Posted on 05/23/2010 11:06:39 PM PDT by JoeProBono
Edited on 05/23/2010 11:17:47 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
Once upon a time, there was a television show about a bunch of people on an island. For six years it was one of the most fascinating things on TV. And then it ended, in the worst way possible.
Lost ended tonight, and with it the hopes and dreams of millions of people who thought it might finally get good again. SPOILER ALERT: It didn't. What did we learn? Nothing. We learned nothing from two-and-a-half hours of slow-motion [expletive deleted by Mod] backed with a syrupy soundtrack.
Everyone loves to see characters who haven't been around for a while, right? Juliet! Where have you been? Shannon! Long time since you were around, irritating all of us and ruining Sayid. But good to see you, I guess! Rose and Bernard! Nice beard, bro! And Vincent! The goddamn dog! There you are, doing dog stuff. How great is it to get all these characters back? Not very great at all, as it turns out.
To me the feeling I think many people have of this was what happened after seeing the movie “Independence Day”.
I would have said this was my feeling, but it’s not entirely accurate as I started to have a very bad feeling aobut the ending on the episode where jacob and the man in black are babies and the west wing broad is the caretaker. I knew at that point they had tanked the ending.
I’m liking the perspective that his was Jack’s redemption story, full of the people that were vital to Jack. Those (the children) who didn’t appear in the end were not central to Jack’s story or Jack’s redemption and moving on. They may be central to the stories of some of the others... others, but not Jack. Kate’s passing may include people not included here. Locke’s would have some of the same and some others too.
RE the kids. Did you watch Jimmy Kimmel after the episode? As for Walt, the actor is over 6 ft now. I think it would have been hard to introduce another actor. Yes, it’s unresolved. But at the same time, why would he go with the rest? Michael wasn’t there.
Daniel Day Kim agreed that there was a lot of question about “what about Ji Yeon” when Sun and Jin died.
As for Jack’s son, remember, that was sideways world. That wasn’t the real world. In the real world, Jack didn’t have a son. What happened on the island was the real world.
And, for the other kids, I think the assumption is that they were killed by the Smoke Monster at the temple.
So, while not complete, I can accept those explanations.
The one that did bother me was Desmond and Penny’s son. Where was he?
Look the people offering up criticism of the show aren’t doing it because they “didn’t like the show” as you simplisticly are saying.
we are being critical of the show and are disappointed in the show because ultimately we don’t think it lived up to its potential. It’s not that we didn’t like it, we didn’t like what they did to the show we liked. Most people here think they had a piss-poor ending to it that while some are praising all the loose threads as brilliant, others see it as the writers having no idea as to how to answer these things and hoping if they go sentimental and weepy and pc about death (the power of men can hold them together in the place they all built, and all faiths get yo uto the same place), some people find that as a cop out and really not worthy of ending the storyline that emerged over the last 2 years. They threw too much crap and weirdness in in the middle that couldn’t be tied up and they tried to ignore it. Things that were written that appeared to have some meaning and importance were, for lack of a better term, story-wise, “lost”.
My take is that they are in Heaven and will be seen in the pure spirit they all will become after they walk through the doors of light that Christian opened.
Exactly. And Claire’s baby is there, Desmond’s kid isn’t. It’s like if there weren’t enough ‘personal connections’ to the group, you weren’t there. But in Sayid’s case, he was really the only one that had any care for Shannon (save her brother) but they died off early yet they both came back. Who was close to Shannon’s brother except possibly one other person, Shannon? Anna Lucia wasn’t there yet lots of people cried when her and the Hurley’s girlfriend were killed. Heck she slept with James, that doesn’t count for anything...
Anyone who watched even one episode past season #1 is a complete and total victim of a show biz joke. Go sit with the fans of “Twin Peaks” and hang your heads.
Life has a lot of weird, fantastic, mysterious events in it that seem really important at the time, but in the end, aren’t. And some that we don’t realize are important till later.
I look forward to watching it again to see if, in the light of the end, some of those things have new perspective, conflicts, or are just one of the oddities of the story that we can make of it what we will.
I personally LIKE that they don’t pretend there’s only one answer to life’s great questions. :~)
I don't feel that "the question of reality" was a big part of the show until the very end, in large part because they did a decent job of making everything seem plausble until that point, which is why there are a whole lot of people expecting a rational science fictiony resolution that they didn't get and they feel like they've just been a Bobby in the shower on Dallas ending.
And the net result isn't that it didn't really matter. The events on the Island fixed a lot of people, remember who they were in the first season, a large collection of seriously screwed up people many with daddy issues, drug problems, incest problems, dysfunctional marriages, and just generally confused. And they come out the other side whole, having solved their issues. That was one of the first clues that the flash sideways was something else, if you notice most of them in flash sideways are much happier people than they were in the main stream.
