Lost. Can we talk about it? Just finished my first watch.

[princess_snow]

ok so I probably shouldn't have binged it I feel like Ive come out of some vortex. I have a few questions.

 

The use of the colour red. I was trying to make sense of it, foreshadowing? Hints ?

How did Sawyer, Kate, Hurley and Ben die ?

 

[Isis]

There are quite a few threads on it here. A lot of us watched it in real time and posted in those threads. I think someone (maybe Wert) did a re-watch and posted a thread about it.

The colour red... I don't recall that being relevant. Do you have any examples?

I do occasionally rewatch the odd episode of the show, still. I have a soft spot for it. 

[Myrddin]

I watched the show live from episode one, and am one of the few who didn't hate the end (didn't love it either, but no burning hatred). I don't remember the color red having any significance, but that could well be an oversight on my part. I pay attention to color when I learn it's significant (like in Unbreakable) but otherwise don't try linking it to anything. 

I've been meaning to rewatch... Maybe I will once I finish rewatching Spartacus. 

[Regular John Umber]

8 hours ago, princess_snow said:

ok so I probably shouldn't have binged it I feel like Ive come out of some vortex. I have a few questions.

 

Woah... what was the timespan of this binge? Did you get a nosebleed?

I've rewatched twice now, most recently about a year ago with my wife. Will revisit it when my daughter is old enough... 15 years?

 

8 hours ago, princess_snow said:

The use of the colour red. I was trying to make sense of it, foreshadowing? Hints ?

 

 Do you mean the red flowers? There was a theory about them being linked to the smoke monster, but it was never consistent enough.

 

8 hours ago, princess_snow said:

How did Sawyer, Kate, Hurley and Ben die ?

 

 .... normally? Or maybe not Ben, as he probably is the new (immortal) Richard now.

 

 

[DunderMifflin]

Sawyer Kate Hurley and Ben all "survived". They never died in the show. They eventually die like everyone and are present at the spirit world thing of the final season.

Hurley and Ben could have possibly survived 1000s of years.

[Starkess]

I saw the thread title and my first thought was "ugh can we not" which probably tells you how I feel about it. I was a huge fan, and I thought the ending (whole last season really) basically retroactively ruined the series for me.

[john]

All the other characters presumably just died of old age or whatever, which I always thought was kind of odd - like, most of them were pretty young, did they not have anything significant happen to them in their lives apart from the island?  Never had any other people they might like to spend their afterlife with?  That's pretty sad.

However, i didn't mind that ending.  It was a lot better than the one in the main timeline.

[RumHam]

On 4/18/2017 at 0:24 AM, princess_snow said:

ok so I probably shouldn't have binged it I feel like Ive come out of some vortex. I have a few questions.

 

The use of the colour red. I was trying to make sense of it, foreshadowing? Hints ?

How did Sawyer, Kate, Hurley and Ben die ?

 

I cannot recommend Lindelof's next show The Leftovers enough. The third and final season just started Sunday and it's sooooo good. And I say this as someone who initially refused to watch the first season because I hated the Lost ending that much. 

[felice]

7 minutes ago, RumHam said:

I cannot recommend Lindelof's next show The Leftovers enough. The third and final season just started Sunday and it's sooooo good. And I say this as someone who initially refused to watch the first season because I hated the Lost ending that much. 

Perhaps it might be wise to wait till the final season has finished before you recommend it?

[RumHam]

2 hours ago, felice said:

Perhaps it might be wise to wait till the final season has finished before you recommend it?

Probably! but I have faith that Lindelof will stick the landing. and that should mean a lot coming from someone who hated the Lost ending. 

Also I'd argue there is an important difference between the two shows. Lost was a drama/fci-fi Mystery and The Leftovers is just a drama that takes places three years after some weird sci-fi/biblical shit has gone down. Lindelof has been very clear about not providing answers to the central mystery. While one of the primary complaints about Lost is that they promised answers for years and then gave us Across the Sea.

I think I lot of the backlash at the finale was because we never got the answers we were promised and instead they wasted time on that side-world that wasn't technically purgatory. 

[PetyrPunkinhead]

I have very fond memories of watching all six seasons of this show live when it aired on ABC. It was the first series where I did not miss a weekly episode from start to finish, and also one of the first series where I really got into discussing it online and devouring any and all the extra content I could find. (I miss those Cuse & Lindeloff recaps they'd do online after each episode.) As for the finale, I'm in the "liked it enough" camp. I by no means hated it or thought it ruined the series for me.

I too recommend LEFTOVERS for any LOST fan. It's all about mystery, religion/faith, loss, regret, finding your "place," and good vs evil. So, a lot like LOST in those regards. 

On 4/19/2017 at 10:05 PM, RumHam said:

Probably! but I have faith that Lindelof will stick the landing...

Some here. If the season premiere is any indication for the rest of the episodes then this will be one damned great season.

