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.
Who was the girl that Hurley was with? She had a nice rack.
I can like it and *still* think this is a pretty good analogy :~D
The difference is if they bring in some sort of adult Aaron he needs to be introduced to the audience. Also since the gathering was Jack-centered and the oldest version of Aaron Jack ever saw was still a young child. There’s no reason to include anything other than a newborn Aaron in the scene, that fits with the continuity of what’s been happening in the alternate reality, and saves you screen time on introducing a new actor for no good reason.
Again with the Jack’s son thing, this is becoming an unseemly obsession. Let’s look at all the things Jack had to deal with in that 2 minutes: finding out he’d survived a plane crash, that crash landed him on a magical island, on that magical island he had many adventures including being beatup and otherwise wounded, that he’d gotten off the island and turned into a raging alcoholic, that he’d met his true love on the island but driven her away, that he’d gone back to the island and become its protector just long enough to die, and that his son wasn’t real. Jack had a whole lot of baggage in that scene, and it’s not like anybody else talked about the differences between their real life and their alternate life, if you have Jack start discussing that then you need everybody to discuss it.
It’s not a matter of proving them wrong, it’s a matter of establishing what is right. The fact that SOMETHING was real was important, the fact that the people who died in the show DIED IN THE SHOW not before the show is important. It’s a dramatic change to the nature of the show if both the Island AND the alternate are both afterlife experiences, it’s a completely different TV show. Just look at all your griping about the implications of the part that was the afterlife, now look at the implications if it turns out the WHOLE THING was afterlife. Then Aaron and Ben and Jacob and Dharma and their personal relationships all become fake.
It all being real is interesting too. But that’s not the story they decided to tell.
It happens, people write themselves into problems, and the preferred method of handling that is to just ignore it. Like in the Big Sleep, even Raymond Chandler has no idea who killed Owen Taylor. Kids present a regular problem on TV shows, because they grow, they change physically at a rate that’s highly inconvenient for TV producers. Remember the first 4 seasons of this show take 108 story days, the actor that played Walt just plain outgrew the role. And it’s a problem you deal with the same way Raymond Chandler did, you move on and hope nobody notices.
Having Sun convince Jin to leave would have completely SHATTERED their story arc. Their arc was about them getting together FOREVER, if Jin leaves, even at the urging of Sun, they aren’t together, arc dies with no payoff. Hurley’s arc wasn’t about getting together with anybody, it was about accepting himself as not just a fat loser, getting a girl interested in him is a step to that process, and ending with the girl is a nice reward for a job well done, but the payoff of his arc was him becoming the new Jacob.
Ben’s already dead. There really aren’t any possible negative side effects to him enjoying being a nice person with the adopted daughter he loved for a while. And anyway he needs to gather together his favorite Others for their trip to the beyond.
Abrams forked reality in Fringe, Lost wasn’t about forking reality, that’s not the cake he wanted.
Sorry but you’ve complained multiple times about the lack of science fiction explanation.
I don’t think the writers made any promises they didn’t keep. I think you and others made a lot of assumptions, but the promises were kept. We got a character driven story, this is what they said it was over and over, in every interview.
Dude, you have WAYYYYY more patience than I do, LOL!
And I'd have been much happier with the ending if they'd taken a cue from the season finale of Legend of the Seeker, which I watched after Lost to get rid of the "Meh." feeling it left me with. As many science fiction and fantasy writing books point out, just because it's fantasy doesn't mean anything goes. Readers expect a certain amount of internal logic. And some writing books go even further suggesting that fantasy and science fiction authors should identify and explain their departures from reality up front and limit them to avoid the reader being disappointed by what feels like a deus ex machina later in the story. This is not obscure advice and the authors of Lost didn't heed it. On the one hand, that helped them maintain mystery for six seasons but, on the other hand, it left quite a few people feeling disapointed.
