COp out just like BSG.
- Thread starter Dar70
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So the setting and the plot are integral to the story that was told, but the story isn't about them? If the setting and the plot are all that make the characters worth watching, aren't they just as important as the characters, and shouldn't they be treated with as much care and gravity? Otherwise all you have is a bunch of well-drawn (or not) characters reacting to random, meaningless events ... an emotional mime show with invisible boxes and ropes.
Any answers about the island would be irrelevant, unless the discovery of the answer was important for the development and growth of one of the characters.
Watching the characters learn factoids about the island may be cool from a geeky, list-making fan perspective, but it would be ultimately shallow and hollow storytelling. Watching the characters grow and evolve as they learn about themselves is what storytelling is all about.
That's what they did for half of season six. The alt universe was the characters without the mythology, and it was pretty boring. The characters just aren't very interesting unless they're exploring the island mythology. Watching them weep about their fathers or make out to Michael Giacchino's score is satisfying at very visceral level, but does not engage intellectually.
Tell that to Ingmar Bergman.
J
Jetfire
Guest
As I have said before one sentence of something vague would be enough for most fans to what the island is...
"The island is the last part of a great and ancient advanced civilization..."
As I said before most fans would accept that...or something similar as opposed to nothing at all.
"The island is the last part of a great and ancient advanced civilization..."
As I said before most fans would accept that...or something similar as opposed to nothing at all.
Nothing about the island engages intellectually. Never has. It's journeys that the characters on the island are taking that is compelling.
And season six certainly isn't the worst offender in that respect. Nearly half of the first three seasons was devoted telling the character's life stories before even arriving on the island. Did you find that equally boring?
The thing is: a lot of the time, characters on this show were behaving very strangely. Suddenly, they knew or believed something that didn't make a lot of sense or behaved in very odd ways. As a fan of the show, I (and others, I assume) always thought: "I guess that's part of the mystery thing, I bet they're gonna explain that later." This means the answers to the mysteries are actually essential to understanding the character drama. If you take away the mystery elements, what's left is just a bunch of characters behaving strangely. If they didn't want to make a show that is really about the supernatural mystery stuff, they should have made the characters' actions and motivations a bit more relatable.
I'm sorry you never found it engaging.
Given that so many of the characters were unexplainably psychotic, zombified, or ciphers, I agree with you. They didn't spend enough time enough time exploring the characters in season six. I would have cut out huge chunks of the interminable temple arc to make time for that.
The flashbacks got repetitive some time in season two or three. Many saw them as filler, and I am not inclined to disagree. How many times did we need to see John Locke being a putz, or Kate running away from something?
To the extent the early flashbacks established the characters and related their earlier circumstances to their lives on the island, I quite liked them. A few even told passable standalone stories. (I may be the only person on the board to defend Stranger in a Strange Land.) But I would not have watched six seasons about Kate running, Jack brooding and drinking, Sawyer brooding and stalking, Michael losing and regaining Walt, etc. Would you have watched that?
Anyway, the flashbacks of seasons 1-3 were connected to the island arc. Every flashback existed to explain why the people on the island were behaving the way they did, even if they ran some of them into the ground. They defined the people who built the camp, fled from the Monster, and confronted the Others, and always invited the viewer to consider what they meant for the characters in real time. The flash sideways, which I called boring, were not connected to the island in any real way. Up until people start waking up, they were simply a soap opera about clicheed personalities (busy dad, maverick detective, violent loner) going through the motions. These personalities could not have carried a series on their own.
How exactly would you end a show of this scale that would please everybody anyway? Even if they had given us everything everybody wanted, there would still be those that would complain it was too predicable.
I'd watch it if it were interesting. Well, all but the Michael bit. I never liked that guy.
I think the character revelations in the flashsidewaysverse were just as revealing about the characters. Instead of giving us the characters' pasts, we got to see what they carried with them at the time of their deaths, or overcame at the moments of death. I need to re-watch those segments after seeing the finale, but a couple of examples that feel right are Jack and Sayid. Jack was defined throughout much of his life by his relationship with his father and his need of his father's approval. In the flashsidewaysverse (which is really more of a purgatory, I just like calling it that), we got to see Jack overcoming his own self doubts and limitations caused by the relationship with his father through a relationship with a fictional son. It doesn't matter that the son wasn't real, because Jack was real and his feelings were real. We also saw Jack as the man of faith, fighting to re-instill the faith which Locke had lost. Sayid, as Hurley pointed out, was never able to believe that he wasn't a bad man. We saw this represented with the flashsidewaysverse Sayid trying to go straight, but ultimately being pulled back into his old ways and finally being caught- set to receive the punishment he felt that he had always deserved for his crimes. Was this how he viewed his time on the island and ultimate sacrifice on the sub?
