119 replies to this topic

[HyacinthGirl]

Mya Stone, on 08 February 2013 - 07:53 AM, said:

I know I'm speaking for Caligula here, but he said the end of season 3 on. I'm thinking from maybe The Brig on...although I also love Catch-22 (as its Desmond-centric and I love me some Des). The end of S3 has the amazing The Man Behind the Curtain and Through the Looking Glass, which still manages to make my allergies act up.

I'm on Jughead now. I still adore Season 4 the most, I think. It contains my single most favorite LOST episode, The Constant. I could watch that episode once a month and not get over it's brilliance. The ending Des-Penny scene is something that tugs at my heart strings.

Ah. Ok then. Yeah, season 3 concluded really, really well.
The Constant, that's the one when Desmond's consciousness is flashing between the past and the present and he gets to speak to Penny in the end? That's a great episode.

[Caligula_K2]

Mya Stone, on 08 February 2013 - 07:53 AM, said:

I know I'm speaking for Caligula here, but he said the end of season 3 on. I'm thinking from maybe The Brig on...although I also love Catch-22 (as its Desmond-centric and I love me some Des). The end of S3 has the amazing The Man Behind the Curtain and Through the Looking Glass, which still manages to make my allergies act up.

Exactly right. I'd say the awesome streak starts even earlier than Catch 22, at the second Juliet episode (One of Us). Even though a lot of season 3 is pretty bad, I have to say that those last eight episodes are probably my favourite eight episode run in the entire show.

HyacinthGirl, on 08 February 2013 - 06:41 AM, said:

That Richard episode is amazing. And you're so right about the flash-sideways, they really caused the plot to grind to a near-halt. However, on my rewatch, the one thing I did like about them is that the character development is incredible. In terms of the plot structure, they are a dreadful device, so try and see them as a characterisation device and S6 will go down a lot easier. Just look at them as a (completely unnecessary) means by which you get to know the characters a lot better.

I tried to do this, but with a couple of exceptions (like Locke's flash sideways, due to Terry O'Quinn's awesome acting and the fact that they actually do something different with his character) I'm usually still bored, in the same way I started getting bored of the flashbacks in seasons 2 and 3 that told us the same things about the characters over and over. By season 6, I think you've gotten the writers' point that Kate is a criminal... With a heart of gold!!! So I'd say most of the flash sideways aren't needed in that sense either.

And yes, The Constant is fantastic. Either my favourite or second favourite episode. Desmond is just awesome, and his episodes are always great.

[HyacinthGirl]

Regarding S3: I think the problem I had with rewatching it is that I didn't remember how badly it started off as, whereas I remembered how messy S6 was and so found revisiting that one easier.

Caligula_K2, on 08 February 2013 - 05:39 PM, said:

I tried to do this, but with a couple of exceptions (like Locke's flash sideways, due to Terry O'Quinn's awesome acting and the fact that they actually do something different with his character) I'm usually still bored, in the same way I started getting bored of the flashbacks in seasons 2 and 3 that told us the same things about the characters over and over. By season 6, I think you've gotten the writers' point that Kate is a criminal... With a heart of gold!!! So I'd say most of the flash sideways aren't needed in that sense either.

Yeah, they are unnecessary and most of them were just pretty bland, eg. Sun/Jin (always felt those two actors were wasted), Jack's one was just boring and predictable, Kate/Claire was dull. I understand why a lot of viewers lost patience with them, but there were a couple of stories that really entertained me: Ben/Locke as teachers, Miles/Sawyer as cops (I could have watched a whole spin off of this, just putting that out there), and even the Charlie/Desmond one (though that was probably because I love those characters so much. Can't really remember what their side plot actually was.)

Edited by HyacinthGirl, 09 February 2013 - 06:20 AM.

[Caligula_K2]

HyacinthGirl, on 09 February 2013 - 06:20 AM, said:

Regarding S3: I think the problem I had with rewatching it is that I didn't remember how badly it started off as, whereas I remembered how messy S6 was and so found revisiting that one easier.