[The hairy bear]

I also have very fond moments of watching Lost, but after it ended I swore to myself that I'd never watch anything else with Lindeloff's or Cuse's name attached to it. It's not just that I disliked the ending. This happens to a lot of great shows. It's that they continuously lied to us whent they were saying "we have everything figured it out from the beginning", "we will resolve all the mysteries that we introduce",...

In a 2005 interview (when the first and second season were already written), Cuse said in an interview: "We're still trying to be ... firmly ensconced in the world of science fact.  I don't think we've shown anything on the show yet ... that has no rational explanation in the real world that we all function within. We certainly hint at psychic phenomena, happenstance and ... things being in a place where they probably shouldn't be. But nothing is flat-out impossible. There are no spaceships. There isn't any time travel."

They have since admitted that they were making everything up as they went. And thus, the story was filled up with huge plot holes and inconsistencies, which is particularly problematic in a show like Lost where the tension was generated by introducing mysteries and juxtaposing time lines. The problem wasn't the finale, was the conclusion. The closer it got to the ending, the worst it got. More mystical nonsense, more characters acting randomly, more and more things happening "because the island wants it". Last season's flash-sideways were a particularly laughable extemporaneous waste of time.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

On 4/18/2017 at 7:42 PM, Starkess said:

I saw the thread title and my first thought was "ugh can we not" which probably tells you how I feel about it. I was a huge fan, and I thought the ending (whole last season really) basically retroactively ruined the series for me.

Isn't that common though? I can't think of many long running shows that wrapped up nicely. 

I currently just finished watching the first season for the first time. I like what I've seen so far, but I don't feel like it's as great as everyone says it is. 

[Gertrude]

19 hours ago, The hairy bear said:

It's that they continuously lied to us whent they were saying "we have everything figured it out from the beginning", "we will resolve all the mysteries that we introduce",...

This was my gripe too. I didn't mind the end. I did mind that they played us for fools along the way.

[Raja]

On 4/20/2017 at 3:42 AM, felice said:

Perhaps it might be wise to wait till the final season has finished before you recommend it?

No. We all probably have various ways in which we judge a TV show; some people need the ending to be land perfectly or in a satisfying way ,whilst others are *okay* if the show has given us enough to latch on to on the way to the end ( the important part was the journey etc yada yada) 

S2 of Leftovers is the most complete piece of TV I've seen in years ( maybe my favourite season of TV of all time?), I would have been perfectly okay with the leftovers ending right there. Even if S3 isn't great ( and that doesn't seem to be the case based on the reviews so far), we still have 1 decent season and one exceptional season before it. 

I totally understand people being frustrated with Lost, I think I had a slightly different experiance as I basically binged the show a few months before the final season. Hairy Bear lays down perfectly valid points in his post. 

[Starkess]

22 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Isn't that common though? I can't think of many long running shows that wrapped up nicely. 

I currently just finished watching the first season for the first time. I like what I've seen so far, but I don't feel like it's as great as everyone says it is. 

I don't think it's that common. Lost is really the only one that I really can't stand.

[Nictarion]

51 minutes ago, Starkess said:

I don't think it's that common. Lost is really the only one that I really can't stand.

Lost is a masterpiece compared to what they did to Dexter...

I fall into the didn't hate it camp. Some of it was frustrating but I was invested in the characters enough I enjoyed the series throughout. 

And I completely agree about The Leftovers. It's a shame more people don't watch it. I've said it several times on here, but I guarantee it ends up becoming a cult classic in the years to come. 

[DunderMifflin]

What mysteries were left unresolved?

[Werthead]

The Lost rewatch thread is here.

Javier Grillo-Marxuarch, a writer on the first two seasons, has an outstanding and excellent essay here on the making of the show. He delves into the "Were we making it all up as we went along?" question in a lot of interesting depth (the answer was: "yes" for some, mostly minor things, "no" for most of the big-picture stuff - although a lot of those ideas were developed over the first two seasons rather than present in the initial pitch - and "kind of" when they had to scramble to deal with something caused by production issues or a writer quitting or something else).

Lost is a show that I watched, engrossed, as it aired and joined in all the theorising. I even dug into the Lost Experience alternate-reality game (which, perhaps unwisely, answered several key mysteries that should have been done in the show itself). Like most people I was unhappy with the ending and lack of the answers to the central mystery (about the Island itself), but I did massively prefer the ending to Battlestar Galactica's, which remains unmitigated drivel (nice space battle though). Rewatching the show, I found Lost benefits enormously from binge-watching in the space of 3-4 months. A lot of character tics and storyline elements are picked up and resolved quite efficiently and the infamous dips in quality in Seasons 2 and 3 are actually pretty negligible when you can move on straight away. The shittiest part of Season 3 - the crew stuck on Hydra Island for too long - was made far worse by the five-month break Season 3 took in the early going, which created the impression at the time that most of the season stank. Watching the show in one go, it's actually more like three out of that opening seven-episode arc and then it moves on and gets a lot better (to the point where Season 3 is probably the best of the show, at least after the first).

