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.
I don’t think I ever claimed that people who didn’t like it weren’t deep thinkers.
I do tend to think that it can be over analyzed.
First the writers never expected to have to end it after 6 seasons, they went in thinking it was a one or two season thing and then it would just be canceled. The stuff that was thrown in was just that - I enjoyed many of them. Do you remember “Twin Peaks”. WTF was that?
I for one was not expecting anything profound at the end, just something that tied it all together and we got that. They all grew and changed in the process - for the most part into better people.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Nope. Not true. You may not have liked it. You may have thought it insufficient. But it was there.
Sorry you didn't "get" it.
So she was a prop and was treated as such by the writers. Exactly.
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.
You mean like, uh, Ben, the guy who killed the Dharma people, was part of the Dharma people, became a leader of the Others, is shown having a support organization off of the Island that can move materials and people to and from the island at will, and who took over the Dharma village and other infrastructure on the island, including other stations. Remember Ben? He wasn't just a minor character.
He's not DI but knows about DI, can find the Island and move people and materials onto and off of it, has every reason to know where Swan is, could have accessed the observation cameras in The Pearl that showed there were people in there and what they were doing, and fooling people is what Ben does for much of Lost. It's fits the MO of what we see Ben do in the show perfectly and we see Ben and his people do everything that you say needs to be done in the show. Further, it's clear from the encounter with Eloise and the pendulum that the Dharma people were no longer in control of the means they used to locate the Island, nor can I imagine Ben and the others tolerating periodic outsider overflights for years.
That adds up a lot better that imagining some phantom skeleton Dharma project that we never actually see that can skill routinely find the Island and send cargo planes over it but never tries to reassert control over it, and isn't snuffed out by Ben or Whidmore, who have extensive organizations able to murder people out globally. It doesn't mean your explanation couldn't work, but it's not the most likely explanation when one applies Occam's Razor and works with what we were shown in the show. It's also not the only sensible explanation or even the most sensible explanation.
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.
My point is this. They were told that they had to push the button or something bad would happen. You are correct that when they didn't push the button some bad things happened, but that misses my point, which was that they didn't have to sit there and keep pushing the button to prevent the bad things from happening. There was always another permanent way to keep the bad things from happening -- destroy the station with the self-destruct. For the latter part of the show, nobody was pushing any button and nothing bad was happening because the problem had been solved.
Now let's apply the same logic to the light and the cork. We're told that someone needs to be a guardian of the light by someone who is, if not evil, pretty amoral herself (the woman that murders Jacob's mother after she gives birth). We're told that the smoke monster is evil and if he leaves, he'll bring that evil to the world. So when Desmond pulls the cork, the light drains away and the island starts to fall apart and the black smoke monster actually becomes mortal (we'll ignore the question of why he gets to keep Locke's form even though the rest of his powers are gone). So from what we see, pulling the cork is actually a pretty good thing. It weakens evil. It's going to make the island go away. So what's the downside of letting the Island sink so that nobody has to protect it anymore? I'll get to why that question is important in a moment.
The parallel I'm drawing is that at the Swan station, pushing the button maintained the status quo, which meant that while pushing the button regularly kept very bad things from happening, it also sustained the conditions by which very bad things could happen in the future if someone failed to push the button and didn't destroy the station. It was basically a box of dynamite. The solution that resolved the problem once and for all, completely removing any present or future danger, was to simply destroy the station. Once the station was destroyed, not only didn't anyone ever need to push the button ever again but there was no longer any risk of the bad things that would happen if they didn't. The risk was removed.
Similarly, having a guardian of the light on the island maintains the status quo, which meant that while protecting the light may have prevented vaguely defined very bad things from happening, it also sustained the conditions by which those vaguely defined very bad things might happen in the future if a guardian fails to protect the light. Again, the light is basically a box of dynamite. When the cork is pulled, the light goes out, the very bad entity that's trying to leave actually loses his powers, and the Island starts to fall apart and sink. It's entirely possible that the solution solution that would have resolved the light issue for once and for all would have been to leave the cork out and light the Island sink, where it will not longer pose any risk or need a guardian.
We can certainly assume that it would have been bad to let that happen and that replugging the cork was the right thing to do, otherwise very bad things would have happened, but we don't really know that for sure. We aren't given enough information to know for sure.