Yeah, they are unnecessary and most of them were just pretty bland, eg. Sun/Jin (always felt those two actors were wasted), Jack's one was just boring and predictable, Kate/Claire was dull. I understand why a lot of viewers lost patience with them, but there were a couple of stories that really entertained me: Ben/Locke as teachers, Miles/Sawyer as cops (I could have watched a whole spin off of this, just putting that out there), and even the Charlie/Desmond one (though that was probably because I love those characters so much. Can't really remember what their side plot actually was.)

Ya, the Charlie/Desmond episode is very good. It brings back that weird/spooky atmosphere that Lost had in spades in the first three seasons and sort of lost as the action ramped up in the last three. The moment when Charlie crashes Desmond's car and Desmond relives the Not Penny's Boat memory gave me chills on rewatch. It's also an episode that makes you think the flash sideways are going somewhere very cool... You get Eloise Hawking talking about Desmond's activities being a "violation" and Daniel Faraday talking about the possibility his life was created by the detonation of a hydrogen bomb. Which all turns out to be as massive a red herring as the island being on the bottom of the ocean, but hey, I can pretend it's all going somewhere interesting while re-watching the episode.

I also agree that a Sawyer-Miles buddy cop show would be awesome (along with a high school show starring Dr. Benjamin Linus, Lesley "I like blowing things up" Arzt and Subsitute John Locke) but I was also pretty unimpressed with the Sawyer episode. He's obsessed with finding Anthony Cooper, causing him to become self-destructive. We've been here before.

I just watched The Candidate, the episode where Smokey reveals his master plan is to slip a bomb into Jack's backpack while he's not looking and then hope that Jack will get on the submarine even though Jack has said 5,000 times he's not getting on the sub. Thankfully for him Kate conveniently gets shot so that Jack is forced to board it, though unfortunately for Smokey he also doesn't understand that it is possible for people to escape from sinking submarines. I guess that given how often Kate ruins everything over the course of the show Smokey had faith that her powers of ruination would cause the deaths of all the candidates.

Sayid gets a good moment as he goes out but I think that Jin's and Sun's deaths are mishandled. Much like the earlier part of the season (where half the cast gathers on the beach for 6 episodes only to decide to go see Smokey anyway), it feels incredibly pointless to have gotten two seasons of Jin and Sun trying to find each other if the only thing they do after their reunion is die. I also still think it's strange that neither of them mentions their daughter and that Jin should probably go raise her, and that they both speak English to each other the whole time.

I'd also forgotten about the "Sun forgets how to speak English plotline," which is probably as dumb as the Jack tattoo episode. Three episodes to go...

Edited by Caligula_K2, 11 February 2013 - 12:06 AM.

[Marakh]

Still my favourite show to date. Problem is, people focus too much on the science fiction rather than the characters, acting, chemistry etc. Who cares if the ending sucks? You don't watch a tv show just to get to the ending, it's what happens in between that is important, and it definitely delivered more than any show I've watched since. Yeah, Breaking Bad, walking dead etc are awesome, I love them all, but not once have I ever had that same feeling when I said "FUUUUUCK" at the end of the season like I did at the end of Lost Season 3. And that is because I cared about the characters. I like the happy parts, I like the sad parts, I love everything that brings emotion. I also love the music, big part of what makes it memorable IMO.
Looks like most of you were waiting for something too big, like a big revelation or I don't know.

Edited by Marakh, 11 February 2013 - 12:42 AM.

[Shryke]

It's not revelation that's the problem, it's resolution.

For all that Lost has individual parts and bits that are good, the whole is less then the sum of those parts (and the shitty parts with them). The whole work never coheres and this is most obvious when watching the first season right after the last and seeing how drastically the show has gone off into the wild blue yonder. Nothing about the show fits together, either thematically or plot-wise.

Shit just kinda .. happens. Over and over till it ends.

[Caligula_K2]

Marakh, on 11 February 2013 - 12:38 AM, said:

Still my favourite show to date. Problem is, people focus too much on the science fiction rather than the characters, acting, chemistry etc. Who cares if the ending sucks? You don't watch a tv show just to get to the ending, it's what happens in between that is important, and it definitely delivered more than any show I've watched since. Yeah, Breaking Bad, walking dead etc are awesome, I love them all, but not once have I ever had that same feeling when I said "FUUUUUCK" at the end of the season like I did at the end of Lost Season 3. And that is because I cared about the characters. I like the happy parts, I like the sad parts, I love everything that brings emotion. I also love the music, big part of what makes it memorable IMO.
Looks like most of you were waiting for something too big, like a big revelation or I don't know.

