GRRM hopes not to "Pull a Lost"

[Iciclefires]

http://tv.ign.com/articles/115/1159870p1.html

Once you read that, respond carefully, because I couldn't help myself laugh out loud.

[Whatever]

well, IMHO they did fuck up the ending.

I think he wasn't entirely serious, but i'll start using "to do a lost" since now :D

[stangles]

I really liked the ending of Lost. It tied up most of the questions, and the parts that werent tied up were not particularly important. Anyway the ending of lost or the "sideways" reality was not a separate reality but the same reality set in the future. Everyone died, some during the seasons of the show, and some died maybe decades after the season finale. This sideways reality in which everyone was dead was out of the mainstream time where they all met up after dying before going to heaven. So the island was not a place for dead people because everyone was alive there and the island was a real if magical place on earth.

[Bronn is God]

Oh please, please, please Mr Martin, let everyone die at the hands of the Others.

PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[The Scabbard Of the Morning]

I liked Lost, even though I wasn't completely happy with the ending, in fact I think the early seasons were much better than the later seasons.

But I have to give Lost credit, they kept it interesting for most of 6 seasons, which is hard to do even if you don't know where you're going.

Heroes, whose creator also promised to "not pull a Lost", ended up being interesting for one season and completely fell apart after that.

So even though I had issues with Lost, I think they still pulled off an amazing 6 year run.

[Phostopheles]

I really liked the ending of Lost. It tied up most of the questions, and the parts that werent tied up were not particularly important. Anyway the ending of lost or the "sideways" reality was not a separate reality but the same reality set in the future. Everyone died, some during the seasons of the show, and some died maybe decades after the season finale. This sideways reality in which everyone was dead was out of the mainstream time where they all met up after dying before going to heaven. So the island was not a place for dead people because everyone was alive there and the island was a real if magical place on earth.

In short, copout. They had no idea what they were doing from the beginning, stupid American fans being stupid American fans saw Jesus in everything and said it must be some sort of purgatory, and LO AND BEHOLD the writers decided to stop giving a fuck and just went with the populist interpretation. The only people I know who continued to like Lost after the finale were Christians, who as we all know are extensively trained to just stop asking questions and pretend like any unsolved mystery equates to goddidit (or in this case, writerdidit). Look past the architect and see the human being, people--it's pretty obvious that if a good portion of Lost still didn't make one whit of sense after the finale, it's a result of the writer's fallibility, not his wisdom.

In the case of Martin, he could leave a lot unresolved and I'd still be happy, simply because of the difficulty level of what he's attempting. Even if I think he's spending too much time piddling around playing celebrity, the fact is that he is at least putting the effort into creating a vibrant, intricate, coherent fantasy setting, and largely succeeding on levels guys like Lindelof will never expend the energy to climb to. Lindelof is a hack, pure and simple, feeding off the average American's gullibility as much as Roland Emmerich or Stephen King.

[End of Disc One]

In short, copout. They had no idea what they were doing from the beginning, stupid American fans being stupid American fans saw Jesus in everything and said it must be some sort of purgatory, and LO AND BEHOLD the writers decided to stop giving a fuck and just went with the populist interpretation. The only people I know who continued to like Lost after the finale were Christians, who as we all know are extensively trained to just stop asking questions and pretend like any unsolved mystery equates to goddidit (or in this case, writerdidit). Look past the architect and see the human being, people--it's pretty obvious that if a good portion of Lost still didn't make one whit of sense after the finale, it's a result of the writer's fallibility, not his wisdom.

Except that you clearly either didn't watch the show or are an idiot and misinterpreted it. And we could do without your fucking bashing of religious and ethnic groups.

Edit: I looked further up in the thread where you said you never got into LOST, so quit acting like you know what you're talking about.

[Phostopheles]

Except that you clearly either didn't watch the show or are an idiot and misinterpreted it. And we could do without your fucking bashing of religious and ethnic groups.

Edit: I looked further up in the thread where you said you never got into LOST, so quit acting like you know what you're talking about.

I don't need to wade through a river of shit to tell it's shit. I could tell just by watching summaries, and conversing with friends who had watched most of it, that the mythology was little more than a shallow mish-mash of bastardized panreligious iconography (but still mostly Christian because otherwise ratings would suffer). Which would be fine if it all were tied together well in execution, but since the writers never bothered to explain half of the mysterious crap they threw in, of course it was going to suck when that sad fact was made public.

And I'll stop generalizing when the sheeple of the world stop acting so stereotypically. It's called marketing, and even if I know Lost to be shit, I at least applaud them for being incredibly smart businessmen, taking full advantage of the target demographic and its shortcomings.

[Dragonfish]

Except that you clearly either didn't watch the show or are an idiot and misinterpreted it. And we could do without your fucking bashing of religious and ethnic groups.

Edit: I looked further up in the thread where you said you never got into LOST, so quit acting like you know what you're talking about.

I did watch the show, every single freaking episode, and Phostopheles is right: it was a total copout. People who like the ending tend to think it was profoundly ambiguous, when in fact the creators were just hiding behind "ambiguity" and "mystery" to hide the fact that they didn't know how to answer everyone's questions. This is the definition of a copout.