What do you mean why not destroy the Island? That's a question without meaning.
That's like saying that suggesting destroying the Swan station was a question without meaning. Turns out that simply destroying the Swan station worked out pretty well in the end, didn't it?
Smoke tried to destroy the Island, the Jacob replacements have the job of NOT destroying the Island.
And Desmond was given the job to push the button and not destroy the Swan station, as was the person before them. Turns out that wasn't the only viable option. Destroying the Swan station worked fine, too.
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.
Fair enough, but aren't you the same guy that's telling me that Penny "isn't a real character" and has no problem with Jin dying to get a Kodak moment with Sun even if it means his daughter will grow up without her parents? Suddenly you are concerned about the bit characters on the Island and want the decisions the main characters to make take them into account? How does your argument go again? Oh, yeah, why waste an half-hour of screen time showing Jack and Hurley rounding up the survivors to make sure they get safely off of the Island before it sinks when the show could just ignore them and not worry about how their story turns out?
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.
That's imply not true. The Vorlons and Shadows in Babylon 5 started out as mysteries very much like those on the Island that were explained quite satisfactorily, as were the Reavers from Firefly in Serenity. It's simply not true that every time a writer sits down to explain a mystery in their story or setting that it comes out as awful as midichlorians did.
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.
That can work so long as the viewer can imagine or assume that there is an explanation that makes sense. A nonsense MacGuffin that the viewer can't suspend disbelief over is very bid as bad as a midichlorians explanation. But I'm not arguing that MacGuffins need to be revealed at all. What I'm saying is that revealing them isn't automatically a disaster. Perhaps I just missed it but I didn't see widespread dissatisfaction over the explanations of the Shadows and Vorlons offered in Babylon 5, nor did I see complaint about the explanation for the Reavers offered in Serenity, despite the fact that it was explained as a sort of space madness in the Firefly series. Was there any sort of midichlorian level of outrage over those explanations that I missed? Were fans cursing JMS or Joss Whedon for wasting their time? Or maybe some mystery reveals are satisfying, like the ending of Sixth Sense, and others aren't, like a lot of the later M. Night Shyamalan movies. It's difficult to get it right but not impossible, hence the accusation by some that it's lazy to not even try.
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.
Yup, I apparently picked the wrong characters to care about but that doesn't change how I felt about the final season and finale.
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.
As I explained, there are two types of mysteries: those designed for the viewer or reader to solve and those designed to be revealed at the end. I think that even though one can spot the clues in hindsight, this was clearly not a mystery they wanted the viewers to solve before the end. Other than some sort of lucky guess, nobody was going to figure it out, so I think it's silly to blame anyone in the audience for making the wrong guess.
And to toss your own argument back at you, the decided to answer a mystery about the ending and it came off like a midichlorians explanation to me. Aren't you the one claiming that's the inevitable result of answering such questions and wouldn't it have been better if they had just shown Jack dying on the Island and the people getting together in the alternate reality and realizing that they all knew each other in some other place and let the audience decide what the alternate reality is?
You are basically arguing out of both sides of your mouth here. When the show doesn't provide answers to the mysteries it raised, you claim that it's better that way because the answer is certain to be disappointing, yet when I tell you that I found the answer that they gave to some of the mysteries that they solved disappointing, you tell me that they had to answer them and it's my fault for not liking the answer. So which is it? Should they be answering mysteries or not?
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.
A self-confident person doesn't turn to Jack for approval or question whether he's qualified or not. Hurley is showing those doubts to the very end, to the point of picking Ben to help him out as his #2.
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.
You are missing my point. While Locke was with the group in the church, Locke ultimately was alone, unless maybe he hooked up with his sidekick Boone again, who was also alone. He didn't have a love interest like a Penny, Claire, Kate, or Juliet. His remained alone and without any real friends.
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.
None of that is impossible to explain, especially in a show that spent a large part of the fifth season on a time travel subplot. If Miles can meet his own father as an adult, how is it any more goofy to have them remember three years from an alternate timeline?
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.