Warning: Long reply ahead. Sorry.

Well, what I was mainly testing with this rewatch was how well the show holds together as a whole, and (if it didn't) to what extent I would still enjoy the show for those character interactions. Particularly since you're absolutely right- on the first time through, Lost could make you say FUUUUUUUUUCK like no other show and get you imagining and discussing with others what it all meant and where it was going. So here's what I've discovered on my rewatch:

Yep, I still enjoy the good character moments and interaction, the music, the often phenomenal acting, and many of the plot elements. I still loved the reveal that Locke was paralyzed before the plane crash. I loved Mr. Eko's and Richard's backstory. I loved Desmond and Penny and the time travel madness. But here's one problem, for me: Lost isn't The Wire or Deadwood, shows with uniformly great actors and characterization. There are a lot of characters who are poorly written and poorly acted. There are a lot of pretty bad episodes. Even a lot of the interesting characters go through uninteresting phases- Jack's tattoo episode is the worst symptom, but there are large stretches of time where Sayid has nothing to do, or where Jin and Sun's only purpose is to pipe in once an episode and say "where's my husband/wife?" in a bored tone.

And I can't get past the fact that I didn't just watch Lost for those character moments. It was a big part of why I watched Lost, sure. But I loved the mysteries. I loved trying to figure out how everything fit together. I loved the island's creepiness, its weirdness, its science fiction. And I don't think you can blame anyone for loving and focusing on those elements of the show. That's what the marketing after season 1 stressed (the ads for season 6 didn't promise a fitting conclusion to a character drama, they promised that THE ANSWERS ARE COMING). That's the way the show was written. I've been going back and reading some of the old threads from when season 6 was first airing, and "the science fiction" is what 80% of the the discussion focused on. It's great if you can focus on the show as a character drama exclusively, but it is disingenuous to claim that Lost never wore it's science fiction/fantasy/mysteries element front and center, or that the show would have been anywhere near as successful if it was just a character drama on a normal island. And I'd argue that its best moments combine the character drama with the mysteries of the island. Desmond and Penny's phone call in the Constant is one example. "WE HAVE TO GO BACK" works not only because it's a complete reversal of Jack's character arc, but also because it changes the stakes of the show completely. What was a show about trying to escape from a weird island becomes a show about the weird island itself and what our characters' relationship to it was.

And I also can't pretend that I don't like stories to be cohesive. I do, and that's my own personal tastes, and it's not something particularly out of the ordinary. It's also why I enjoy the last half of season 3-end of season 5 the most, because overall that part of the shiw does feel like a pretty cohesive story. Because once I know that an element, or two or five or five hundred aren't part of the cohesive story, then the show's weaknesses start becoming pretty apparent to me. All the stuff with Jacob's cabin always seemed kind of silly to me, but I could excuse it because I was excited to see how it fit into the show. Well, it turns out to all be a complete red herring, so the silly scene where Ben pretends he's talking to Jacob just remains... Silly. A lot of the show's weaknesses become more apparent (in season 6, for example, the characters' tendency to go halfway across the island, meet someone, ask some questions, get a vague response, ask no follow up questions and then go to the other side of the island to repeat the same process). So for me it was never about the answers to the sorts of questions like "what is the Hurley Bird?" or "who exactly built the statue?" It's about knowing why Eko is killed by the smoke monster in season 3, and why noone ever brings it up again. Or what happened in Jacob's cabin. And again, when you realize that these events don't fit into the show's plot at all, then a lot of the show just becomes silly, random things happening.

Anyway, that's just my take on the show, and I'm happy that there are people who still love the whole thing. Coming off this rewatch, my overall feeling is that I still like Lost. But probably not enough to ever watch the whole thing again.

Edit: Shryke said it better, in 69884494 less words.

Double edit: I'm re-watching Across the Sea right now, and fuck if the writing in this one isn't awful.

Scene 1:
Young MIB: "Mom, what's death?"
Creepy stepmother: "Something you'll never have to worry about."

