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

[Isis]

I think that the ending to Lost becomes less offensive when compared to BSG or The Sopranos. After those it just feels mildly disappointing.

[Werthead]

I do a have a philosophical objection to Lost, which is that it ended up being about Faith vs. Science and Faith won (as it did in BSG), which is annoying bullshit. Building up Jack as a man of science and reason and then presenting him only as a more virtuous and "right" character when he swapped sides to "Faith", with the Island punishing Sawyer when he made a choice based on reason by killing Sayid, Sun and Jin, was all a bit weird.

I'd like to see one of these shows do "Science vs. Faith" and Science wins outright, as it does in real life.

[Gertrude]

Technically they may have given us most of the answers, to me they just felt really underwhelming. I don't know where the blame lies for that - the fans put so much time and effort into theorizing and discussion that Wert's right - nothing would make everyone happy. However, I do feel that they were in love with the mystery aspect of the show and threw in stuff just for the sake of it. The build up on their part was real and their follow-through was hit or miss.

As an example, I remember being extremely disappointed with all the Egyptian symbology. Yes, technically there was an explanation that we could infer from 'Across the Sea'. The fact that Egyptian symbols were scattered throughout the island in the hatch, the ankhs the Dhama people wore, the smoke monster's lair, the statue, Jacob's weaving, etc - it felt like we were being lured into investing into a great mystery and not just 'It looked cool and there were probably Egyptians on the island at some point in the past.' Shit like that.

[Gertrude]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

I do a have a philosophical objection to Lost, which is that it ended up being about Faith vs. Science and Faith won (as it did in BSG), which is annoying bullshit. Building up Jack as a man of science and reason and then presenting him only as a more virtuous and "right" character when he swapped sides to "Faith", with the Island punishing Sawyer when he made a choice based on reason by killing Sayid, Sun and Jin, was all a bit weird.

Well, they punished Locke for being a man of Faith as well. From Locke's PoV, he had every reason to trust in the Man in Black. He could walk, he was spared from the smoke monster, the man in the cabin talked to him, Ben's gunshot didn't kill him - he's seen some god-damned miracles and mystic occurrences and should have faith. He just had the bad luck to be chosen and manipulated by the bad twin.

[Nictarion]

12 hours ago, Isis said:

I think that the ending to Lost becomes less offensive when compared to BSG or The Sopranos. After those it just feels mildly disappointing.

The Sopranos ending was fine. I can see why people didn't like it initially. I wasn't crazy about it at first, but I've completely changed my mind on what it meant. I certainly don't think it should be viewed as ruining the entire show, or anything that extreme. 

[princess_snow]

Sorry for late reply, Ive been sick with the flu.

I binged it over maybe 2 months, started watching a few eps per night but toward S6 I binged it hard. I was very happy with the finale. For me I felt satisfied with major questions being answered. I came to view the Island as a kind of Eden, and I felt there were parallels re MiB and Jacob to Cain and Abel.

I loved the central themes, good vs evil , science v faith etc. However my partner could not cope with it but stuck it out. At times I got a bit frustrated by what felt like a re hashing of the story, for eg, when they got to the temple. This may have been due to binging it though. 

I can understand how when it aired people gave up as watching it week to week with a break for end of season must have been infuriating.

 

I read too that they always knew their endgame ,but some issues cropped up due to the network not deciding on how many seasons there would be, which would create issues to the overall story.      

[princess_snow]

Its been awhile since Ive been on this forum. Has the way we reply to posts been changed ? I'm having issues replying individually.

[PetyrPunkinhead]

On 4/22/2017 at 6:01 PM, DunderMifflin said:

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

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

Yaass! I loved those Dharma episodes. I wanted more Dharma. Namaste.

On 4/23/2017 at 9:13 PM, princess_snow said:

Its been awhile since Ive been on this forum. Has the way we reply to posts been changed ? I'm having issues replying individually.

