None of that was ever onscreen. You may have read about it in an interview or on some message board from somebody who studies Egyptology or listened to the podcast or read that as a description in a script but none of that was made clear on the show. As such--even if it weren't sorta a very lacking answer--it wasn't actually answered in the show itself.
Does A Bad Final Year Ruin A TV Show's Memory?
- Thread starter Mr Light
- Start date
That was all made clear on the show. The creators don't spell things out to you like it's an episode of CSI, you have to think about some mysteries. After a moment or two of thinking the above that I posted becomes pretty damn clear.No it was not. How does a casual viewer know the statue is of an Egyptian God? That'd be like a show talking about some scientific process and not bothering to explain it those who might not be familiar with the subject matter.
I don't have an issue thinking about stuff and coming up with answers myself by drawing conclusions from available information and clues they provide but it is entirely another thing to expect the audience to know the statue is actually based on an Egyptian God and isn't something they just created. Same for assuming the glyphs are Egyptian? How would a layman immediately know that? Same goes for the Latin answer to "What lies in the shadow of the statue"--you'd have to close caption it then find someone to translate it rather than the writers finding a way for a character to provide that bit of info to the viewer.
I think a lot of what some fans say is blatantly obvious only do so because they read every podcast or Q&A or visit a ton of LOST boards where all this info is looked up on the internet and gotten second hand or GOOGLE it or visit Lostpedia rather than coming up with it from the sole source material i.e. the episodes themselves.
Well, luckily, it appears that Lindelof and Cuse assumed the average viewer is smarter than you assume them to be. And thank God for that because it was quite refreshing.
Well, I haven't seen / read a single Lost podcast, have read maybe one or two Lost-related Q&As ever, have never looked at or signed up to a Lost board (this forum is it for me), haven't used Google for any "answer"-related Lost material, and didn't discover Lostpaedia's existence until about halfway through the last season. And yet somehow I managed to arrive at the same sort of conclusions sidious (and others) did. Maybe we got different episodes in Australia or something but to suggest there were no "answers" in the episodes is pretty ridiculous. If I (who can be a spectacularly clueless viewer at times) can find them, without outside assistance, they have to be there.
(Note that I'm not having a go at anyone other than myself with that remark.)In any event, to each their own. Clearly the Lost finale has polarised people to a remarkable degree. I've seen better finales, but not many. I didn't want to be spoon-fed every last answer to every last question I had about the show. I got answers to everything I really wanted answered - by watching the episodes - and was entertained and moved in the process. If it didn't work for everyone, such is life. Nothing appeals to everyone.
Pretty much only watched every episode of Lost the once, never went on forums or listened to podcasts or anything and I figured out it meant the Egyptians had been on the Island at some point and it seemed pretty obvious it was an Egyptian God. I might have wanted more info about the Egyptians being on the island sure, but there was no real mystery about the nature of the statue.
Nardpuncher
Rear Admiral
Now you're starting to get silly. You certainly seem to be trying to insult startrekwatcher in an underhanded way.
Just showing an Egyptian statue and then expecting the viewers just go straight to thinking that that means Egyptians have been there is acceptable, but if you think it wasn't all set up as something more mysterious than that then you are also deceiving yourself.
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The Egyptian statue and Egyptian inscriptions would have seemed very mysterious for the first few seasons, because the island was in the Pacific and it seemed extremely unlikely that Egyptians had ever been there. But since we found out that the Island can, and has probably always been "moving" in both place and time, it didn't seem so unusual anymore. Would I want to see a little more about the time when it was built, sure, but it's not really necessary.
I was far more disappointed about the way the whole Dharma Initiative thing was dealt with after so much setup. Ditto with characters like Lance Reddick's Matthew Abbadon, who seemed so mysterious and special and then turned out to be completely unimportant and killed off unceremoniously.
I was far more disappointed about the way the whole Dharma Initiative thing was dealt with after so much setup. Ditto with characters like Lance Reddick's Matthew Abbadon, who seemed so mysterious and special and then turned out to be completely unimportant and killed off unceremoniously.
I think it depends on the show really. With arc-based shows the final season has to wrap up those arcs in a satisfactory way, and sometimes if they've been building for a number of years it can fail to meet the expectations. And with that type of show then I think the final year could ruin what came before.
But if it's a sitcom I think it's entirely different because you're not really invested in an ongoing storyline, you can put a random episode in, laugh at a few jokes and be done with it.
But if it's a sitcom I think it's entirely different because you're not really invested in an ongoing storyline, you can put a random episode in, laugh at a few jokes and be done with it.
I dunno. The first time we saw the statue, I thought it was weird, but I honestly never gave it much thought beyond that. It was certainly one of the show's lesser mysteries.
Maybe it sucks when the show is first broadcast if its last season or seasons are poor or a decline in quality from the previous ones, but once the show's off the air, nah. That's part of the beauty of TV shows being on DVD. Your love of the show doesn't have to be tainted by the memory of its lows. You're not forced to only remember shows as they were when you watched the whole series on TV. When you own all the episodes, you can just skip the episodes (or entire seasons) you didn't like and in your world, they don't exist. When I watch "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", Xander saves the world, Andrew makes a documentary, and then no more episodes. Therefore, Anya's stupid pointless death and the rest of the crap in season 7 never happened.
