The Lost Finale Was Incredibly Dumb

gawker ^

[JoeProBono]

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.

[GOPJ]

The show portrayed the classic battle between good and evil, free will, redemption and forgiveness.

It was a great ending too - when they had all died ( and that happened at different times ) they came together in a place that was timeless - and represented by all religions ( did you notice the stained glass?) They were bound by love ... here and hereafter...

[Question_Assumptions]

Do you blog? I mean seriously, I don’t agree with all of your points (and am not going to argue with them). But you’ve put a great deal of work into your posts on this thread. Fascinating observations really. Even if you are wrong. :-)

No, I don't blog because I respond to other people's point better than pontificating on my own. I didn't really have anyone to talk about the finale with so this is substituting for that.

I will point out that I do think Penny was significant in the sideways world because of the reaction of Eloise Hawkins when Desmond heard her name before the concert. Plus the obvious recognition (if not flashback) when they met in the stadium.

I get that there is a connection. What I'm saying, in a roundabout way, is that I think the metaphysical milieu created at the end is silly. Why goes back to the Matthew 22:23-32 passage that I quoted earlier in the thread. A group of Sadducees, who didn't believe in resurrection or Heaven, tried to trip Jesus up by postulating exactly the sort of scenario we see at the end of Lost. If a woman marries a man, he dies, and then she marries another man, who is she married to in Heaven? Jesus answers the question by saying by saying that, "At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven."

Whether you accept Jesus was really who Christians believe He is or not, that's the correct answer because, as the Sadducees realized in trying to trap Jesus, any answer that has people married in Heaven will fail the logic test once you are confronted with people's lives that continue beyond the lives of dead loved ones, including falling in love with new people. The idea that once slice of live is simultaneously the most important time of existence for over a dozen people isn't philosophically sophisticated enough to ponder any life beyond the show without causing problems.

At the end of Lost, these people were all portrayed as being tied together but that was just a slice of their lives. Even within the show, Kate spent three years raising Aaron and failing to have a relationship with Jack. Sun spent three years raising a daughter. Desmond spent three years having a son. Desmond, Kate, Sawyer, and Claire leave the island on the plane with Lapitus and hopefully live for years after that.

So Kate and Sawyer never get together now that Jack and Juliet are both dead? Do they never find anyone else as a soulmate? Do Desmond and Penny never develop any closer ties than they have with people that Penny barely knew? Does Kate stay with Claire to help raise Aaron? Does Kate have her own child? Does Clare never find a love better than Charlie, with whom she had a brief and rocky relationship? Yes, she was important to Charlie but was Charlie really that important to Claire? Basically, by putting them all in that church with each other, the answer is, "No." No matter how long they live, what they do, or where they go, the most important part of their live was their time on that Island or, in Penny's case, simply being hitched to someone who was on that Island.

If that's not the case, then the whole ending runs into the problem that the Sadducees tried to trip Jesus up with. I don't really find that endearing. I find it kinda depressing that even after death, the Island essentially won't let them go. Yes, it made for some nice scenes of all the characters back together in the same place finally happy, but dig too deep and ask too many questions and, metaphysically, it was a mess. And because I'd considered this before the finale, it was what jumped to mind for me.

The absence of their son (and no mention) did bother me.

How about Sun leaving Ji Yeon to go after Jin and then, when she's dying, neither Sun nor Jin consider that maybe Jin should live to see Ji Yeon. Especialy considering the sacrifices Jin's father made for him. Doesn't bother you?

Sorry, Ji Yeon. Mommy's not coming home and neither is Daddy. Ever. They had better things to do with each other.

That's where the whole Sun and Jin thing, which were probably two of the characters I had cared the most for, went off the rails for me, even before the finale and even before they died. It seemed like Ji Yeon had become inconvenient for the authors so they chose to ignore her in the end. Had the alternate reality been a real alternate universe, it would have given them the chance to have Ji Yeon together and do right by her but then that turned out to be a fake. I had high hopes for that alternate reality but, nope, all fake.

