Lost The Plot
May. 29th, 2010 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6Okay, so, Lost. Big spoilers. But my main reaction is "WHAT TOTAL CRAP"
You had at least 3 years where you knew when the show was ending, 3 years to craft and ending, and THAT'S what you came up with?
Okay, here's the thing about the alternative timeline. It was only introduced this year. It took up a lot of our time, mostly with stuff we already knew (Jack and Locke have Daddy issues, Jin and Sun love each other but their father gets in the way, Sayid has a dark past he's trying to live down), just subtle differences that we looked for because we had a feeling it was going to be important. So I don't think it's too much to expect that any revelation about it actually connects to the plot. And it didn't. No, I'm sorry, it didn't. We spent 5 years getting to the last season, and then the biggest surprise of the final episode is what the hell this lame plotline that was taking us away from the real plot, the one we'd hoped would connect somehow.
I feel cheated on several levels.
If the flash-sideways weren't part of the season-long plot, teasing us with the idea that moment where Desmond realizes the truth and decides to assemble all the Oceanic survivors where you think, "Oh, yeah, things are happening now, this is actually going somewhere", except it wasn't. He wasn't assembling everybody together because it affected the main plot in some way. He was assembling everybody together because he was impatient to get everybody through their issues so they could all run off to heaven. They (in the flashsideways) were dead this whole time. If they had this alternate timeline bit as a short coda in the last episode, it would be extremely treacly, but oh well I can deal with it. But to have teased us for 6 months that it was going to matter is a cheat.
Second cheat. They didn't play fair with the audience. The flashsideways was either a real universe, with all the normal rules of a real universe (in which case, man, Jack and Juliet really don't care much about their son, because they abandoned him to run off to heaven without a second glance... was that the deep life lesson you learned in the afterlife? It's okay to abandon your son, just not the people you spent some time on a tropical island with?), or it isn't, it's just some metaphysical quasiworld that lets them fix their issues. That's the more standard interpretation, but there's a big flaw. In the season premiere, what did we see? The Island, underwater. That wasn't a character seeing that. It was a direct shot to the audience. It was telling us something. It's a cheat, just as much as it would be if you were watching a movie where the explanation is "it was all a dream/simulation the whole time", except there were plenty of times we saw scenes that had nothing to do with the person dreaming, that they never found out about or even directly connected to their plot. It's a cheat, and poor writing. I rebuke you, staff of Lost.
Third cheat. It cheated us out of the REAL answers. I don't expect or desire any story I read to go into detail about what happens to the characters long after they all die (unless it's specifically a story about "what happens after you die?"). I do expect to get closure on what happens in the character's LIVES. What happens to Sawyer and Kate after leaving the island? Does Kate get in trouble for breaking her parole conditions? How do they explain another Oceanic survivor who wasn't accounted for? What does Richard Alpert do in a post-island life? All of this was WAY more important to me than "Hey, do they all get together and hug one last time after they die?" We didn't even get a definitive "does Kate choose Jack or Sawyer?" moment (not that I particularly cared about that, but after all the time we spent on that plotline I think we deserved an actual wrap-up instead of, maybe, Jack and Kate meeting in Heaven).
And likewise for unanswered questions about the past. "Do you hang out with the same cool people's club after you die that you did at the most important time in your life?" is not a question I want answered. "What's the deal with Ben and Widmore's rivalry? How did it start. Why were there 'rules?" "What's the deal with Eloise, how is she aware of time travel stuff and can talk to Desmond when he's back in time?" "Is Jacob right about the island's magical light being 'important', or was Smokey right about it being a natural phenomenon that might well be investigated scientifically" (no, we did not learn this. Nothing we saw proved anything one way or the other). "Why did Jacob do or sanction so many evil things if he's supposed to be the good guy?" "Why didn't Sun go back in time with the others?" "How exactly did Jacob's magic work and what did it allow him to do?" (Jack didn't seem to get any of it when he took over). "WTF is with the 'sickness' and the temple and Claire and Sayid being totally Smokey's?" Who built the statue, who was it of, and why? Who built the temple? Who was trapped in Jacob's cabin?