So what?!? Aren't you the person arguing that MacGuffins should never be explained because the explanation will inevitably be disappointing? They explained the alternate universe to me. The explanation disappointed me. I'm saying that it would have been better off for me if they had never explained it because then I could just believe whatever explanation made the most sense to me and isn't that exactly what you keep arguing? Seriously, pick a perspective and stick with it. As for my own argument, in lieu of the explanation they did give, I offered up a few fairly minor changes that would fixed the problems that I and others had with the ending without undermining what people liked about the end that we got and that fits into my point about some mystery reveals being better than others. To make my point perfectly clear, in order of preference, a solid and widely satisfying answer is best. In the absence of that, maintaining the mystery with ambiguity is probably best, which fits your point about MacGuffins. The least desirable is an explanation that disappoints or angers a lot of the fans.
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.
What interactions did they have with the outside Island world in the first season? I'm honestly curious because that's not what I remember, hence the purgatory theories.
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.
It was also a fully functioning alternate reality and could just as easily have been that.
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.
David wasn't important... except that if he wasn't important to Jack, then how did David help Jack sort out his daddy issues and why would he worry about picking him up at the concert? Jack sure seemed to think he was real up until the point where he didn't. As for Locke hating his off Island life, wasn't coming to grips with that part of what he needed to move on? You want to explain the ending as characters coming to grip with their flaws and making peace with them yet want to use those flaws to explain elements of the end. Locke was an idiot for losing Helen. And don't forget that Claire's relationship with Charlie wasn't all that much stronger than Helen's was with Locke when Charlie died and maybe not even as strong.
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.
Doesn't make it good. Doesn't invalidate the feeling of people who don't like it.
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.
So you were indifferent to the story quality of how she was removed. Yes, being indifferent to the quality of story is one reliable way of being satisfied with whatever an author does.
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.
There are people who felt that Lost just plain wasn't a good show. There are people who think that Babylon 5 was a stupid show. Different people have different tastes and care about different things. And it's not always as cut and dried as that. Quite often, people will watch a show for the parts that they like even though there are parts they don't like. And those people get disappointed when the parts that they like are sacrificed for the parts that they don't like. Thus is life.
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.
My English BA has a creative writing concentration (I even once had the infamous Amiri Baraka as a creative writing professor). I've also read several dozen books on writing fiction, including books on writing genre fiction like science fiction, fantasy, and romance novels. I've also attended quite a few writer and editor panels at science fiction conventions, worked for a major publisher at one point, and also play role-playing games that cover a lot of the same ground concerning mysteries, suspension of disbelief, characterization and so on. As hard as it may be for you to believe, I'm qualified to opine on issues of story and suspension of disbelief.
While your concerns over pacing are reasonable, you are missing all of the other advice that book after book on writing science fiction and fantasy give and that the writers of Lost didn't follow, from not ending with everyone being dead to clearly explaining all of the rules of the setting up front as well as more general advice that once can find in writing book after writing book about things like the implied author-reader contract I mentioned earlier.
As I've said, the solution to the problem was simple and would have had no impact on pacing or much of anything else. Make the alternate reality real, too, and let the character's memories cross between them. Heck, keep the church at the end as an antechamber to heaven if you really need the cast party at the end, too. Then you don't have to explain away Jack's fake son or Helen or Aaron's age or any of the other baggage created by the metaphysics of ending they did show if one starts digging into it. Better yet, don't explain whether the Island or alternate reality are real and add some separation between the church scene and alternate reality, perhaps showing only people as they step into the Church.
My other fix would have been to have Jin survive for Ji Yeon in the Island reality, but even that's not entirely necessary with the other fix.
Now, you can complain that having Jin survive would have robbed you of the scene of Sun and Jin dying together and you could complain that if the Church scene starts with the people stepping in, perhaps with Jack meeting Christian in the alcove, that you couldn't have the scene with Ben and Locke but let me ask you this. If you didn't know those scenes existed, would you have felt robbed if they didn't? If, for example, the submarine explosion ended with Sun convincing Jin to leave and live for Ji Yean, would have have been angry and have argued that it spoiled the characters for you and that you really wanted to see them die together? If Ben had apologized to Locke while meeting in the alternate reality but separate from entry in to the Church at the end, would you have been disappointed that the apology didn't happen right outside of the church?
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.