The writers didn't provide an answer to any of the mysteries. We had a show with two different characters that talked to the dead and had two completely different methods and impetuses for that contact. Walt had some sort of telepathy but again we don't know why, how, or what the limits were. They just threw stuff out there, and the rare occasion there was an answer it was like the polar bear, which basically turned out to be just like the canned food, stuff left over from the Dharma guys. There really wasn't much technobabble at all, even the hatch and button basically boiled down to "there's a whole bunch of electromagnetism there, we don't know why, the Dharma guys were trying to get to it, they screwed up, now bad things will happen if not adjusted every 108 minutes".
There was technobabble related to the hatch, the Dharma experiments, getting on to and off of the Island (the safe bearings and the pendulum), the plane crashing, why pregnant women died, the presence of the bears, how the Black Rock wound up inland, and so on. They explained enough with plausible and scientific-like explanations that I don't think it was unreasonable for people to expect that everything could be explained that way. The writers expended at least some effort creating the illusiton of a technical explanation for what was going on.
You asked for a rational science fictiony explanation. This was the wrong show for that. Your obsession with Jack's fake son is really getting weird. Jack had other things to deal with at the time, he MOVED ON, you should to.
No. What I said was, "there are a whole lot of people expecting a rational science fictiony resolution," and even though I'm not disappointed by the show being more fantasy, I can understand why other people had those expecations and are disappointed that they weren't met.
As for Jack and his fake son, in case I didn't make it clear enough, what other things does a parent have to deal with that's more important than their child? If you answer is, "Jack and his own emotional landscape," then I think Jack didn't really learn anything about the island or from his fake son and it's still all about him.
I presume you haven't seen the movie The Forgotten or found the plot to that weird and inexplicable, then?
I don't see how any of it could be explained by Jacob not interfering in their lives. For one thing Jacob really didn't interfere with their lives, for another none of the EVENTS of their lives had changed, only how they were DEALING with them was different. Jack was still the son of a supersurgeon who fooled around and drank too much and managed to drink himself to death in a foreign country, the only change was Jack no longer hated his father and feared his shadow. Hurley still managed to win the lottery with those numbers, Jacob never caused any of those problems, for all we know he didn't even cause the numbers to be a big deal, but Hurley could handle the situation which he couldn't before.
So then what was the point of Jacob showing up and giving people advice? Jacob gave Sawyer the pen that he used to write his revenge letter. Jacob approached Jack during an argument with his father after an accident during his first surgery. Jacob prevented Kate from being punished for shiplifting as a child. He gave advice to Jin and Sun at their wedding. He touched them all and who knows what that did or what else he did with, for example, Locke's father who wound up on the island? A very small change in a person's past can change their future and if you remove Jacob from any of those key scenes (e.g., maybe Sawyer doesn't write his letter, Jack's emotional reaction to his father after the argument is different without Jacob's intervention, Kate is punished for shoplifting, etc. and maybe Sawyer never becomes the obsessive con man, Jack has a better relationship with his father, but Kate still winds up a fugitive, etc. What I'm suggesting here isn't any more of a stretch than the things you think people should just accept.
I don't think any of it was undermined by showing the alternate reality wasn't really an alternate reality. The clues were there that it wasn't just any old alternate reality all along. I didn't start picking up on them until Tuesday's ep, but it was always there, I hadn't figured out the pocket heaven thing, but I did figure out this was not just "life without the Island". That's the fun part of this kind of show, it's all about when you pick up on the clues. I'm betting when I go back and rewatch I'll see stuff that shows it's the afterlife, I'm going to pay more attention to Hurley, I think he's the key to understanding pocket heaven because he's the one who seems to be enjoying it the most. And yes they could have made them both real, but I'm betting when they saw the audience theories that the Island was a way station on the way to dead they decided that was way too fun an idea not to play with.
It was clear to me from the beginning that it was "life without the Island" but what I don't understand is why it had to be fake. As for Hurley having the most fun, he has the most fun wherever he is. Remember the golf game?
Initially I was with you, until I noticed how happy most of the characters were. That's when I decided the alternate reality was more alternate than just their lives without the Island.
