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.
Not quite. In fact, possibly afraid that people might suspect a Christian theme, they made sure to adorn the "church" at the end of the show with a prominently-featured stained glass window containing the symbols of all the major religions. A big muslim crescent and star were in the upper left corner, the cross in the lower right, some other crap in other parts of the window... And no, I am not joking.
Kenny G stole Hurley’s hair from your #5 post.
That's a very nice, very artsy way of saying...COPOUT.
I can’t remember if Walt and his Dad were there at the end. I didn’t delete it yet tho, so I may rewatch that last scene.
I wish I could remember where I read whatever it was I read, but I can’t. And of course, it was likely wrong.
You know, I started because it was sort of sci fi ish, and kept at it because I liked the characters. My husband watched the first season, suffered thru the second and then quit, so I would TiVo it and watch it by myself. It certainly wasn’t for everyone. He did let me tell him about the ending, and I think he had seen enough of it that he more or less got it (yes, he loves me that much, he did listen! LOL). He had guessed early on that they were dead, but I think he thought it was more of a purgatory thing and that they died in the crash, which was clearly NOT the case.
All in all, a well done show. One of the writers is the son of a friend of my next door neighbor. I never can remember which one, and I don’t think she’s ever met him, but they are talented guys and what a career maker.
I wonder if someone will write a book that goes into details about questions. I don’t know if I really want to go there. I thought about the son, but really, does he matter? I don’t think he was real anyway, they were never married because that whole sideways life was not real. Maybe he was a kid who was also preparing to go on to his own afterlife.
Just read this morning that Dave Hahn made his record breaking (for a non-Sherpa) 12th summit. He was in support of Leif Whittaker who is the son of America's first man on top in 1963.... Jim Whittaker.
No, it’s the way good stories are told. Good stories expect more out of the viewer than to sit there like a lump with their brain off. And the best way to turn their brains on is to let them figure some stuff out.
Walt and Michael were not there in the end.
Walt escaped and was living with family in New York. (one of the problems was that the actor was too old and too tall to play the part).
Michael was trapped on the island because of what he did to Libby and Anna Lucia. He was not “redeemed” so to speak.
Penny was in the church because she was important to Desmond. Penny’s father either wasn’t awakened yet or, like his wife, had chosen to stay. Desmond was a big part of the core group, and instrumental in killing Smoke. It’s all quite logical actually.
The Dharma Initiative stayed long after the accident. And even after Ben killed them on the Island the off Island part of DI was kept bringing button pushers and supplies for the button pushers. Clearly they were leaving the door open for a return at some point. We didn’t see a full scenario because in the two times the button pushing was significantly late one of them it eventually got pushed (after bringing a plane 1000 miles off course and crashing it) and the second the bunker got sealed. We did see enough to see that clearly bad things do happen when the button doesn’t get pushed.
Just because the MacGuffin lacks intrinsic importance doesn’t mean the audience can’t care about it. Again, if the audience doesn’t care then they won’t believe the characters caring. You’re adding a “to them” to the definition that isn’t there, the definition stops at “lacking intrinsic importance”, but clearly the characters THINK it’s important and they make the audience THINK it’s important. And it doesn’t break that contract.
But then what? None of those reactions serve any purpose in the story, and they would all grind the narrative to a halt for nothing. All of them wind up with a pointless ellipses “Jack throws a tantrum and then...” “Jack demands time with his fake kid and then...”. By the time Jack gets awakened the story is OVER, time to end it, not dilly dally for 5 more minutes for Jack to prove he’s a deep character, he’s been the center of 6 years of story, it’s already been proved.
I didn’t say you should ignore what Faraday said, just keep in mind that he already had a long history of being wrong. He’s a bright lad, but not perfect, and he didn’t wind up wrong just in his back story, remember he theorized they all wind up off the Island, the bomb went off and they were STILL on the Island, he was wrong again.
He’s not taking Desmond’s lead, he’s following good advice. Even strong confident characters can take advice from others. The big difference between late Hurley and early Hurley is that Desmond didn’t have to tell him over and over eventually leading him by the nose, Desmond said go for it and he did. A far cry from the Hurley that had to be told 3 times by Jack that he could indeed help people after the plane crash.
