Damon Lindelof's Watchmen

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?

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.

by the end of season 1 i had realized that JJ's big trick was in hyping things up. every single episode had the most important event happen at the very end, at the very last shot, so that anticipation built for the next one. maybe it's like that trick of not showing the monster until the last frame or whatever. the anticipation will always be better than the reality cos it is the point where the viewer's imagination goes off.

as for the story, i didn't mind it, in fact i loved the pulp time skipping and all that. it was quite clear that they never had a grand plan or overall story, but the way it was made it made you THINK they did. he pulled off the same trick with TFA (the follow up of which was similarly unsatisfactory).

JJ's involvement with Lost ceased halfway through the first season

Forget it, he's rolling.

He definitely helped set the storytelling template for the rest of the series, but yeah for specific character and plot decisions the blame lies with Lindelof, Cuse, and to some extent ABC

well yeah not just JJ but he likes that style of storytelling and he did set the tone for the series. ofc they continued w teasing interesting ideas past his involvement.

like somebody gets shot in the very last scene and it doesn't even show you who it is. they do this all the time. it's exciting but the answer is not gratifying (hence the need for the next episode to end on another enticing cliffhanger). i often feel like they wrote episodes by first writing the cliffhangers and working backwards from there.

That would suggest a degree of planning and forethought went into the endeavor.

Not to reopen old wounds, but what was that thing with Locke being shown the box? Did that ever get resolved?

It was locked.

Spurgeon notes:

* the "Who's Alan Moore?" part of this open letter is hilarious in a punch yourself into unconsciousness at the way art is treated kind of way. Which I guess is its intention, after a second read. Hm. If they had just waited another ten years people would have split with the material more fully and an adaptation wouldn't have seemed such a gold mine -- let alone multiple adaptations. I'm just going to be shitty and weird about this particular thing for the rest of my life, so apologies in advance. We've reached the point where I'm pretty sure people think they're improving on what for all its faults is a wholly realized expression of personal belief about art and politics. The idea of fixing art is always worthy of contempt. A potential Stoppardian take, even projected as good, doesn't seem to change the original, unnecessary treatment of the writer.

There's nothing inherently wrong with remakes or reinterpretations imo. What is inherently wrong imo is the naked cynicism of remaking a thing solely for the sake of capitalizing upon whatever marketable appeal the original work still possesses while not actually bringing anything worthwhile to the table or even trying to improve on what came before. It could be argued (and I have argued) that remakes should maybe be reserved for works with promise but whose execution was dicey.

agree w all that

it's also inherently wrong not to compensate the original creators, but we've been over that

What is inherently wrong imo is the naked cynicism of remaking a thing solely for the sake of capitalizing upon whatever marketable appeal the original work still possesses while not actually bringing anything worthwhile to the table or even trying to improve on what came before.

That would be wrong and craven, yes. Let's see if that's the case in 1.5 years or so.

Sometimes it's surprising what remakes end up bringing something new or worthwhile to the table - sometimes even remakes of already-good-or-even-great things. The Crazies, Let Me In, Fargo (again, for people who aren't me), arguably Snyder's Dawn of the Dead (I didn't like it much but it has plenty of defenders), probably lots of others I'm forgetting.

those all suck