The Lost Finale
May. 24th, 2010 01:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficI can really only call this half-good. No matter how satisfying the character work was, it could never be enough. From the beginning, the show has been split into two halves. There was the question of what would happen to the characters, and then there was the question of what was up with this island.
Put simply, at the end, we found out that it was a magic island. Is your mind blown yet?
I guess the biggest reaction I have is... is it just me, or is Kate being the one to kill Smokey/Esau/MIB/'there was no point whatsoever in not giving this character a name' totally random? Remember that Lord of the Flies episode The Simpsons did? At the end, the narrator goes "and they were all rescued by... oh, let's say Moe." That's what it felt like. They just remembered that they had nothing for their female lead to do so they gave her the big one-liner, even though she had no emotional connection to SEMT at all. Wouldn't Ben have been more thematically appropriate? Not to be un-PC, but Michael Emerson was really the MVP of this show, and having him betray SEMT at the finish would be fitting for his character and let him earn his (admittedly wibble-inducing) reward. Right now, it seems like he feels sorry for killing and hurting all those people and letting loose Ancient Evil and murdering Locke, so that's okay now.
But moving on. I'm guessing you're going to hear a lot of analysis in the coming months about where Lost went wrong. Did the creators' heads go up their asses? Did some vital voice leave the production staff? Was some pivotal decision mismade? As worthy a quest as this is, they're overthinking it. They'll be, appropriately enough, noticing all these cool carvings on trees and not seeing the forest. Which is, quite simply, bad writing.
I don't know how one of the most well-written shows on television began to suck at storytelling. Why were so many characters introduced who served no purpose but to be killed off later on and then pop up as Easter Eggs? Why was so much weird shit piled on top of weird shit, until there were so many mysteries I doubt anyone can remember them all? But most importantly, why did the show spend so much time forcing round characters into square plots, then at the last moment about-face and declare it was all about the characters? That's disingenuous, at best.
Take Sawyer. He had a pretty good thing going on the Island. Killed his arch-nemesis, fell in love with Juliet, banged Evangeline Lilly. Then at the end of season five (which we can now see is totally pointless, since the DHARMA Initiative didn't have anything to do with anything and the atomic bomb Juliet sacrificed herself to detonate did nothing), he decides to chuck it all so he can go back to being a bitter asshole. That's plot making characters its bitch, which I feel could be The storytelling sin of the 21st century. It also sunk the BSG finale.
Bad storytelling. Like how Kate had to convince Claire to leave the Island about three times. I'm just a humble fanfic writer, but it seems to me that you should have Claire refusing to go, until finally Kate manages to convince her and at the last second they fly off together. And do it in the airplane's bathroom. What? Fanfic writer.
On a sidenote, while I'm okay with the last fifteen minutes, which I feel was the grace note to a misfire of a story, how do all these chuckleheads get into heaven? Most of them condemned bunches of innocent people to death in the second plane crash. And a lot of them straight-up shot innocent people to detonate Jughead, whose only purpose was to fake-out the audience. Yeah, those DHARMA Initiative guys are all hippies, doesn't give you the right to murder them for getting in your way.
Even in the flash-sideways, which eventually turned out to be a needlessly elaborate purgatory (we don't find out Flocke's name, but we do find out who the mother of Jack's imaginary son is. Genius), there's bad writing. The scenes where people remember their awesome times on the Island quickly got played-out, and should've just been done as one montage, or spaced out over the season so we didn't have to go through the rigmarole of "Others! Not on the Island! What does it mean!?". And poor Locke. He had to get run over by a car to remember, when all it really took was brushing hands with your snuggle-bunny.
Bad writing. Right up to the end, plot points that had been introduced THAT SEASON were being hedged and seemingly made up on the fly. With the Purgatory reveal, I think everyone was less "ah-ha!" than "seriously?" After all the conspicuous bits of importance like the sunken Island, Kate being innocent, Sawyer being a cop... well, they were all meaningless. A fever dream.
It's telling that so much of what the finale got right was playing on the goodwill of those first seasons, where there was really a sense of community and people could conceivably watch the show for the characters instead of the convoluted mythology. Since then, the writers got their heads up their asses so far that they thought to get cute with storytelling basics like the stakes, the scenario, and the villain's fucking name. 'Does it really matter if we know WHY the Island is so important when we already know that it IS important?' Yes. Yes, it totally does. Can you imagine if Star Wars were written like this?
Leia: Luke, you must fly up in an X-Wing and destroythe Death Star Locke.
Luke: Why? Could it destroy the Rebellion?
Leia: ...possibly. But it's a bad thing. Definitely bad.
Luke: Why should I believe you?
Leia: Because it's your destiny to choose to believe me.
Allison Jannery: What up, ninjas?
Show, don't tell. We're told that Flocke leaving would destroy the world, but how does that make sense? Why would he want to leave if that's the case? What's he going to do, fly around the post-apocalyptic wasteland shouting "FREE, MOTHERFUCKERS!" and doing that Smoke Monster noise? If it's a choice between the set of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and an island paradise, I'd turn into the cutest dead person around and start coseying up to Claire's uber-cute Aussie accent. Turning into smoke has got to be good for picking up chicks. Or hang out with the Others, they seem cool. It must be fun seeing how creepy it is for Ben to say things like "Pass the salt."
