Lost 6x16: "What They Died For"

[davejames]

It's been kind of difficult to suddenly adjust to Smokie being the big baddy of the series after being little more than just another unanswered question of the previous 5 years. Ditto with Jacob being the ultimate force for good.

That hasn't been a problem for me. I was never crazy about the Smoke Monster being just a glorified "security system" for the island. Somehow it feels more appropriate, thinking back to that frightening first appearance in the pilot, that it would end up being the main villain after all.

Go back and watch season 4 or 5 and that is what season six should have been like--tons of revelations, fast pace, intriguing mysteries, urgency to the narrative, tying off dangling threads and building to a fever-pitch culminating in an epic payoff. So instead of building on what they had developed in S3-5 they just decided to drag out the season, just burning off episodes to kill time mostly until the series finale. They mismanaged their storytelling and those 13 or so episodes were kinda wasted. This was the 6th and final Act of what has essentially been a 6 ACT Story. This should have been the year they peaked--this should have been their crowning achievement.

I wouldn't call it a complete waste. Even if they were light on mythology, I thought the flash-sideways this season were almost all well done and all well worth watching.

The island stuff, on the other hand...

 

[Jenee]

It's been kind of difficult to suddenly adjust to Smokie being the big baddy of the series after being little more than just another unanswered question of the previous 5 years. Ditto with Jacob being the ultimate force for good.

Accepting Smokie as the big baddy is much easier if you go back to the Pilot - which will air before the finale.

But, were do you get that Jacob is the ultimate force of good?

 

[ClayinCA]

I thought Sayid got Desmond out.

No; in fact, right before he sacrifices himself, he specifically tells Jack that there's a well with Desmond in it and that Jack should go and get him out.

 

[Hermiod]

An Above Average from me, not quite as good as some recent episodes but still great.

If I haven't said this before, Ben rocks.

 

[startrekwatcher]

It's been kind of difficult to suddenly adjust to Smokie being the big baddy of the series after being little more than just another unanswered question of the previous 5 years. Ditto with Jacob being the ultimate force for good.

That hasn't been a problem for me. I was never crazy about the Smoke Monster being just a glorified "security system" for the island. Somehow it feels more appropriate, thinking back to that frightening first appearance in the pilot, that it would end up being the main villain after all.

I personally liked the idea of Smokey being the Big Bad of the Final Season. The series over the course of its run kept taking us up the food chain until we came to the head honchos in Jacob and Smokey. I loved how it was revealed MIB was actually "Locke" and then they take it one step further with MIB being Smokey who turns out wasn't some mindless guard dog of the island but a sentient being who was actually once a human being.

The problem I had was he was built up as Evil Incarnate and except for the first few episodes this season and the season finale last year he hasn't actually felt that way despite all the carnage. I remember those sinister expressions in the last few episodes of season 5 and it sent a chill up my spine when Ilana's friend told Frank "something more terrifying than what is in this box".

Go back and watch season 4 or 5 and that is what season six should have been like--tons of revelations, fast pace, intriguing mysteries, urgency to the narrative, tying off dangling threads and building to a fever-pitch culminating in an epic payoff. So instead of building on what they had developed in S3-5 they just decided to drag out the season, just burning off episodes to kill time mostly until the series finale. They mismanaged their storytelling and those 13 or so episodes were kinda wasted. This was the 6th and final Act of what has essentially been a 6 ACT Story. This should have been the year they peaked--this should have been their crowning achievement.

I wouldn't call it a complete waste. Even if they were light on mythology, I thought the flash-sideways this season were almost all well done and all well worth watching.

I found the flash-sideways to be rather tedious and lacking. Jack's were the most interesting. Kate's was a bore. Sawyer the cop bedding alt Charlotte--pass, Sun and Jin meh, killer Sayid going after alt Keamey pretty dull.