[Question_Assumptions]

Penny was important to Desmond, who was a core character. That’s why she was there. Sorry you can’t see that.

I get it. My point is that your answer is always about what's important to Desmond, not about what's important to Penny. You don't consider or care about what Penny thinks or feels because she's not a real character in that context. She's there for Desmond. Desmond and the other people aren't there for her. She's like the wife that tags along with her husband as his friends when they go bowling so she can be with her husband.

We saw Dharma supplies get dropped with the Swan logo. And Ben’s gas attack happened 15 years after the incident. You asked what experiments: FIFTEEN YEARS. There were only a couple of months of time in between when the station was destroyed and when Ben moved the Island. And the magnetic surge from destroying the station is what allowed Mrs Widmore to figure out where the Island was. We are QUITE sure on most of this stuff.

Give me a laser printer and some adhesive and I can give you a crate full of cans with Dharma swan logos on them. This web page makes the case that Kelvin Inman was part of the original Dharma project, meaning that Dharma never sent a relief crew after it was exterminated on the Island, as you claimed. They were supposed to send a new crew every 540 days but after the gas attack, he was never relieved, which is why his partner committed suicide and he tried to stick Desmond with the button. You can find a ton of speculation about the supply drops here. Here is another page that speculates about when the Dharma project ended. What you should get from these pages is that it's not nearly as clear as you are claiming it is.

The second time the button didn’t get pushed they turned the fail safe key. We don’t know what would have happened if they continued to let it go. And we also don’t know which of the two times the build up went longest, could be the second time was shorter. Either way very bad stuff happened when the button didn’t get pushed, we saw it.

Yes, I've acknowledged that we see something bad happening (and I complained that, by contrast, what we see when the cork is pulled doesn't seem all that terrible). That's not my point. My point is that the solution, that prevented the need to ever have to push that button again, was to just blow the station up with the failsafe. When they did, it stopped being a problem ever again. And because of that, I speculated that we don't know if they just let the Island sink that that wouldn't simply have been the end of it and nobody would ever have to be stuck there as the caretaker ever again.

Pulling the cork was going to kill the Island. Nobody said pulling the cork would release any evil, just that it would destroy the Island and Smoke wanted to kill the Island as well as escape. We’re pretty sure Smoke could leave with the right combination of people, knowledge, and lack of a Jacob, he didn’t have to destroy the Island to leave, he just wanted to.

OK. So why not destroy the Island, then?

We were all curious about the contents of the briefcase, but the contents weren’t intrinsically important. We were all curious as to how the Island does what it does, but the how isn’t intrinsically important. Yes some people who don’t get the concept of MacGuffins will be disappointed. Can’t satisfy everybody. On the other side if you do explain the MacGuffin you tend to get a lame midichlorians explanation, which disappoints pretty much everybody.

What separates a MacGuffin from a not-MacGuffin or is everything a basically a MacGuffin? And, while the midichlorian explanation was awful doesn't mean that all such explanations are awful any more than one corrupt Republican politician means that all Republicans are corrupt. All it takes is being a better writer than George Lucas which, given the last three Star Wars movies that he made, isn't all that difficult.

If you’ve gotten to the last 10 minutes of the last episode in the 6th season and still haven’t established that your characters are human and deserve empathy you probably didn’t manage to get high enough ratings to get 6 seasons.

Oh, I cared about quite a few of the characters and still think the series had a lot of good parts to it. I simply didn't care about Jack all that much until I saw him in the alternate reality and interacting with his son, and then got told that was all fake. I liked the alternate Jack a lot better than the Island Jack. I still cared about Hurley and liked the alternate reality reunion with Libby quite a bit (especially when I though it was real and thought they might actually get a life together), and Sawyer, as well as characters like Miles and, of course, Lapidus. I cared about both Desmond and Sayid but Desmond became sort of a grinning lobotomy patient after the electromagnetic blast and Sayid became a sad-sack zombie after hid death. The submarine death was really sour for me because I see it as disappointing and a waste, not romantic. Sorry. Kate just sorta seemed there near the end, which is ironic since she was originally the main character of the show before they decided to go with Jack. I also cared about a lot of the B characters including Miles, Penny, Helen, Faraday, Charlotte, and, of course, Frank Lapidus.