I'm not sure if it's different for your browser/interface, but for me there's a grey button with the + symbol in it next to the word "quote" at the bottom of every post. Click the + button (it should say "multiquote" when you hover over it with your mouse) for each post you'd like to reply to. A little grey window should appear in the bottom right of your screen that reads "quote post.". Then when you go to respond in the reply box click the grey window I just mentioned and all the posts you clicked + on will appear in the reply box and you can respond to them all at once. It'll look like this post here where I replied to both you and @DunderMifflin in the same post. Hope that was helpful and not an over explanation.

[princess_snow]

All good. Its definitely not the way I use to do it. Thanks for your reply. 

[princess_snow]

On ‎18‎/‎04‎/‎2017 at 7:02 PM, Isis said:

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. 

It appears frequently. I'm not sure when I started to notice it. Hugo for eg wears a red bathrobe off the Island and often a red tshirt on. I started to try and see if they were clues or foreshawing but I couldn't find a correlation to anything. Unless I'm missing something ? 

[princess_snow]

On ‎20‎/‎04‎/‎2017 at 10:34 AM, 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. 

I'm looking for a new show. Ill check it out thankyou !

On ‎22‎/‎04‎/‎2017 at 7:40 AM, 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. 

Ive seen many shows have this problem. I really didn't have a problem with it. I have to say I loved it. I got very invested in the characters though. I can totally understand why there is a cult following. Give it a go. Perhaps too I benefitted from binging it ? NOt sure what it was like for people watching it week about.

[princess_snow]

On ‎18‎/‎04‎/‎2017 at 10:57 PM, Regular John Umber said:

 

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?

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

I think it was less that 6 weeks building up more toward the last couple of season. Hahaha.

NO not the flowers. There were so many scenes with red objects or clothing etc. I gave up as I couldn't find a correlation to anything ! 

On ‎23‎/‎04‎/‎2017 at 7:33 AM, Nictarion said:

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. 

I agree, they totally butchered Dexter. It was great up until S4. The last season was a disaster. I cant unsee it.  

On ‎23‎/‎04‎/‎2017 at 8:33 AM, Werthead said:

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).

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.

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).

Thankyou for the link. I agree with everything you have said, and Ive read similar on other forums. I was fine about " what the Island was " and I felt most of the important mysteries were answered. I usually nitpick the hell out of everything so I'm not sure why I was so relaxed about that.

I feel like I binged it too quickly in fact. Ive decided Ill do a rewatch at the end of the year.

 

I think without the characters, which were really well fleshed out and the stories around them I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much. There were some outstanding performances.

Lastly I agree re the flash sideways in that they spent too much time on it, I didn't hate it however.

[briantw]

On 4/22/2017 at 4:29 PM, Raja said:

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) 

I think there's an argument that some shows are about the journey more than the destination.  I just don't think Lost was one of them.  You can't spend literally the entire series asking questions and then not answer half of them, and then pretend it was all about the journey and the characters.  No, Lost was all about the mysteries, and they just didn't resolve a lot of them adequately or satisfyingly. 

On 4/21/2017 at 5:40 PM, Tywin et al. said:

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

Yeah, it's definitely a common problem.  The Shield is one of the few long-running shows I can think of that totally stuck the landing.  Dexter shit the bed, lit the bed on fire, then shit on it again and pissed on the ashes.  Dexter, naturally, is the best argument Lost has for not being the worst finale ever.  

Honestly, the guys who created Lost should send a fruit basket to the people who wrote that Dexter abortion every year, because now Dexter is always the first thing that comes to mind when I think of an awful TV finale.

[Raja]

1 hour ago, briantw said:

 I just don't think Lost was one of them. 

 You're totally entitled to think that Lost was about it's mysteries, and you're correct. But for me, I just didn't care *too* much about the mysteries, I was more invested in the characters from the start. That is one of the reasons the flashbacks worked so well for me. That stuff, at least at the start, had little to do with the island, and it was excellent. So yes, Lost did ask a lot of questions about the island/ others/ etc, but that was never the main draw for me. For you, it clearly was. 