Fourth Cheat. The "wink wink, we're all in a television show" cheat. You know, the one where, startlingly, out of all the Oceanic Survivors and related people, the only one Desmond goes to awaken are the "main characters", past and present (and more particularly, the ones who could be persuaded to come back). We never see Nikki and Paulo. Arzt didn't get the memo (That's certain to help him out with HIS purgatory issues of always being left out of the cool group). We never see Walt, or his dad. Jack's dad shows up, despite there being nothing to 'awaken', but he's been an important part of the show, so you'd better let him show up. Eko and Ana-Lucia don't show up at the church (Ana-Lucia spent more time on the island than Boone or Claire, and was at least known to Desmond unlike Boone). Penny gets to show up, despite never setting foot on the island, but Nadia doesn't, despite being the focus of Sayid's life for a long long time... instead, Shannon gets to be with him in Heaven, aww, sweet, isn't it nice that, despite them spending only a few weeks together, she's his soulmate? No, that's crap. Why did it happen like that? Because that's what the writers wanted to happen. That's it. My old nemesis, "Just So" writin rears its ugly head.
But let's disregard the flash-sideways, and the questions it didn't answer, and just look at the plot. The flashsideways didn't matter at all, so what we got in the finale was a plot where:
Jack, Locke and Desmond meet up and decide to go to the magic cave together. They lower him in. He shuts off the magic light. This doesn't do any devestating tihngs to the world that we see, but makes the island start to sink and turns off Smokey's powers (which, presumably is a good thing... maybe the island SHOULD have been sunk, then we'd have no more losers with super powers thinking they can manipulate people's lives). So Jack is able to get into the almighty fistfight to kill the badguy. Then Jack needs to sacrifice himself to turn the magic lights back on. Meanwhile, everyone else rushes for the plane.
Really? THAT'S HOW YOU RESOLVE A SIX YEAR SHOW? MAGIC LIGHTS THAT TURN OFF WHEN YOU MOVE A STONE, FOLLOWED BY A RIGHTEOUS FISTFIGHT? It didn't even really make sense. Why does any of it happen? Just cause the writers want it to. That's the only reason. They didn't bother to build (or reveal) an underlying framework for why any of it happens. It just does, because it's the easiest solution they could come up with.
The resolution would make EXACTLY as much sense if Desmond Jack and Locke went into the hole, where they found a magic talking polar bear who ate Desmond's liver, killed Locke, and vomitted on Jack giving him godly power with the magic bear-vomit, and told him if any more than 2 people remain alive on the island in one hour's time, the universe explodes.
I mean, I didn't go into this with my hopes too high, I think. I was prepared that there would be a lot unanswered. I was prepared that the answer to much of it would be 'magic'. But I hoped at least that they'd answer the BIG questions, and that the magic would be at least a little explained... where it comes from, how it works. But we got NOTHING along those lines. All we got was "there's a light at the middle of the island, it does stuff and it can't go out" and characters like the MiB just knowing how to build a wheel to access the light which moves the island for no good reason.
You know, since S1, people had speculated that maybe the Island was a purgatory. That wasn't what we got (they made it very clear the island life was real). However, THAT would have at least made a lot more sense and thematically held together on some level (at least, if introduced at a certain point, probably before the FlashForwards started). I'd have been angry, but only because the writers swore that wasn't what the solution was. Instead we're given this random other purgatory that had nothing to do with the plot. (And the writers still lied in this one, because they said a lot of the mysterious things like the Smoke Monster had a non-supernatural explanation. I didn't buy it then, but it was a bald-faced lie).