To get from the people they were on the island to the people in the alternate reality wasn't a huge jump, in my opinion, and could just as easily have been explained by the absence of Jacob intervening in their lives, for example. And let's not forget that they were still pretty dysfunctional people in the alternate reality, with Sawyer doing shady things, Jack divorced, Locke punishing himself, Kate headed for jail, Hurley looking for love, Charlie trying to kill himself, Sayid headed for jail, and so on. Nor where they really made whole by the island experience. It drove Claire nuts, made Ben a mass murderer, killed Jin and Sun, killed Locke before he'd completed his mission, Kate and Jack never really work anything out, Sawyer loses Juliet, Sayid has a pretty trajic ending a dies... not quite saving everyone.and so on. Now, if you want to claim that a fusion of the two realities was needed to deliver a happy ending for everyone, with the romantic affinities bleeding across realities, then I'd buy that and that's how I was hoping it might go. But I think my biggest problem is that the people in both realities just stopped acting like real people and felt like plot puppets to me for the last few episodes and expeically during the last one.
As for the rest of the analysis, if it's just all about people fixing each other and that only that small slice of their lives really matter, then I'm underwhelmed by that theme and that it took 6 seasons to get to that punchline.
Let me clarify my above post.
When I say THEY are in Heaven, I mean Charlie Hume, Aaron, Walt etc. and all the people who are not in Jack’s anteroom.
They are behind the light and will joyously embrace Jack et. al. as they pass through the door and have ‘moved on’.
Eh... Some of the Twin Peaks fans are at least fun to be around. :~p
RE: “Episode 1, season 1.
That was the first and last episode I watched.”
****************
AGREE — and I’m not sure I even lasted the entire first episode!
And perhaps part of my problem is that by the end, I just didn’t care a lot about Jack. I cared about other characters, including those simply swept aside as extras or plot devices. In fact, one thing I did really like about the ending was finding out that Frank Lapidus was still alive because he’s one of my favorite characters.
That’s fine you enjoyed the show ending. I am just saying I was disappointed because it appeared that midpoint they were able to salvage a decent storyline out, but in the end they to me, and apparently a lot of others, finished it off in a way that did not live up to the writing of the last two years.
That’s true as long as they aren’t permitted to discuss “who killed Laura Palmer” or say anything about coffee and cherry pie. Ahhhhh....
Agreed. I always found Locke and Desmond to be far more interesting than Jack. And Desmond became even more fun in the end. And I think the man in Black was more interesting and complex than Jacob... who may have been a very nice guy, but his people... I didn’t trust. Seemed like everyone who served, or *thought* they were serving Jacob, manipulated and abused people into doing what “Jacob” wanted. At least the man in black was honest. That’s one of the things I want to look for when I watch it again.
And yeah - what’s not to like about Lapidus. :~)
Here we are going to agree.
My hope was that since Desmond was unique, he survived the electromagnetism and "discovered" the alt-universe. Once he became aware of it (and it's possibilities), he began to bring the others "over" and joining themselves into a happier 'whole'..
I was hoping Jack would heroically kill the MiB and sink that damned Island and would wake up in the happy-ever-after AltWorld.
Yes, but Jack's son David didn't feel fake to him or his mother Juliet, did he? Like I said earlier, if I suddenly found out that my two daughters weren't real and I didn't have two daughters, there would be no other issue on my mind and I'd be damning the entire universe to Hell for taking them away from me. But Jack and Juliet finding out David doesn't really exist? Nothing. Jin and Sun after seeing their baby (probably not Ji Yeon) and finding out he or she doesn't exist? Nothing. Claire gets to have an infant Aaron so is he an eternal infant in Heaven or just a prop so Claire can be some sort of eternal mommy?
Other shows have dealt with this much better. In Journeyman, the lead character had to deal with choosing to make one child not exist in order to make the child he knew exist by changing the timeline because he couldn't have both. In FlashForward, it was important for a character to get pregnant at a specific time so she could have the baby she saw in the future rather than just any baby.
I think this point also has me bothered. For all this speculation about the afterlife here, nobody ever talked about God or their relationships with God save for the older interracial couple. You can say “well they lived their faith/what they believed” and that’s all fine but unbelievers live the way they believe too. as far as the interracial couple that was the ‘faith’ couple they never wanted to get involved with anything going on on the island, like both sides are bad and the only thing they are concerned with is each other. That’s not a Christian mentality. Most Christians are not Amish and isolated themselves from the world.
It’s like what if secular people decided to try to write a story about the human spirit but let’s have human power and love be enough to create an afterlife for people of all religions, because the personal relationships they have with each other is enough for them to exist after they die.
Just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I guess I’m too literal. I wanted things explained a little. Nothing was. If I wanted a confusing, ethereal, misty ending, I’d go back and watch memento or something.
Plus, amen to former complaints about slow and draggy. I watched the first year and I watched this year because it was supposed to end.
I’ll never get those hours back, but I would probably just waste them on something else.
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