Lost Season 6 - RE: LA X

I was torn between laughing and crying when the music suddenly went all jaunty and we had a little zoomy underwater tour around Nu-Otherton. Out of all the stuff on Lost, that totally freaked me out.

Enjoyed:
- Fake Locke's FACE OF EVIL right after he tells Ben he wants to go home. He gets gradually more evil looking as the conversation proceeds and then there's a bonus GRRR shot at the end as well!
- Fake Locke's summary (judging??) of Locke.
- Cindy & the kids!
- Jack needing a pen on the plane
- Alterna-timeline on plane gradually getting a bit more interesting (noticed the Ms Paik thing, etc).
- I imagined the smokemonster doing a little giggle when he worked out how to get Bram out of the circle of ash. Hehe, another loophole!
- Glad Juliet's gone, although "I've something important to tell you" "..." was cringey.

Scratching my head over:
- No WAAALT and Michael on the plane?
- Does Ben really not have a clue wtf is going on, as he seems to?

I'm assuming the temple day spa was meant to be healing water and the guy cutting his hand was to test it.
Have to say I'm glad everyone on the island is back in the same time.

Yeah, gotta say... even though he's been so good every season, to the point where it's kinda taken for granted now, Terry O'Quinn is pretty awesome in these episodes, the variation between Smokey-Locke and Locke-X is great and so well-played and effective in both cases.

Lol, just reading the interview with Lindelof/Cuse linked upthread.

"When our characters posited the “What if?” scenario, they neglected to think about what the other effects of potentially changing time might be and we’re embracing those things."

Yeah. They neglected to think about quite a lot of things, or ever query anything (tbf, Mrs Hawking did tell Jack not to think about how ridiculous anything was) or ask any pertinent questions, or share valuable information throughout all 5 seasons, because THAT'S NOT IMPORTANT RIGHT NOW.

probably my favorite scene in the episode was a pretty small bit, but was so emotionally jarring that it just really grabbed me, and i don't think i've ever seen anything exactly like it before: after sawyer finishes burying juliet and badgers miles to tell her what her last thoughts were, and miles is evasive, sawyer's dropping miles into the fresh dirt and rubbing his face in the grave was very startling to me. a real emotionally "wow" moment. iirc.

If you read interviews with "darlton" they're constantly on about it being a "character driven" show and it's "all about the characters". But this is bollocks, it's the least character driven of any serial tv show in this era.

Do any of you even care about the characters? Sure we have our favourites but they're mostly just impulsive idiots running around wildly.

The plot rules all with lost, agree with people saying it feels like we've missed a season. Not cos it's confusing, more cos it's hard to care about a lot of the cast.

Eg Jin and Sun....who could possibly care?

i do. but i'm a girl who doesn't get alternate realities.

But this is bollocks, it's the least character driven of any serial tv show in this era.

seriously, as someone who sat through four seasons of Smallville and 2 1/2 seasons of Heroes, I completely disagree.

You're right that plot is far more key to LOST than character but I do think the characters are a huge part of the show's appeal. the show started out as character-study first and foremost - things like the monster and the polar bear felt tangential compared to the character backstories: why Locke was in a wheelchair, why Kate was a fugitive, why Sawyer was such a dick. we take this stuff for granted now, mainly because the plot mysteries got more interesting than the character mysteries, but they were a pretty big reason why I started watching LOST in the first place.

and i think even now the writers take pains to make sure that characters always have a good reason in doing what they do, no matter how misguided or dumb (the only time i thought this didn't work AT ALL was Juliet's about-face re: Sawyer and Kate at the end of season 5) and that well-loved characters get a proper resolution when they die.

I'd say LOST's best moments are when they manage to get the balance just right, which is why "The Constant" is everyone's favourite episode - it's a stupidly, unabashedly romantic episode that also moved the plot forwards big time.

^absolutely otm. This show's backbone has been the flashback structure, unabashedly sentimental and melodramatic. I care a hell of a lot about the characters, even Jack! The pure, unyielding, unforgiving REGRET that this show is soaked in has always been a major draw for me along with the mysteries.

yeah it's a very character-driven show, it's just successful to wildly varying degrees at how convincing it is at letting the characters drive the plot. i don't think i ever would've got sucked in w/o characters like Hurley, Ben, Sawyer, Sayid, Desmond, etc.

don't know why no Michael/Walt on the plane is any more head-scratching than no Shannon, or Desmond being there...obviously lots of things are different, and if there was any scene they'd avoid having the 17-year-old Walt actor play, it's a reenactment of the pilot w/ 12-year-old Walt.

Loved the new episodes.
Best moment, Charlie's first words on the plane: "Am I alive?..."