Scene 2 (literally the next scene): Young MIB and Jacob are hunting a boar. A mysterious man kills it and they escape.

Scene 3: Young MIB: "Mom, someone killed a boar!"

Lolz.

Edited by Caligula_K2, 11 February 2013 - 01:45 AM.

[HyacinthGirl]

Caligula_K2, on 11 February 2013 - 12:05 AM, said:

I just watched The Candidate, the episode where Smokey reveals hismaster plan is to slip a bomb into Jack's backpack while he's not looking and then hope that Jack will get on the submarine even though Jack has said 5,000 times he's not getting on the sub. Thankfully for him Kate conveniently gets shot so that Jack is forced to board it, though unfortunately for Smokey he also doesn't understand that it is possible for people to escape from sinking submarines. I guess that given how often Kate ruins everything over the course of the show Smokey had faith that her powers of ruination would cause the deaths of all the candidates.

Sayid gets a good moment as he goes out but I think that Jin's and Sun's deaths are mishandled. Much like the earlier part of the season (where half the cast gathers on the beach for 6 episodes only to decide to go see Smokey anyway), it feels incredibly pointless to have gotten two seasons of Jin and Sun trying to find each other if the only thing they do after their reunion is die. I also still think it's strange that neither of them mentions their daughter and that Jin should probably go raise her, and that they both speak English to each other the whole time.

HISHE's How Lost Should Have Ended basically centres around this epiosde and really makes me laugh. http://www.youtube.c...h?v=rrcF7dYADsw Anyway, I remember that they built the tension really well for this episode and I really liked it. All the characters go nuts. It's great. And lol, Claire gets left behind again... Yeah, agreed about Sun and Jin dying. However, that damn Giacchino rescues the moment yet again with the Life and Death theme which is so incredibly moving.

Caligula_K2, on 11 February 2013 - 12:05 AM, said:

I'd also forgotten about the "Sun forgets how to speak English plotline," which is probably as dumb as the Jack tattoo episode. Three episodes to go...

You just reminded me of this, I forgot about it even having rewatched. It's just stupid. So irrelevant. And in this waste-of-space of a subplot they could have given Yunjin Kim something much more interesting to do.

Edited by HyacinthGirl, 11 February 2013 - 02:37 PM.

[Caligula_K2]

HyacinthGirl, on 11 February 2013 - 02:37 PM, said:

HISHE's How Lost Should Have Ended basically centres around this epiosde and really makes me laugh. http://www.youtube.c...h?v=rrcF7dYADsw Anyway, I remember that they built the tension really well for this episode and I really liked it. All the characters go nuts. It's great. And lol, Claire gets left behind again... Yeah, agreed about Sun and Jin dying. However, that damn Giacchino rescues the moment yet again with the Life and Death theme which is so incredibly moving.

Haha, that HISHE is amazing. I guess Chaz did deserve to win.

And I do agree that The Candidate is overall a good episode, and you're absolutely right that Giacchino's score nails that scene. I guess I just feel bad that the Smoke Monster due to all his rules has to come up with such a lame and convoluted plan to kill the Candidates. If that's what you have to do, Smokey, just sink the island. Poor bastard.

Across the Sea, though, is a pretty bad episode. There were so many opportunities for them to answer basic questions in this episode: Jacob asks his mom whether you die if you fall into the light, and she just says "something much worse happens." Why not take that opportunity to answer what the Smoke Monster is? Very silly that the writers were so coy even in the episode that's supposed to answer all. And the dialogue is just awful. "I'm going to channel the light and the water and leave." "How do you know that?" "Because I'm SPECIAL, mother!" (I feel bad for poor Titus Welliver, who couldn't seem to figure out another way to deliver that line other than to go Buster Bluth on it).

Two more episodes to go!

[Castel]

I don't see what explanation could have been given that would have enhanced the episode.
What happens when you fall in?
You become a smoke monster with invulnerability and the ability to morph into dead people.

What would they tell us that we don't already know? They could probably have come up with something cool like "it turns you into a soulless creature blahblahblah" but I don't see it mattering.

