Bitching about Lost

[prog]

Honestly, I found this the weakest of the season closers. "But, they exploded a nuke! And there was Jacob craziness!" Yeah, well...

OK, first of all, yeah, I liked the Jacob stuff. The opening scene of the finale, with Jacob and Black Tunic Dude, were great. I also enjoyed the scenes of Jacob intersecting with the main characters' earlier lives, though I would have edited it together differently, making it more of a rapidly unfolding montage. (If the whole season were a 2-hour film, that's how it would have happened, and it would have looked awesome. Sigh.)

WRT the nuke: O RLY? So the final scene is Juliet banging on it with the rock, and then there is a rumble and the screen goes white. Title card, credits. So one of two things just happened:

(a) Yes, she really did set off the bomb. In which case she accomplished the goal that several characters had been trying to achieve for the last several acts, to an obvious outcome. Which feels like a let-down, to me.

(b) She didn't set off the bomb. Maybe something else blew up; maybe the thing wasn't actually a bomb at all. (Lots of things in LOST cause the television screen to turn white, if you hadn't noticed.) It's useless to speculate now, but it would certainly be cliffhanger-standard to pull this one out at the start of the next season, and honestly it's what I'm expecting to happen.

Either way, we-the-viewers get nothing, not even a tease, to lead us into the next season. The strongest part of all four prior finales was the hook offered by the final scene, and this episode hands us a brick wall. I guess I can respect them wanting to try something different here, but as far as I'm concerned they just took all the air out. I basically feel like nothing at all happened, and I'm wondering if you and I even watched the same show, o you-who-were-so-excited-about-this.

This doesn't make me want to watch the next season. It does makes me angry and feel like a chump for letting myself get strung along. I feel like I do after finishing a big-budget single-player 20-hour video game that wasn't really much fun towards the end, but which I kept playing out of momentum.

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I will admit I did find the meat of this season at least mildly entertaining. I did like how all the conflicts were character-driven, versus the the show ratcheting up the drama by introducing yet another fire-breathing ghost or whatever. (Jacob's appearance is the culmination of a long thread, so he gets a pass.)

Uh, though I really started to loathe the finale upon Jack's line about being too scared to hit on Kate or whatever the hell. I despise Jack. He hasn't learned a damn thing, and the show continues to treat him like he's its sympathetic center.

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I thought that the Others' lack of emotional response to the Losties' mowing down untold numbers their comrades during the first three seasons was significant, and was hoping that maybe they'd be explained as Phil Dick-style androids. I was honestly fascinated by this and couldn't wait to see what they'd do with it.

Now I'm pretty sure it was just due to bad directing.

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The Lost casual game: the player controls an armed character in the jungle. Every so often, the tall green plants rustle: oh no, danger! Use the mouse to aim your crosshairs! When you do, one of your character's friends pops out. Whew, what a scare!

If you accidentally click the mouse while aiming, there is a gunshot! Oh no! And then you realize that you're the one who's been shot, by an offscreen assailant. The game ends, after a brief epilogue where your character regrets their failed relationship with their father.

Comments

[radtea.livejournal.com]

It does makes me angry and feel like a chump for letting myself get strung along.

Isn't this the basic premise of the show, stringing the viewers along?

I haven't watched Lost at all, but initially thought the premise was intriguing. However, everything I've seen written about it since the first episode suggests that there is no underlying plan, any more than there was an underlying plan in BSG. What there is is a room full of writers trying to figure out how to jerk the fans around with enough local tinsel that they won't notice/will put up with the lack of overall direction.

Local character-driven stuff is great, but at the end of the day if a story has the appearance of a global arc then that arc has to advance in a meaningful way. The mystery has to be resolved somehow. Joss Wheadon is a master of this, to the extent that even his weaker characters (I'm thinking the Buffyverse) are sufficient because he plays fair with the viewer on the global storyline.

BSG and Lost (I say confidently, having watched the first season of one and nothing of the other) turn the Wheadon formula on its head: loads of strong character stuff locally, but with a long-term arc that has no substance for all of its apparent complexity. They are old-style episodic television, and the appearance of a larger-scale structure is mostly fake, and therefore frustrating.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

For me, Lost has definitely always had a strong and detailed underlying plan, while Battlestar Galactica only barely had one (and it was kind of lame). Maybe it's just an illusion, but it's a well-crafted illusion that I'm happy to believe in. The level of consistency of its interlocking parts is pretty amazing, and I never find myself questioning "what does this character want?" (except for the few times where it's intentionally unclear, and most of those have been resolved). Whereas I never could wrap my head around a single thing that the Cylons did.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

Cool. My reaction to BSG was pretty much the same as yours, so I may have a look at Lost. Thanks.

[toonhead-npl.livejournal.com]

I didn't find her setting off the bomb so shocking either. I mean, that's what we were expecting the whole time, right?

But the whole thing with the screen going white and the title card becoming a negative image of itself was awesome. I'm hoping the nature of the last season means it's gonna stay black on white.

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

I was under the impression that this was indeed the last season of Lost.

Yeah, I'm reading spoilers since I haven't seen these episodes. I'd have tried to catch up but Disney/Go/ABC's stupid page only lets you see the last 5 episodes and wants to download some crap onto your computer just to play it .. so much for that. I might see it if/when my roommate buys the DVD set since he has the other 4 seasons.

[prog.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that the next season is the last one. And we are both too lazy to go look it up. :)

[gemini6ice.livejournal.com]

correct

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

I got the feeling from the beginning of this season that the writers had finally hashed out where they were going. It's clear from discussion info on the various DVDs that they did not have a clue when they started, but it's possible they do now. I really hope so. The end of BSG was a serious let down. I thought the ending of this season was not so much "nothing" as "totally obvious", you could tell that was how it was going to end a long while back, maybe even from the previous two episodes.

I still hate Kate.

[prog.livejournal.com]

OMG ME TOO

Jack is written self-destructive, but he's not a well-written self-destructive, he's just irritating.

Kate... I don't know what the frak she is

[gemini6ice.livejournal.com]

Kate is a dumb attention-hungry catgirl.

[kahuna-burger.livejournal.com]

Heh, I feel so justified in giving up on Lost after maybe a half season of reruns and fan synopsis of what was going on... It just seemed unsustainable to me from the start.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I agree that the ending was anticlimactic, and they didn't give enough information to know if I should care or not: if the bomb went off and the plan was truly successful, then the plane never crashed and everything resets, so Juliet isn't actually dead and no one knows each other. Seems unlikely that it's that simple, though.

What excited me about the finale was Jacob, and the statue, and the "Nemesis", and Richard, etc. I think that is the hook for what the final season will be about, the centuries-long war between Jacob and whatever, perhaps intertwined with the war between Charles and Ben. The whole bomb thing seems like kind of a sideshow to that, and mainly a way to somehow wrap up the whole time-travel thing, which I was mostly kind of annoyed with. (I think I agree with jwz: stories that feature time travel but are not about time travel never get it right.) My guess is that Miles was right, and the bomb actually created the anomaly rather than destroying it, and that somehow the characters will all pop out into the present day (except Juliet and maybe Sayid) with the timeline being intact. But I have faith that they'll fill in the blanks better than that. Crossing my fingers, at least...