Lost Season 6 - RE: LA X

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.

here's what sums this show up to me: when jack gave hurley the magic water to drink, ben spontaneously produced a plastic bottle. Out of nowhere. Like he'd been waiting to give him one. And that's dumb. It doesn't follow any internal logic that he'd have a plastic bottle lying around. But whatever.
Then Jack bends down to a puddle to get magic water to make him the IMMORTAL ISLAND GUARDIAN. Which is dumb and just showed up and makes no sense within the context of the show.
So Jack fills up the magic bottle with magic puddle water. And the puddle is, unsurprisingly, brackish brown and muddy as hell. And Jack comes up with a bottle of PURE CLEAR WATER for Hurley to drink. Why? Because we don't want the audience to be uncomfortable with him drinking brackish water. And that's the only reason.
They were writing this nonsense while paying no attention whatsoever to narrative or tying up threads rationally and okay that sucks but I can deal with that. But what I can't deal with is that they were routinely lying, in small ways and big, about what we had just seen happening. That's what folks in the trade call "bad writing".

i love how the creators and writers will blame the audience somehow for not embracing their finale

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.)

― scott seward, Monday, May 24, 2010 10:03 AM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this would have been so rad--some jurassic park 3 type shit

my hope was that they would go TRUE meta and have Jack's dad explain that he was on a television show and that all the people on the island with him were actors and they had to go to the wrap party.

Not the wrap party, the Kimmel show. Have the final scene just seamlessly live edit into that.

http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/13242/2010/05/500x_picture_7_05.jpg

there is SOOOOOOOOO much they could have done!

The entire six years was just a plot for everyone to at last get to appear on a late night show for their big break.

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

It seems a better explanation of all the random elements that were thrown in along the way that were never explained. I like it.

Not going to lie, though -- the Juliet and Sawyer reunion made me tear up.

desmond could have woken everyone up and when they look around they see that the man in black has laid waste to half the planet! and that the man in black has clouded their minds and made them live in a dream world/universe. but now they are ready to get revenge! so sad...heaven is just so sad.

I liked this a lot, but I wasn't interested in getting literal answers to specific questions. (Not something D&C conned me into during the finale last night...a position I reached gradually, mostly during the break between the 5th & 6th seasons.)

BUT...the generally poor writing and acting in S6 did take a lot of the shine off the series as a whole.

It doesn't follow any internal logic that he'd have a plastic bottle lying around. But whatever.

People who travel by foot around an island in the middle of nowhere don't throw away a plastic bottle when it's empty?

So Jack fills up the magic bottle with magic puddle water. And the puddle is, unsurprisingly, brackish brown and muddy as hell. And Jack comes up with a bottle of PURE CLEAR WATER for Hurley to drink. Why?

Because Jack's magic turned it into clear water?

That was basically like the "Seinfeld" finale, but mawkish. Hey, let's bring everyone back then stick them in a room! The difference is that "Seinfeld" had no arch, per se, and embraced anarchy. "Lost" had some semblance of order, which makes the finale feel more like a bait and switch. And also, courtesy Slate, a big riff on C.S.Lewis.

Also, where the fuck do the Sleestak fit in all of this?

I like the LA Times Watership Down comparison. Although the precision with which they recreated Jack's famous waking up scene in the final shot reminded me most of the end of Gilmore Girls.

I kept hoping a polar bear would just randomly jump out the trees and take down Locke/Smokey. That would have been emotionally AND narratively satisfying.

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/lost-finale-executive-producers-reveal-thoughts-finale/story?id=10720042

HEY LOOK GUYS A CHUCK E CHEESE

"And if we did our jobs right, we hope there was a lot of crying across the country last night, because we like to cry," Lindelof said.

Has anyone summarised this entire thing in a couple of paragraphs yet?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9TFSrCxStk

Has anyone summarised this entire thing in a couple of paragraphs yet?

The finale, or the series?

People who travel by foot around an island in the middle of nowhere don't throw away a plastic bottle when it's empty?
He produced it on cue!