I would say that a lot of the traditional criticisms of the show are either overblown or perhaps based on confused and contradictary information (so still the showrunners' fault, just not quite in the same way). The only one I really agree outright with is the flash-sideways in Season 6. It's actually quite well-acted, it's just pointless, takes up far too much screen-time (away from the more important and at times somewhat under-serviced story on the Island) and has little bearing on the on-Island storyline. As mentioned above it also suggests that Claire, Kate and Sawyer never did anything else with the rest of their lives (Sawyer was in his mid-30s, Kate in her mid-20s and Claire barely out of being a teenager). It also undersold Miles, which was really harsh (considering by the show's internal timeline Mile was a vital and important member of the team for far, far longer than Shannon, Boone, Libby or even Rose and Bernard), and kind of dumped over Nadia, the love of Sayid's life for over a decade, by suggesting that the fling he had with Shannon for a couple of weeks was more important to him.

For the main criticisms I'd say:

They made it up as they went along

They did and didn't. JJ Abrams came up with a lot of the concepts, some solo, some directed by the studio and some in conjunction with Lindelof. Abrams then fucked off four weeks into the show to make Mission: Impossible 3 and left Lindelof and the other writers scrambling to make things make sense (not helped by Lindelof then having a literal nervous breakdown halfway through Season 1, with the show pretty much being saved by Cuse soldiering on and pretending to ABC that everything was fine until Lindelof came back). They actually locked down a lot of ideas early on that were playing out in later seasons, although in modified forms. The hatch was an idea of Abrams from the very first story-breaking session and the DHARMA Initiative - under a different name - was invented shortly thereafter. The Whispers being the spirits of dead people was also developed in Season 1 and was supposed to be a major story revelation, but that didn't happen so instead they gave away the answer in Season 6 in a fairly offhand manner. The idea of there being two opposing forces of good and evil who would eventually coalesce into representative figures was also in pilot and the first couple of episodes (remember the backgammon game?), even if it didn't start really kicking into gear until Jacob was mentioned in Season 2.

Lost, crucially, never made the claim that the storyline was laid out in precise detail from the very first episode (which Babylon 5 did, which was actually a bit of a titanic fib given how differently the show turned out to JMS's original plan). There are clearly points where the storyline backed up after going down a blind alley (Jacob's cabin in Season 3, for example) and the Writer's Strike which curtailed Season 4 definitely gave the show major issues it didn't quite recover from, but certainly after the producers settled on the end date with the studio between Seasons 2 and 3 the show has much more of a coherent storyline and revelations are dished out fairly regularly. Stuff before that (like the Numbers, which were resolved off-screen in The Lost Experience, and Walt, whose storyline they ended up chucking out the window due to the timeline issues and the actor ageing) tended to be more hit-and-miss.

What is the Island?

This is one of those things that will piss some people off and others will find fine. The writers actually developed a working notion of what the Island was in Season 1 and pretty much stuck with that, but they also believed this was a revelation that had to wait until the end of the show. Then they got to Season 6 and realised that fans all had different theories (the Island was a spaceship or part of another dimension intruding into this one, a remnant of Atlantis and/or Eden, a time-travelling device from the far future sent back by persons unknown etc) and whatever answer they gave would piss off 80%+ of the fanbase. So they chose not to answer the question.

That may be a cop-out, but there is literally no answer they could give which the majority of fans would all take on board and accept, so they chose not to answer it (Lindelof's same rationale for The Leftovers, in fact).

Quote

What mysteries were left unresolved?

Apart from "What is the Island?" I don't think the show really left a single, major question unanswered. There was a bit of minor stuff (WTF was going on with Jacob's cabin?) but most of the big stuff was resolved.

For me, the most interesting thing is the fan theory that Jack actually became the Smoke Monster when he went into the cave at the end of the show to save the day and is doomed to stay on the Island as its guardian whilst Hurley, Walt and Ben get to go off and have adventures. Short of a spin-off series, we'll never get that answered though.

Quote

 

I too recommend LEFTOVERS for any LOST fan. It's all about mystery, religion/faith, loss, regret, finding your "place," and good vs evil. So, a lot like LOST in those regards. 

 

I think the real modern successor to Lost is Sense8. Straczynski was a huge fan of Lost's and it's clear he's taken on board what worked (the tight character focus and creating individual characters we just like seeing hang out) and has rolled back on what didn't (Sense8's mystery/mythology/backstory stuff is far less complicated and involved than Lost's, and really isn't the focus of the show).

[DunderMifflin]

I was fine with the flashsideways I took it as everybody's fairy tale they would have if they weren't "damaged"

Thats probably better than showing how Kate and Sawyer and Claire lived out their real life after the island, because honestly what else in life is going to top saving the world on a magic island? 

The biggest complaints I remember were......

- Radzinsky was a let down, he got sort of a Boba Fett style build up, then when he appeared on screen he fucking sucked.

- Mr Eko quitting, he was one of the best actors on the show and he's just supercool. They planned on keeping him until the end, so much left undone with mr ecko.

One of my favorite parts of the show was Dharmaville back in the 70s.