Because Helen wasn’t that important to Locke. He’d moved on from her pretty well long before getting to the Island. Vastly different from the Penny-Desmond relationship. Desmond wanted off the Island to get back to Penny, Locke never wanted to leave the Island and get back to Helen or anybody else.
They’re that way in the pocket heaven because it fits the narrative structure easily. We don’t know anything about the other side, other than them wanting to get there together, making assumptions that they’ll be the same way on the other side they were when they left pocket heaven is just that, your assumption, unsupported in the story, and unsupported by most religions and mythologies, in general if you get to go to a happy afterlife you get to go in an “ideal” form, healthy, young but full grown. And they’re waiting because they all want on some level to go as a group, but they weren’t all ready.
Jack’s a man of science not faith, and he’s a fighter and a doctor. He has a long history through the entire show of not accepting death for other people, he’s just not an accepting death kind of guy. The funeral for his father was bodiless, while he was willing to go through with it it was clear he wanted the body there as part of accepting his father was dead. It would be hard for him to accept his own death when he still hadn’t accepted his father’s. Locke was pretty close to last, but he needed to jettison the baggage of his own father first, he was probably OK with his death, it’s his life that Locke always had issues accepting, part of why he never wanted to leave the Island. The kid was there for Jack to accept his daddy issues, letting down his kid in ways that his father probably let him down gave him a chance to move on.
I’m glad you brought up B5, because B5 had an advantage over other arc shows in that it had a well developed outline before any camera was ever loaded. And yet it dropped characters and plots all over the place. Whatever happened to the praying mantis guy that ran down below? Sinclaire’s girlfriend? Interplanetary Expedition? Thirdspace? There’s a bunch of conflicts between races that just kind of disappeared. Sinclaire and Sheridan were both involved in conspiracies, seemingly different conspiracies, that didn’t trust EarthGov that both evaporated. And then there’s half a dozen characters that JMS tossed aside with a quick “they got reassigned” (taking full advantage of the fact that most of his character were in some sort of semi-military).
I don’t do Chuck but I’m sure in 5 minutes on a good Chuck wiki I can find plenty of stuff. It’s a natural product of TV writing, ideas seemed good when they set it up, then didn’t later. Stargate is a mess, you only have to see the commercials to know they’ve re-arranged that universe a dozen times. Farscape was unwatchable and mostly just ripped off bad Star Trek episodes. None of your examples are holding. Plots get dropped, and you know it.
Doesn’t seem odd at all. Since we know most of the Islanders in pocket heaven were real, it’s probable the rest were too. Heck everybody might have been real but tied to their own stories. For all we know pocket heaven was like the alley scene in Shaun of the Dead.
A lot of people are ALWAYS going to be unhappy with the ending. The only way to avoid that is to have the show run so long after the audience cares that nobody actually watches. But with this one the happy seem to outnumber the unhappy, and it got plenty of viewers.
OK so Smoke took 4 bodies instead of 3. Big deal. Doesn’t change my point.
Yes, I recall that Walt escaped and was living with (his grandmother?) and I guessed he moved on and probably didn’t want to stay with the other people when he moved on in death—which seems to be what you do according to Lost theology. I wasn’t as sure about Michael, I couldn’t remember exactly what happened to him, over the years I did lose track of a few characters.
I really do want to buy the entire set and rewatch it in a few years. My youngest son is a big fan too and he said that sounds like a fun thing. Maybe we will take a family vacation somewhere. But it’s a little too soon.
I was sorry that Michael did not find a way to redemption because it seemed that he loved his son and only wanted to find him and save him. Maybe I missed something tho.
One thing I’m still working thru. Do you have any insight on what Juliette meant when she said “It worked” (I think she told Miles that, or he told Sawyer she told him that after she died). Does that ring a bell? I thought at the time she meant the bomb worked and it reset everything and the plane did not go down, but I’m a little unclear on what she meant now. Any idea?