Fake Locke's FACE OF EVIL right after he tells Ben he wants to go home. He gets gradually more evil looking as the conversation proceeds and then there's a bonus GRRR shot at the end as well!

yah with those pointy ears he looked like THE DEVIL imo.

so rite
-c. 1600 there were these two guys, jacob and that guy from deadwood.
-then a ship landed.
-alpert was on the ship?
-cut to: the 1950s
-the US army come along. then the dharma initiative?
-ben, son of a dharma guy, meets with alpert, an immortal
-in a fit of pique he kills lots of people
-in 2004 when oceanic 815 crashes, you have ben + ex-dharma bros? and also alpert and his guys?
-and from a certain point in time mr widmore, ex-US army guy, has been trying to find/take control of the island
-ben is against this
-in 2007 that arab guy from 'three kings' lands with locke's body and... uh... this is where i really lose it.

time to hit lostpedia.

oh and

-there are also these temple guys + danny mcbride's brother from eastbound and down/farrell's ex-ci in miami vice... they for some reason took some of the 815-ers, but not the rest. they are part of team alpert?

mr widmore, ex-US army guy, has been trying to find/take control of the island

Widmore was the leader of the Others prior to Ben, not an army guy.

The Others have a habit of taking the clothes/weapons/homes/identities of the groups they've displaced - they did this for the US army in the 50s and Dharma after the 80s. I think Ben is the only Dharma guy to turn to the Others, and kills the rest of them in the Purge (late 80s in theory).

hm. i just watched a recap, and i guess it's when they bring in the *donkey wheel that can move the island* that i nod out. that and the time travel. and the whole thing of jack-kate-hurley-sayid getting zapped off the plane when everyone else on the plane lands on the island, kind of thing. bit arbitrary.

Yeah I thought Widmore was an army guy too, but according to Lostpedia he just stole the uniform.

I think there's always been a tension between character-focus and plot-focus in Lost. We were drowning in character-building for the first three seasons, and it wasn't until they introduced the flash-forwards as a device that the plot really started gaining the upper hand. Like, finally we could stop dwelling on increasingly extraneous character information like Sawyer's daughter or Jack's fucking tattoos and instead watch the characters react solely to new situations.

I think S3 jaded me to a lot of what was good about seasons 1 and 2, because after a certain point it was like "Okay, you've created your sandbox, let's start playing in it already."

it's the least character driven of any serial tv show in this era.

http://www.anderewelten.de/images/Jack%20Bauer%20II.jpg

re. characters... it as "good" characters, but everything is so fucked up you can't really call it character-driven. in alias, you had this whole complicated story going on but it was easy to watch it w.out really caring about the fibonacci code or whatever it was. also lost has about twenty impt characters at any one time so.

Re: All the joking earlier about women not "getting" parallel universes.

Obv. this isn't really a gender thing. I'm seeing TV writers (Male & Female) expressing anger over this two timelines concept, and it seems to boil down to "I'm too stupid to even bother attempting to think about this idea, so therefore it's too complicated for the audience." They said the same thing about the time travel stuff last SSN.

It seems that some people feel upset that they were tricked into watching a SF show when they thought it was something else.

There seems to be a real resistance to science fiction amongst TV and movie critics. I can't count how many reviews I've read of fairly straightforward SF movies where the idiot critic decided the plot was too complicated.

I can understand criticism of Lost along the lines of "time travel and alternate realities have been done to death already" but not of "this is too hard to follow."

For an annoying example of a show going out of way to make sure the audience "gets it", there's Flash Forward where everytime a character or events from more than ten minutes ago is mentioned, you see a flashback filling you in on it.

You know it's bad when the producers actually use that episode to pitch the network execs "see? this is what you'll get if we don't get an end date for this show! this crap!" and it works.

Ha ha I had no idea!

one problem is that it can't address the ridic paradoxes thrown up by time travel.

and when we have a sitch where some people on a plane are sucked back in time, and others aren't, we're in bad "the island wanted it to happen" territory.

i like sci-fi, but not final-five era BSG.

n e way, i think in the past there has been muttering about how the valenzetti equation etc. are meant to prevent THE END OF THE WORLD. so that jack-attack et al tampering with the past has fucked things up, and so the world is going to end unless they go back one last time. or s.thing.

re: "the island wanted it to happen" territory

gotta remember that LOST isn't just overtly sci-fi but overtly religious/supernatural at the same time - it's concerned with duality most of all. you know, "man of science, man of faith", fate/destiny vs free will, black vs white, us vs Others...

skins vs shirts

I'm not saying everything on Lost makes perfect sense, but people getting all brain-fizzled over tried-and-true concepts like alternate realities and time-travel is like if every time a cop show had a plot where the FBI and the local police had a dispute over jurisdiction and critics were all, "OMG what is this bureaucratic mumbo jumbo? How are we supposed to follow the inner workings of the justice system?"

To confuse things further about whether Sun & Jin married in the alt-timeline. The producers admitted that they fucked up from the beginning by giving Sun Jin's last name, since Korean women do not adopt their husbands' last names. Maybe in the alt-time line Lost hired more culturally sensitive fact checkers.

that would be ... confusing.