Jack showed a lot of depth and humanity all season. Sorry you missed the scenes after Juliet died, after Sun and Jin died, and when he took the gig as Island protector.

I saw the same scenes you did. To be fair, there were some good scenes. After Juliet died was good. Supporting Hurley when he decided to go talk to "Locke" was good. Putting the cork back and dying was good, too. I liked the scene with him on the ground, with Vincent, watching the plane fly away. Good stuff. But Jack was so often absorbed with himself that I just got tired of it, and that reappeared when he took the gig as Island protector. That was the same Jack who was certain he needed to blow up the nuke that killed Juliet.

We knew Faraday was wrong about his theory when the bomb went off and the people were still on the Island. We didn’t necessarily know the details, but we knew he botched it.

Sure, but we had no way of knowing in what way he was wrong and the clues they were giving pointed to an alternate reality explanation, not simply a stopping the time travel explanation. After all, exploding the bomb should have changed history since the Swan wreckage was carried into the future, right?

Hurley volunteered to go back with Jack, which meant saving the Island or die trying. And he mostly didn’t want the gig because that meant acknowledging that Jack was going to die. Hurley all but said that when he said he’d give the job back as soon as Jack came out of the cave safe and healthy. He was willing to take the job, but he liked Jack, Jack was the first person to ever show any confidence in him, Jack was a major father figure to Hurley. He wasn’t ready to accept Jack’s death, which had to happen to take the job.

Which is all fine and well, but it wasn't being particularly assertive.

Might as well have a girlfriend when you’re in alternate universe. Helen was a part of Locke’s crippled off Island life, which Locke was desperate to never be a part of again. Being able to walk was much more important to him than anybody we knew off Island. Notice he walked into the church, he had what was important.

But in the alternate reality, she wanted him to walk, too. Yes, he walked into the church but he walked into the church alone. Even Ben didn't go in with him. His desire to do things alone was one of his character flaws, too. Remember, "Nobody does it alone, Jack." But it seems Locke never really got that message, did he?

You picked the wrong characters to care about. Helen was always at best a throw away, which is unfortunate because I always liked the actress, but her character was never going anywhere, it was kind of a shock to see her back at all in 6.

Yes, I picked the "wrong" characters to care about but that doesn't change my disappointment over the way they were handled in the end.

Frank was a pretty awesome character. I never said they skimped on characterization because it plot based. I said doing what you wanted them to do with the end would break the narrative structure and needlessly waste screen time.

It wouldn't have taken all that much to fix the ending for me, though it would have been a different ending than we got. Make the alternate timeline real and a reunion of all of the characters real, rather than spiritual, because Desmond allowed their memories to bleed across from the Island. That would have fixed just about everything I'm complaining about, even Sun and Jin dying without considering Ji Yeon because she would have had them both with her in the alternate reality. It also would have eliminated all of the Dallas comparisons and confusion over what was real or a dream. No, it wouldn't have made a metaphysical religious statement about dying and the afterlife but I thought that was pretty cheesy New Age nonsense, anyway. If they wanted the New Age nonsense, they could have tacked on a more detached church scene with Christian Sheppard welcoming Jack in.

I also think it's increasingly clear to me that the authors really had intended the Island to be purgatory and then changed course when too may people guess that answer. All the clues were there and even claiming that Jack's last scene would be what they filmed would have fit that interpretation. That's also likely why they added so many misleading clues about the alternate reality, to avoid having people pop their purgatory bubble yet again.

I don’t think Jack had resolved any of his daddy issues when he died. He never really got the chance. And he certainly didn’t accept his death. While he went in knowing he was going to die, he managed to get of there and get back to the bamboo before finally dieing. There’s a difference between willingness and acceptance. Jack kept fighting to the end.