Well, that's the whole problem in a nutshell, I think, and this has also helped me confirm my feelings about the new (JJ Abrams) Star Trek reboot. I'm a fan of the original Star Trek (above all other Star Treks) but I really like what Abrams did with the new Star Trek and enjoyed the movie a great deal.
But...
As soon as I look too closely at a few of the scenes and set or try to make sense of the main plot, it starts to fail on me. A lot of stuff is off, just a little, or doesn't quite fit together. The plot is just a loose structure to put the characters in certain situations and to feel certain things, like a sort of large scale Kobayashi Maru test, but it's not really a very good plot.
So I have two choices. I can enjoy it on a visceral level and have fun with it or I can dwell on the weaknesses and spoil it for myself. In that case, I do choose to "not go there" and give the plot a pass because the parts I'm giving a pass two just weren't very important to me. My ability to enjoy that movie doesn't depend on a solid plot holding it together because the one part of the plot I do care about, Pike daring Kirk to top his father, is rock solid.
I have a similar perspective on the movie Armageddon, which I now enjoy a great deal even though I originally hated it, because I realized that it really doesn't matter if the science or technology is ridiculous because the story is still a lot of fun. So, again, I can enjoy the movie if I don't go there.
The problem with that, though, is that it doesn't really excuse flaws, nor does it mean the writers and directors weren't being lazy. Had they spent a little more effort on the plot or the technology or other things, it would have been rock solid through and through, but instead I have to avert my eyes to ignore the flaws and enjoy the end result. I'm willing to do that, to a point, but I'm not necessarily going to give it a pass.
So where does that leave me with respect to Lost? To at least some degree, I was able to ignore the weaknesses through much of the show and, on balance, I think I'd still recommend that people who haven't seen it watch it, with the caveat that they shouldn't expect too much from last season or finale. The ride was incredibly enjoyable and there were some great scenes and stories along the way that made watching it worth it. But my problem with Lost, and why I'm complaining about it, is that they fumbled things I can't just compartmentalize away and ignore because they are things that were critical to why I enjoyed the show.
They claimed it was a drama about the characters, and I'm fine with that, but even the characters started to stop making sense in the last season and the finale. Sayid gets turned into some sort of moping zombie. Claire is crazy lady. Locke isn't really Locke. Richard goes back and forth about what to do. They waffle back and forth between everything that matters and just seem to muddle through it all. The characters just sort of slog back and forth and fumble along on the Island, the part that's supposed to be real. I didn't really like the way any of the characters played out on the Island, with the possible exception of Frank Lapidus.
One of my biggest disappointments was Sun and Jin and how that played out. Early on, Sun abandons her daughter, neither Sun nor Jin really say or do much (they even take away Sun's ability to speak English for a bit) and then they die, neither of them thinking about the daughter that Sun abandoned and Jin never met. The picture I posted in reply 218 (with a bit of dialog) explains why I'm not seeing a lot of redemption or good character logic in that scene. I think their ending was awful and pretty selfish rather than romantic. The whole "it's all about me" focus that you get in a lot of New Age pseudo-spiritualism seemed to be driving a lot of the end of the series and I find it pretty distasteful.
Far more interesting to me was what was going on in the parallel universe. Locke had another shot at Helen. Jack had a son he was starting to work things out with. The characters were dealing with situations that gave them a shot at a happy ending but still required them to sort some problems out. And then it turns out that was all a fantasy. I would have been happier if the last season on the Island was the fantasy because I didn't care that much about it.
So why can't I just "not go there" and ignore the throwaways and cry when the soundtrack wants me to cry? Because by the end, that's not the part of the show I cared about. Much of what I cared about (with a few exceptions like Frank Lapidus) were broken by the final season and final episode and ignoring that would mean ignoring why I kept watching the show.
I didn't want to see whether Sun and Jin die together or not. I wanted to see if Jin ever got to see his daughter, but in the end, his daughter became a throwaway. I was curious about Jack's son and how his mother was (a friend guessed Juliet) and so on but, that, too, became a throwaway. So did the alternate Alex and Rousseau. So did Helen. So was Ben's father. So a lot of the character drama I cared about in the last season turned out to be a throwaway.