Because Jack's magic turned it into clear water?
Magical Brita Jack explains so much.

6 seasons building up to the ending, and they give us dime store mysticism and blather about "letting go"? Booooo!

What bothers me most is there is no internal logic to anything Smoke monster was doing. He was the overarching villain from season 1 on, yet they kept on making up all these arbitrary rules about him. Now it turns out he can't leave the island until he turns off the light? But then he becomes mortal and very easy to kill? What if Widmore didn't tell him about Desmond? Would he be stuck on the island forever?

He produced it on cue!

He turned around and got it out of his backpack, it didn't just magically appear in his hand.

I haven't watched a single episode of this

people who've watched it all: is it worth watching in the end?

iatee: No, but the first (and second) season are really good.

Oh, I thought of something else that annoyed me vis a vis the insistence that "it's all about the characters!" I totally did not believe Kate's sudden decision to "chose Jack." I'm sure that was very satisfying for Jack/Kate shippers out there, but by now, Kate's character was so shallow and annoying that I couldn't figure out any reason why she'd pick Jack over Sawyer or someone else or just living alone. It just seemed like something they stuck in there so that Kate could touch Jack's face in (ugh) purgatory and make him remember some shit enough to trust her to take him to the church.

Also, the idea that it can be all about the characters or all about plot is a false dichotomy. We care about characters because we get to see how they act within the framework of a plot. And we care what happens in a plot because we want to know how it plays out for the characters. So when the writers decided that they should focus on just the characters and ignore questions they raised in their framing of the plot, they are forgetting that we only give a fuck about these assholes because of the situations we've watched them all go through in the last five years. I definitely wouldn't have teared up when Vincent laid down with dying Jack if I'd been watching Jack puttering around his suburban home doing yard work on weekends.

Also also, as far as PLOT HOLES go, not only did Jack magically purify the water that he gave Hurley, unless I missed it, Jack didn't say the magic mumbled invocation first.

that was how Jacob ran things ;)

really, nitpicking internal logic gaps for this is like critiquing the placement of corn kernels in a stranger's bowel movement

iatee: No, but the first (and mostly the second) season are really good.

I really hated everything about this last season when I think about it.

What I loved about the show was that there seemed to be a huge, convoluted system of some sort in place on the island, how it worked, how some people could get on and off the island and others couldn't, how these different opposing groups came to exist there and what their motivations were. There was more than enough to work with there to have the last season not necessarily explain every minute detail but to at least resolve a lot of the intertwinedness of everything in a satisfactory manner. But instead we got a bunch of new characters and side plots and other things that were all for nothing, and existing plot points were ignored or glossed over to focus on...something, I guess. Whatever that something was is absolutely not interesting to me.

I'm just glad they introduced the whole Temple thing this season. At first I thought that spending multiple episodes on it might be a bit wasteful, but the role that it played in the finale made it all worth it.

…

PSYCH!

has any show ever satisfyingly resolved a series long enigma? Cuz the x-files and heroes sure as shit didn't.

i thought this was fine but then again i don't really care.

"This was fine but then again I don't really care" should be slapped on the DVD box.

The finale, or the series?

― mh, 24 May 2010 14:59

The series, really- but given that that would be spoiler-tastic i'll settle for the answer Jenny gave iatee above.

I'm still hoping that they get round to season 2 of John Doe, really. There was a show with potential

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_5gW6OiFwD2U/RnA6dvgL2tI/AAAAAAAAAZw/9rBv_sRWsRI/s400/annie.jpg

back when i scoffed at lost, before i got drawn into it, i was all "this is going to be just as unsatisfying as the x-files, just u wait and see"

i should have listened...

to MYSELF

:(

maybe the worst part of this was having my assumption that everyone on the planet hated this episode and the love square and all the awful bullshit in the show as much as i did

turns out that there are a lot of people who thought the ending was--im gagging here--like, SPIRITUAL, and BEAUTIFUL and, christ, MEANINGFUL