Lost: The End...
Ryan Dunn | May 24, 2010
Hated it.
For the record, I thought LOST jumped the shark when Sayid and what's her name fell in love...I just didn't buy the attraction.
Since then I've watched the show with a "love to hate" perspective.
Spoiler Alert:
So they're all dead. Really? Really?
I was sorta digging the whole "remembering the alternate life" thing, and kinda getting into the combining of parallel universes...and then it turns out they're dead. So what, the island was purgatory? Or it was real and the alternate life was purgatory? Or we're not supposed to know which was what and this and that? Frikkin Lost.
This experience has really made me think differently about the Sopranos finale. I went from being a hater to a lover. I am convinced that Tony took a bullet to the head and never saw it coming, and respect David Chase for deciding not to spoonfeed his audience. As Chase said, “If you look at the final episode really carefully, it’s all there.”
The LOST folks tried to tidy everything up in a neat little package with a bow on top. Reminded me of the ending of the god awful Star Wars Episode 3 when Jimmy Smits is frantically covering all the loose ends so the plot fits with Episode 4: Fake but not far off Bail Organa closing dialogue: "Okay, the twins can't end up together so I'll take one, and the other goes to Tatooine cuz, just cuz... and erase the memory of the protocol droid...but NOT the R2 unit...cuz that makes sense...and while you're at it, remove the rocket boosters from the R2 unit because there's about a gazillion times in the next 3 movies that rocket boosters would have come in handy..."
Sorry for the rant. Anyhoo, not crazy about the LOST ending.
Samir Mehta | May 24, 2010
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Ryan Dunn | May 24, 2010
Samir: "- The Island is a "real" place in the fictional world. We're told this repeatedly and more to the point people seem to come and go from it a LOT. I think this isn't possible if they aren't "real" or then the whole thing is an elaborate dream sequence.
- The Sideways world is a less real place but an important one where Jughead DID stop the Incident and thus prevented the Island from staying around. Whether it is a fantasy or real isn't material. (Real argument: It is a distinct separate reality created by Jughead. This has a fatal flaw, though, because the characters are also dead in that world.) We see the Island buried under water which would happen only if it was destroyed. Narratively, no one saw the Island underwater so we probably should assume that this world reflects the one without Jacob, the Light, etc. What happens in this world? An appearance of a happy life for many characters but they are all missing something key. That is what the Island is about."
(Tongue and Cheek Sarcasm Alert) Oh, I see. Thanks for clearing that up. ;)
Samir Mehta | May 24, 2010
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Steve West | May 25, 2010
From Gawker.com - Lost ended tonight, and with it the hopes and dreams of millions of people who thought it might finally get good again. SPOILER ALERT: It didn't. What did we learn? Nothing. We learned nothing from two-and-a-half hours of slow-motion bullshittery backed with a syrupy soundtrack.
Ryan Dunn | May 25, 2010
Great Gawker post, Steve. Link.
Pretty much sums up my feelings. A few more highlights:
Spoilers
"Everyone loves to see characters who haven't been around for a while, right?...Shannon! Long time since you were around, irritating all of us and ruining Sayid."
"IT TURNED OUT THAT THEY HAD ALL DIED. All of them! And not even all together, simultaneously, in some awesome disaster/explosion. They had all died, at various times, throughout history. (Except for Michael and Walt, apparently!)"
" I have taken a creative writing class or two (can you tell?) and do you know this thing they teach you? "Don't end your story with all your characters being dead." It is like cheating. It is worse than cheating! It is the wussiest thing a writer can do. And these smug dickheads went ahead and did it."
Samir Mehta | May 25, 2010
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Denise Sawicki | May 25, 2010
I saw it... I haven't really been a huge fan of the show for a while but I stuck it out until the bitter end. I too thought at first that they were saying everyone had been dead since the beginning... As for the "real" explanation, I hardly like that any better. Why the urgency to get everyone together in the afterlife? It seems it would have been better if they had a real purpose to achieve such as helping to save the world. Speaking of saving the world, everyone seems to agree that saving the island saves the world, but why and how? :P Oh well. I think I am biased to not like that finale that much because I just don't like most of the characters that much and I find their relationships boring.
Scott Hardie | April 14, 2011
We finished Lost last night after about five straight months.
I really enjoyed the series. I don't need to spell out its virtues here. What you liked, I liked.
The inconsistent characterization is my only major complaint. Characters could be nice most of the time, then turn into belligerent, obtuse thugs for a couple of episodes to drive the plot, before returning to normal. We started calling the show Stupid Asshole Island because the men kept fighting to be the king of stupid assholes. But even this complaint is fading as I get further and further from those awkward episodes, leaving only positive memories behind. I look forward to watching the whole series again someday and finding out whether those same parts still bother me.
I can't decide what to make of the tonal shift in the later three seasons, where the reduced episode count forced them to barrel through the plot at full speed rather than taking the time to show scenes of everyday life on the island. Those early episodes really had time to breathe, and provided some context to the adventure. But I can't really fault the producers and writers for the realities of contemporary television production, especially in the midst of an industry-wide strike. They did the best they could.