Alt Des' just dragged on interminably with a useless appearance by Dominic Monaghan in my opinion. They talk about love in a bar, then crazy Charlie drives them into the marina, then we get a boring MRI scene then Des chases Charlie in his hospital gown and in the midst of that he briefly crosses paths with alt Jack. And poor Eloise just criminally wasted in her one appearance this season. That woman deserved much more screentimes--she was a lot more compelling than a lot of other characters on the show. I've never enjoyed Hurley except in small doses. I've never liked his flashes except for season one's "Numbers". "Dave" sucked, "Everybody Hates Hugo" sucked. And this was maaaaaaybe a smidge more bearable but I never cared for Libby or their supposedly sweet and innocent burgeoning love affair so you probably already know what I think of "Everybody Loves Hugo". He is almost as annoying as Hiro on HEROES.

Really the alt flashes, in theory, needed much more time than just one season to get me to care. I realize though the main point for them were to make a brief comparison to the lives of the survivors from what might have been had they not crashed to what they are on the island--and we therefore a means to an end.

The island stuff, on the other hand...

Good we can at least agree about this. It was just a bunch of scurrying about like mice--Sayid swims to hydra, sayid swims back, Smokey harrasses Sun, Sun hits her head, Sawyer goes to the village, Kate goes with Jin to find him, Jin gets captured by Claire, Sawyer joins Smokey's camp, Jack goes to Lighthouse with Hurley, Jack & Hurley join up with Ilana' group, Ilana explodes, Widmore and Smokey stare down each other, Zoe's group grabs Jin, Smokey throws Des down a well, Sawyer plans to steal the sub and double cross everybody, Claire wants to kill Kate, now they want to hold hands, Sayid is bloodthirsty but not really because he was told he is good so of course that means he is good and then goes Boom!, Jack jumps off a boat, becomes friends with Smokey and saves his life--dumb, Jack non chalantly ditches Claire, Hurley acts like an idiot and blows up the Black Rock etc etc.

I've been trying to put my finger on what it reminds me of and then it dons on me seasons 2/3 of HEROES where it pretends like all of these little things are going to add up to something more but never does. It is just a bunch of random stuff happening to fill a season of tv. The detonation of Jughead in hindsight was a bad idea as it seems to have altered the course of LOST's writing and transported Elizabeth Mitchell to a crappy tv show in the process.

 

[davejames]

Good we can at least agree about this. It was just a bunch of scurrying about like mice--Sayid swims to hydra, sayid swims back, Smokey harrasses Sun, Sun hits her head, Sawyer goes to the village, Kate goes with Jin to find him, Jin gets captured by Claire, Sawyer joins Smokey's camp, Jack goes to Lighthouse with Hurley, Jack & Hurley join up with Ilana' group, Ilana explodes, Widmore and Smokey stare down each other, Zoe's group grabs Jin, Smokey throws Des down a well, Sawyer plans to steal the sub and double cross everybody, Claire wants to kill Kate, now they want to hold hands, Sayid is bloodthirsty but not really because he was told he is good so of course that means he is good and then goes Boom!, Jack jumps off a boat, becomes friends with Smokey and saves his life--dumb, Jack non chalantly ditches Claire, Hurley acts like an idiot and blows up the Black Rock etc etc.

Lol. Yeah I don't really mind the idea that the characters are improvising and making things up as they go along (because that's probably how it would actually be), but unfortunately I got the sense the writers were doing that too.

Although some of those I didn't have as much of an issue with. Claire's evolution felt like it was done gradually and believably enough. And (perhaps because of the actor) Locke's arc felt pretty consistent to me all the way through too.

In fact, O'Quinn did a LOT to make this season worthwhile in my book. Without his commanding presence throughout, I'd probably be a lot more disappointed in this season than I am.

 

[startrekwatcher]

Although some of those I didn't have as much of an issue with. Claire's evolution felt like it was done gradually and believably enough. And (perhaps because of the actor) Locke's arc felt pretty consistent to me all the way through too.