The stuff I cared about on the Island didn't really pay off, either. I hated the way Sun and Jin died. I hated that Sayid spent much of the last few episodes as a sort of slack-jawed zombie with no character. I never much cared about the whole Jacob and his brother storyline, especially after finding out that their mother was murdered by the previous caretaker (she's the "good guy" protecting the world from "evil"?). And the whole idea of those particular people needing to wait for each other in the afterlife before going to Heaven just seemed more silly than satisfying to me, for reasons I explained in an earlier reply.
We had every reason to believe that at least some of those characters had more important times later in their life, including Sawyer, Clare, and Kate who escape and likely all play at least some role in Aaron's life. Why wouldn't Kate and Sawyer get together once they know Jack and Juliet are gone or maybe Sawyer would develop a relationship with his own child? But that ending hauls them all right back to the Island and plane as if that's the only thing that mattered and the only thing that will ever matter in any of their lives. From a philosophical and spiritual perspective, it just fails for me. Simply put, it means none of them ever really got to escape the Island.
Yeah, I loved seeing Frank Lapidus, Miles, and Richard getting the plane ready to go, the plane stopping for Sawyer, Kate, and Claire, and it flying over Jack at the end. Great stuff. There were other parts of the end I liked or at least thought were OK. Some of the rememberings worked really well for me while others didn't, perhaps because what the show flashed back to wasn't what I saw in the characters anymore. And while I think it had it's flaws, I think the whole uncorking, defeating the mortal smoke monster, and then recorking it worked OK for me, even though it seems to have some weak spots to it (e.g., If the smoke monster became mortal and non-magical, how did it wind up in a real Locke body, which it was in theory maintaining through some sort of magic, since the real Locke's body was show as a separate thing?). So I guess I wouldn't call it a total failure. But, on balance, it didn't leave me feeling satisfied. I was somewhere between indifferent and annoyed.
I'm going to try to watch it again when they repeat it (I think next Saturday) and see if my opinion of it changes at all, now that I've discussed it here and elsewhere.
I thought about the son, but really, does he matter? I don't think he was real anyway, they were never married because that whole sideways life was not real.
Yes, he matters if for no other reason than Jack's relationship with him and concern over him produced positive character development in Jack. To the sideways life Jack (and presumably Juliet and Claire and others who met him), he was real. Like I asked earlier, if someone suddenly told you that a person you loved, a child or other relative you loved, wasn't real, how would you react? And would being told, "Oh, he/she was never real so it doesn't matter," really make it not matter to you? Even if I were willing to just discard any feelings that I, as the viewer, might have developed for that character because he wasn't real, I find the lack of reaction by Jack (and Juliet and so on) as problematic to those characters. Are they really that shallow and self-centered that, like Sun and Jin, they'll casually stop caring about their own child?
Maybe he was a kid who was also preparing to go on to his own afterlife.
Sure, I could try to play that game but that will open yet another philosophical and theological can of worms and having considered such questions before, I don't see it ending well from the starting points given in the show.
By the way, if you enjoyed the ending, by all means keep enjoying it and don’t let me spoil that for you. I’m explaining my problems with it. I’m not demanding you have the same problems with it.
No idea on that one. I do seem to recall Miles giving Sawyer a message. Of course you never know with Miles, we do know he’s willing to lie about what the dead said to make people happy (and to make money). Or it could be the ghost of Juliet on the Island saw Juliet in the pocket heaven and made assumptions.
Michael was blown up on the freighter. He was there on behalf of Widmore and not Jacob.
I think Juliet’s message that “it worked” was that it reset the timeline.
Except as far as we can tell it didn’t, since that “timeline” was actually the entry hall to the afterlife. I’m leaning towards Miles was BSing Sawyer. Or there was a reset timeline but we never saw it.
Micheal’s problem is what he was willing to do to save Walt. He betrayed his fellow crash survivors to the Others, directing killing 2, then set the bomb intended to kill the rest and did kill the crew of the “rescue” boat. There’s a lot one can do to save one’s kid and stay a good guy, but multiple cold blooded murder of people who posed no threat to your kid is not on the list.
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