[Caligula_K2]

Castel, on 12 February 2013 - 09:02 PM, said:

I don't see what explanation could have been given that would have enhanced the episode.
What happens when you fall in?
You become a smoke monster with invulnerability and the ability to morph into dead people.

What would they tell us that we don't already know? They could probably have come up with something cool like "it turns you into a soulless creature blahblahblah" but I don't see it mattering.

I would have appreciated anything that connects the Smoke Monster of the first four and a half seasons (acting as some sort of security system, judging people, chasing everyone around the jungle, etc...) to the Smoke Monster of the last season and a half. Or what about its nature makes it such a threat to the outside world if it ever leaves the island. I remember watching Across the Sea for the first time and feeling more confused about what the Smoke Monster was than before I'd watched the episode, so anything non-vague would have been appreciated.

One more episode to go! What They Died For is a great episode and a good way to lead into the finale. You get some answers (even about things as simple as Widmore's motivation), you got Ben and Richard and Miles being an awesome badass team, and you got Desmond being the super cool mystery man in the Flash Sideways. What more could you want out of an episode?

[HyacinthGirl]

Oh, the magical-pool-of-light-that-is-the-reason-for-everything episode. This one made me roll my eyes. It's good that they dedicated a whole episode trying to explain the Island, only the execution wasn't great ("I'm special, Mother!" x 1000) and... they didn't explain everything. I remember talking to my friend at great length about why Lost was still worth watching and this is the episode she happened to tune into after deciding to try and pick it up again. She does not trust my taste in television anymore.

I can't remember who it was who said it would have been better if Smokey had inhabited corpses rather than morphed into dead people, but I definitely agree, having thought about it. It would have limited him somewhat, and made perfect sense regarding Christian and Yemi. I like what they did with Terry O'Quinn in the last seasons but they could have worked around that, i.e. Locke died on the Ajira plane crash.

[Caligula_K2]

HyacinthGirl, on 13 February 2013 - 01:57 PM, said:

Oh, the magical-pool-of-light-that-is-the-reason-for-everything episode. This one made me roll my eyes. It's good that they dedicated a whole episode trying to explain the Island, only the execution wasn't great ("I'm special, Mother!" x 1000) and... they didn't explain everything. I remember talking to my friend at great length about why Lost was still worth watching and this is the episode she happened to tune into after deciding to try and pick it up again. She does not trust my taste in television anymore.

I can't remember who it was who said it would have been better if Smokey had inhabited corpses rather than morphed into dead people, but I definitely agree, having thought about it. It would have limited him somewhat, and made perfect sense regarding Christian and Yemi. I like what they did with Terry O'Quinn in the last seasons but they could have worked around that, i.e. Locke died on the Ajira plane crash.

They didn't even need to change anything, actually, since Locke's corpse comes back with the Ajira flight. All that would change would be the final reveal at the end of season 5 of Locke's corpse in a box. Which was a cool reveal, but it did seem pretty wtf that Smokey could suddenly become any dead person in season 6. Right now it just makes him seem like he has a weird fetish for stealing bodies.

And ya, it's not just that Across the Sea doesn't explain much and is ridiculously cheesy. It also makes you more confused about many of the mysteries they try to answer. I mean, we knew that the island was special because of its electromagnetic energy- this episode just raised many more questions about it than I'd ever thought of before.

Edited by Caligula_K2, 14 February 2013 - 10:18 PM.

[Mya Stone]

I just finished Happily Ever After and Everybody Loves Hugo.

I unabashedly love both of those episodes so much.

I'm on the home stretch now...

[Castel]

I thought that the pool of light was the electromagnetic field? Or the electromagnetic field was a manifestation of the pool of light.

[OllieOwl]

Castel, on 14 February 2013 - 10:40 PM, said:

I thought that the pool of light was the electromagnetic field? Or the electromagnetic field was a manifestation of the pool of light.

Wasn't the nuke/nukes the electromagnetic field? Or at least part of it.
And the pool of light was in its turn something supernatural, but it could also have been electromagnetic.