That's not how I saw the scene, nor what we saw of his daddy issues later in the show. I don't think it was necessary to have an entire alternate reality with fake son to sort that out. You're complaining about wasting a few minutes emoting at the end and as I see it, they wasted a big chunk of the last season on alternate events that weren't real and ultimately didn't amount to much of anything, as you pretty much keep telling me each time I suggest that David or Helen should have been important. They weren't, really. None of it was because it wasn't real and didn't really impact the end.

All your “reasons” are fine. But you’re ignoring what I said. I said every show drops characters and plots without explanation. All those characters I mentioned evaporated without explanation within the show. They all had potential plots and they all just POOFED away. Just like the ones in Lost you’re complaining about. It happens. Characters go poof.

There is a difference between something that gets dropped because of reasons beyond the writer's control (e.g., the actor playing Walt growing up too fast) and the authors simply dropping it because they don't care, get distracted, or are too lazy to deal with it. And some shows do a much better job of avoiding loose ends than others. Yes, it happens, but it's not a good thing. It's not generally something to be embraced and encouraged. It's something that gets done by mistake or by bad writers. It's like canon inconsistencies and story contradictions. Yeah, it happens, but it's not a sign of good writing. It's a sign of bad writing. And, as such, it's not exempt from criticism. Read some writing books. Play in some role-playing games. They all talk about this stuff and deal with it.

I don’t think any of those poofs are “flaws” in B5 or lost that deserve derision. I’m pointing out a basic reality that you’re adamantly ignoring. Characters and plots evaporate when they become inconvenient. It happens. Deal with it.

I think the way the exit of Talia Winters was handled deserves derision because it was awful. I think the horribly one-sided love letter to labor unions that pokes fun at Rush Limbaugh (the "Rush Act") was pretty awful. But for the most part, Babylon 5 tried to tie up the loose ends. Yeah, it happens but I don't have to like it and I have no obligation to sit down and shut up about it when I don't like something.

Watch Farscape Crackers Don’t Matter and Star Trek’s hate monster episode. There’s others too, all the ones that were recommended to me were ripoffs of bad eps of Trek. Farscape is a grossly overrated show.

Television shows steal plots from other television shows all the time. "It happens. Deal with it." Did that suggestion solve your problems with Farscape and make you like it? Of course it didn't, because it's nonsense as an excuse. If something doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. And if it's fair game for you to call Farscape "unwatchable", why isn't it fair game for someone else to call the Lost finale "Incredibly Dumb"? Either such aesthetic judgments are fair game or they aren't and that doesn't change just because you like one television show and don't like another.

There was backlash against the entire final season of B5. A lot of people still hate it. Most of what hurt the season was all the plot points that got pulled forward into 4 because of the uncertainty. But there’s a big bunch that considers the series over after 4 because of their hatred of 5. IMHO some of the best eps are in 5, the fall of Centauri eps are amazing.

Of course there was a backlash against the fifth season because Claudia Christian was gone (she had a big following) and a lot of it seemed kinda pointless and tacked on. People can and do react to the quality of what they are watching based on what they care about in the show. That said, I agree there were some great episodes, including Neil Gaiman's Day of the Dead, which illustrates the right way to deal with a metaphysical encounter with dead people and treated bit characters from earlier episodes with the sort of respect I wish Lost has treated their bit characters with.

The complainers are always going to make more noise than the people that are happy. But I think there’s more people that liked the end of Lost than hated it. It’s certainly getting more positive reviews.

I see both kinds of review and I'm sure there are plenty of people in the middle. Overall, I still liked the series and don't think I wasted six years watching it. But that doesn't change the fact that I was disappointed by elements of the last season and found a lot I disliked in the finale. But you also need to bear in mind that by the last season, Lost had lost roughly half of the audience it started with. While at least some of that was probably due to how ratings are counted and things like DVRs, Hulu, and the people who watch shows on DVD when a full season is out, it's clear that Lost lost quite a few people before it got to that final episode. In almost every discussion I've seen about the finale. there are comments by people who said, "I stopped watching in season X" (usually 1-3 but also 5, because some people seem to have gotten fed up with the time travel, which I actually liked). That Lost kept changing as it went on kept in fresh, but it also lost some of it's audience each time it changed because when it changed, it changed something they liked into something they didn't.

