Lost Season 6 - RE: LA X

how do you protect it, well don't let your brother...put out the light...by taking out the big stone plug...but if you do that...make sure you put it back in, like, twenty minutes or so...then it'll be fine...

― wtf why are there vampires in forever 21 (reddening), Monday, May 24, 2010 2:54 AM (4 seconds ago) Bookmark

tbh i had seen minimal amounts of lost but i was watching bits of it tonight just so i could even reasonably attempt to follow all the forthcoming chatter about it, but was this scene(s) as bad and stupid to fans as it looked to me? felt like i was watching some late 90s indiana jones rip off or something

yeah it looked like they filmed it in the indiana jones ride at disneyland.

the existence and purpose of this big stone plug that has alternately golden light or hellish lava underneath it is...bewildering.

So is the heaven-in-the-church thing happening years later, after Hurley and Ben have hung out on the island that Jack saved for many years (and maybe handed off to another candidate)... and Lapidus flew a bunch of those guys off the island and they led full lives, then died... and after everyone in the church died?

The island never really sank? Jughead detonating didn't actually do anything (besides lead to Juliet's death)? What were the criteria for ending up in the church at the end? (Obviously there are certain actors they couldn't/didn't want to get, but if Penny was there why couldn't Eko, Nikki & Paolo, Walt, etc. etc. be there?)

There was a lot I didn't get, I think.

why did Frank etc think they could fly off the island without the special bearings? I assumed their appearance in the church meant they didn't make it, which I'd quite like actually.

I was actually really enjoying the first half of this, but then everything on-island became so...casual... sort of off-the-cuff.
Whoever said this was a good ending to s6 only, OTM - I feel like that's the end of s6 but now I want to go back to our regularly-scheduled LOST :(

Also why did Kate change out of her party dress and into the green silk shirt before ascending?

ugh gawker thread of lost apologists is the worst.

like i can accept sepinwall's review because it walks the line between "i enjoyed seeing all the characters reunited" and "many of the important plot points weren't satisfactorily addressed." but this bullshit refrain of "you don't DESERVE answers, if you thought you were going to get any answers you were watching the WRONG SHOW" is some stockholm syndrome shit.

it's unusual in a consensual hereafter to have the viewer get a free view around the world to see stuff not being looked at by the protagonsists.

LIKE THE SUNKEN ISLAND RIGHT AT THE START OF THE SERIES

seems like the bomb + magnetism did = time travel and there's an end to it.

seemed less robbed when ashes to ashes did this ending 2 days ago.

why did Frank etc think they could fly off the island without the special bearings? I assumed their appearance in the church meant they didn't make it, which I'd quite like actually.

I don't think so, I interpreted it as this:

So is the heaven-in-the-church thing happening years later, after Hurley and Ben have hung out on the island that Jack saved for many years (and maybe handed off to another candidate)... and Lapidus flew a bunch of those guys off the island and they led full lives, then died

the show "ended" on Jack's death but there was a bunch of other stuff we didn't see

so yeah why was the island underwater in purgatory again? even two-thirds of the way through the finale I was like "wow this is pretty sappy" but certain scenes were effective, like Charlie/Claire .... but then instead of an actual alternate reality that the h-bomb made possible, the alt timeline is some big metaphysical happy-place they all went to?

i'm pretty unimpressed with the howls of THAT NEEDS EXPLAINING. But, and this is a BIG but, you can't show people a mysteriously sunk island and not expect them to expect you are going to explain that. there is just no explanation for that initial 'hey look at this, ooooOOo'

tbh "they set off a bomb and it created an alternate reality" would've been a terrible stupid explanation too, don't know why everyone was so set on that panning out, by comparison i don't mind what they did that much.

i guess they were deliberately running viewer expectations against themselves 'oho an alternative reality you say, let's play the game of how these worlds are different'. ok, sort of cool. like the way the flashforward switch worked, but hyper.