I think Ben is the only Dharma guy to turn to the Others, and kills the rest of them in the Purge (late 80s in theory).

think there was one real Dharma guy left after the Purge, Kelvin was locked down in the Swan before Desmond got there

I'd like to know who was watching this show about a magical island for four years and didn't realize they were essentially watching a fantasy-based genre show.

im with nrq, theres messing-with-factual-reality and then theres it-was-all-a-dream-deus-ex-machina-type sins against narrative

tired of the s3 panning. the second half was good and the last few superb - gbx you must watch them for cryin out loud

the more i think about it the more i realize how much better this show would have been as 5 or 6 12-episode seasons

not that i dont love the show with all my heart and soul

but im feeling a little bit abused at this point

Maybe in the alt-time line Lost hired more culturally sensitive fact checkers.

they're still going to get it loliciously rong when doing Des in England.

maybe he's a Rangers fan now

I'd like to know who was watching this show about a magical island for four years and didn't realize they were essentially watching a fantasy-based genre show.

naw dog, i was signed up for whatever, but in the makers' claims to have got it all figured out are not borne (sp? born?) out by the show as it unfolds. i don't really feel much is added to the show, quality-wise, by having the island move through space. i wish it was like a big novel where they publish it section-by-section but then can, ahem, go back, and tighten it up.

i don't care about stuff like jack meets bai ling. makes more sense to me than jacob being killed by -- not the smoke monster-as-locke, but by ben, because uhhh. and then jacob can actually come back to lyfe and tell hurley if he leaves it about 90mins, because hey what the fuck it's only a gunshot wound right?, he can go resuscitate sayid, but maybe sayid is now jacob, and sayid is now vitally impt... n e way this is kind of "and then he"-style storytelling.

jacob is just a ghost, altho it does beg the question what could he do alive that he can't now do dead - apart from catch fish and work the loom thingy

xpost i think they did the island moving in space/time thing because it was a convenient way of filling in the island's backstory - the dharma stuff, the origin of the Others, also Ben/Miles/Daniel/Charlotte/Widmore's stories...

okay not entirely sure why the O6 needed to be rescued at all, but i think the three-year gap and separation created some good developments wrt the character dynamics (though maybe these are the parts that everyone hates) - Jack being just that little bit more fucked up, Sawyer/Juliet, Hurley embracing the crazy, Jin now speaking fluent English, Desmond/Penny/Baby Charlie, Sayid working for Ben...

i'm going to give the Jacob/Smokey/Locke thing a bit of time - they introduced all of this in the last episode, so it's not even close to being completely fleshed out or explained yet...

(also you're nrq? haha sorry i just realised...)

makes more sense to me than jacob being killed by -- not the smoke monster-as-locke, but by ben, because uhhh.

How does Ben killing Jacob rather than Flocke not make sense? If Smokey could kill Jacob himself he had several thousand years to do it in. It would have been a lot worse if Flocke just killed Jacob.

I'm not saying everything on Lost makes perfect sense, but people getting all brain-fizzled over tried-and-true concepts like alternate realities and time-travel is like if every time a cop show had a plot where the FBI and the local police had a dispute over jurisdiction and critics were all, "OMG what is this bureaucratic mumbo jumbo? How are we supposed to follow the inner workings of the justice system?"

― President Keyes, Thursday, February 4, 2010 7:18 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Well, I think the thing you're overlooking is that Lost is as much a mystery as anything else, and instead of having episodic mysteries or one big mystery, they keep so many different plates spinning at once that I think sometimes it does become overkill and the audience has a right to cry foul. I think the flash forwards were introduced, and then resolved, pretty gracefully, and that great episodes like The Constant really helped people get on board with the time travel stuff. But the alternate reality/flashsideways stuff is a whole new and deliberately disorienting beast, and while I think it's too soon for any critic to say this is too much, it all depends on how they deal with it in the next few episodes, I can still totally see this being the development that turns everyone into Austin Powers going "oh no I've gone cross-eyed."

my mind was not blown but i have faith that the writers won't fuck this up

yeah reading that brief interview with them on EW was re-assuring.

"they keep so many different plates spinning at once that I think sometimes it does become overkill"

well, this is exactly what makes Lost so unique :)
It was like this since the first episode and the writers have been able to resolve effectively many twists and turns. After all, we watch the show mostly to be all-amazed: generally, Lindelhof & Cuse are able to get away with it.

Lindelof, even.

hey guys, it's happened, I am completely disinterested in speculation about the plot now! it only took five seasons.

think u mean uninterested brah

he's completely nonplussed

yeah probably

you guys just don't know about my relationship with the screenwriters

Well, I think the thing you're overlooking is that Lost is as much a mystery as anything else, and instead of having episodic mysteries or one big mystery, they keep so many different plates spinning at once that I think sometimes it does become overkill and the audience has a right to cry foul.

True. But I object to storytelling devices (especially common ones that have been around for centuries) being rejected out-of-hand, before the critic even knows where the writers are going with them, as too complicated for the dumb-ass TV viewership. I mean FFS, there's another network show (Fringe) already using an alternate universe plotline.