And while I do think there were some very real flaws to the last season and the finale, what much of my complaints boil down to is an explanation of what didn't work for me and why. Like I said earlier, if you enjoyed the last season and ending, by all means don't let me take that away from you.

[fr_freak]

If you remember her incomprehensible dying words at the bottom of the well in Season 6 Episode 1, she asked James if they could get coffee sometime, and that they could go dutch.

Those were the same words she said to James at their mutual sideways-world awakening in the Finale.

I wish that is what the writers would have done, but it didn't go that way. Juliet only said "We should go for coffee sometime" after she and Sawyer touched hands and had a flashback. In fact, just before she says "We could go dutch" she has the flash memory of saying that on the island, so it's almost as if she's saying these things as she remembers them, rather than there being any independent bleed over.

[Junior_G]

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.

But that isn't what the writers did. There is a huge difference between "letting viewers figure some stuff out" and forcing viewers to make up their own theories out of whole cloth because the writers couldn't figure it out on their own. It's like displaying a blank canvas in a modern art museum. Sure, you'll find plenty of people who will say it's "brilliant", but the fact remains that it's an uninspired piece of crap.

I was very surprised at how completely unclever the series finale was.

[Corin Stormhands]

Okay some of what you write is just more analysis that I want to put into a TV show that I enjoyed for the last six years. More to the point, it’s a TV show, not a theology.

I think I mentioned this upthread, that on Jimmy Kimmel following the finale, Daniel Day Kim did say that not mentioning Ji Yeon had troubled him and had generated a significant amount of negative comment. But the reality came down to the need to have a significant moment with Jin and Sun. It was a judgment call the producers/writers made for the impact of that scene.

I think they tried to remedy that by the hospital scene where they see the baby on the ultrasound. I’m not sure it worked. Obviously for you it didn’t.

[Question_Assumptions]

Okay some of what you write is just more analysis that I want to put into a TV show that I enjoyed for the last six years. More to the point, it’s a TV show, not a theology.

Sure, maybe it's close enough for TV work, but I didn't get any profound and useful insight from it.

But the reality came down to the need to have a significant moment with Jin and Sun. It was a judgment call the producers/writers made for the impact of that scene.

I think that scene would have had plenty of impact if Sun convinced Jin to leave for the sake of Ji Yeon, having them both realize that it's not just about them (real character growth), and then had Jin leave the Island without Sun, only to be reunited at the Church at the end, perhaps telling Sun what it was like seeing Ji Yeon grow up. It wouldn't have fulfilled some sort of need the writers apparently had for them to die together, but wasn't the point of the end that everyone can die at different times and it doesn't really matter? And what they had to sacrifice to get that scene just wasn't worth it, in my opinion. Even the actor playing the part apparent realized that the decision for Sun and Jin to forget about Ji Yeon just didn't ring true to the characters. As such, the authors abandoned the character-driven story they claimed they were writing to hit a plot point they wanted to hit.

I think they tried to remedy that by the hospital scene where they see the baby on the ultrasound. I’m not sure it worked. Obviously for you it didn’t.

Oh, I think the hospital and the alternate reality would have been an excellent remedy for it, except that the hospital and the alternate reality weren't real. The changes needed to fix these problems were relatively minor and had the alternate universe been real and the church scene in some misty and distinct future, I don't think any fans would be complaining that they wished the alternate reality had just been a fake dream.

[mad_as_he$$]

I came to the same conclusion. Those who didn't get it were never in tune with the whole idea. Obviously it has been water cooler discussion all week and many are just clueless about the points made. Jack being such a hero in the end after screwing up his “real” life. Kate finally realizing she truly loved Jack. The fight between good and evil to control the Island and on and on and on.