[Caligula_K2]

The great Lost rewatch is done! Though I still need to rewatch The New Man in Charge. Thoughts on the finale:

The island: There's some cheese, an over reliance on the pathetic fallacy and I'm still not entirely pleased that the climax of the show is Jack slamming a giant dildo into a hole in the ground. But overall the island action works very well and is damn entertaining. It earns its emotional moments: Given how much I dislike her character, I was surprised how much I choked up at Jack and Kate's goodbye. Richard's first grey hair is also pretty moving. Nearly every character (minus Claire) gets a moment to shine during the island section. And I love the dynamic that the end sets up with Hurley as island protector and Ben as his second. Finally, Jack's death is beautifully done and I cried quite a bit when Vincent comes to lie beside him in the bamboo field. Jack's eye closing is definitely the right image for the show to go out on. So, I think that this part of the episode is done really well. I'm not sure if it really functions as a wrap up to the plot elements of the series, but as closure for season 6's main plotlines and for our characters' journeys, it works. Though I still think that a reveal of why it was so important to keep Smokey on the island would have been nice at some point. What are the stakes? And also, STOP CALLING SMOKEY LOCKE, EVERYONE. So contrived.

The flash sideways: Well, I hate the flash sideways twist as much as I did the first time through. This has all been discussed to death so I won't provide a detailed explanation as to why I dislike it so much (though if people would like to discuss it as they finish their rewatches I'll be sure to join in), but my main reasons for disliking the twist (and the majority of the flash sideways), IMO: It's dumb and makes little sense. It's cheesy. It provides a cheap and unearned happy ending for all the characters, just because the writers can. Aside from a few episodes where they're used well (Happily Ever After being the highlight), the flash sideways are generally... boring. With a couple of exceptions, they don't tell us anything we didn't know about the characters, and I'd argue that the twist actually demeans them. All in all, they just don't work for me, and the finale doesn't make me feel anything when reunion # 17 happens or when yet another character remembers his/her life. I think that there was a lot of wasted potential here and it's too bad that half of Lost's final season is devoted to... this.

Overall, I enjoyed my rewatch of Lost. Parts of it were a real slog to get through. The love triangle stuff is awful, particularly when it starts becoming the prime motivation for characters to do things like blow up nuclear bombs. Seasons 2 and 3 and 6 have a lot of filler and many boring, pointless and dumb episodes. Watching it all at once, you also do realize (as Shryke said above) that so much of the show is just random shit happening. It's not a show that is coherent plotwise, or which makes much more sense overall on your second time through than on your first. Season 6 in particular mainly fails at tying in the Jacob/Smokey plotline to the rest of the show.

But the parts that do tie together are very cool. It was fun seeing how Smokey manipulated the Oceanic 6 to return to the island. Locke told Jack that they had to come back to save the people on the island because Richard told him, whom Smokey had told while pretending to be Locke. In season 2, Ana Lucia finds an army knife, and in season 5 we learn about the U.S. army's activities on the island. In general, the last parts of season 3 to the end of season 5 hold together the best, though of course all things that you learn about Jacob and his cabin turn out to be giant red herrings which make no sense.

And Lost still has a lot to offer even when it doesn't make sense. It has some fantastic characters and actors to play them. Ben, Desmond, Hurley, Richard and Sun are among my favourite television characters. The best emotional moments still affect you on rewatch, from Charlie's death to the reveal of Locke's paralysis to Eko's first flashback to Desmond and Penny's phone call in the Constant to Jack's death in the finale.

One other thing I did notice on this rewatch is how badly the female characters are often treated and written. I mean, it was obvious the first time through that the writers instinctively killed their women characters whenever they wanted a death. But I'd never realized how the only way the show presents the grieving for one of these women. is through a man who is in love with her (even if they've only known her for seven days). I think the only exception to this is Ana Lucia. Otherwise, the deaths of the female characters become all about the man and how he's feeling. Part of the mourning of Charlie comes from Claire and his death is partially about her; but nearly all of the mourning for characters like Shannon and Juliet and Charlotte becomes about Sayid and Sawyer and Daniel. The writers were also very good at building up suspense about female characters, revealing one interesting thing about them, and then killing them off (Libby, Charlotte) or pretending they don't exist and giving them no plotlines (Sun, Claire to a certain extent). It's a very disappointing aspect of the show.