Yeah but we never did really get a very good explanation of Claire's odd behavior--she acted "off" in "Cabin Fever" but she clearly wasn't like Sayid who died and came back "evil". I guess they want to argue she went mad in the jungle being isolated but she wasn't since Smokey was with her some of that time. Then she just seems to snap out of it. I didn't buy it. It was like the writers had something possibly in mind but then it never went anywhere. They just dropped it.

Then we spent all that time at the Temple and we still don't know how "Dead is Dead" yet Sayid is alive or why Jacob wanted him to survive or how it messed with Sayid's good/bad levels . And tying back to this why did Smokey grab Rousseau's husband and drag him down to temple? Or why he was dragging John back in S1--back then thought maybe John had done something to piss off the island but now that he isn't an agent of the island what was he going to do? He couldn't kill him and take his form that would be breaking the RULES.

 

[SJA]

An Excellent from me - Michael Emerson was amazing in the scene in Alex's house - when her mum told him that her daughter thought of him as a father - Just brillant - really subtle beautiful acting from one of Lost's greatest actors - Terry O'Quinn was superb too!

 

[Mallet]

Finally got a chance to see it.

Not much to add to the conversation that has not already been said.

I guess it is all up to tomorrows episode to see if this show will be one (of the very few) series that make a full, great series or if it will end up a big disappointment like X-Files, Heroes and many, many other series that have gone before it.

Interestingly enough, it will come down right to the last episode to find out which it is (unlike, say, X-Files where you knew to had turned to suck well before it ended), which I guess says something for the writers and creators of Lost. They've done such a good job of building up the story and the characters, without explaining everything away, that it will really come down to the final episode to find out if they have actually done it.

A great series or just a series of carrots dangled before us to keep us watching commercials week to week and buying dvd's every summer?

We'll all know in less then 24 hours...

 

[Zulu Romeo]

I guess it is all up to tomorrows episode to see if this show will be one (of the very few) series that make a full, great series or if it will end up a big disappointment like X-Files, Heroes and many, many other series that have gone before it.

Interestingly enough, it will come down right to the last episode to find out which it is (unlike, say, X-Files where you knew to had turned to suck well before it ended), which I guess says something for the writers and creators of Lost. They've done such a good job of building up the story and the characters, without explaining everything away, that it will really come down to the final episode to find out if they have actually done it.

I remember that the end of the UK version of Life On Mars worked nicely and effectively precisely because it gave away nothing until the final episode. I've not really seen Heroes so I don't know if they had the same problem of us having that gut feeling that the ending would not work as X-Files did.

However, knowing that Damon and Carlton (no Polar Bear though) are in radio silence about the final episode once it finishes airing, suggesting an unwillingness to talk about it; and given interviews with the cast which I have read (and watched on YouTube) about this final episode where, although remaining tight-lipped about the whole thing, the general consensus is that it's a "satisfactory" end but one which you'll "have to think about for a long time before you feel happy with it"...

... let's just say that I have a very bad feeling about it.

 

[RoJoHen]

the general consensus is that it's a "satisfactory" end but one which you'll "have to think about for a long time before you feel happy with it"...

Which basically means it's going to be a pretty standard episode of LOST.

 

[Zulu Romeo]

the general consensus is that it's a "satisfactory" end but one which you'll "have to think about for a long time before you feel happy with it"...

Which basically means it's going to be a pretty standard episode of LOST.

Actually, in hindsight, that consensus is a completely accurate description of "Across The Sea" - the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. (Incidentally, I loved that episode.)

 

[startrekwatcher]

I guess it is all up to tomorrows episode to see if this show will be one (of the very few) series that make a full, great series or if it will end up a big disappointment like X-Files, Heroes and many, many other series that have gone before it.

