Lost Season 6 - RE: LA X

the island is protecting an incredibly vague "light" entity that is everything and nothing imaginable.

stick a wooden wheel in the light and shit happens.

smokey is a truly sympathetic character has every reason to want to leave the island.

adam & eve are smokey and his fake crazy mom.

i appreciated all of this

This feels like something Cuse/Lindelof thought would be cool to do four years ago, and stubbornly stuck with even after it became obvious it was a semi-waste of an hour.― Grisly Addams (WmC), Tuesday, May 11, 2010 9:19 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

this is sorta otm. i mean, the actual episode itself was hammy and poorly done---it probably would have been better executed earlier in the series, when there was less pressure for it to be The Ep That Explains It All---but otherwise as ~explanations~ go, it seems about as reasonable as any bullshit sci-fi imaginarium backstory.

well i mean yeah it didn't but people acting like his dead body floating down the river contradicts the MIB=Smokey thing are weird imo

― some dude, Wednesday, May 12, 2010 1:37 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

no but what does contradict it is him really pointedly saying "GOODBYE, BROTHER" at the end. he practically said it to the camera

yeah, this wasn't amazing or anything but I'm going to go with the boilerplate response of "If you've been watching this show for 6 seasons, I don't know why you're complaining about this episode in particular." It wasn't any stupider than anything else that's been going on. I think people just complain more now because even though it's always been dumb, it used to have the potential that something awesome would happen and wrap everything up in a satisfying way, and now we're losing that potential.

While I am as guilty of speculating about the identity of Adam & Eve skeletons as anyone, it's a bit presumptuous to assume they'd be people from the cast who went back in time and not what old skeletons normally are -- people you don't know from a long ass time ago.

"it used to have the potential that something awesome would happen and wrap everything up in a satisfying way"
these are incompatible goals for a series! Can't be both awesome and satisfying.

guys seriously here is an exercise: start speaking, aloud, a well-crafted sensical reason for why there is a magic island that moves through space and time, powered by magnets, with two immortal weirdos trying and failing to kill each other, that crashes planes and gives people superpowers, and has hidden a magic well that teleports you off the island or turns you into smoke, and then see how long it takes to realize that you sound like a crazy person.

we are in the realm of radioactive spiders and wizards, ppl, i figure they tidied up the backstory as well as they could in one episode. would've been better if they'd established it as a point of order like five fucking seasons ago---nothing revealed affects the main characters ~that~ much beyond clarifying that the island needs protecting by some schmo willing to be a murdering sissy and that getting off, once you're there, is really fukkin difficult. there's still a lot unexplained, but i'm caring less about that shit, tbh---even after last week's garbage, i care more about the ppl on 815 than jacob and smokey

I get what you're saying about explanations being impossible but why do the final episodes have to be done in the style of some disney channel reject show

I'm not looking for sense just excitement

I'm american goddammit

YES! USA! USA!

lots of pregnant mother of twins killing for a disney reject show.

How come they both had Bieber haircuts.

like, i know it seems like a cheap dodge, but n/a is otm about this being sorta par for the course---expecting this to redeem the i dunno fundamental quality of the series' fantastical architecture i delusional. embrace your ignorance of a higher power~~~

~do you see~

what happened is exactly as bullshit as the premise that big magnets crash planes and boats and polar bears. imo they'd have been better off NEVER EXPLAINING ANYTHING and like not have The Gang Go To The '70s and live in an alternate reality, but that's what's happened, and at this point an rpg savepoint and a creepy momma's boy are what we get

The only way they can make this up to me now is by killing Kate. They can do it next Tuesday, doesn't even have to be in the finale.

I get what you're saying about explanations being impossible but why do the final episodes have to be done in the style of some disney channel reject show

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Wednesday, May 12, 2010 12:55 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I'm not looking for sense just excitement

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Wednesday, May 12, 2010 12:56 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is otm, tho---like, since whatever i'm gonna get for backstory is going to be nonsense, at least make it artful nonsense, not pablum. this ep was definitely cheezeball, but since they felt the need to put in that ridiculous flashback, i'm guessing that this is some lowest common denominator bullshit that is inevitable when there's the expectation that this little story is somehow going to do a lot of dramatic heavy lifting for the entire series. if it had been an aside in the second season or w/e they'd have had the freedom to craft it better, imo---they've done "backstory" eps about characters that are actually pretty good, so there's no reason this shouldn't have been, too.

The Ben sideways episode is terrible on paper, but the actor made it pretty good.
The only reason this episode was bad was they didn't use forced perspective hobbit tricks to have them play kid versions of themselves.

The episode wasted the talents of Pelligrino and Welliver.

http://cdn.videogum.com/files/2010/05/blankets.jpg

gbx otm

guys seriously here is an exercise: start speaking, aloud, a well-crafted sensical reason for why there is a magic island that moves through space and time, powered by magnets, with two immortal weirdos trying and failing to kill each other, that crashes planes and gives people superpowers, and has hidden a magic well that teleports you off the island or turns you into smoke, and then see how long it takes to realize that you sound like a crazy person.