I think it's more alternate than just their lives without the Island but I think it could have been explained by their lives without the Island, the influence of Jacob, the Dharma project exiting the Island, and changes in all of the other people touched by Jacob and the Island, perhaps even retroactively back in time.
The show wasn't silent about it. Christian explicitly told Jack (and us) that the people present died at various times and some were "long after" Jack died, that the reality they were in now was of their own unconscious creation, and that the focus was people important to Jack while he was on the Island. Hurley told Ben he was a great Number 2, and Ben said Hurley was a great Number 1, so we know Hurley did something interesting enough to be called great, and to leave both of them feeling happy with their time there. they didn't delve into the details, but these things were clearly not ignored.
I got all of that. But you were saying that I was "deliberately ignoring" some of the remaining mysteries in order to be underwhelmed. I just didn't consider their being left unresolved (e.g., how long Hurley was #1) to be a problem but I also find it difficult to be wowwed by something that they leave unexplained.
One alternative is to not have Aaron at the end at all. Another alternative was to leave Claire pregnant at the end, like Sun. They picked the baby Aaron because they wanted the birth revelation, which I get, but I didn't find where they went from there satisfactory. They just sort of punted it. They created the cosmology and they have some responsibility to make sure it really makes sense, not just "sorta sense", and expect the audience to avert their gaze from the mess. Anyone can write a mess and it's not the sign of good writing to leave a mess laying there.
Again with the Jack's son thing, this is becoming an unseemly obsession.
Children matter to their parents. It's often a point of obsession. I ask, again, do you have kids?
Let's look at all the things Jack had to deal with in that 2 minutes: finding out he'd survived a plane crash, that crash landed him on a magical island, on that magical island he had many adventures including being beatup and otherwise wounded, that he'd gotten off the island and turned into a raging alcoholic, that he'd met his true love on the island but driven her away, that he'd gone back to the island and become its protector just long enough to die, and that his son wasn't real. Jack had a whole lot of baggage in that scene, and it's not like anybody else talked about the differences between their real life and their alternate life, if you have Jack start discussing that then you need everybody to discuss it.
And my point, again, is that to a parent, losing a child (because that's what it essentialy is) should rank up near the top of things he's reacting to. And while, yes, talking about the fake life experiences would have opened up a can of worms, the authors created that can of worms with the fake life in the first place and leaving it closed and pretending it didn't exist was very unsatisfactory to me.
It all being real is interesting too. But that's not the story they decided to tell.
The question isn't whether it's the story they decided to tell but whether it would have been a better way to have the story go than what they decided.
It happens, people write themselves into problems, and the preferred method of handling that is to just ignore it. Like in the Big Sleep, even Raymond Chandler has no idea who killed Owen Taylor. Kids present a regular problem on TV shows, because they grow, they change physically at a rate that's highly inconvenient for TV producers. Remember the first 4 seasons of this show take 108 story days, the actor that played Walt just plain outgrew the role. And it's a problem you deal with the same way Raymond Chandler did, you move on and hope nobody notices.
And that's a lazy and cheap solution, and people shouldn't be surprise if, when people do notice, they aren't happy with it. The impression I got from several of the scenes in the finale, because of the music and emotions and so on, was that they were hoping to just carry the whole thing along on emotions. From a pure vicseral level, I think the finale succeeded in many ways just like James Cameron's Avatar did. Where it failed (and where Avatar fails) is when one thinks about it.
Having Sun convince Jin to leave would have completely SHATTERED their story arc. Their arc was about them getting together FOREVER, if Jin leaves, even at the urging of Sun, they aren't together, arc dies with no payoff.
The payoff is at the end, where they are finally together in the alternate reality and death. All the submarine death did was assure that their two corpses were together, at least until the natural decay process carries them apart.
Hurley's arc wasn't about getting together with anybody, it was about accepting himself as not just a fat loser, getting a girl interested in him is a step to that process, and ending with the girl is a nice reward for a job well done, but the payoff of his arc was him becoming the new Jacob.