Unless that number is from a random sampling of the audience, it's no more meaningful than any other web poll as a measure of what most people think. As for trying to figure out why people were unhappy, I could just as easily argue that the reason why so many people say that they liked it is that after spending six years watching the show, the people who could be disappointed stopped watching and those who were going to stick with the abusive relationship to the end did so and refuse to admit that they wasted their time. Is that a fair assessment? Of course not. Let's stop playing psychoanalyst in order to dismiss the feelings of others as invalid. I've given you reasons why I was disappointed that range from character integrity and plot to the metaphysics at the end. There were a lot of flaws in the show along with a lot of good things and whether a person thinks that the show was good or bad or somewhere in between is going to depend on their tastes and how the course of the show fit or didn't fit those tastes.
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.
That was one of those cases where I did what people suggest I do with Jacks fake son. I just largely ignored it. The most logical explanation, supported by the tail section children being there at the end, was that they were a part of the Others that lived at the temple rather than the Dharma village. And as will Talia Winters, I don't think just "offing" a problem character or characters is the solution. It's lazy. The right thing to do is figure out a graceful way to fix the problem that fits the rest of the story and setting and doesn't feel forced.
Near the end, we find out that the numbers correspond to the candidates: 4 = Locke, 8 = Reyes, 15 = Ford, 16 = Jarrah, 23 = Shephard, 42 = Kwon. Those are the only numbers on the hatch, used by Hurley in the lottery, and repeated by the guy in the asylum that Hurley gets the numbers from. But Kate has a number, too: 51. Jacob said he crossed Kate off when she became a mother but she could still have the job if she wanted it, but she didn't become a mother until after she escaped the island. So why wasn't her number included? If you want to argue that it was because she was never going to be the final candidate, well, neither were Locke, Ford, Jarrah, or Kwon, yet their numbers were included.
No dream.
The bottom line is, you don’t think they explained it. I do.
I am at peace.
Namaste.
If that’s your criteria for a character to be a prop then it’s time for you to come to grips with the fact that all characters are props.
But why would Ben bother to make it look like Dharma drops? It makes no sense, it’s a lot of effort to accomplish nothing. If he wanted to keep the guys in Swan in supplies he could just give them supplies, he doesn’t have to go through all the troubles of putting Dharma logos on everything and air dropping the supplies. Heck if he actually knew about the guys in Swan and what they were doing there he’d probably actually rotate people in and out so they wouldn’t go stir crazy and fight each other failing to push the button and bringing a plane full of unwanted visitors to his favorite Island. So no that theory doesn’t hold. Occam’s Razor actually says it was probably some remnant of DI, trying to get it back together to re-establish themselves on the Island.
The existence of a fail safe key doesn’t negate the idea of needing push the button. That’s like saying that if you have a fire control system you don’t have to follow fire safety protocols with your fireplace. At some point people were being put in that hole by DI which apparently wanted to keep the bunker available for experiments, and so people were instructed to push the button and keep it all safe, whether or not DI still existed they thought it did and handed down those instructions. Yes there was a fail safe, but use of that ended any potential usefulness of the bunker, thus they had to keep pushing the button or bad things would happen all the way up until somebody triggered the fail safe.
We’re not told the Smoke monster is evil, it’s pretty obvious that he’s evil. He likes killing people, lots of people, painfully. When not killing people he manipulates people, often into killing other people. He’s evil.
Pulling the cork is only a good thing if it doesn’t stay pulled. Keep the cork pulled too long and the Island goes away. The Island, when stupid people aren’t doing stupid things with it, seems to be a pretty nice place, cures disease, heals injuries, nice weather. That’s the downside, and there’s probably a lot more to what the Island can do that we ever saw, we actually spend remarkably on the Island with anybody who knows much about it. Jacob knew the most, and like Hurley said, Jacob had a strong Yoda streak.
I don’t think Jacob wanted to take the risk. Pulling the cork would have meant he was mortal too, so then it’s him vs Smoke monster, and sure maybe Smoke loses his magic powers, but he’s still not nice and wouldn’t be a nice person to inflict on the world. And Smoke might be smart enough to put the cork back and regain his powers after killing Jacob.
We’re given more than enough information to know that the world will be a better place without Smoke at all, and if he has to be on it contained on the Island is better than roaming free. And we’re given plenty of information that the Island is pretty nice and might actually be useful to the world in the right hands, so the world is better with it.
