered oxygen deprivation and massive brain trauma, resulting in the following six-season hallucination.”
(And, to be honest, that fits what we see on screen even better than my wormhole idea.)
If my theory’s right, hubris could have been a factor. They wanted to claim they had an amazing ending that nobody could guess. The problem was that people guessed all the good endings.
And if they had used an ending like “They’re all in purgatory” then the finale would have seemed like a let-down. The viewers would have been saying, “That’s it? They’re in purgatory? We were saying that four years ago!”
In the annals of bad parenting, I have to tell this story.
I didn’t start watching Lost until about the third episode, but I found it interesting. At the time, my daughter was in fifth or sixth grade and she started watching it with me. She became obsessed with it.
It soon became a “don’t miss” show. One time, a thunderstorm knocked out our dish and I had to take her to a friend’s house so she could watch it. When she was still in elementary, I bought her a stupid “Lost” board game which was impenetrable as the show. I had to play it with her.
She grew older and kept watching. It was great from my point of view. It was something we could talk about that didn’t involve fashion or make-up. We debated theories, exchanged what we may have learned or heard about the show on the internet. She had her thoughts, I had mine.
Eventually she collected all the available episodes on DVD. We talked about it all the time.
Then, when she was in high school, the final episode aired.
She’s in college now. She still will not talk about it. I don’t think that anything in her short life has disappointed her more.
However, from my point of view, it was great. I was able to share a common experience with my daughter and talk about it.
I think that’s exactly what happened. “What? The island exists in an alternate universe? There’s time travel? Pshaw, our ending is WAY better than that.”
“Um…guys… we do have a better ending than that, right? …guys?”
First, the common complaint that they were making it up as they went just wasn’t true. The writers had an overall plan, and every mystery that they introduced they knew the answer to it when it appeared. And most of the mysteries had satisfying answers. There was a small stretch of episodes when they were negotiating how long the series would be (Jack’s tattoo episode) where they were putting in some filler while they figured out how long they had to work with, but that was pretty quickly resolved.
The finale was disappointing for two reasons.
One, it’s true that it seemed like they were holding back some reveal that never came, but this was only with regard to the ancient deep mystery of what the island is exactly, and maybe some of the Heiroglyphic stuff. Pretty much all the mysteries since Jacob was born were touched on.
Two, the reveal that the alternate universe was actually the after life. I think the after life plot line actually worked pretty well overall, and was a nice resolution, and even tied in with the otherworldly aspects of the island, but it was disappointing only in relation to the build up of thinking it was a different scenario.
The ending was great. It didn’t reveal the ancient history of the island, and the side-universe was a little different than we expected, but those are minor quibbles.
Also, did JJ Abrams even have much involvement after the pilot?
Were they? To me, saying that the mysteries were resolved means that we can go back and watch from season 1 episode 1, and every time something that seems incomprehensible happens, we can understand why it happened. And in particular, that needs to include motivations for why people did things. (And “they’re making lists of special people” doesn’t count unless we understand why they were making those lists, etc.)
By that standard, I feel like about 50% of the mysterious stuff we saw never got an explanation at all, and another 40% just got an explanation that was replacing one mystery with another (for instance, what was the significance of “the numbers”? Well, they were part of some equation that explained some thing or other. But that’s not really an answer, that’s just another question.)
Another reason I ended up hating the show was the number of unannounced repeats.
After watching another great episode, the buzz lasted for a few days. Then I would say, “Oh great its already …day, only three more days until another Lost episode.” Then the show day would arrive and finally it was time for the show… WTF!!! ANOTHER REPEAT!!!
The show was a huge hit and was making untold millions of dollars in advertising money and ABC couldn’t afford to pay the writers to come up with a few more episodes?
No, no, no, a thousand times no. It was a character-driven show with a plot that got way out of hand. It was always about the characters, and they did a great job of assembling a cast of characters that complemented each other. I was turned off by the ending, but by the time it came around, I wasn’t expecting anything better.
I recently re-watched the first 2 seasons and thoroughly enjoyed watching, not because of all the woo, but because of the interaction between the characters.
Well, I liked the characters, but it’s not so much the characters as their interactions with each other. Especially when Ben is thrown into the mix.
And I was suspicious of the whole “we promise we’re not just making things up” by the authors. I hoped they weren’t, but I expected to be pleasantly surprised if that was true.