It just seems a little odd to root for the enforcers of mindless dogma to oppress the rebellious, curious, victimized intellectual. Reminds me of high school. But oh, he had one line about how people suck, with no reason for why he feels that or why Jacob disagrees, so I guess he must be evil. Plus, he wears black.
Would explaining the origin of the Others, or any other question, a few seasons back have hurt the show? I think it hurt more to let the question build and build, then put in one line about how they're... survivors of a shipwreck. Yes, I could've guessed that! If they'd just spent five minutes to have one of the vaguely mystical chess-masters say "You're probably wondering what's up with that four-toed statue," then this would've been a slam dunk. But by fetishizing the ambiguity, for whatever reason, the show fucked itself up its own ass like something out of a Garth Ennis comic.
The thing is, Lost came so close, so achingly close, to being a true American myth. If they had zigged instead of zagged, if they had faith that the audience would stick with them even with some mysteries solved, if they had just fine-tuned their ratio of weird shit to explanations for weird shit... but no. All that great acting, writing, and let's not forget the music, was taken out back and shot in the head. Now it'll have to serve as a warning of What Not To Do when writing the American epic.
To sum up, it was all a dream people had in purgatory after they had died on a magic island.
But on the plus side, Kate and Claire were super-gay for each other.
Put simply, at the end, we found out that it was a magic island. Is your mind blown yet?
I guess the biggest reaction I have is... is it just me, or is Kate being the one to kill Smokey/Esau/MIB/'there was no point whatsoever in not giving this character a name' totally random? Remember that Lord of the Flies episode The Simpsons did? At the end, the narrator goes "and they were all rescued by... oh, let's say Moe." That's what it felt like. They just remembered that they had nothing for their female lead to do so they gave her the big one-liner, even though she had no emotional connection to SEMT at all. Wouldn't Ben have been more thematically appropriate? Not to be un-PC, but Michael Emerson was really the MVP of this show, and having him betray SEMT at the finish would be fitting for his character and let him earn his (admittedly wibble-inducing) reward. Right now, it seems like he feels sorry for killing and hurting all those people and letting loose Ancient Evil and murdering Locke, so that's okay now.
But moving on. I'm guessing you're going to hear a lot of analysis in the coming months about where Lost went wrong. Did the creators' heads go up their asses? Did some vital voice leave the production staff? Was some pivotal decision mismade? As worthy a quest as this is, they're overthinking it. They'll be, appropriately enough, noticing all these cool carvings on trees and not seeing the forest. Which is, quite simply, bad writing.
I don't know how one of the most well-written shows on television began to suck at storytelling. Why were so many characters introduced who served no purpose but to be killed off later on and then pop up as Easter Eggs? Why was so much weird shit piled on top of weird shit, until there were so many mysteries I doubt anyone can remember them all? But most importantly, why did the show spend so much time forcing round characters into square plots, then at the last moment about-face and declare it was all about the characters? That's disingenuous, at best.
Take Sawyer. He had a pretty good thing going on the Island. Killed his arch-nemesis, fell in love with Juliet, banged Evangeline Lilly. Then at the end of season five (which we can now see is totally pointless, since the DHARMA Initiative didn't have anything to do with anything and the atomic bomb Juliet sacrificed herself to detonate did nothing), he decides to chuck it all so he can go back to being a bitter asshole. That's plot making characters its bitch, which I feel could be The storytelling sin of the 21st century. It also sunk the BSG finale.
Bad storytelling. Like how Kate had to convince Claire to leave the Island about three times. I'm just a humble fanfic writer, but it seems to me that you should have Claire refusing to go, until finally Kate manages to convince her and at the last second they fly off together. And do it in the airplane's bathroom. What? Fanfic writer.
On a sidenote, while I'm okay with the last fifteen minutes, which I feel was the grace note to a misfire of a story, how do all these chuckleheads get into heaven? Most of them condemned bunches of innocent people to death in the second plane crash. And a lot of them straight-up shot innocent people to detonate Jughead, whose only purpose was to fake-out the audience. Yeah, those DHARMA Initiative guys are all hippies, doesn't give you the right to murder them for getting in your way.
Even in the flash-sideways, which eventually turned out to be a needlessly elaborate purgatory (we don't find out Flocke's name, but we do find out who the mother of Jack's imaginary son is. Genius), there's bad writing. The scenes where people remember their awesome times on the Island quickly got played-out, and should've just been done as one montage, or spaced out over the season so we didn't have to go through the rigmarole of "Others! Not on the Island! What does it mean!?". And poor Locke. He had to get run over by a car to remember, when all it really took was brushing hands with your snuggle-bunny.
Bad writing. Right up to the end, plot points that had been introduced THAT SEASON were being hedged and seemingly made up on the fly. With the Purgatory reveal, I think everyone was less "ah-ha!" than "seriously?" After all the conspicuous bits of importance like the sunken Island, Kate being innocent, Sawyer being a cop... well, they were all meaningless. A fever dream.
