For me it is about the mysteries.
I like the characters and their back stories but if the show was just set in some town or city somehwere then I would not be watching.
I agree they are the hook, but people don’t just stick around for an interesting premise; it has to lead somewhere dramatically or it’s just a clever exercise. This is the basic MO of most good scifi: set up the “What If?” early on, and explore its dramatic possibilities. People didn’t watch, say, “The Twilight Zone” because of the premise, they watched to see how characters would react to the premise, or how the drama could convincingly deliver irony or pathos.
My theory is they do this for 2 reasons: (1) they do actually have some ideas about the overall purpose of the island, but also (2) they want some new dilemmas to hang dramatic ideas on. Let’s face it: Once the secrets of the island are fully explained, there is only so much you can do dramatically.
I’m coming off here as something of a “Lost” defender; let me clearly state that I think the series has made some mistakes along the way, mainly by introducing ideas that didn’t really have much (if any) payoff, and making the mythology so confusing that it strains credulity to think there is a neat solution. I can also completely understand why people have abandoned this show: They expected it to lead to a final theory that explained everything, and with recent events that is becoming far less likely (if they can find a way to tie in the four-toed foot, the Black Rock, the disease both Danielle’s expedition and baby Aaron contracted, the Dharma initiative and the apparently-unrelated presence of the Others, the producers are far smarter than me). I just think that if you’re hinging the quality of this program on the timely resolution of big mysteries, that’s not really fair because you’re overlooking a lot of the good drama, which is really what made this show so interesting in the first place.
And I say so, too (if you’ll read my post carefully). But I also say that you have to resolve or explain that interesting premise, not just leave it hanging there like the obvious McGuffin it is, or else most people won’t watch your show any more.
(bolding mine)
Man, I really, really, REALLY hate people.
I’m interested in this. Do you think the problem is that the premise and associated mythology has been designed poorly (i.e. they can’t be reasonably resolved), or that there’s too much left concealed for a long period of time, i.e. the presentation of the mythological premise is poor and turns people off.
I approach the show assuming the premise will eventually be explained in the main. I’m not too worried about the details that seem to fascinate many of the hard-core fansites I read on the Internet. For me, the problem seems to be with the slow pace of the revealations rather than the quality of the myth, but I’m willing to forgive that for some of the dramatic payoff. Many others, I understand, are not.
I like the flashbacks as well but at the dreaded beginning of this season they did flashbacks on characters that had nothing interesting in their past anymore. Anything good regarding Jack, Kate, or Sawyer was revealed in Season 2.
To answer the Q I’m really interested in a weekly Locke & Hurley variety hour.
I’m interested in seeing more Naked Desmond or Naked Sawyer. I’d even take some Naked Jack. I wouldn’t have minded Naked Paulo 'cause he sure was purdy but he may not be so purdy now.
I like equal parts mystery solving and character development. I like the way they took Locke from badass to wimp and back around to badass again. If they could just develop some of the other characters that well it would be much better.
IMO, it’s simply this…
I can come up with something cool. It can be put into a story and it will make you say, “Whoa” and “Cool” and make you want to talk about it with your friends. You want to know what happened next, and WHY it happened and all the big questions that go along with that.
But you do all that because we all believe that there is a reason for all of this - it’s not just some random crap that I put in there just to make you say, “Whoa” and “Cool” - you can posit all the explanations you want, but none of them are actually going to be accurate because there IS no explanation.
So, it’s not a ‘way cool bunch of mysteries to be worked out’, instead it’s a variation on the old joke, “How do you keep an idiot in suspense?”
-Joe, still watches
I don’t watch these because I’m convinced that there is no overarching, guiding vision that will ultimately be resolved. There’s no incentive for the writers to have a definite end – it’s to their advantage to keep the show going as long as they can, at least until they’ve achieved a large enough body of work to get into syndication. Twin Peaks and X-Files never really did come to a satisfactory end, and I don’t expect Lost to, either.*
There’s no reason they couldn’t answer some of the mysteries, closing the book on some and opening new ones. But I predict they won’t. The old ones have proven value, and they can keep stringing people along on them, so they will.
*I understand that the series babylon Five actually did have a well thought-out arc in advance, and actually followed it to a predetermined and logical conclusion. And ended. I really do have to rent those shows and see this for myself. It sounds unique for a series, as opposed to a declared mini-series.
I can sympathize with the frustration “Lost” produces in many viewers as the mysteries pile up. However, with all due respect, I think many viewers bring this frustration on themselves by demanding things no series can possibly deliver.
I take the producers at their word that the broadest outline of the island is already plotted out, and I think the pacing and general theme of the series support this. However, there are a host of details needed to support this broad outline, and here I think is where viewer obsession with the details of the mystery ultimately leads to disappointment. There is just no way IMO all of these details can be managed in a completely consistent way without sacrificing a lot of the drama. I return again to the example of the Black Rock ship; does it really matter why the ship is there, or how it fits in with every other piece of the presumed puzzle? If the final explanation fails because it doesn’t adequately account for the ship being there, does that really destroy the credibility of the series?
I’m not saying that everything in the mythology can be ignored in service of the drama; not everything can be a MacGuffin, lest we lose a sense of connected reality with the setting and characters. I guess in the end I’m satisfied in not having every question answered, as long as the storytelling is sharp.