I honestly don't see Hurley as having changed all that much. I thought he was pretty much a constant, which is why I expected him to get the Jacob gig at the end. Yes, he has to get over the fear that he's cursed, but he was still a lottery winner in the prime reality who owned the company John Locke worked for.
Ben's already dead. There really aren't any possible negative side effects to him enjoying being a nice person with the adopted daughter he loved for a while. And anyway he needs to gather together his favorite Others for their trip to the beyond.
The side effects are that he doesn't grow and move on. Another negative side effect is that he gets to see a daughter that he simultanously can remember being mercilessly murdered on the Island. That sort of escapism rarely fares well in fiction and didn't really fare well in Lost, either.
Sorry but you've complained multiple times about the lack of science fiction explanation.
Because I think it's a legitimate complaint at the root of the disapointment felt by many unhappy with the finale. Even though it didn't bother me, personally, I do think the authors telecoped a science fiction explanation (that writing contract thing) and disappointed the people who fell for it, who felt like suckers. To some degree, fooling the audience can be an effective storytelling device (i.e., Scream) but there are reasons why science fiction and fantasy writing books advise against playing around with the rules of the setting anywhere other than the beginning of the story.
I don't think the writers made any promises they didn't keep. I think you and others made a lot of assumptions, but the promises were kept. We got a character driven story, this is what they said it was over and over, in every interview.
They promised more than that. It's like Barack Obama running for President. The people who guessed which promises were true and which were lies aren't disappointed. The people who believed the lies and didn't belief the truth are the people who are unhappy with him. That plenty of people on this site could see right through Barack Obama's lies doesn't mean that it's all the fault of the people who believed him for falling for his lies. Trust isn't necessarily a bad thing.
All I can say is that if you made a grown man of 58 cry four times in two and a half hours, you’ve done something right.
Heck.....that’s bordering on another miracle.
I don’t care what in the heck you do—you can argue back and forth until the end of time for all I care.
I was just saying that discostu was a much more patient person than I.
Sorry you’re a bit touchy about the subject...didn’t realize how important it was to you.
Carry on (salute)!
Awwww :)
The whole show wasn’t purgatory (or whatever), just the extra bits this season were.
If I remember correctly Mr. Eko had to leave the USA for some reason and they wrote him out of the show because he couldn't come back in time for the shooting schedule.
According to IMDB, you are exactly correct. Walt hit a growth spurt and the writers had to get rid of him.
It was all Jack. Everyone in the show were just people Jack last saw on an airplane. He made it all up in his head (Davy Jones Locker) so that he would feel like he had accomplished something worthy of passing on.
Some people will watch anything!
My wife and I watched all the seasons on DVD, then watched this season live. We began to be disappointed during season 4, even more so during 5, then this season made it worse.
We were expecting answers, and looking forward to buying all 6 seasons on DVD to watch again. Thankfully, we’re going to save a couple hundred dollars.
We were very satisfied with the last two episodes of Season 6; and we were especially satisfied with the ending for all the characters.
But, the Island was a main character throughout the show, and they answered zero questions about the island. At the end, Hurley gets to protect the island. Great! Who the hell cares? We don’t even know why the island is special. That seemed to be a very important part of the show.
You can argue that the island was just the vehicle that carried the character development, but I say that you could have done that without all the sci-fi theories that just got left out of the picture. We liked Lost because of the characters, but we believe the island was a character, and the writers completely ignored it in the end.
Oh trust me, I agree on that, it almost made the entire time on the island seem meaningless, it’s still soaking in right now, the more on dwell on it the more it seems like the thing we joked about, that is, “It was all a dream” and while they didn’t portray it as that the results are the same. I would have ended it with Locke killing them all in a shocking epic struggle and then sailing off towards “real time” and the rest of Mankind, not only would this have been totally shocking but it would have kicked the doors wide open for LOST 2 in 5 or 10 years ...
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