I will add that IMHO the island had become on of the characters and in a sense we didn't really get closure on the Island it's self. Other than Hurly and Ben talking about how they ran it well.

[Corin Stormhands]

Perhaps, but then Jin living in the island reality and going home to Ji Yeon would set up a whole new series of conflict with Sun’s parents. They didn’t like him. He’s gone for three years. Their daughter disappears and he returns and says she’s dead.

Of course Jin could say “when I told your father you were dead he had me tossed out a window...”

:-)

[Question_Assumptions]

If I’m not mistaken, Sun took control of her father’s company before she left and left her daughter with her mother, suggesting she had things under control before she left. But even that uncertainty, or the uncertainty of the alternate reality where Sun’s father had tried to assassinate Jin, would have been preferable to the certainty that he got to die without even meeting her.

[discostu]

Penny was a minor character at best. So who gives a damn what’s important to her. She got maybe 20 to 25 minutes of screen time for the entire 6 seasons, she isn’t a real character in ANY context, she’s there for Desmond in every scene she’s in. That’s the nature of minor characters.

You’re deliberately missing the point. Yes someone COULD fake Dharma labels but why would they, within the context of the Lost world there simply is no reason for anybody to fake up a bunch of Dharma labels to put on stuff and dump on the Island periodically, it simply doesn’t make sense. You’d have to have somebody not DI that knows about DI, can find the Island, knows where Swan is on the Island, at least suspects there are people in Swan and wants to fool the people in Swan into thinking DI is still supplying them. Just plain doesn’t add up. It’s much simpler to figure form of DI still exists, probably not as large and well funded as it was in the 70s, hence the lack of replacements, but somebody is keeping the DI lights on somewhere.

All of which is of course a complete sideline to the original point, you said nothing bad happened when the button didn’t get pushed, but a plane got sucked 1000 miles off course and crashed, that’s bad.

What do you mean why not destroy the Island? That’s a question without meaning. Smoke tried to destroy the Island, the Jacob replacements have the job of NOT destroying the Island. Heck if nothing else they shouldn’t destroy because there’s still innocents on the Island, Bernard and Rose and possibly some Others and even Jacob cultists. Should at least keep the Island going long enough to get it fully evacuated.

MacGuffins are unexplained unexplored centers of a plot. Once it becomes explained it isn’t a MacGuffin. And you already know that. All such explanations have been awful. You brought up the end of Alias, one of the big problems with the end of Alias was that they de-MacGuffined the Rambaldi stuff and they would up stupid. That’s how it always winds up working, you have this cool mysterious unexplained thing and if they explain it the explanation winds up removing everything that made it cool and mysterious. The smart writers know to not mess with it, they know the unexplained will always be more interesting than the explained.

Well then you got attached to the wrong characters at the wrong time. Jack was plenty interesting to me before pocket heaven, and the kid wasn’t that interesting other than as a footnote.

We knew Faraday was wrong. That’s a good start to wonder if the flash sideways is really an alternate reality, a theory from a guy with a history of being wrong, or something else. Then when characters get their memories back those memories go to years (assuming they lived that long) after the time frame in sideways they were, that’s another good clue (given repeatedly) that it’s not some sort of alternate reality. The clues were there, they were missable but they were there.

I never said anything about assertive, I said Hurley gained self confidence, those are different character traits. He went from a guy who didn’t believe he could do anything, to a guy who still might need direction but no longer said he couldn’t do it.

Locke figured it out in the end, he let Jack operate on him and let Jack convince him to drop his daddy issues. Ben didn’t go into the church with him because Ben chose not to, had nothing to do with Locke’s decisions.

If the alternate timeline is real then you don’t have the characters coming to grips with their lives on the Island. And you have the problem of people in alternate reality 2004 “remembering” events in Island 2007, which is goofy at best. And it wouldn’t have eliminated any of the “confusion” about what’s real and what isn’t. Most of the people that are confused about that have been saying from day one that all the characters died in the plane crash, and those people would still be saying that.