It's telling that so much of what the finale got right was playing on the goodwill of those first seasons, where there was really a sense of community and people could conceivably watch the show for the characters instead of the convoluted mythology. Since then, the writers got their heads up their asses so far that they thought to get cute with storytelling basics like the stakes, the scenario, and the villain's fucking name. 'Does it really matter if we know WHY the Island is so important when we already know that it IS important?' Yes. Yes, it totally does. Can you imagine if Star Wars were written like this?
Leia: Luke, you must fly up in an X-Wing and destroy
Luke: Why? Could it destroy the Rebellion?
Leia: ...possibly. But it's a bad thing. Definitely bad.
Luke: Why should I believe you?
Leia: Because it's your destiny to choose to believe me.
Allison Jannery: What up, ninjas?
Show, don't tell. We're told that Flocke leaving would destroy the world, but how does that make sense? Why would he want to leave if that's the case? What's he going to do, fly around the post-apocalyptic wasteland shouting "FREE, MOTHERFUCKERS!" and doing that Smoke Monster noise? If it's a choice between the set of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and an island paradise, I'd turn into the cutest dead person around and start coseying up to Claire's uber-cute Aussie accent. Turning into smoke has got to be good for picking up chicks. Or hang out with the Others, they seem cool. It must be fun seeing how creepy it is for Ben to say things like "Pass the salt."
It just seems a little odd to root for the enforcers of mindless dogma to oppress the rebellious, curious, victimized intellectual. Reminds me of high school. But oh, he had one line about how people suck, with no reason for why he feels that or why Jacob disagrees, so I guess he must be evil. Plus, he wears black.
Would explaining the origin of the Others, or any other question, a few seasons back have hurt the show? I think it hurt more to let the question build and build, then put in one line about how they're... survivors of a shipwreck. Yes, I could've guessed that! If they'd just spent five minutes to have one of the vaguely mystical chess-masters say "You're probably wondering what's up with that four-toed statue," then this would've been a slam dunk. But by fetishizing the ambiguity, for whatever reason, the show fucked itself up its own ass like something out of a Garth Ennis comic.
The thing is, Lost came so close, so achingly close, to being a true American myth. If they had zigged instead of zagged, if they had faith that the audience would stick with them even with some mysteries solved, if they had just fine-tuned their ratio of weird shit to explanations for weird shit... but no. All that great acting, writing, and let's not forget the music, was taken out back and shot in the head. Now it'll have to serve as a warning of What Not To Do when writing the American epic.
To sum up, it was all a dream people had in purgatory after they had died on a magic island.
But on the plus side, Kate and Claire were super-gay for each other.
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no subject
Date: 2010-05-24 06:14 pm (UTC)That's what I got from it. I figured the fact that Jack died in the same spot he woke up, and the first scene was so perfectly mirrored, that it was definitely all just a dream. Remember the terrible wound in his side in the pilot that Kate stitched up? It seemed to reappear as he was stumbling through the forest. Hm.
I don't see why only the main characters were in the church at the end. What about Artz, who was blown up by dynamite? What about the two douchebags who got buried alive? Is it evidence the writers had no clue what they were leading up to? Probably.
Also... if everyone came to the Happy Shiny Funeral Home no matter when they died, why did everyone happen to be the exact same age they were on the island? And why was Aaron a baby? Maybe he lived eighty years, died peacefully in his sleep, and now he has to spend an eternity as an infant because that's how fucking Jack Shephard knew him? What?
Anyway.
And one glimpse of Evangeline Lilly was enough to remind me why I spent so long on this show. :D
No.
Date: 2010-05-25 02:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-24 06:18 pm (UTC)I think you're assuming facts not in evidence. :D
I sat through the first season of LOST before bailing out, and nothing I've heard since makes me think it was a bad decision. It seemed clear to me that the writers had no master plan. They were making shit up as they went along, throwing out weird questions and pointless mysteries to convince the rubes that the show was rilly, rilly deep.
But most of those questions were never answered. It appears that there never WERE any answers to many (most?) of them. I've heard people defend the show by saying it was all about the characters and not the mysteries.
Pretty to think so, but character is revealed when characters make meaningful choices. If most of what goes on is meaningless, so are the characters' decisions. So ultimately it had all the meaning of Bobby Ewing stepping out of Pam's shower on DALLAS.
I'm sorry you were disappointed by it. Sorry...but not surprised.
I agree
Date: 2010-05-24 08:47 pm (UTC)it's like the difference between "Heroes" before the writers strike (grand plan, season plotted out in detail from the beginning). and "Heroes" after the writers strike (oh shit, oh shit, we need a steady viewer-rating, lets make cliffhangers that prey on peoples curiosity - it doesn't matter what happens to them plot-wise after the next episode is over).
no subject
Date: 2010-05-25 03:15 am (UTC)Glad to see it didnt live up to the hype, I really wasnt looking forward to keeping track of the questions lol
But.... you cant be serious. It's all some sort of dream in the end? That's just so pathetic...
no subject
Date: 2010-05-25 02:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-28 12:56 am (UTC)