in the end they're saying, all that tricksiness we played for hours on end, stuff happening for reasons, doesn't matter. it's about tearful reunions, and emotion in the afterlife.

ok. got you.

xpost- would have made more sense than "an h-bomb created heaven" unless we're saying that the bomb didn't do anything, in which case seasons 5 *and* 6 were pointless?

when this ended last night I thought "didn't hate this, could have been worse" but the more I think about it the worse it seems

pretty much agree w/ this --> I don't think that I'm actually mad, just wondering what happened over the last year that made all the stuff I liked about the show not matter to the writers anymore.

xpost- would have made more sense than "an h-bomb created heaven" unless we're saying that the bomb didn't do anything, in which case seasons 5 *and* 6 were pointless?

― dmr, Monday, May 24, 2010 7:04 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that's exactly it imo

I dunno, them saying the alt was "the place you all made," I thought it was because of the bomb. who knows

so much of the stuff they actually did show seemed anticlimactic. seriously, that was the smokemonster's death scene? deserved more tbh. (and yeah, to someone's point upthread I think when they turned off the light of the island it turned off his smokey-powers so he was just mortal again and kate could shoot him)

i took that in a "heaven is what you make it to be in your mind" kinda thing. why would "the place you all made" be a reference to a small handful of the people present did?

a reference to a THING that a small handful etc.

took that in a "heaven is what you make it to be in your mind" kinda thing

yeah you're probably right. pretty lame.

and in their mind, the island is underwater

Harold Perrineau and his son don't deserve heaven.

The debate about whether this ending or Battlestars is truly the biggest piece of shit begins now (I say this).

I don't know that this was the best ending this show could've had, but within the context of this season, I think this episode was pretty good and entertaining. Maybe because I was watching it with a bunch of other people, but I laughed quite a bit and teared up nearly every time the sideways characters had an island flash (esp. Sawyer and Juliet). Felt like a satisfying way to send it out -- not because it answered unresolved mysteries or even really made coherent sense, but it reminded me of what I've liked about the show over the last six years.

(I don't mean that what I liked about the show was the character relationships rather than the mysteries/mythology, just that the episode had a nice elegiac feel that made me feel fondly about the show in general.)

i09 nails it, I think. The ending means that nothing at all mattered, ever, and it never had a story, it was all just stuff that happened.

http://io9.com/5545911/lost-was-the-ultimate-long-con

this bullshit refrain of "you don't DESERVE answers, if you thought you were going to get any answers you were watching the WRONG SHOW"

The thing is, the questions that people are raising, at least in this thread, aren't about demanding answers to the island's mysteries. They are about pointing out GIANT PLOT HOLES that any professional writer of fictional entertainment should be able to plug. Or in the case of the Lost writers, not create in the first place. The island being underwater; Lapidus et al flying out without the bearings; if the alt time line happened after the island events, what was up with all of the bleed-over; the a-bomb did what exactly... The Lost writers created a universe with rules and then when they couldn't write themselves out of their narrative dead ends (not even by introducing a bunch of new characters) they just acted like these inconsistencies were MYSTERIES and that any fans who questioned what was going on with the show weren't enjoying the MYSTERIES.

I watched this in a movie theater last night. Kind of hard to even judge it because the music was so overpowering and the whole audience was weeping.

Glad that the one supposed spoiler I saw turned out to be fake: something about it ending with Jack going off island and touching people like Jacob did.

What has pissed me off about the whole last season, however, was the decision to introduce and kill off a bunch of new characters and spend all this time in the fucking heaven/purgatory time line instead of giving the existing characters reasonably satisfying endings to their stories. Widmore getting shot without much fanfare is a good example. Or Sayid going from badass but good-hearted to dead to back from the dead to zombie back to badass but good hearted without there being any examination of exactly why this happened. I guess that technically falls into the "mystery" category of questions I'm not supposed to want to ask, but I know there's a middle ground between full exposition and completely ignoring the fate/motivations of a long-running and much beloved character. There would have been lots of time to really get into what happened to the people we cared about within the frame of the story that we've been enjoying for the past five years if it weren't for the writers deciding to make up an alt-time line that had nothing to do with anything and spending time with Dogen and John Lennon and Tina Fey, etc. etc.