[Isis]

6 hours ago, Raja said:

 You're totally entitled to think that Lost was about it's mysteries, and you're correct. But for me, I just didn't care *too* much about the mysteries, I was more invested in the characters from the start. That is one of the reasons the flashbacks worked so well for me. That stuff, at least at the start, had little to do with the island, and it was excellent. So yes, Lost did ask a lot of questions about the island/ others/ etc, but that was never the main draw for me. For you, it clearly was. 

I always think of it as being a character-driven show. Yes, there are the mysteries and questions but so much time is spent on the characters and their back stories, it's really all about them.

[briantw]

7 minutes ago, Isis said:

I always think of it as being a character-driven show. Yes, there are the mysteries and questions but so much time is spent on the characters and their back stories, it's really all about them.

I think Lost had a lot of great characters, but ultimately the show was built around the mysteries.  The hook of the show was the island and all the mysteries surrounding it.  If these people had all been stranded on a normal island, I doubt anyone would have given a shit.  Lost became a pop culture phenomenon not because of Jack, Sawyer, Kate, or Hurley, but because of all the mysteries that pulled you in and kept you questioning just what the fuck was going on.  It was one of the first shows to truly leverage the power of the internet to get people talking and have fans proposing wild theories constantly.

The problem is that, when the creators couldn't figure out a satisfying explanation for many of the questions they'd spent years posing and teasing, they just didn't answer some of them and hid behind the "it was all about the journey" excuse.

Contrast that with The Leftovers, another show with a big mystery.  However, The Leftovers very clearly isn't about that mystery.  It's about the people who were left behind and how they struggle to go on with their lives.  If it never answers exactly what happened to all the people that vanished (which I don't believe it will), that's fine, because the show isn't about that.  Lost, however, was very much about the island, what it meant, what it was, etc.  It was about the characters too, but ultimately what people wanted were answers, and they didn't get enough of them, and many of the ones they did get just weren't that satisfying.  

[DunderMifflin]

On 4/21/2017 at 5:40 PM, 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 think it's pretty impossible in the internet age to have a nice and tidy ending to any great serial. There are just so many people out there that it only takes like 10-20% of the viewership of a popular show to go online and rant about how shitty the ending was for it to officially be labeled a shitty ending.

Feeling sorry for GRRM already, nothing will be good enough for that ending. I wouldnt be surprised if he's just stringing it out so he will die before an ending because he knows there will be outrage no matter what he writes.

[Raja]

38 minutes ago, DunderMifflin said:

I wouldnt be surprised if he's just stringing it out so he will die before an ending because he knows there will be outrage no matter what he writes.

Wtf is this...

[DunderMifflin]

6 minutes ago, Raja said:

Wtf is this...

Just some very unserious speculation that's all.

The part about about the asoiaf ending will not be good enough to avoid outrage and labeled a shitty ending is serious.  I believe an asoiaf ending, if we ever get one will be labeled shitty by fandom no matter what gets written.

The part about GRRM purposely not writing the ending for that reason was the not serious part.

[Raja]

59 minutes ago, briantw said:

 Lost, however, was very much about the island, what it meant, what it was, etc.  It was about the characters too, but ultimately what people wanted were answers, and they didn't get enough of them, and many of the ones they did get just weren't that satisfying.  

 I think YMMV on this question as like all art, Lost was clearly about different things to different people, in this case the characters was a strong pull as opposed to things like what's down the hatch/ what's the point of those numbers etc. I agree with Isis, to me, it became a show that used those mysteries to explore its characters. Which, I would argue is exactly what the Leftovers does too. There's an excellent podcast that covered the finale of Lost which expands on some of the points that I've been making ( there are also guests who take your position) . Have a listen, if you've got the time. 

The /Filmcast: Bonus Ep. – Lost Series Finale and Wrap-Up (GUESTS: Katey Rich and Myles McNutt)