Lost Season 6 - RE: LA X

what WAS happening???

this morning im working myself up in a lather about the finale for no reason

I prolly do this about once a month on average

I still feel burned whenever I think of this show. I still rewatch the x-files, but I can't imagine rewatching Lost.

yeah the penultimate episode definitely dug the ditch so deep that the finale couldn't go lower (though it tried).

fuck this show

This pretty much charts the sequence of thoughts every time LOST passes through my mind.

Sometimes I reach this zen place where I'm like "can you believe how much you enjoyed a drama on ABC for awhile? That's almost impossible!"

I started watching in Season 3 and the whole time my friend who I made watch the show was like "this show sucks" and I could never really disagree with him but I still loved it. It's my own fault, basically.

Well, could have been worse. Could have been Heroes.

i feel like early enthusiasm for the show was like the bush tax cuts. there was no way anyone could have realistically expected it to end well.

I don't think I ever really expected a satisfying conclusion for this show, but the actual ending was just so much worse than anything I could imagine.

god, remember the good times?

polar bears!

if you introduce a polar bear in act I...

not that this didn't bug me all the while watching the show for the first time, but man, on re-watching it the mysteries aren't so immediate and the shoddy writing wrt the characters is ~really~ jumping out this time around.

It really points up how easy it is in serialized storytelling to get your audience with you by alluding to ~secrets and mysteries~, no wonder they binged on that so recklessly. But unless you're counting on getting cancelled, those gd mysteries are gonna come home to fkin roost at some point. Same goes for those BSG fuckers, but they were even more brazen about it, having the very tag line of their show be a straight-faced lie. (tho i still love BSG).

Yeah, I guess that's a quality that I don't sweat in mainstream comics because those things run for centuries, and even if the current creative team doesn't resolve anything, someone else will pick up the thread years down the line. Television show runners, however, would probably be wise to work from a slightly different playbook.

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/03/18/lost-writers-debunk-theories-about-hit-series-10-years-later/

Cuse also said the writers decided not to provide answers to all the questions raised by the storylines in the final season. “Every question sort of begets another question. … We just didn't feel like there was any way to answer all the open questions at the end of the show without it feeling really didactic and boring.”

I hate these motherfuckers so much.

They asked way too many questions

Though:

Lindelof said they did write a scene that answered who was on the Outrigger, but the scene was never shot. That script may be auctioned off to raise money for a charity in the future, he said.

When you not a sociopathic douche, every question begets an ANSWER.

I just read back a couple pages in this thread and realized that I got into kate beaton and anthony clark's webcomics via their LOST Cartoons. alright LOST that's one point in your column

Lindelof said, “We felt that withholding from the actors audience was best for the show.”

fuck this show, fuck these people, etc

In 2014 AD there was still folks who cussedly hated Lost ...

we must go back in time and change nothing

It is weird how ... I don't want to say seminal but that's the only word that fits ... seminal the show is, I keep seeing shows that feel like it or borrow from it. Expecting Terry O'Quinn to show up on Walking Dead, for instance, because of the 'personal journey in extremis' thing. 'Begins as a colossal puzzle but at the end get rid of all that and just say it's an allegory' or 'ironic commentary between present and past scenes' of True Detective. Or maybe it's my taste that just draws me to similar material

That outrigger thing gets my goat though and no mistake

so wrong that an all-time story like 'the constant' has to be embedded in this pile of shit

every time i remember a cool thing about the show i also remember the corresponding failure to justify it at the end. like when the world thought they found the sunken remains of the plane, every detail super-convincing, but really it was a decoy widmore put there...because it was going to allow widmore to fulfill his master plan of ??? anyway he got shot and died.

It is weird how ... I don't want to say seminal but that's the only word that fits ... seminal the show is, I keep seeing shows that feel like it or borrow from it. Expecting Terry O'Quinn to show up on Walking Dead, for instance, because of the 'personal journey in extremis' thing. 'Begins as a colossal puzzle but at the end get rid of all that and just say it's an allegory' or 'ironic commentary between present and past scenes' of True Detective. Or maybe it's my taste that just draws me to similar material

― Brakhage, Wednesday, March 19, 2014 8:17 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't watch Walking Dead but i think LOST has been hugely influential on TV, if primarily on network shows that nobody watches that get canceled after one or two seasons. there are seriously like 2 or 3 high concept shows debuting on ABC or CBS every few months, there were just a couple new ones last week. seminal in the sense of lots of doomed sperm swimming around.

hey person of interest is still standing!!

the whole obsessive, poring over every frame and prop on the show, style of TV-watching definitely started with Lost. I also feel like it's the first show to really take advantage of Internet fandom, what with sprawling wikis, weekly podcasts, those Hanso videos, etc.

person of interest is basically an updated touched by an angel with a bit more paranoia and occasional nods at procedurals and then whedon-inflected comic book season arcs.

siberia seems like its stuck the closest to "what lost coulda been".

x-p
Didn't Twin Peaks get some obsessive fan action? And network extras?

Is Siberia returning? Serious question, every time I google it there is no record that it was canned or otherwise.

what was the outrigger again?

id forgotten too so i googled it and turns out its a bunch of bul lshit

The most annoying thing about that final season is that they COULD have answered most of the questions people cared about in a reasonably satisfying way but instead they spunked away half the screen time on a pointless alternate timeline that went nowhere and just kind of tied up everything else in 30 seconds as an afterthought. Some great characters (ie Sayid) got totally shitty ends to their stories as result.

Like, you read that quote upthread and it basically means "we're shitty writers".

OTM
I'm not as negative as most people about the end but it did feel surprisingly rushed compared to how drawn out all the mysteries had been. No doubt linked to wasting half of the screen time on a pointless gimmick twist that had been done better before with the flash-forward trick.

primarily on network shows that nobody watches that get canceled after one or two seasons

Alcatraz didn't even get to finish the first season :(

Is Fringe worth watching? I keep toying with the idea but don't want to get burned again.

I haven't seen a single minute of Fringe.

Skipping 6054 messages at this point... Click here if you want to load them all.

so tempting

must resist...

Fringe was great--it promised a lot less than Lost but it posed big questions and answered them pretty much every season, leading to weirder questions. Also, the last episode was pretty satisfying.

It is pretty good, especially when it hits the mind scrambling parallel universe storylines, the incidental episodes get a bit tedious. It all fizzles away in a slightly whelming manner. So yeah essential viewing ;)

Best thing about Fringe was that at some point they gave up on trying to attract new viewers (something Lost never really stopped doing) and just made the relationship stuff service the confusing story arcs.

The Fringe guys went on to make Sleepy Hollow which is one of the more successful post-Lost network shows

Love Fringe - Matt, I think you'd dig it.

It helps that it had a much smaller central cast (and all the additional characters were played by the same people, because of parallel universe shenanigans.)

I love the way loveable acid casualty William Bishop's self from the other world is a evil, humourless arch baddie. The parallel universe stuff is easily some of the best sci-fi tv ever, it gets a bit silly but it is a heck of a lot of fun.

he's just trying to save his world!!

last 1.5 seasons or so of Fringe were 90% garbage, people

The J.J. Abrams curse

or starting from whenever it was that manimal ark thing happened

Lol that shit was so barmy, did they get Lee Scratch Perry in as a consultant?

The end of Season 4 is basically the disappointing Lost/BSG-style series finale you were dreading. Then Season 5 course corrects from that in an interesting and unexpected way, sputters a bit, but ends well.

Halfway through season 2 through the end of season 3 are pretty much some of the most fun TV sci-fi ever though.