Even beyond the lame ending, this season felt very uneven and cheap. In previous seasons, when major characters died, it felt like it mattered. In this one, it doesn't. Sun and Jin finally get to meet after holding back for two years, then die. Sayid gets the Arzt treatment. Even what's her name, the leader of Jacob's group, just gets blown up. It doesn't complete their story. It doesn't explain their story. They just all get offed. Likewise, there were so many last minute swerves and dropped plot threads with no payoff. Ben seeks redemption with whatserface, but then she blows up, and a few episodes later Smokey asks him to kill people and he's all "lol, okay". and then he switches sides again a bit later. And it's not like it looked like "Hey, master plan I'm executing here!" It was like the writers didn't know what they wanted to do. Sayid dies, comes back to life. Joins Locke for a while, gets all dead inside and psycho-killer. Suddenly, last minute reversal! Out of worrying about what Nadia would think of him (of course, she's not his soulmate, that's Shannon, Nadia's just some girl who died). Temple crew? Sure, let's waste time there for a little while. Then KILL 'EM ALL! No reason to leave them alive. Their purpose for the plot was served, and that purpose was only to waste an episode or two while spouting out a couple of vague teasers that will never get resolved. It was a little bit exciting at the time, but that was because we thought it was going somewhere. It's easy to make a lot of exciting events that seem like they're going somewhere, but they have to ACTUALLY GO SOMEWHERE. Otherwise, when you look back on it, they seem rather lame and pointless.
Answers this season were pretty sparse. About the only big mysteries that got solved were "what were the voices", "who were the Island's Adam and Eve" (lame and could well have been one of the ongoing mysteries), and "What relationship did Jacob and MiB have?" (also pretty lame). Oh, and let me digress here. The coyness with the MiB's name. More total crap. The only good reason to be coy about somebody's name, to tease the audience with moments of "maybe we're going to reveal it... oh, no, fooled you, we aren't!" is if it's meaningful. If you NEVER plan to reveal it, don't bother teasing us. Just don't mention it at all, or better yet, just give it a name up front). We got virtually nothing, all to waste time on a crappy feel-good ending where everybody hugs.
Yeah, I'm angry, and I'm perplexed at the people who talk about what a good ending it was. I feel cheated and like I wasted a lot of time and investment in these characters. So, I'm afraid I have to completely write off this whole season. For me, personally, Lost ended with the group detonating an atom bomb. It was an abrupt ending, with many loose ends, but there was one thing, at least, that it was not. TOTAL CRAP, with many loose ends. BAD ROBOT? No, BAD WRITERS.
You had at least 3 years where you knew when the show was ending, 3 years to craft and ending, and THAT'S what you came up with?
Okay, here's the thing about the alternative timeline. It was only introduced this year. It took up a lot of our time, mostly with stuff we already knew (Jack and Locke have Daddy issues, Jin and Sun love each other but their father gets in the way, Sayid has a dark past he's trying to live down), just subtle differences that we looked for because we had a feeling it was going to be important. So I don't think it's too much to expect that any revelation about it actually connects to the plot. And it didn't. No, I'm sorry, it didn't. We spent 5 years getting to the last season, and then the biggest surprise of the final episode is what the hell this lame plotline that was taking us away from the real plot, the one we'd hoped would connect somehow.
I feel cheated on several levels.
If the flash-sideways weren't part of the season-long plot, teasing us with the idea that moment where Desmond realizes the truth and decides to assemble all the Oceanic survivors where you think, "Oh, yeah, things are happening now, this is actually going somewhere", except it wasn't. He wasn't assembling everybody together because it affected the main plot in some way. He was assembling everybody together because he was impatient to get everybody through their issues so they could all run off to heaven. They (in the flashsideways) were dead this whole time. If they had this alternate timeline bit as a short coda in the last episode, it would be extremely treacly, but oh well I can deal with it. But to have teased us for 6 months that it was going to matter is a cheat.
Second cheat. They didn't play fair with the audience. The flashsideways was either a real universe, with all the normal rules of a real universe (in which case, man, Jack and Juliet really don't care much about their son, because they abandoned him to run off to heaven without a second glance... was that the deep life lesson you learned in the afterlife? It's okay to abandon your son, just not the people you spent some time on a tropical island with?), or it isn't, it's just some metaphysical quasiworld that lets them fix their issues. That's the more standard interpretation, but there's a big flaw. In the season premiere, what did we see? The Island, underwater. That wasn't a character seeing that. It was a direct shot to the audience. It was telling us something. It's a cheat, just as much as it would be if you were watching a movie where the explanation is "it was all a dream/simulation the whole time", except there were plenty of times we saw scenes that had nothing to do with the person dreaming, that they never found out about or even directly connected to their plot. It's a cheat, and poor writing. I rebuke you, staff of Lost.
