Lost Season 6 - RE: LA X

the second to last episode is actually the only one i never saw-- i was traveling that week and missed it, then didnt want to have to wait to see the finale after my friends (and i knew it was all going to shit by that point anyway) so i just said fuck it and watched the finale

was it actually that bad??

What do you think of Roman matrons?

i just now remembered the crumpled up water bottles

http://i50.tinypic.com/2uzbczp.jpg

remember how the writers petulantly refused to have anyone say the name of titus welliver's character in that episode, just because the internet had gone ahead and assumed it was esau? an hour of monotone references to "my brother"/"your brother."

also remember when alan dale hired a lady who looked like tina fey to go to the island and then she served no purpose and died

remember how Whitmore was like this huge villain for years and years and then in the end he was unceremoniously shot just to get the character to go away b/c they had no idea what they were doing, really

Can we start some sort of class action suit against Darlton? Like to get them to do our laundry and grocery shopping and whatnot until they've worked off all of the hours they stole from us?

^ there were 121 episodes of lost. pretty sure I'm not the only one who has seen all of the (pre-season 6) episodes multiple times.

Guess they better get those mowers mowin', then.

I think the statute of limitations is up for bad TV.

Classical-Fusion Driveshaft Concert

I wish I could you that excuse when if make a major mistake at work "no one has told me how it should've been done", no one could keep a job with that line. Yet this guy is still employable.

Not only that, but about to make a prequel for Alien. :/

I still feel burned whenever I think of this show. I still rewatch the x-files, but I can't imagine rewatching Lost.

The X-Files finale was pretty bad too but at least it felt like it was part of the show. The end of Lost felt really tacked on and bullshity to me.

pretty sure I'm not the only one who has seen all of the (pre-season 6) episodes multiple times.

I don't think I've ever rewatched a single episode. If it really had been character-driven in the way that, say, ER was, I would have done. But for me LOST was always about finding out what happened next and finding out the answers to the questions that had been posed in previous episodes. There was almost nothing else. The dialogue was always shit (with some exceptions, like Sawyer's lines, or some of Desmond's stuff, or whatever), I never liked Jack, I always HATED Kate. So when what happened next turned out to be utter, utter bullshit in the worst possible way, I was genuinely angry for about a week. Now I just don't care. At least with Game of Thrones this stuff has already been plotted out somewhere else, so I feel relatively safe getting excited about it. But no episodic television programme will ever fool me like that again.

Let's not forget, too, that some of us in the British Isles were excited enough about the finale to get up at three in the morning so that we could watch it at the same time as it was broadcast in the US. What morons we were.

I sometimes wonder if there was any possible way that it could have ended well. I'm personally comfortable with extensive ambiguity in the film and TV that I like; I mean, I love the Sopranos finale and was baffled when people were angry. But they couldn't realistically have been ambiguous with the Lost ending - they would have been crucified. I don't think there is any possible way they could have ever been able to wrap it all up and make anyone happy.

It's really down to how much the showrunners stoked the notion that it was all coming down to a single, major reveal that would explain everything. If they had been a lot more "this isn't Shyamalan - we're playing around with a bunch of themes" or something, maybe people wouldn't have been so pissed?

I don't know, I just can't believe there was actually a time when I was like "yeah, they've got this. It's all going to make total sense and I will like it."!

Some years ago two friends of mine started going out in secret, and I asked them if they were together. They said "no". Then, that they were actually together, they said "and you had no idea!" No, what happened was I asked you a direct question and you lied and I took you at your word. This is the same thing.

That should say "then, when they revealed that they were actually together", obviously.

did anyone mention the amazing death of the smoke monster? AAAH I FELL OFF A CLIFF I'M DEAD

it was the unplugging of the RPG save point what killed that beast iirc

As I recall, as the latter half of the season unraveled, it became increasingly clear that the finale was going to be a big raspberry. By the time it actually hit, there really wasn't any way it could be halfway decent. Even then, I'll grant, it was bad.

Classical-Fusion Driveshaft Concert

Gah, I had blocked that from my memory until now.

I don't think there is any possible way they could have ever been able to wrap it all up and make anyone happy.

Probably not. But there's lots they could have done to avoid pissing a huge swath of fans off to the point that they're still bitching two years later. Like not constantly assuring us that they knew exactly where things were going and that it would alllllll make sense in the end when the whole show was actually a secret attempt to break a Guiness world record for telling the longest shaggy dog story ever.

I sometimes wonder if there was any possible way that it could have ended well. I'm personally comfortable with extensive ambiguity in the film and TV that I like; I mean, I love the Sopranos finale and was baffled when people were angry. But they couldn't realistically have been ambiguous with the Lost ending - they would have been crucified. I don't think there is any possible way they could have ever been able to wrap it all up and make anyone happy.