I see the flashsidewaysverse lives as representative of the characters' ultimate journeys throughout the series, but like I said, I haven't re-watched them since last night's finale to study them in closer detail. And I likely won't have the chance until the DVDs are released.
Kudos to you and Brent, btw, for intelligently articulating your thoughts without resorting to personal comments or obtuse non sequiturs. If only everyone in this thread was able to do so...
Nah. BSG was terrible and I knew it would be terrible because the story had become nonsense long before the finale. It was nonsense because the writers didn't work out what the heart of the plotline was - the Cylons' motives - and couldn't come up with something workable later - so they were just scrambling like mad to cover up for the flimsy core of their story.
On Lost, the writers chose to make the characters' relationships more important than the mythology. Since they couldn't invalidate either of the timelines (which would have been truly aggravating) or present the flash sideways characters as not being the 'real' characters (even more aggravating), and nobody in the real world recognized the famous Flight 815 survivors, they were left with only one path: the future of the original timeline, but not in the real world.
If they had placed the mythology first, they might have had the flash sideways be a hallucination/virtual reality type test or conflict that related to Smokey vs. Jack - the resolution of the test would reveal who won, in some way. But they obviously thought the characters were more important, so the afterlife won out.
The ending works if you watch it with your heart and not your head. If you've been watching it the other way - well no wonder you're pissed!
On Lost, the writers chose to make the characters' relationships more important than the mythology. Since they couldn't invalidate either of the timelines (which would have been truly aggravating) or present the flash sideways characters as not being the 'real' characters (even more aggravating), and nobody in the real world recognized the famous Flight 815 survivors, they were left with only one path: the future of the original timeline, but not in the real world.
If they had placed the mythology first, they might have had the flash sideways be a hallucination/virtual reality type test or conflict that related to Smokey vs. Jack - the resolution of the test would reveal who won, in some way. But they obviously thought the characters were more important, so the afterlife won out.
The ending works if you watch it with your heart and not your head. If you've been watching it the other way - well no wonder you're pissed!
The ending works if you watch it with your heart and not your head. If you've been watching it the other way - well no wonder you're pissed!
I wouldn't watch it just for the characters, but I'd watch it if it were interesting, too. I don't think the characters and the lives they led before the island were that interesting. It's the link between the before and after that made them interesting. I don't think either alone would have worked in the first season, but the island arc became nearly self-supporting in the second.
I might also watch it if, in lieu of a good plot, it had really snappy dialogue.
This doesn't mean much to me, because for half of them their deaths are completely unknown quantities, and what we can speculate about them doesn't suggest their deaths are in play in the alt universe. Hurley and Ben may have lived for millennia, but they are apparently working through the same issues in their afterlife--Hurley is a superstitious stress eater (albeit one with better luck) and Ben is just as unfulfilled as ever. Kate is still running but trying to settle down. Claire still wants to be a mommy or she doesn't. Sawyer is still the bad guy with the heart of gold, even if he's drawing a paycheck from the good guys. These are characters that are supposed to have lived and developed for decades, but they were all reset to caricatures of their 2004-2007 selves. I just watched five and a half seasons of their 2004-2007 selves, showing me more of it isn't enlightening.
For those whose deaths were known, I don't think we got much from the sidewaysverse that we didn't already know. We just saw the characters come to terms with it and feel better. Oddly enough, most of the really broken characters, the ones who most needed healing, didn't participate. Rousseau and Alex are either unwitting dead, or constructs of Ben's imagination. Michael was nowhere to be found. MIB and Jacob were completely absent (imagine their afterlife!). Were they not invited when the losties created their meeting place? Or did Desmond just choose not to wake them, like he chose not to wake Ana Lucia? It's a pretty crappy form of universalism that depends on Desmond's favor to achieve salvation. Who gave him the keys to the Kingdom?