Third cheat. It cheated us out of the REAL answers. I don't expect or desire any story I read to go into detail about what happens to the characters long after they all die (unless it's specifically a story about "what happens after you die?"). I do expect to get closure on what happens in the character's LIVES. What happens to Sawyer and Kate after leaving the island? Does Kate get in trouble for breaking her parole conditions? How do they explain another Oceanic survivor who wasn't accounted for? What does Richard Alpert do in a post-island life? All of this was WAY more important to me than "Hey, do they all get together and hug one last time after they die?" We didn't even get a definitive "does Kate choose Jack or Sawyer?" moment (not that I particularly cared about that, but after all the time we spent on that plotline I think we deserved an actual wrap-up instead of, maybe, Jack and Kate meeting in Heaven).
And likewise for unanswered questions about the past. "Do you hang out with the same cool people's club after you die that you did at the most important time in your life?" is not a question I want answered. "What's the deal with Ben and Widmore's rivalry? How did it start. Why were there 'rules?" "What's the deal with Eloise, how is she aware of time travel stuff and can talk to Desmond when he's back in time?" "Is Jacob right about the island's magical light being 'important', or was Smokey right about it being a natural phenomenon that might well be investigated scientifically" (no, we did not learn this. Nothing we saw proved anything one way or the other). "Why did Jacob do or sanction so many evil things if he's supposed to be the good guy?" "Why didn't Sun go back in time with the others?" "How exactly did Jacob's magic work and what did it allow him to do?" (Jack didn't seem to get any of it when he took over). "WTF is with the 'sickness' and the temple and Claire and Sayid being totally Smokey's?" Who built the statue, who was it of, and why? Who built the temple? Who was trapped in Jacob's cabin?
Fourth Cheat. The "wink wink, we're all in a television show" cheat. You know, the one where, startlingly, out of all the Oceanic Survivors and related people, the only one Desmond goes to awaken are the "main characters", past and present (and more particularly, the ones who could be persuaded to come back). We never see Nikki and Paulo. Arzt didn't get the memo (That's certain to help him out with HIS purgatory issues of always being left out of the cool group). We never see Walt, or his dad. Jack's dad shows up, despite there being nothing to 'awaken', but he's been an important part of the show, so you'd better let him show up. Eko and Ana-Lucia don't show up at the church (Ana-Lucia spent more time on the island than Boone or Claire, and was at least known to Desmond unlike Boone). Penny gets to show up, despite never setting foot on the island, but Nadia doesn't, despite being the focus of Sayid's life for a long long time... instead, Shannon gets to be with him in Heaven, aww, sweet, isn't it nice that, despite them spending only a few weeks together, she's his soulmate? No, that's crap. Why did it happen like that? Because that's what the writers wanted to happen. That's it. My old nemesis, "Just So" writin rears its ugly head.
But let's disregard the flash-sideways, and the questions it didn't answer, and just look at the plot. The flashsideways didn't matter at all, so what we got in the finale was a plot where:
Jack, Locke and Desmond meet up and decide to go to the magic cave together. They lower him in. He shuts off the magic light. This doesn't do any devestating tihngs to the world that we see, but makes the island start to sink and turns off Smokey's powers (which, presumably is a good thing... maybe the island SHOULD have been sunk, then we'd have no more losers with super powers thinking they can manipulate people's lives). So Jack is able to get into the almighty fistfight to kill the badguy. Then Jack needs to sacrifice himself to turn the magic lights back on. Meanwhile, everyone else rushes for the plane.
Really? THAT'S HOW YOU RESOLVE A SIX YEAR SHOW? MAGIC LIGHTS THAT TURN OFF WHEN YOU MOVE A STONE, FOLLOWED BY A RIGHTEOUS FISTFIGHT? It didn't even really make sense. Why does any of it happen? Just cause the writers want it to. That's the only reason. They didn't bother to build (or reveal) an underlying framework for why any of it happens. It just does, because it's the easiest solution they could come up with.