It's really down to how much the showrunners stoked the notion that it was all coming down to a single, major reveal that would explain everything. If they had been a lot more "this isn't Shyamalan - we're playing around with a bunch of themes" or something, maybe people wouldn't have been so pissed?

I don't know, I just can't believe there was actually a time when I was like "yeah, they've got this. It's all going to make total sense and I will like it."!

― Walter Galt, Thursday, May 17, 2012 7:01 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah this is otm. i think the show was actually at its best when they kept a lot of plates spinning and you got to wonder about time travel and all this other weird stuff -- the more they introduced, the less they were ever going to 'resolve' anything with any one episode or even one final season arc. maybe they should've just answered some major questions about the island while introducing more as a way of saying "are you still with us?" and if people were, then it could've been a really long-running thing like Dr. Who or Star Trek where you can do spinoffs with the characters or storylines people respond to the most.

like this could've been a franchise people would actually care about and have huge conventions for 10 years after it went off the air, but they almost wanted to just milk it as much as possible while it was going and then burn all those bridges to a lucrative long tail and get away.

should have been surprise-cancelled after season four, then people would still be speculating about how great it could have been

not that this didn't bug me all the while watching the show for the first time, but man, on re-watching it the mysteries aren't so immediate and the shoddy writing wrt the characters is ~really~ jumping out this time around. hay we're introducing a new character hmmm what's their thing idk how about stupid daddy issues again? it is so truly awful and lazy. how they convinced themselves that this was what the show needed to focus on is a brain scrambler.

"The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr." was so great that it makes me sad that this is Cuse's creative legacy

always rep for Nash Bridges

I honestly think I could write an entire book about how to construct long-form narrative solely using Lost as an example of how not to do it.

get right on that, bubba

I might!

(I had a previous idea for a book on writing sitcoms that basically boiled down to: DO write like seasons 1-5 of Rosanne, DON'T write like seasons 7-9 of Roseanne. Season 6 was a bit of a gray area, but also was just after she'd had extensive plastic surgery so it was, perhaps, instructive in its own way.)

it's when they added that extra E that things went bad

EEXACTLY.

what WAS happening???

this morning im working myself up in a lather about the finale for no reason

I prolly do this about once a month on average

I still feel burned whenever I think of this show. I still rewatch the x-files, but I can't imagine rewatching Lost.

yeah the penultimate episode definitely dug the ditch so deep that the finale couldn't go lower (though it tried).

fuck this show

This pretty much charts the sequence of thoughts every time LOST passes through my mind.

Sometimes I reach this zen place where I'm like "can you believe how much you enjoyed a drama on ABC for awhile? That's almost impossible!"

I started watching in Season 3 and the whole time my friend who I made watch the show was like "this show sucks" and I could never really disagree with him but I still loved it. It's my own fault, basically.

Well, could have been worse. Could have been Heroes.

i feel like early enthusiasm for the show was like the bush tax cuts. there was no way anyone could have realistically expected it to end well.

I don't think I ever really expected a satisfying conclusion for this show, but the actual ending was just so much worse than anything I could imagine.

god, remember the good times?

polar bears!

if you introduce a polar bear in act I...

not that this didn't bug me all the while watching the show for the first time, but man, on re-watching it the mysteries aren't so immediate and the shoddy writing wrt the characters is ~really~ jumping out this time around.

It really points up how easy it is in serialized storytelling to get your audience with you by alluding to ~secrets and mysteries~, no wonder they binged on that so recklessly. But unless you're counting on getting cancelled, those gd mysteries are gonna come home to fkin roost at some point. Same goes for those BSG fuckers, but they were even more brazen about it, having the very tag line of their show be a straight-faced lie. (tho i still love BSG).

Yeah, I guess that's a quality that I don't sweat in mainstream comics because those things run for centuries, and even if the current creative team doesn't resolve anything, someone else will pick up the thread years down the line. Television show runners, however, would probably be wise to work from a slightly different playbook.

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/03/18/lost-writers-debunk-theories-about-hit-series-10-years-later/

Cuse also said the writers decided not to provide answers to all the questions raised by the storylines in the final season. “Every question sort of begets another question. … We just didn't feel like there was any way to answer all the open questions at the end of the show without it feeling really didactic and boring.”

I hate these motherfuckers so much.

They asked way too many questions

Though:

Lindelof said they did write a scene that answered who was on the Outrigger, but the scene was never shot. That script may be auctioned off to raise money for a charity in the future, he said.

When you not a sociopathic douche, every question begets an ANSWER.

I just read back a couple pages in this thread and realized that I got into kate beaton and anthony clark's webcomics via their LOST Cartoons. alright LOST that's one point in your column