If I had a magic wand to change any one detail, it would be the exit of Mr. Eko. He was my favorite character, so original and so unpredictable, and I was bummed to see him go. To learn online last night that the writers planned a four-year arc for him that would have made him a central character like Jack and Locke made it even more depressing. I know what the actor went through and why he had to quit the show, but it's still a huge, sad waste of potential.
As for the ending, I'm not going to make any friends with this, but I really liked it. Metaphysical endings are rarely popular, but the writers were under such pressure to deliver the greatest ending of all time that virtually anything they did would have been booed. I tend to understand shows like this from the writers' perspective, and I could tell why they did that whole L.A. subplot and ended the show that way because of what it allowed them to say about the characters and their experience, but I know it's not terribly satisfying to hungry fans; it was a writer's ending, not a viewer's ending. Like Ryan, I too had thought that L.A. was an alternate dimension that somehow (via Desmond?) they were going to connect to the real world, and I dug that idea, but I don't mind that it turned out differently. And like Denise, I would have liked it more if the characters' gathering had been for some greater purpose, but I wonder again if the limited episode count forced the writers to rein in their ambitions. I do think it's worth noting that the entire series, including all flashbacks and flash-forwards and even the L.A. subplot, are all canonically part of the same timeline, just at different points. Nothing on the show "didn't actually happen" except for a handful of single-scene hallucinations.
A funny thing happened after the finale that I didn't expect: I stopped minding that certain details were never provided, because I somehow came to understand in the back of my mind that there was never any more information to provide in the first place. For instance, Walt Lloyd: What are his psychic abilities? Why did the Others want him? For years I've been wondering, and I gained a sinking feeling as the series approached conclusion without any hope of answering these questions, especially since the show passed on a golden opportunity to re-introduce him as an adult in season five. I expected to regret having never gotten answers when the series was over, but instead it dawned on me that Walt's story was complete long ago and the answers to those questions were self-evident. I suddenly felt content. This applied to other mysteries as well, such as who the Others were, how they maintained their population in light of a (temporary? permanent?) fertility crisis, what rules governed the conflict between Linus and Widmore, and so on. As soon as the series was over, the explanations for all of these clicked in my mind because the pieces had been there all along; all I lacked in order to put them together was the knowledge that no more pieces were necessary. The show created a kind of addiction to its own storytelling, in which I stopped trying to provide my own understanding and relied upon the narrative to spell out every detail for me sooner or later, and the unexpected release from this dependency was a strange but welcome feeling. It's another reason why I found the last episode satisfying, even though this has nothing to do with anything that happened in it.
All that said, I'm newly aware of how widely reviled the ending is, here and elsewhere, something I missed at the time it aired. When I wait until a series is over to watch it all at once, I used to think it was a liability that I missed out on conversations with other fans, since I'm forever playing catch up, sometimes many years later. (The other series I'm watching right now is the frigging Cosby Show.) But now, seeing online how many people nitpicked Lost to pieces, especially big episodes like the series finale, makes me feel pretty lucky that I experienced it in a vacuum after all. The Internet has ruined shows for me, and I don't need whiny, implacable, hostile "fans" to taint my experience; the good conversations aren't worth the bad ones. I'm going to continue watching shows this way.
Now to get into all of the copious bonus material and mini-episodes. I hear there's a computer game; is it just entering a number sequence every 108 minutes to avoid a game-over screen? We have the elaborate collector's edition thanks to it coming out a week before Kelly's birthday, and today Kelly just followed the obscure series of clues and hidden notes inside the package to reveal an entire bonus disc hidden inside a secret compartment. This set is definitely the way all series should be presented.
Samir Mehta | April 14, 2011
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Steve Dunn | April 14, 2011
Mad Men is one of very few shows I think about after each episode is over.
Jackie Mason | April 15, 2011
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Samir Mehta | April 15, 2011
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Samir Mehta | April 15, 2011
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Scott Hardie | April 16, 2011
DVDs and especially the Internet are breaking down traditional viewing habits. Production companies are slowly adjusting to meet the inevitable new reality, but without a safe, time-tested way to make money doing it that way, I understand their reluctance.
Anyway, a friend pointed out how different Lost felt with a week (or a month or many months) between seasons, when the anticipation was heightened and part of the rush of finally seeing a new episode. Kelly and I did watch too many episodes at first, 8-10 a week, which provided a great rush at first but soon soured us on the whole show by season three. We paced ourselves in the later seasons (1-2 a week) and wound up enjoying it a lot more. Watching a blend of series at the same time, all different, may also have helped to keep the palate cleansed.
Scott Hardie | April 17, 2011
If I had to sum up Lost in six words...
Erik Bates | April 18, 2011
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Jackie Mason | April 21, 2011
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Scott Hardie | July 26, 2011
A new "deleted scene" at Comic-Con proves that Lost had a plan all along. (spoilers)
Scott Hardie | June 14, 2015
Spotify just acquired the Lost soundtrack albums -- all 12 hours and 15 minutes of them -- and that great music is bringing me a flood of good memories from this show. Man I need to watch this again. Lost did some things wrong, but so many more things right. It continues to this day to inspire imitators, some of them subtle. What a great adventure RPG this scenario would have made.
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Samir Mehta | May 24, 2010
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