Destroying Swan, like destroying the Island, is only a good option if you assume nothing useful can be done with it, maybe by DI maybe by somebody else. A big ol source of magnetic power could be pretty useful harnessed right, but you need some sort of Swan station to harness it. So no destroying Swan didn’t work out fine, it ended any potential usefulness of Swan.
Penny isn’t a real character, but whether or not to save the Island is a WITHIN the story decision. You want to know why the characters should keep the Island around, other characters not having escaped is a good reason.
The Vorlons and the Shadows were never MacGuffins. Neither were the Reavers. They were all in story things, not sought after things, and they all had intrinsic value in the story (Vorlons and Shadows had great tech, and made useful allies in the short term, Reavers were a kick ass super army).
Sorry but I’ve never seen a MacGuffin revealed that wasn’t a disaster. I suppose it’s theoretically possible, but so far in story telling history there’s a big fat 0fer on doing it successfully.
There’s nothing wrong with the mystery being unsolvable until the end. That doesn’t change the fact that those clues were a clear indication that this alternate reality was not just the same world with the same people sans-Island. The clues might not have been enough to give us the pocket heaven explanation, but they were enough to rule out alternate reality. I’m not blaming anybody for making a wrong guess, I’m pointing out that your complaints about your wrong guess aren’t the writers’ fault, you came up with an answer you liked and ignored the evidence that your answer didn’t fly. I don’t blame you, it just makes your complaint that they gotcha’d in the last episode invalid. There was no gotcha, the clues were there all season that your answer was wrong.
The nature the flash sideways world wasn’t a MaGuffin. Flash sideways had intrinsic value in the story, it was a continuing epoch of the characters, and wasn’t a source of stress and conflict between the character. Eventually it had to be revealed what they were flashing to, much like the flash forwards.
I’m not arguing out of both sides of anything. But you’re trying to make this about me is getting kind of sad.
He wasn’t turning to Jack or question his qualifications anymore. We went over this already, look up 5 or 6 posts ago. And there’s nothing wrong with having a lieutenant to bounce ideas off of. We see what a pinhead Yoda-wannabe Jacob turned into. Like Locke points out, you can’t do it all yourself, even if you do have self confidence.
It wouldn’t be impossible to explain, but it would need additional explanation. Which would probably wind up silly. Had their “memories” stayed current with where they were in the parallel timeline it would have required a lot less explanation.
It wasn’t an explanation, it was just a defining of parameters. Island world real, non-Island world afterlife. No explanations. There’s still a certain MacGuffiny aspect in we don’t really know how they made this pocket afterlife, it just happened. My perspectives haven’t change,d and once again stop trying to make this about me. This has been an interesting discussion, but you’re turning the corner into making it a stupid personal argument.
In the first season we get the Smoke monster, Rousseau, the Others, the lottery numbers and the radio beacon. Lots of outsiders, lots of stuff from outside. Then there’s all the people dieing, doesn’t really make sense in purgatory, especially people like Boone and clearly hadn’t redeemed himself.
David wasn’t important to the story, and while he might have helped Jack work out some issues, in the end he was just another minor character. Non-important characters can still be helpful. And Jack wanted to pick him up after the concert because he was supposed to, following through on commitments and stuff.
Characters evaporate. Yes it would be better writing if they didn’t but they do. It’s part of arc story telling.
Talia Winters (really Andrea Thompson) was such a vicious drag on every scene she was in that no matter how they got rid of her the end result was guaranteed to be a better story. She was just a horrible actress that caused the character to be annoying and stories that revolved around the character to be painful. That’s probably a big part of why the story that wrote her out was bad, it had to focus on her in the A plot for most of the episode, and she was called upon to emote and other things she turns out to be no good at. It probably would have been better to just have one of the characters mention she tripped in the shower and broke her neck.
I realize I’m bucking a large part of scifidom but I’ll stand by it. Farscape was a stupid show, poorly acted, poorly written, and I’m glad it’s gone.
You might be “qualified to opine” but it doesn’t make your opinions right. And it doesn’t mean that the things you’re saying they should have done would have actually resulted in a better story. All of them would have ground the narrative to a halt for pointless introductions and meaningless emotive scenes. Maybe 3 episodes from the end, but not in the last episode and very much not in the final scene of the last episode.
