Mmm. [LOST SPOILERS HALLO]

[prog]

So Lost ended, and firstly let me say that I liked the note that the "real world" thread ended on, finding it a perfectly fine and even touching closure. They even gave ol' Vincent a rationale for being there. This was good and I appreciated it. I will even fondly remember it.

I can't say I felt that way about the other business. That the show pulled a fast one on us about the context of the side-stories wasn't itself objectionable -- indeed, the reveal in 2007 that that season's flashbacks were actually flash-forwards remains a series high point. But the "the 'alternate timeline' was actually Heaven" thing... eeugh. What does that have to do with anything that came before? It felt like the show stapled a made-up-at-the-last-minute cosmology onto the end, totally divorced of anything the characters or DHARMA or any other element of the drama, and then dumped us all into it.

I can also add that propping a carefully panreligious stained-glass window into the final side-scene doesn't make it anything other than a distinctly bubblegum-Christian depiction of the afterlife, but I am sure that wiser critics will do a better job sighing at that than I. Oh well. I don't regret watching it, nor do I regret taking a pass from watching the previous several episodes.

The rest of you may all commence making fun of me for grousing about this but still liking Battlestar Galactica.

Comments

[radtea.livejournal.com]

I'm not gonna make fun of you... I'm just going to feel smug about not watching the show myself. Too damned easy to get sucked into even though I know perfectly well that the writers don't have a clue what the actual backstory is. If they did, it would inevitably leak over the course of time. So the last season of a show like this is always going to have rough spots in the wrapping up because no matter how many hints and clues you've been given the reality is that nothing makes sense and most of the action is being chosen for the drama, and the big reveals are actually the result of random co-incidences the writers hit upon fortuitously during production.

Being currently in the "re-writing and reconciliation" phase of the novel I'm working on, I'm continually surprised by what kinds of connections and rationales I find between disparate parts of the text, and I'm as sure as anything that I didn't put them there. What I'm doing is the equivalent of seeing a face on Mars: we are tuned up to find order and meaning in events, so we do, even where there is none.

In the unfortunate social and political climate in the US today, falling back on "God did it" must be incredibly tempting for writers trying to bring so many disparate threads to some kind of coherent conclusion. Curiously, this is actually the idea that William of Okham was pushing with the idea that has since transmogrified into "Okham's Razor". When he said, "Do not multiply entities beyond necessity," he meant that only God is necessary to explain everything.

[kahuna-burger.livejournal.com]

I am expereincing as similar smugness, based on having watched a couple of early episodes, heard people talking about it and formed the nigh instant conclusion that there WAS NO big secret, they were making it up as they went along. The closest opposite expereince I can describe would be the Astro City comic series, where even though the early stories were very unconnected, I had a strong sense that the writers knew EVERYTHING about the background, and the hints really were hints at something they had fully plotted out somewhere, even if they never gave it to us all in one story.

Maybe I was wrong on Astro City, but even if I was, that illusion was powerful stuff in the ye olde willing suspension of disbelief process.