That said, I don't share Phostopheles' views on Christianity and its relation to one's opinion of the Lost finale. By way of example, my Christian family members pretty much hated the finale.

[Phostopheles]

I did watch the show, every single freaking episode, and Phostopheles is right: it was a total copout. People who like the ending tend to think it was profoundly ambiguous, when in fact the creators were just hiding behind "ambiguity" and "mystery" to hide the fact that they didn't know how to answer everyone's questions. This is the definition of a copout.

That said, I don't share Phostopheles' views on Christianity and its relation to one's opinion of the Lost finale. By way of example, my Christian family members pretty much hated the finale.

Yeah, to be clear I never said that all Christians loved it, merely that it aptly described target demographic (as do a lot of populist American TV dramas) and thus tended to encapsulate the viewers who actually enjoyed the finale.

Maybe some case could have been made for it being "profound" before the writers publicly admitted they were making shit up as they went along and had no idea how they were going to tie it all together. At that point they pretty much lost all credibility in my book. I realize that most shows are written season by season, but the good ones, especially dramas, try and keep everything heading towards an end goal that was in mind from day one. Tacking on a superficially "profound" explanation like "they were dead/dying the whole time" is indeed a huge copout.

By the way, I don't know if anyone has put this forth yet, but Martin might not have been referring to Lost specifically when he criticized the ending:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeadAllAlong

I don't know how memetically fit that particular trope has been outside the interwebs, but it certainly describes the trope the Lost crew used very well. Where they fell flat was forming a coherent conceit with it like Sixth Sense, The Others, Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, etc. Which is really hard to do if you haven't been planning it from the beginning and developing the plot to properly hint at it.

[Dragonfish]

Tacking on a superficially "profound" explanation like "they were dead/dying the whole time" is indeed a huge copout.

By the way, I don't know if anyone has put this forth yet, but Martin might not have been referring to Lost specifically when he criticized the ending:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeadAllAlong

I don't know how memetically fit that particular trope has been outside the interwebs, but it certainly describes the trope the Lost crew used very well. Where they fell flat was forming a coherent conceit with it like Sixth Sense, The Others, Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, etc. Which is really hard to do if you haven't been planning it from the beginning and developing the plot to properly hint at it.

To be fair, they weren't actually dead all along, everything that happened on the island was real. But to my mind that just makes it worse, because that means their "shocking" revelation at the end of the series was just an answer to a mystery that had only been a mystery for the very last season. When they set an end date for the show after its third season, they could have used that opportunity to truly codify the mythology and plan out how they were going to reveal it in an adequately dramatic fashion. Instead, they chose to set up a new mystery for the final season, a mystery that no one cared about, and reveal its "shocking" answer and act like that would suffice. Well, it didn't suffice, not for me at least.

[The Scabbard Of the Morning]

This is the only thing that makes me nervous, that GRRM "hopes" to not pull a Lost.

To me this has nothing to do with hope, either you know where you're going, or you're making it up as you go along. And if you're doing the later, no matter how good your are, you WILL pull a Lost.

The only way to avoid that is to know where you're going all along, which GRRM supposedly does. But then again, the Lost writers claimed to know where they were going too, and they evidently did not. I don't like to hear GRRM sound uncertain in any way about this.

[Josiah Rowe]

In short, copout. They had no idea what they were doing from the beginning, stupid American fans being stupid American fans saw Jesus in everything and said it must be some sort of purgatory, and LO AND BEHOLD the writers decided to stop giving a fuck and just went with the populist interpretation.

Except that, as Dragonfish has already pointed out, the Lost characters weren't in purgatory, at least not when they were on the island. The "flash-sideways" part of the last season turned out to be a sort of limbo/purgatory, but everything that happened on the island was part of the "real world".

Some people are acting as if GRRM was under this same misapprehension about the Lost finale, but I don't see that in the EW article. Is there more from the New Yorker article (which I haven't read, as it's behind a registration wall)?

(Oh, and Lost in general and the finale in specific actually went out of their way to draw from different world religions, not just Christianity. But that's neither here nor there.)

[Phostopheles]

To be fair, they weren't actually dead all along, everything that happened on the island was real. But to my mind that just makes it worse, because that means their "shocking" revelation at the end of the series was just an answer to a mystery that had only been a mystery for the very last season. When they set an end date for the show after its third season, they could have used that opportunity to truly codify the mythology and plan out how they were going to reveal it in an adequately dramatic fashion. Instead, they chose to set up a new mystery for the final season, a mystery that no one cared about, and reveal its "shocking" answer and act like that would suffice. Well, it didn't suffice, not for me at least.

Well yeah, they weren't dead all along, but it was just as bad as them basically being in limbo and waiting for resolution/judgment/death, which tends to be a unifying theme in dead all along tales. The difference is that they never once bother to try to explain the mythology behind the "flash-sideways" universe, or even most of the island's magical mysteries beyond some pseudo-philosophical hand-waving. Anything that was explained was done so in an incredibly shallow manner.