Having Jin survive wouldn’t just rob me of their final scene together. In the series recap the writers talked about how the eternal question for that was would they or wouldn’t they manage to stick together, and having them die together gave that a resounding yes. I wasn’t making it up as their goal, I stole that statement straight from the writers, that WAS their goal.
Where the Ben and Locke moment happened wasn’t important. What was important was that it happened after they were both fully away, after they both knew what Ben was apologizing for. And that it showed Ben knew what a complete ass he’d been, that’s a big part of the redemption of Ben. He’d done so many bad things he needed to do a lot more than just some good things, he needed to acknowledge having been evil.
The metacritic number comes from checking the various places that rate TV shows. It’s not random, but it’s not a web poll either. It’s Rotten Tomatoes for TV, pooling reviews and ratings to look at reaction of a large population of reviewers.
I don’t know why the killed the Cult of Jacob. I just liked that it meant we no longer had to deal with them and their temple that didn’t make any sense. From a results oriented point of view killing off that don’t make sense is good, sure it would be better if they hadn’t existed in the first place, but at least their gone.
Where I get the most bothered is when I think the ending gets close but then fumbles the execution at the end. I think Life On Mars did that. It was close to being a satisfying ending but missed something important. Similarly, I think Lost got very close to an ending that would have satisfied me and a lot of the other people that are complaining if they'd just done a few things differently, been a little more specific on a few of the mysteries, and and hadn't made the alternate reality fake.
The two camps all come down to whether the expectations people had were met, questions they needed answers for were answered, and the characters they cared about were handed in a satisfactory manner. To that end, the people with the fewest expectations, the fewest questions, focuses on the main characters, and were open to however the authors decided to end their story arcs probaly fared the best. The people who expected a particular type of ending that didn't pan out, wanted many of the mysteries explained, and/or cared about characters that weren't important to the writers fared the worst. People who are willing to look at the bright side and overlook flaws also probably fared better than people for whom the flaws spoiled everything for them.
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 think it's fair for the people who watched and gave up to comment, especially if the finale and/or the opinions surrounding it seem to confirm their feelings about the trajectory of show or otherwise relate to why they stopped watching.
People who never watched it or maybe just watched the pilot, on the other hand, really don't have much to add.
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
Probably too long for a college course unless they selected only a handful of episodes to illustrate particular points, but I'm not sure how well that would work with Lost and asking students to watch six seasons is a bit much.
Anyway, you said:
People who are willing to look at the bright side and overlook flaws also probably fared better than people for whom the flaws spoiled everything for them.
I think is a pretty fair assessment, and may explain why I was so taken with the ending. I never really thought of Lost as a love story until the end, and then that's exactly what it became. And I liked that. And of course, it went right along with my theory on what Heaven is, a place outside of time, where we all wake up at the same time, regardless of when we died (to my Mom I'm already there, for instance). I don't agree with their theology, entirely, but I *got* that part. If you didn't already think that Heaven was outside of time tho, it probably was not easily digested and seemed artificial and made up, just to make the ending work.
The British Life on Mars had a much better ending. But America loves their happy ending, or at least writers in America think they do. So that Brit ending was never going to happen here. Both versions of he show are really good, and for the most part they did a good job of “Americanizing” the show without making it stupid, but he British ending is so much more satisfying. I wish BBCA would show season 2 of Ashes, or the DVDs would come out, REALLY want to see that ending.
I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.
Namaste
I am curious, if you think they were in purgatory, they would even be together. Most of them didn’t know each other before the plane crash. Is purgatory a place you end up with people who just happen to die at the same time as you? (I’m not sure, as a former Catholic, I never bought the whole idea of purgatory anyway). Can you flesh out your idea?
The way I would have fixed the American Live on Mars ending (SPOILER ALERT) is that I would have had someone mention that when Sam’s simulation got damaged, that it drew from the other simulations to keep his going, in particular the commander’s, thus explaining how they all wound up as Wizard of Oz type characters in his simulation. They mention that he had picked a police simulation so add him mentioning that he shifted into the early 1970s, have some of the other characters mentioning no glitches in their simulation, and add a character asking the commander something like, “Wasn’t your simulation was about women overcoming sexism in the early 1970s? Did you two run into each other?” At which point the commander smiles at the main character and says, “Maybe,” leaving it open that the interaction, at least between Sam and Annie, were essentially real.
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