Folks have different tastes, and I respect your opinion on Lost. I will say that the producers’ choice to magnify the time-line of the series–only 80 days of island-time have passed over the past three years–does give them a better chance to follow thru on a definitive ending. If this were going on in real time, in the castaways’ third year on the island, it would be much harder to justify the keeping them living in mystery.
I also think syndication isn’t much of a goal for dramatic TV series today (unlike, say,. when X-files or Twin Peaks were deevloped). The **Law&Order ** model of self-contained episodes that can be digested like potato chips on some cable channel’s extended evening lineup is becoming a thing of the past. DVD sales, on the other hand, are much more lucrative for serial dramas, and IMO the goal in making a “good for DVD” TV drama is to (1) make it so dramatically riveting that a viewer wants to watch it all in one sitting, and (2) develop content that’s amenable to a lot of good DVD producer commentary and general “extras”. On that score Lost delivers in spades, so I guess you’re right; the producers really don’t have a reason to wrap it up just yet 
If all these details can’t be managed, then why introduce them all in a show that is – or was – ostensibly a mystery.
And, if was just the ship, that’s one thing. . .but magic Walt, polar bears, healing, tree eating, black smoke, evil numbers. . .well, you know the list.
Anyway, you and Cal have articulated well what the show is doing. I don’t think there’s disagreement between your two sides. There’s just disagreement between who finds their type of storytelling enjoyable.
I imagine that some people would still watch if you told them, “the show will run for 5 more years. It will turn into Melrose place on an island, and on the last episode, Bob Newhart will wake up in bed and go, ‘it was all a dream’”.
I’m not saying that that’s what the show is going to do, but for some of us – well, there’s no way to say this without sounding uppity – I just don’t watch enough TV to abide that. For some people, it sounds like they make a choice between Lost and whatever else is on TV. I make a choice between Lost and the TV being off. Lost won that battle in the beginning, but when I started to feel like it was lost, they lost me.
I liked this post, thx. I certainly don’t think people who have given up on the show are fools; I completely understand their taste.
It just seems that whenever I hear or read about how Lost is “not as good as it used to be” or has (ha ha) “lost its way”, the criticism is almost exclusively about the overarching mystery; the drama and storytelling are completely overlooked. Spend some time over at the Fuselage (at least the last time I checked), and you’ll find scads of writing that seeks to connect the most minute details into a grand theory of Lost. From this, I gather that folks are less confident talking about the artistic qualities, or just not interested in drama. That’s a shame, because I believe this is where Lost finds its strength. Cuse has something of a point (for me at least) when he says that “there’s a much larger audience that’s much more interested in who is Kate going to choose than the details about who Alvar Hanso is.”
At the risk of turning this into a Lost analysis thread (like we don’t have enough of those), I’ll say that one of the major themes of the show is the human need to find meaning in events which–objectively–don’t really have meaning. The numbers are the most obvious metaphor, but I think it also is a part of magic Walt, healing, even the black smoke (the polar bears…well, that’s beyond me at this point). The danger of exploring this theme is that it can make the show very frustrating (read: people grow tired of being jerked around), and at some point too much of it makes the action incomprehensible. But in small enough doses it can also be an excellent device for exploring character. Lost has had mixed success with this, but there’s enough there to keep me around.
Unfortunately, it seems that the producers of “Lost” have gone the Chris Carter route of periodically painting themselves into a corner and cutting through the walls to create an escape hatch (occasionally taking out a load-bearing element of the edifice in the process).
I don’t find this presumption to be compelling – it’s possible that the producers can afford to throw in an occasional red herring, are forced to work around the loss of an actor, etc.
If it weren’t for those people, though, Lost would have been canceled after the first season (or a part thereof).
I echo many of the comments above: I want answers to the island’s mysteries. To the extent that the backstories illuminate the mysteries, that’s great. To the extent the backstories illuminate Jack’s rippling triceps or Kate’s six-pack, they suck.
I fear that the implicit message being communicated to the “cultists” who want the mysteries fleshed out is this: “Don’t hold your breath.”
Generally so, albeit with a few glitches. In fact, I was thinking of B5 when I noted in my previous message that *CJJ’**s presumptions based on “the ‘rules’ of TV production” are not necessarily valid becuase the complications of TV production can trump them.
I agree, which is why I don’t accept the critical model of treating episodes of the show strictly as data points in the grand mystery; it leads to absurdities. Of course the producers can throw in a red herring, or abandon a storyline if they see better dramatic possibilities elsewhere, but not if you believe that everything presented is in service to uncovering the mystery.
I also agree that Lost has had problems with the size and unwieldlyness of the overarching mystery, but again, it seems the demands of some viewers are that if it isn’t all completely explicable, then the show isn’t worth watching. That’s an impossibly high standard for any large-scale entertainment to reach (Babylon 5 may have done it–I’ve never seen more than a few minutes of that show–but for those who did watch it to the end, I’d be interested in what the “completeness” of the B5 universe accomplished for the overall quality/entertainment value of the show).
The show doesn’t seem to be about people stranded on a mysterious island anymore. Now, it seems to be about people involved in some giant conspiracy that happens to take place on a myserious island.
The feeling that they were all alone in a primitive place is gone. Learning to cope and survive, gone. Even the Others aren’t the vicious threat they were at the start. The island used to seem like a fresh unexplored place that only few eyes had seen. Now it seems like a place that thousands of people had constructed funded by a giant corporation with underground tubes and electricity.
The straying from the original premise is what’s most damaging to the show. Getting off the island is the least of anybody’s problems.