So, good show overall, though not a great show on rewatch. I doubt I'll ever watch the whole thing again. I don't think it'll be worth it for all the time it takes up. But I can definitely see myself rewatching Walkabout, or Exodus Part I, or the 23rd Psalm, or Flashes Before Your Eyes, or Through the Looking Glass, or The Constant, or The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham, or Ab Aeterno. It's also too bad that from my perspective, the sixth season is the show's weakest, and where it stumbles quite a lot. But still, kudos to Lost. I've never watched a show as addictive as it, or (in many ways) as ambitious as it, and I doubt I ever will again.

Edited by Caligula_K2, 16 February 2013 - 07:33 PM.

[litechick]

I've been doing a very sloppy and indifferent rewatch.  Mostly I just have it on for background noise while I'm doing something else and mostly I only pay attention long enough to snort when one of their tropes is activated.

Even in the beginning they would plant self-referential comments about how characters just kept finding one excuse after another to traipse through the jungle but they still kept doing it.  Even in the middle Miles makes a quip about "go to the beach, go to the well--you people only have two plans."

The writers are acknowledging their own crappy plot devices but they still keep doing it!

Most recently I 'watched' The Last Recruit and all that is left is some grim humor every time someone flip flops their loyalty.  Jack is against Locke, he's for him, against, for--and now we've filled up the episode, All Done!  Kate is determined to bring Claire back to Aaron, or maybe not, or yes, definitely--I refuse to leave without her!

In the wider sense, how many times have they had a character say "I'm absolutely certain this is the right thing to do!  Oh, whoops, I was wrong."  "I'll never leave you again.  Just wait here, I'll be right back."

I wonder if anyone has ever troubled to make a master list of Things that Must Happen or Everyone Will Die.

Caligula, I do find your observations on the treatment of female characters interesting.  I have long suspected that the only purpose of the pregnant women subplot was a cynical device to hold female viewers.

Sorry to be so negative but I suppose I have to give them credit for making me want to thump someone on the head.  I'm not even sure why I care enough to hate it or why I turn the damn thing on at all.

[Tears of Lys]

Having been only a half-hearted Lostie at best, take this FWIW, but there's much better stuff on now that you could be watching.  There's only so many hours in the day, y'know.  


(Like "The Americans""

[kevin1989]

My favorite show till today. Some episodes weren't as good but even the worst episode is better than 90% of the episodes that has been on Television (all shows).
What I loved with Lost is the realistic characters. You can cry and laugh with them. The mystery. How everything fit together. Also things that you need to understand before you can love it. Like the ending, I hear many people around me complain with the argument: They are all dead. That's the point they wanted to tell, everybody dies, some sooner than others. You can see in the show that Lindelof has some feelings with the ending, as the die hard fans know, he has some big problems with his father before his father died, that's why he wrote the Jack character, and it's probably why he wanted an ending where you can redeem yourself after dead.

And I loved that they choose their way of ending the show instead of listening to fans because many shows listen to the fans and the show fails.

And about the argument: they didn't finish every question. they finished more than 90% of the mysteries. The only thing is that you need to use your brain with most of them. Rewatch the show, putting 2 or more things together to see the big picture. And finals aren't suppose to answer much questions. It's about answering 1 or 2 questions and closing the show in their own way.

I think the fault with the answering the mysteries lies with ABC and the strike in season 4. Their plan was to have season 4 and season 5 have both 24 episodes. ABC wanted 6 seasons so they rewrote the show with 3 seasons of 16 episodes. Then they needed to change it again because of the strike.

What I don't understand is that very much people complained in season 5 that the show was on a answer-mode and that they slow down in season 6 and that people complain that they didn't get much answers.

And about the end, try to understand the ending and you will love it, you will cry about it. One of my friends is terminal and totally understood what the show told in that episode. He cried the whole episode.
Look at the small things in the end. Ben can't move on because he still feel guilty about Locke and Alex. Sawyer who tried to be good instead of being a bad person. Jack wanted to be a good father.

Claire who doesn't want back because she things she's a bad mother. Try to understand her motive in that scene.

If you just enjoy the final instead of worrying about answers, maybe you see the beauty in the end and can you try to understand what it is about.

Last thing I wanted to say:
Nobody does it alone. You needed all of them, and they needed you. To remember. And to... let go.