I kind of wanted to see Walt again, but the fact that he didn't show up in the deadverse probably means he moved on with his life and forget about all those suckers he used to play backgammon with and stuff. He probably became a professional bird-flinger and owned a nice car.

forgot

Lapidus et al flying out without the bearings;

I wondered about this, too, but thought maybe it only applied to boats? Did the helicopter carrying the Oceanic 6 use the bearings before it ran out of fuel?

And that's especially galling in light of the writers' (I can't call them "Darlton" and I can never remember how to spell the Lindwhateverwhatever guy's last name) constant insistance that it has never been about the MYSTERIES. It has always been about the CHARACTERS. I suspect it's been about these two dudes falling victim to the Peter Principle and getting in way over their heads.

Okay. I'm done ranting. I had really low expectations, too, and in some ways I agree with John that the finale felt appropriately elegiac and that was fine. But from a story-telling point of view, mysteries or no mysteries, the whole last season was just a bunch of hooey.

(xpost Otherwise, I pretty much agree with you 100% about Season 6 as a whole.)

hopefully there'll be a couple TV-movie sequels where the Harlem Globetrotters resolve everything

LOL

Didn't Kimmel make a joke about the Harlem Globetrotters last night?

I think about 8 million people have made about 8 billion Gilligan's Island jokes over the past 6 years.

Oh, I didn't know that was specific to Gilligan's Island.

OK everybody knows Walt got kicked off the island for going through puberty, but did Claire go "crazy" because she got fat?

i really wish they'd had jacob actually explain why the MIB leaving the island was such a bad thing. that's one "mystery" that felt like total bull. then when MIB unplugs the island he becomes human and pathetically has to run to his boat and get to the plane as fast as he can...and then what? how did he know the pilot would even be there to take him off the island? and what happens when he leaves? does he become a serial killer? so stupid.

they should have had the island sink. and the losties have to catch and kill MIB in the real world. THAT would have been an awesome finale. (for a minute i actually thought desmond was getting everyone in one place so that they could magically defeat the MIB cuz desmond knew he was coming. and that once they killed him the alt/sideways universe becomes the real universe and everyone lives happily ever after.)

that's pretty much what I thought (hoped?) would happen too. Smokey succeeds in the "real" world so Desmond the failsafe has to wind things back in the alt.

maybe the island did sink, I assume it eventually did while hurley was in charge. it would have been nice to have seen this though. saving it for the comic books I suppose.

yeah i'm guessing hurley and ben figured out a way to sink it so that hurley could go home and get some more chicken.

cuz if its underwater they would't have to worry about anyone finding the light.

Didn't Kimmel make a joke about the Harlem Globetrotters last night?

I know a guy who was on the college humor magazine with me has been a producer-writer for Kimmel, so there ya go. The onerous late '70s references foisted on youth.

jimmy kimmel is a gen-x 40-something guy. i'm sure harlem globetrotter jokes come easily to him.

the stoned theory my GF and I arrived at last night: entire show is dying fantasy of immediately post-plane-crash Jack, who's such a high-strung type-A bro that he needs to invent some crazy story spanning multiple dimensions and dozens of characters (starring himself as THE SAVIOR OF THE WORLD!!!) before he can 'let go' of life

Sam: [enters a room where Nick is up late watching TV] What's this?
Nick: I'm not sure.
Sam: What's it about?
Nick: I don't know.
Sam: Who's that?
Nick: I think the guy in the hat did something terrible.
Sam Weber: Like what?
Nick: You're so analytical! Sometimes you just have to let art... flow... over you.