― rapping about space and shit, floatin’ around in an orgy of screen savers (gbx), Wednesday, May 12, 2010 12:53 PM (38 minutes ago) Bookmark

This does not take the writers off the hook in the slightest.

Their audience is ready and willing to accept sci-fi nonsense. The writers are just too chicken or lacking in creativity to dish it out.

gbx and others thanks for keeping the sanity alive on this thread, the overwhelming tides of hate just make me want to give up on this thread altogether

I guess in the end I wanted "The Explanation" to be more sci-fi and less fantasy/religious allegory (and the magical island spring to look less Ferngully)

Baby blankets: Looool they shoulda made MIB ginger just to fuck with us

I thought the twist would be jacob would turn out to be the MIB when the original MIB swaps bodies with him, instead of getting dumped in the xerox cave.

you're thinking too hard

someone has to, if the writers won't

MIB:You can't do that Jacob.

Jacob: Why not?

MIB: Because it's against the rules.

Jacob: You made the rules.

MIB: I found it. One day you can make up you own game and everyone else will have to follow your rules.

(Could serve as an autocritique of the creative/writng process that goes into Lost)

maybe this is blessing for critics to go off writing revisionist Lost fanfiction?

seriously though how did allison janney fill in a huge hole with dirt and murder twenty people in like twelve hours.

DON'T ASK. Just make up your own answer. It's probably better.

she's pre-MIB smokey, and jacob knifing her by surprise released her from her smokely duties, hence the "don't let them speak, just stab with this here knife" strategy.

^ good point, actually!

er MIB i mean. also explains why she says "thank you"

ok, if it turns out allison janney was the smoke monster all along i will forgive this episode.

oh god what if it's like, the island guardian is ALSO a smoke monster, but it looks like a cloud of golden fairy dust or something. and when jacob travels to america to touch people he actually races across the sea in a gust of golden light.

I feel like Lost fans are doing the writers' job by coming up with their own superrior explanations for what happened on the screen because the writers and producers sure as hell can't be bothered to do so.

Well that's been the case essentially since episode #2.

They just throw out some twists, like Ben Linus, and the Dharma Initiative, and now Jacob/MiB, and let the viewers collaborate on an interesting story. FUCK! Those guys have the easiest job in the world.

I thought the first two seasons were fairly well plotted/written at the time, but I've never rewatched them so I could be misrembering how good those seasons were through the haze of nostalgia.

No, they were actually pretty good, but that was back when they had no obligation to answer any of the questions they were raising.

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I want to join everyone in hating this episode as virulently as all of you guys do. But on the other hand, I'm kinda thinking "what is it about this particular episode that's finally gotten this reaction from you guys?" It's not much different from ab aeterno, imo, and everyone loved that. And I feel like we've known that the Jacob/MIB storyline was some bullshit that ruined the show for a while now. Is it really cause we're so close to the end and the fog of denial is lifting?

what happened is exactly as bullshit as the premise that big magnets crash planes and boats and polar bears. imo they'd have been better off NEVER EXPLAINING ANYTHING and like not have The Gang Go To The '70s and live in an alternate reality, but that's what's happened, and at this point an rpg savepoint and a creepy momma's boy are what we get

That is so otm it hurts.

why are you guys still watching this vs why am i still opening this thread after watching a new ep

thought this was pretty awesome, they should have named mib though.

imo it's plenty different from Ab Aeterno in that that episode centered on an actor who'd had substantial screentime already, and had a well acted and fairly compelling drama that tied into the present day with some main characters, and didn't raise far more questions that it answered. (xpost)

btw i'm sorry if i'm coming off like a raving angry lunatic, i mean i'm still going to patiently watch the last 2 episodes hoping for the best and don't really want the producers' heads on a platter, but i feel like this episode had more squandered potential than any other episode i can think of.

The only squandered potential I feel is that Ian McShane was not revealed as Smokey/Jacob's pops, then shown dying cursing the island.

Literally cursing I mean. If ABC can give special dispensation for that sort of thing.

Philip u were OTM, check this from vozzek:

Cue spooky music change, and enter our oldest LOST character to date - 'mother'. Right away, we should know who this really is. We're given a tremendous clue as Claudia stops to drink from a stream: the overhead reflection that startles her is nearly identical to a scene in The Cost of Living. In that episode, Mr. Eko is drinking from a similar stream when he sees the reflection of the smoke monster looming over him.

so that's how she laid waste to the well diggers.

as much as i'm happy to let vozzek give me some interpretive food for thought like that, sometimes i feel like he's just making much ado about recurring camera angles and visual motifs that are bound to happen multiple times in the course of 100+ hours of television without necessarily meaning anything.

fair point, yeah, but the smoldering huts were a pretty big clue as well.