I just finished watching Lost. I didn’t watch it in the previous decade, because everyone told me the ending was super bad. Now that I’ve finished it, I don’t get it. What was so bad about it?
As I recall, the main point of contention was that this was one of the first big “there’s a big mystery and the whole series is one big story to unravel it and we totally have it all planned out, honest” series. And then it turned out that no, they didn’t totally have it planned out, and they were just making crap up as they went and most of the profound “clues” people were trying to cobble together were basically meaningless.
Maybe the show runners managed to cobble something together out of them that was satisfying regardless, but still, it felt like quite the betrayal. History repeated itself with Battlestar Galactica, where the show kept insisting “they have a plan!” When no, they really did not.
There was a big mystery from the beginning, they all died in the plane crash, and they were building an afterlife where they were all together. They did reveal it gradually, with a mounting number of conflicting facts.
Battlestar Galactica also had an overarching plan, that they would end up on Earth and restart the cycle.
BSG is an interesting example. I’m in the middle of a rewatch. Yes on the Earth aspect.
But the opening credits always mention that the cylons have a plan. After the show was over Ronald D. Moore, the show runner, admitted they made up that line because it sounded cool. There was no cylon plan. Disappointing as that part of the show’s mythology was teased and I would have liked to know more.
That line is dumb, I’ll agree on that point, but you can easily filter it out, and you’ll get a much better series. I didn’t remember that line until you mentioned it. If you need to cut out major plotlines for a series to be good, then it’s a bad series. But if your series is suddenly much better by willfully forgetting a single dumb line, then let’s all collectively forget it and enjoy it more.
One big issue, is even if they have a “plan” it goes out the window if the show is too successful(or unsuccessful). A 5 season arc now needs to last 6 or 7…
I know Buffy for example had been planned for 8-9 seasons. And then producers were like nope the 7th is it. So they had to try and wrap everything up in one season.
Twice, technically. Once when it was canceled with season 5, then again with 7.
This is all true but I think it was still a good show especially compared to what else was on non-cable TV at the time. There wasn’t any show that actually prompted conversation about it in my family the way Lost did. That they built its appeal on reckless overprinting of plot threads they could never satisfyingly resolve was a dirty trick, but everyone fell for it, so to me they still get credit.
It didn’t explain 99% of the show’s mysteries and made everyone feel like they wasted hours of their lives watching the series. The entire series was complete dogshit and is a classic example of what happens when writers get their heads too far up their asses. They feel like they have to make every episode have like 8 “twists.” Complete garbage.
Boost isn’t marking spoilers correctly and I’m confused… So be warned to anyone curious about watching it. (I recommend it )
I watched it back then, and enjoyed it, but I get why some people were disappointed. We were told it would be explained, and the explanations got kinda hand-wavey. We were told they weren’t dead, and they weren’t in purgatory… And while that was true, they did all die and end up in “purgatory” for the resolution to happen. (And if the flash-sideways weren’t exactly “purgatory” five, but it was equally as unfulfilling and unexplained.) And all this happened when we weren’t investing days and weeks into it, but years.
That said, it was still one of the best “first seasons” of TV ever. And back then the prevailing logic was that flashbacks were tantamount to narration; just not to be done in GOOD media. But Lost did it great. It often showed us motivations (and even the reason decisions were made) in the modern day, without informing other characters the reasoning behind those choices. Sure, sometimes they just felt like plot, but not usually.
Also, if you enjoyed Lost, go watch From. It’s been renewed for a 4th season. Oddly, also featuring Harold Perrineau.
I didn’t even finish watching it. Its just some weird “oh no we left the island but we gotta go back” like wtf. And then there was a ghost thingy on the island, and like wtf I lost track of the story.
It was a cop out. Let’s all meet at the church and kum ba yah.
No pay off and few answers after all those seasons.
Let’s all meet at the church and kum ba yah.
As a character literally named “Christian Shephard” leads us into the gates of heaven. 🤮
IIRC, most of the fan theories were that they were all “dead” on the island. The writers promised this was not the case from about season five onwards and yet…
It’s been 14 years since I’ve seen the finale, but I think that the ending with them all together in some afterlife, was both different and enough from the original theories in season one that they were all in purgatory. It was like people who weren’t even watching heard that the ending was they were all dead, and said that they called it in season one.
That being said, my memory of the final season was pretty lackluster, and the expectation was that everything would be explained and tied together. For the most part, the original questions were answered with even more questions and philosophical metaphors, that just confused people even more leading up to the final season.
But they weren’t dead the whole time. They were only all dead in the final season’s flash forwards and last episode.
Just the bullshit they fed everyone to cover up the bullshit ending. People argue this point as if it makes any difference in the quality at all, but it doesn’t.