[Phostopheles]

Except that, as Dragonfish has already pointed out, the Lost characters weren't in purgatory, at least not when they were on the island. The "flash-sideways" part of the last season turned out to be a sort of limbo/purgatory, but everything that happened on the island was part of the "real world".

Some people are acting as if GRRM was under this same misapprehension about the Lost finale, but I don't see that in the EW article. Is there more from the New Yorker article (which I haven't read, as it's behind a registration wall)?

(Oh, and Lost in general and the finale in specific actually went out of their way to draw from different world religions, not just Christianity. But that's neither here nor there.)

Yeah, see above. Also, I pointed out that it was an incoherent mishmash of iconography from world religions--the end result though, the metaphyisical elements that were more active in the plot and more importantly how they impacted the characters, smacked very strongly of Christianity. It's new age panreligion for people too afraid to completely abandon Abrahamic faiths...

[Dragonfish]

Well yeah, they weren't dead all along, but it was just as bad as them basically being in limbo and waiting for resolution/judgment/death, which tends to be a unifying theme in dead all along tales. The difference is that they never once bother to try to explain the mythology behind the "flash-sideways" universe, or even most of the island's magical mysteries beyond some pseudo-philosophical hand-waving. Anything that was explained was done so in an incredibly shallow manner.

Yeah, you'll get no argument from me on this point.

[Werthead]

Lost's ending was probably ill-advised with regards to the purgatory stuff. It's an overused storytelling device at best. Where Lost was clever is that they didn't rely on it as the sole ending of the series, and the actual last scene was 'real' and on-the-Island. There's actually a Phantom Edit-style retooling of Season 6 on the interwebs shorn of the whole flash-sideways stuff, and I imagine that working a lot better than what we did get. Of course, it didn't help that Ashes to Ashes addressed some of the same issues as Lost but did so far more concisely, far more coherently and built to a far more emotionally satisfying conclusion which only aired 3 days befoe Lost's (though that was mainly a problem in the UK). All of that said, the on-Island stuff generally worked, even if some of it was a bit hard to swallow.

There's certainly problems with the on-Island stuff in Season 6, but they weren't enough to retroactively reduce my enjoyment of the whole series. BSG's ending is far more nonsensical and betrays the fundamental concepts of both the series in particular and 'divine intervention' storytelling in particular (where the gods can get involved but generally through human agents; the god in BSG basically saying, "Fuck this, you guys are retards," shoving them aside and sending one of his angels to directly steer them to safety was half-assed, lazy storytelling at its worst).

[ríomhaire]

Ok. So seeing as spoiler tags seem to have gone out the window:

They weren't dead all along for the entire show. This makes the ending worse. Because the grand reveal that they were dead all along in the sideways universe means that that entire plotline (half of the last season) was pointless. Half of the final season, the season they should have been using to tie up things, was padding that had nothing to do with the mysteries that had previously been set up and only existed to reveal itself in the end.

The revelations we get about the actual plot is basically:

• The smoke monster was the villain all along
  
• The island is magic and exists to stop the smoke monster escaping via a magic rock
  
• Jacob was magic because his mother was magic
  
• No we don't know why his mother was magic

Which doesn't go to explain a ten of the plot mysteries set up to grab people's attention.

Also, the people who I know who liked the ending weren't Christians. They're people who say "But you don't understand, Lost was always about the characters! The island doesn't matter because the CHARACTERS!" Because saying the word characters over and over totally justifies all the bullshit.

[Kalbear]

I think that when GRRM says he doesn't want to pull a Lost is that he wants to make sure that if he raises questions or mysteries, the answers are reasonable, follow nicely from the text, and are thought about ahead of time. Jon's parentage, the prophecies, Dany's birthright, the Others and how to stop them - all of these things are Big Questions, and deserve good answers.

And while I have zero doubt that he knows the real, honest to goodness answers to these questions, how he delivers them could be Lost-like if it's just abrupt and doesn't follow from what he's written. It's not just about the answers - it's about making sure that they fit well within the context of the story and what has come before. Lost did a really horrible job of that sort of thing - either not knowing the answers and not bothering answering them, answering them boringly (How did a ship get to the center of the island? by wave. Why is there a 4-toed statue there? Someone built it), or actually ignoring prior mysteries so that they could move on.

I think this is one of the reasons that things are harder to write as we move forward - because GRRM is checking all these things as he moves along. His own worst enemy is his devotion to continuity.

[alguien]

Both BSG and Lost endings are similar in that they are somewhat satisfying on an emotional level but leave something to be desired from a whole plot coherence/story structure standpoint.

I mean,

much as I didn't like the "God did it" stuff in BSG, I will admit to enjoying the soundtrack and liking each character's send-off. Even if some, well most, of the choices made little sense to me in retrospect.

And Lost writers have gone on record to say now admit there was a lot of stuff in the beginning that they weren't sure of and had to abandon in later seasons.

I'm confident that GRRM will be able to pull of an ending that satisfies emotionally and makes sense.