Sorry I get the exact opposite. It’s quite clear to me that the author NEVER intended the Island to be purgatory. It had way too many interactions with the outside Island world from day 1 for it to be purgatory. That explanation was always silly and never grounded in the show.

It wasn’t an alternate reality, it was the anti-chamber to the after life. It’s not that uncommon a theory in religions (mostly Eastern) that there’s a waiting ground to the afterlife where you have to come to grips with your life and death before you can move on to whatever is next.

David and Helen weren’t important. One didn’t exist, and the other was the off Island SO of a guy who hated his off Island life so much that he would rather die than go back.

Characters that get dropped are characters that get dropped. It happens, it’s a standard part of arc TV, happens in all of them. No different on Lost than any others.

I didn’t care what it took to get rid of Talia Winters. I hated that actress, and it was great to get Lyta back through any means necessary, better character and a better actress.

The problem with Farscape was in the few eps I watched they always stole from Star Trek, they always stole bad episodes, and they stole them so poorly they actually made some of the worst eps TOS has seem good. Just plain not a good show. And I never said it wasn’t fair game for you to complain about Lost, I just think some of your complaints are silly, especially if you’ve actually taken creative writing classes. Most of your complaints want things to go in directions that any writing class would say is the wrong way to go, too slow, too many pointless scenes that don’t progress the story and needlessly draw out the end.

Both sets of reviews are out there, a 74 rating on Metacritic means 26% of the reviews are negative. But nearly 3 times as many are positive. I think most of the negatives revolve around people not having their pet theories confirmed, indeed having their pet theories basically ignored. A large part of the American public just isn’t into MacGuffins, they like everything explained in minute often boring details.

My biggest beef with the whole show, not really the last ep but the last season, is the whole Cult of Jacob. I had a hard time conceptualizing them, another group on the Island besides DI and the Others and the survivors that managed to go undetected all this time AND be recruiting people off Island and bringing them to the Island. I was really glad when they got offed, because they were just silly and beyond credulity for me. And given how wild Lost was for its whole run, that’s saying a lot.

[brytlea]

Yes, and I’m not positive, but the more I think about it, I think maybe Ben is not dead yet, but maybe he just wants to wait to move on (he seemed to need forgiveness from Locke, so maybe from others too...he did some bad stuff). Of course, I’m not one who needs a direct answer to every little thing, it’s ok if the authors leave a few things for me to figure out on my own, like, what happened to Kate, Sawyer, Miles, Frank and Claire? Clearly they got off the island and went on to live their lives til they died and reunited with their friends. I don’t think it really matters what happened, but if someone wants to imagine their lives, that’s fine. It’s just not important.
Some people want a story with a beginning, a middle and an end and they want every thing told to them. Fine. I like something a little more complex and puzzling that I can think about later. And one fun thing about Lost has been having those moments of...OH WOW (like the fact that Juliette said the same thing to Sawyer at the vending machine that she said to Miles after she died, even tho I didn’t recall it, how cool was that?).

[discostu]

That’s exactly what the writers did. They gave a bunch of info about how the Island behaves, how long it’s been around, and some important physical properties. But they didn’t get into how it got that way and why because that’s the territory of midichlorians, and that never goes well.

I’m glad the series finally wasn’t clever. “Clever” is usually just dopey.

[Question_Assumptions]

Okay some of what you write is just more analysis that I want to put into a TV show that I enjoyed for the last six years. More to the point, it's a TV show, not a theology.

I just want to add that I find it somewhat funny that after reading all sorts of comments claiming that the people who didn't like the ending aren't deep thinkers or didn't understand what they were seeing, I'm now getting accused of thinking too deeply about it. Maybe the problem doesn't lie in the people who didn't like it but in the show, itself, or simply differences in taste that have nothing to do with intellectual capacity or attention paid to the show?

(I'm not accusing you of making those claims but you can find them in this thread and elsewhere.)