Lost didn't explain everything but partway into S6 I started to notice a Midichlorian phenomenon creeping in - they'd explain something and I'd go "ugh, maybe they should have left it be." Like the whispers being ghosts. Not sure I much cared for that.
That, combined with the 'for every explanation, ten more questions arise' phenomenon that seemed to accelerate during S6 (particularly with the whole Jacob/Samuel/Alison Janney family circus) cured me of wanting answers. I'm happy they ended the show before they blew it entirely. Sometimes mystery is better than answers.
You shouldn't be glad. It's a groundbreaking television show and we'll never see anything like it again on network television.
Nardpuncher
Rear Admiral
Truthfully, I see it as a very well written show with great chraracters, and prior to the finale I called it the best show on TV, but yeah, since the thing that hooked many of us from the start was the mystery of the island (even many people who've never even seen the show know that there's mystery about the island) but that wasn't played out to my satisfaction. Again, that's my opinion, as well as many others. Others do believe we got answers.
So I'd say yeah, you shouldn't start the show now.
Agreed 100%. It was as if the detonation of Jughead reset the quality of the show sending L/C back to the stalling dicking around period of S2 and portions of S3.
Looking back now it was clear that L/C's reach exceeded their grasp. They introduced too many things and it got away from them. I just assumed they were in control. They just didn't bother to sit down, keep track of their mysteries and formulate a strategy to pull it altogether to where they would converge at a Big Grand Moment. Instead you have what I see as a bunch of frayed threads left hanging in the wind. Kelvin who cares? Radzinsky down in the Swan? Hanso? Dharma? the statue? the ancient civilization? Jacob's cabin? Ilana's flashback? Why was it frozen down in the wheel chamber? Who was the mysterious man behind the Lamp Post? What triggered the Purge? Ben in S3 told Jack he ordered it then Ben told Hurley the leader who turned out to be Widmore? And why wait 15 years after the Incident--wouldn't that be enough provocation? etc etc etc
Frankly after LOST I'd prefer arc series to just do season long arcs where they introduce a manageable number of mysteries and answer them by the end of the year. For all the crap Heroes gets, I think its formula in how they handled S1 is just about the best compromise from the various approaches I've seen shows tackle--no filler, no carrying over too many questions that they get away from you, and just the right amount of frustration in the pacing of reveals while still maintaining interest in getting answers.
YOu should watch it. It is the best series of the last decade. It is the most ambitious, most complicated series *ever* in my opinion and the writers skill at pure plot structure is astonishing and shouldn't be missed. Plus it introduced a completely new style of storytelling that has informed a large swath of the tv landscape.
Sure the show wasn't nearly as good as it might have been because it wasn't a coherent satisfying whole but there were plenty of exciting and satisfying storylines that can be found within the bigger mess most notably S1, the last 2/3 of S3, all of S4, all of S5 that can still be enjoyed on their own.
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Envision your own personal continuum of taste of what you value in a show, from Original/Chaotic to Formulaic/Orderly. The further the needle point to the Original/Chaotic side, the more you'll like Lost. If you're on the Formulaic/Orderly side, avoid it.
Which is just another way of saying, if you want artistry and brilliance, you need to let go of having everything be neat and tidy, and all questions answered and tied up with a bow.
Network TV is definitely trending towards Formulaic/Orderly, so if and when something like Lost appears again, it'll be on cable.
That's true of all artists. I think one problem here is that everyone is so unfamiliar with the notion that anything on TV could be art, or even want to be art. The criticisms I've read about Lost wouldn't make any sense if applied towards, say, an abstract painting. That damn Jackson Pollock never answered any of our questions! And I still don't know what that blue splotch on the lower left means.
All it's done is to rile up a bunch of TV writers to try to imitate it, and fail miserably, not unlike a gang of kindergardeners trying to mimic Pollock through finger-painting.
What the Lost writers attempted is so difficult that it's rarely even tried. Other shows that do complex arcs well - Breaking Bad, Dexter, Sons of Anarchy, Big Love in S1-3 - have far less ambitious topics. None of them are making islands vanish or frakking around with the space-time continuum or telling stories all out of order. Cable shows take The Sopranos as their template. I can't think of any show that's come close to successfully aping Lost, tho The Event is going to be the latest to give it a shot.
I don't want to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what a blue splotch is suppose to represent or mean if it came from him dripping a little paint accidentally on his canvas.The criticisms I've read about Lost wouldn't make any sense if applied towards, say, an abstract painting. That damn Jackson Pollock never answered any of our questions! And I still don't know what that blue splotch on the lower left means.
I'm not suggesting that many succeeded in copying LOST--in fact there are a long list of those that failed-V, Surface, Flash Forward, Invasion etc. But you can't escape the fact that shows every season try to copy its characteristics--large expansive cast, non linear storytelling, flashbacks, tons of questions/mysteries, lots of twists/turns, WTF cliffhangers, well executed action sequences, tackling a massive interconnected story where individual storylines collide sending them off onto new shared trajectories, densely plotted, encouraging theorizing, dizzying pace with a voluminous amount of information dumped, extremely subtle touches almost hidden as easter eggs for viewers etc etc.
S1 of Heroes did a pretty good job in following the mold of LOST.
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