It's not really like a purgatory. No one is being purged of anything, or made more sanctified so they can enter God's presence. They're just viewing phantasms that they believe are real, until they don't, apparently for their psychological health or self-esteem.
I read somewhere--don't have a link--that the spring "blanked" Sayid's moral compass. He was literally free to choose good or evil, just like Jacob believed all mankind could choose. Thus the flat affect, and Dogen telling him to kill Flocke before Flocke could speak, lest Flocke imprint evil upon him. Sayid was imprinted, but in the end, he chose good with his sacrifice. I was disappointed that he couldn't make that choice in the alt universe; that he had to get a pep talk from Hurley and feel up his dead girlfriend before he got his self-confidence back. It kind of belittles Sayid, and the lifetime of hard choices he made.
Maybe, but like I said, seeing a representation of their ultimate journey through the series feels like a cheat to me because we have already seen their journey through the series. Spending half the final season to set up an obscure recapitulation of those journeys is wasteful. It's a thematic clip show, covering old ground, with no development beyond what we knew of them in the first season, except that some safely non-denominational divine presence is okay with them so if they can just let go of their cares, don't worry, be happy, it'll all be all right.
Is that it? Is that their answer to human suffering and a lifetime of ethical dilemmas? Figure out what went wrong in your life--or ask a friend to explain it to you--let go, and have a good cry?
I was wrong. This isn't glurgy spiritual fluff. This is glurgy psychotherapy fluff.
No personal comments are necessary. We all love Lost, so we are all men or women of excellent taste. And if I have avoided non sequiturs, it is because the great non sequitur of Sunday night still stings.
Lost didn't have a story to begin with, just a giant bunch unbelievable contrivances and unanswered questions. Every time they introduced a new mystery, they didn't know jack shit how to solve it. And my bet it they didn't know how to end the show until they wrote the script for the finale. And then they realized they couldn't come up with clever answers.
When I read stuff like "The Island was just a setting - it was always just about the characters" I'd normally get angry, but then again, I know the writers and hence cop outs like this are not surprising.
When I read stuff like "The Island was just a setting - it was always just about the characters" I'd normally get angry, but then again, I know the writers and hence cop outs like this are not surprising.
What didn't we find out?
During season 1 we didn't know anything. We had a bunch of people stranded on a strange island where mysterious things happened.
Now we know what was going on all the time, the picture having gradually become clearer and clearer during 6 seasons. The island turned out to be a mystical source of spiritual energy that is manifested mainly as electromagnetism in the physical world. During history there have been many who have tried to gain control of this energy for their ends, but they have always been stopped by a line of protectors who are in tune with the source
That's the story really. That and the characters, who were lost in their lives, but found meaning in the island and each other. What else do you need to know? The fundamental nature of the heart of the island? It's been made clear that this is mystical/religious, so they could either come up with a whole new specific cosmology for the show's universe or tie it with and existing world view or religion but I'd say it makes a lot more sense to leave it open to interpretation.
Other than that there are just insignificant details that people obsess over. As a whole the story of Lost works perfectly well. They told the story they wanted to tell, and very competently. There's no cop out.
During season 1 we didn't know anything. We had a bunch of people stranded on a strange island where mysterious things happened.
Now we know what was going on all the time, the picture having gradually become clearer and clearer during 6 seasons. The island turned out to be a mystical source of spiritual energy that is manifested mainly as electromagnetism in the physical world. During history there have been many who have tried to gain control of this energy for their ends, but they have always been stopped by a line of protectors who are in tune with the source
That's the story really. That and the characters, who were lost in their lives, but found meaning in the island and each other. What else do you need to know? The fundamental nature of the heart of the island? It's been made clear that this is mystical/religious, so they could either come up with a whole new specific cosmology for the show's universe or tie it with and existing world view or religion but I'd say it makes a lot more sense to leave it open to interpretation.
Other than that there are just insignificant details that people obsess over. As a whole the story of Lost works perfectly well. They told the story they wanted to tell, and very competently. There's no cop out.
So do you think Sayid dying and coming back to life mysteriously is insignificant? We still have zero idea how that happened. It's hardly obsessing when people want to know answers to blatant questions like that which are major plot points. Bait and switch is not an acceptable resolution unless you just turn off your ability to think.
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