[brytlea]

I think it’s hard to know what someone does in the stress of the moment (wife is trapped and is going to die) and he had never met the child. I don’t think it doesn’t ring true, and I think to put your own idea of what you would do in the situation is nice, for you, but doesn’t negate what the writers did for the character. It worked for me, and I suspect I’m not alone.
I just get the feeling that you didn’t care for the show, and so you keep trying to find reasons not to like the resolutions. That’s fine, there are plenty of shows I don’t like. But I was pleasantly surprised with what the writers did with this one. I so hope they do something else as good, altho I doubt they will.

[mad_as_he$$]

The only other thing I can add is Ben was the most beat on character in the history of television!

BTW I agree about the tiny things there are just some thigns more important ot me than other things. Being an engineer I am obsessed with how stuff works!!!

[brytlea]

Actually, what might be interesting would be to analyse what sort of people found the show and ending satisfying and what sort of people didn’t. Seems to definitely be two different camps on that. It doesn’t bother me particularly that some people didn’t like the ending, in fact, I feel bad for them, I would hate to have spent 6 years watching something only to feel let down by how the writers chose to end it. That would really stink. I was actually ready for that because I was afraid they would just sort of end it or go with the cheap ending, or not really tie things up.
The only people that bother me are the ones who clearly watched a season or two and are now saying how stupid the ending was. Or just come on the threads to tell us all how stupid the show was (and how wise they were to never waste their time on it. But for those who actually watched it and want to dissect it hey, go for it.
I bet there will be college classes on it in the future. I once got an English credit in college for reading and discussing the works of Kurt Vonnegut! LOL

[brytlea]

LOL to the engineer part. I am totally not an engineer (my Dad has that kind of a mind and two of my 3 sons do tho, so I hear about that stuff all the time!) And yes, poor bloody Ben, but he generally deserved it. ;)

[fr_freak]

...Those who didn't get it were never in tune with the whole idea. Obviously it has been water cooler discussion all week and many are just clueless about the points made.

Bah. I watched all 6 seasons from the beginning. I even watched a couple of those seasons over again in anticipation for the final season. Having a giant mystery (which has an answer) in your story and letting the viewer figure out a lot of it is one thing, but creating a mystery without an answer is another.

It is clear that most of the mysteries created by the Lost writers actually had no answer, even to the writers, themselves. They were simply throwing in weird stuff to bewilder the viewers but never had any idea where that stuff was going. To say, then, that anyone who wasn't happy with the ending didn't "get it" is asinine, because there was never anything to "get". The analogy to abstract art that someone made earlier is valid: you slosh some random paint on a canvas and call it art, and a whole bunch of suckers stare at it trying to figure out the "genius" of the painter, and what it all means. Some people love that kind of formless art, and feel superior that they can "get it" while others don't.

Hollywood is full of examples of art-house movies which are incomprehensible, yet people spend a great deal of time trying to figure them out as if there is some concrete reality behind it rather than random imagery. For example, I could make up a story where a woman is alone in a room, shrieking into a phone, "I need you! I need you. It's almost here!", then hears a knock on her door. She opens it and the person standing there is herself, holding a baby doll. Now you, as the viewer, could spend hours discussing what it all means, but it actually means nothing - I just threw in random stuff because it sounded cool and mysterious. There is no cohesive reality behind it. That is essentially the case with Lost. They probably had a sketch outline of the story ("A plane crash on a mysterious island where a bunch of weird stuff happens") but all of the details which filled out the first 5 seasons were just random imagery to keep people watching.

That is why I prefer the idea that everyone died in the plane crash initially, and the whole story was a purgatory of sorts, because that would remove the need for anything to make sense, and would allow for the story to be "all about the characters" as the current cop-out goes. I know that Christian said that all the time on the island was real, but just because the time spent on the island may have been in a different plane of reality than regular Earth life, doesn't mean it isn't as real, or as meaningful, and that could be what Christian meant. In fact, I strongly suspect that the writers had a purgatory/limbo theme in mind, but might not have liked that everyone figured that out so soon, so they changed their minds mid-stream.

[Corin Stormhands]

I would think that Mr. Paik was a good enough “businessman” to get the company back, without Sun in the picture.