Damon Lindelof's Watchmen

Super great and honest form of critique tho

If you want to know why people like the show maybe try watching it

life, short. sorry for spoilers tho.

Does give me an excuse to post this tho

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Country_Safari#Frasier_the_Sensuous_Lion

All joking and teasing ITT aside, spoiling any TV show is unconscionable and you should be ashamed of youself, ledge.

I'll make my peace with those whose enjoyment I've spoiled in heaven.

Am willing to accept Leftovers is good without watching it, but Lindelof has been involved in a lot of things, and only one of them was good, so perhaps with that track record it's reasonable to expect Watchmen to be shit, especially given the screwing-over of the creators and the staleness of going back to this stroy AGAIN when it requires no expansion.

just cause Lost had a bad final season doesn't mean it wasn't an all-time great show

no, there are other reasons

I think it's reasonable to expect this will be good since Leftovers was the last thing he did, for the same company, probably with some of the same writers (and at least one shared principal actor). no idea why the creators getting screwed over makes it less likely to be good, and it seems like the story is going to be significantly different, if not unrecognizable

Watch Men will be like Mad Men except about watches instead of madness or whatever that show was about.

no, there are other reasons

― we used to get our kicks reading surfing MAGAzines (sic)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The integrity of Lost depended pretty much entirely upon the satisfactory resolution of its intricate latticework of mysteries. That it had a shitty final season was almost incidental to the fact that the entire thing turned out to be a shaggy dog con job. Like who gives a fuck about a Miss Marple if Christie decides on the last page that some incidental schmuck introduced on the page before was the killer all along and also everyone is in heaven for some reason.

The integrity of Lost depended pretty much entirely upon the satisfactory resolution of its intricate latticework of mysteries.

Lost was an ensemble drama and its "integrity" depended upon the characters, their relationships, and their struggle to survive. For five years, the show managed to ground the intrigue with emotional stakes, but as it approached the end, the intrigue overwhelmed the stakes and the character beats didn't land as hard.

I don't quite understand how that final season invalidates the thrill ride of the first five years. i guess it's a basic philosophical question of tv criticism. is the destination more important than the journey? i would say no.

anyway, the leftovers managed to avoid the issue by stating outright that none of the mysteries would ever be solved.

Kate and Jack were so damn boring tho

kate, yes. jack was horribly annoying at times, but i wouldn't say boring. his conflict with locke was very compelling and one of the thematic engines behind the series.

The destination isn't more important than the journey unless the narrative in question is all hints and allegations about the destination and oh man, this destination, just you wait, it'll blow your socks off, boy oh boy.

And everyone who ever said it was all about the characters was lying to themselves. There were some fun performances but as characters they weren't were cardboard pawns being moved around a Rube Goldberg chessboard. Events were more often motivated by someone's incoherent intrasigence wrt revealing a key truth than by like actual human emotions or desires. What were anyone's motivations beyond the two or three broad personality traits that defined them in toto?

weren't

The integrity of Lost depended pretty much entirely upon the satisfactory resolution of its intricate latticework of mysteries. That it had a shitty final season was almost incidental to the fact that the entire thing turned out to be a shaggy dog con job.

And everyone who ever said it was all about the characters was lying to themselves. There were some fun performances but as characters they weren't were cardboard pawns being moved around a Rube Goldberg chessboard.

yeah, this is just wrong.

guess i'll keep lying to myself about why I loved the show

I would never deprive you of that.

yeah there were lots of good characters (and performances), even if they weren't always well served by the plot or, y'know, were unceremoniously killed off cause the actors wanted out (RIP Mr Eko).

one under-appreciated reason for the stuff that didn't work is the old-school network model of super long seasons, which made for a lot of draggy, shaggy storytelling and made them feel the need to throw in all kinds of stupid shit they then ALSO felt the need to try and resolve later.

aka the chris claremont model of longform serialised storytelling

The flashbacks in particular, at least in the earlier seasons, were mostly useless filler they used to pad out 60 minutes.

'Aw, sweet, finally an hour devoted to Sawyer having an argument with his half-brother about whether they should sell their dead father's house! Crucial backstory, bruh.'

(Made-up example, obvs, but the point stands.)

lmao that's basically all the Kate episodes

Speaking of cardboard pawns - watching Westworld makes realise how memorable and distinct the characters on Lost were. Almost everyone on Lost is someone's fan favourite. Even the good performances are kind of neutered in Westworld.

^^^^yep. which reminds me that the worst thing about Lost isn't the ending, it's the dozens of shows that have followed trying to one-up or even just ape it. there were lots of especially dire ones directly afterwards (Wayward Pines, anyone?)

I'm scanning through the old Lost threads atm, trying to find the point when the wheels decisively came off and splattered my previous gushing fanboy luv across the road.

pls keep discussions of splattering and/or gushing fanboy luv to i love tmi

For me, Lost was more disappointing for failing its great characters with silly endings than for failing its mysteries.

The two off-the-rails bits for me were:

* "Let's all nuke ourselves and go back in time" - you know, even on a show about a magic island, this didn't really make sense
* The Alison Janney episode - like, the most full-on terrible nonsense since the Jack tattoo story
* Sun deciding to die with Jin on the sub - the point where the characters turned into cardboard pawns

er sorry bg

idc about discussing lost itt, i just wanted to make a jizz joke

sorry bg

sorry chuck

Ha, I just found an eight-year-old post in the Lost season 6 thread which is basically a clone of my harangue a few posts up. Although I referred to the characters as 'cogs in some big Rube Goldberg machine' not cardboard pawns, so clearly our thoughts and ideas are capable of evolving over time.

'devolving' surely, cuz cogs makes more sense in the context of rube goldberg than cardboard pawns

U clearly have not witnessed my Rube Goldberg machines, friend.

Also my previous thoughts on 'it's the journey, not the destination': it's like you had massive diarrhea throughout the entire last day of your otherwise amazing six-day trip. And then you arrive to find that your destination has been razed to the ground. And the architects are peeing on the rubble.

I think Westworld is the first high-concept show I've started watching since getting burned on Lost (aside from Orphan Black, I guess, but that always felt like sorta trashy and meandering fluff which existed mostly as a performance showcase). I've enjoyed it thus far but I've been hurt too badly in the past to give it the whole of my heart.

I don't think Westworld is really built for emotional investment in the same way anyway

Or if it is, it's a complete failure

xps yeah, but still, most of the trip was good

"* The Alison Janney episode - like, the most full-on terrible nonsense since the Jack tattoo story"

I don't even remember this at all!

LOST is actually way more fun to rewatch than it was to watch initially when I thought things would be explained

I'm mostly just worried that the children of today will stumble upon historical records of our positive feelings toward Lost without fully understanding the gravity of the ultimate lesson we learned. It keeps me up nights, sweating profusely and weeping.

Alison Janney ep was I think the penultimate episode which flashed way the fuck back and revealed that many of the island's mysteries revolved around characters we didn't meet until the penultimate episode. Like all good fiction, really.

Alison Janney ep comes right after the one where Sayid, Sun & Jin all die - all the remaining Not White People in one convenient batch! - delaying the followup to that for another week, which was super annoying.

While we're on this train, the parallels between the beginnings of S2E1 of LOST and the most recent Westworld were definitely on purpose, right?