KILL THEM WITH FIRE.
Ahem.
I didn’t quote your entire post, though I am referencing it. (I have a pet peeve about just slapping the Quote button on a longish post
and then just posting one or two thoughts about it). We also are in CS and not the Pit, so I am not going to post “da fuck??” here (although you may consider it to be typed.)
Did you have a financial stake in this show or something? Lost is pretty much known to be the poster child show for being the opposite
of practically everything you included in your post. Is there a reason your perspective is this “little bit different”?
I can see John Mace’s position. I liked the character interactions in the first few seasons and was kind of thinking of the show as a psychological thriller as much as anything else. Even when the characters themselves are unlikable, their interactions were likable. (In the same sense that Darth Vader is clearly not a nice person, but watching him terrorize Imperial minions is pure joy.)
However… I agree with you on two key points.
First, the characters get increasingly unlikable the longer things go on… and once I’m thoroughly disgusted with the whole lot of them, there’s no going back to re-watch the first seasons with the same enjoyment as the first time.
Second, the characters cannot carry the show alone and the mystery was a necessary supplement to keep my interest.
Defending Lost as a show about characters strikes me as particularly ridiculous. The characters would change constantly to serve the whims of the plot. They’d do idiotic things, fail to communicate, change their motivations at random, and get strung around mysteriously by the needs of the plot. There were some iconic traits - Sawyer’s quips and nicknames for example - but otherwise, as a character study, it was a hot mess. Well below average for a drama.
Let me give you an example. Locke was one of the main characters on the show, at times the main character. He had quite a journey. And it turned out, at some point around season 3 (?) he had actually died and been replaced by some manifestation of the smoke monster. Right? Vague recollection here. For a season or two, as we watched Locke’s journey, we were actually watching some spirit that appeared as Locke acting randomly.
Now was this unexpected and we were fooled because the spirit perfectly imitated Locke for some reason? No. If you go back and watch, can you see the clues that would lead you to understand, in retrospect, what had happened? No. Did the producers even know at the time that Locke was an imposter, or did they just make that all up at the end? You can’t tell because all of the characters were randomly mystery boxes with mysterious motives and mysterious actions sujbect to change at any time. They weren’t characters painted with consistency or growth or good storytelling. They were just black boxes with a little bit of personality (Sawyer quips and cons, Kate looks good in shorts and is retarded and runs, etc).
They weren’t the consistency, growing, nuanced, interesting characters of a character driven drama. They were mysterious, arbitrary, random, and at the service of a nonsensical plot.
Imagine if in Breaking Bad, it was revealed in Season 5 that Walt had died in season 3 and had been replaced by a robot. Ridiculous, right? Well, the fact that it wasn’t even ridiculous in Lost, and par for the course, shows how bad the show is from both a plotting and character driven perspective.
I followed the show pretty closely, helped edit the wiki, read articles on it and so forth. I was pretty into it. But I also read enough about the behind the scenes stuff to know that some of the fan complaints were off base.
In terms of everything being opposite, if you want to delve in point by point, let me know your specific objections and I’ll respond.
Actually, your response here has answered my question.
I was interested to hear about the behind the scenes stuff in your post as well.
It’s just that your first sentence was so at odds with people’s experience of the show that I was curious.
…I wasn’t aware that holding differing opinions about things as subjective as a television programme was such an evil thing. There are thousands of people out there who enjoy Lost, enjoyed the final season and loved the finale, and I’m one of them. But a thread titled “The problem with “Lost” wasn’t the finale, it was the entire show” is not going to attract a lot of Lost fans. You guys are entitled to your opinions. Just because you aren’t hearing a lot of counter opinion doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.