The resolution would make EXACTLY as much sense if Desmond Jack and Locke went into the hole, where they found a magic talking polar bear who ate Desmond's liver, killed Locke, and vomitted on Jack giving him godly power with the magic bear-vomit, and told him if any more than 2 people remain alive on the island in one hour's time, the universe explodes.
I mean, I didn't go into this with my hopes too high, I think. I was prepared that there would be a lot unanswered. I was prepared that the answer to much of it would be 'magic'. But I hoped at least that they'd answer the BIG questions, and that the magic would be at least a little explained... where it comes from, how it works. But we got NOTHING along those lines. All we got was "there's a light at the middle of the island, it does stuff and it can't go out" and characters like the MiB just knowing how to build a wheel to access the light which moves the island for no good reason.
You know, since S1, people had speculated that maybe the Island was a purgatory. That wasn't what we got (they made it very clear the island life was real). However, THAT would have at least made a lot more sense and thematically held together on some level (at least, if introduced at a certain point, probably before the FlashForwards started). I'd have been angry, but only because the writers swore that wasn't what the solution was. Instead we're given this random other purgatory that had nothing to do with the plot. (And the writers still lied in this one, because they said a lot of the mysterious things like the Smoke Monster had a non-supernatural explanation. I didn't buy it then, but it was a bald-faced lie).
Even beyond the lame ending, this season felt very uneven and cheap. In previous seasons, when major characters died, it felt like it mattered. In this one, it doesn't. Sun and Jin finally get to meet after holding back for two years, then die. Sayid gets the Arzt treatment. Even what's her name, the leader of Jacob's group, just gets blown up. It doesn't complete their story. It doesn't explain their story. They just all get offed. Likewise, there were so many last minute swerves and dropped plot threads with no payoff. Ben seeks redemption with whatserface, but then she blows up, and a few episodes later Smokey asks him to kill people and he's all "lol, okay". and then he switches sides again a bit later. And it's not like it looked like "Hey, master plan I'm executing here!" It was like the writers didn't know what they wanted to do. Sayid dies, comes back to life. Joins Locke for a while, gets all dead inside and psycho-killer. Suddenly, last minute reversal! Out of worrying about what Nadia would think of him (of course, she's not his soulmate, that's Shannon, Nadia's just some girl who died). Temple crew? Sure, let's waste time there for a little while. Then KILL 'EM ALL! No reason to leave them alive. Their purpose for the plot was served, and that purpose was only to waste an episode or two while spouting out a couple of vague teasers that will never get resolved. It was a little bit exciting at the time, but that was because we thought it was going somewhere. It's easy to make a lot of exciting events that seem like they're going somewhere, but they have to ACTUALLY GO SOMEWHERE. Otherwise, when you look back on it, they seem rather lame and pointless.
Answers this season were pretty sparse. About the only big mysteries that got solved were "what were the voices", "who were the Island's Adam and Eve" (lame and could well have been one of the ongoing mysteries), and "What relationship did Jacob and MiB have?" (also pretty lame). Oh, and let me digress here. The coyness with the MiB's name. More total crap. The only good reason to be coy about somebody's name, to tease the audience with moments of "maybe we're going to reveal it... oh, no, fooled you, we aren't!" is if it's meaningful. If you NEVER plan to reveal it, don't bother teasing us. Just don't mention it at all, or better yet, just give it a name up front). We got virtually nothing, all to waste time on a crappy feel-good ending where everybody hugs.
Yeah, I'm angry, and I'm perplexed at the people who talk about what a good ending it was. I feel cheated and like I wasted a lot of time and investment in these characters. So, I'm afraid I have to completely write off this whole season. For me, personally, Lost ended with the group detonating an atom bomb. It was an abrupt ending, with many loose ends, but there was one thing, at least, that it was not. TOTAL CRAP, with many loose ends. BAD ROBOT? No, BAD WRITERS.
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no subject
Date: 2010-05-29 07:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-30 07:14 am (UTC)Galactica was also a bit like this. A very strong start as a serious sci-fi show, limping on up mixing up mysticism and religious bullshit, with a pretty lame and pointless ending that didn't made much sense.