Heroes had only one great season--season one. Unlike LOST that was more of a self-contained standalone season where almost all the questions raised were answered that year--there was four or five that weren't and were meant to be carried over to the following season and one big one meant to span the series--the explosive rift Isaac repeatedly painted--but for the most part it stood on its own. So you can sort of separate it out from the others--Lost is more of a Whole and you can't so easily separate stuff out anymore than you can a baked cake once all the ingredients have been mixed and cooked. And as Kring originally intended the character arcs wrapped up in satisfying ways in season one. And that is probably why the Heroes characters didn't do much since then because their arcs the way Kring wanted were complete and didn't see them being around 3 years later. Heroes is also interesting in the way that most series have an awkward beginning as it tries to find itself, a strong middle consistent run, then comes off the rails at the end. But it had a brilliant first season then just got progressively worse--it burned very bright but burned out quickly. So I can actually just think of Heroes as running one season.

The XFiles had started coming off the rails in season 6 got progressively worse and made the mythology more and more convoluted and incoherent that I just gave up trying to make sense of it. It didn't help that they got rid of Duchovny in the last two seasons and in the final season reduced Gillian's role to basically a cameo. It also had a bad series finale. But since the mythology was only the focus of season premieres, Feb sweeps or season finales and the bulk of the show was episodic I can still enjoy it despite the myth being messed up. Lost, on the otherhand, is so interconnected and everything ties into eveything else that one bad misstep can poison to a certain degree everything it is feeding into. We are obviously going to have pieces of the puzzle never filled in that are just going to be voids when you go back and rewatch it because those answers or flashbacks you thought were coming never do i.e. the shitload of questions I've posted over and over in the last few episode threads. But is that going to be enough to undermine to a degree all the other stuff it did do right--like the character moments, twists, cliffhangers, reveals, build up etc. I don't know. LOST is this big complicated show that is never cut-and-dry so why should my final verdict be any less conflicted and complex.

BSG had an uneven final season I thought--the plot mythology was unsatisfyingly wrapped up but amazingly it had a great finale. In fact, I see some similiarities to LOST's final season(although I think LOST had a better overall more consistent final season so far than BSG but BSG did have higher highs than LOST with "The Oath", "No Exit", "Daybreak" for instance--LOST really has only had "Ab Aeterno") where it felt the writers were stalling and dragging everything out until the series finale. Like BSG, we keep waiting for answers as the number of hours left to possibly address the outstanding questions dwindle and then cross our fingers that maybe the writers can pull it altogether and only need 2 hours to do so. BSG couldn't, over the last few episodes suggest to me LOST might not either.

BSG's final season didn't really build up to the series finale--it felt more like a standalone sendoff like VOY's Endgame or TNG's AGT where the season didn't build to it--it just had a manufactured crisis devised in order to have something the finale could center around and Moore pretty much confirmed it in an interview after "Daybreak" aired. LOST feels that way too. It doesn't feel like series or even the season has built up slowly and methodically to this series finale--it feels like a standalone story. It doesn't feel like "There's NO place Like HOme" for instance where the entire season centered around this and everything was building to it. Part of that is how they pretty much sidelined mysteries for this season and stumbled around so of course they'll just stumble into this.

I wondered back in season 4 how they would top letting the Six leave the island and return to their lives--well the answer was they couldn't. I was excited about the S1 finale, the S3 finale, the S4 finle and the S5 finale but tonite with the series finale I shouldn't have the indifferent attitude I do and I fault the writers for not knocking it out of the park this year.

TNG had a weak final season but AGT is still to this day the best series finale in tv history followed by MASH and BSG.

Prison Break had a great final season but a weak finale. ENT had a good final season but it really wasn't intended to necessarily be the final season so I'm not sure it is fair to include it here although TATV was middling--I don't hate it the way so many do.

So as it stands now DS9 is the only series I've watched that managed to not only have a good final season but also a good finale. It started off a little rocky but it did so much better in the second half--doing a little bit of everything well--touching on elements from all over the series, letting us spend some good quality time with the characters one last time before launching into the final stretch, bringing back old faces one last time(compare this to the ham-fisted attempts by the writers to do this with all the pointless namedropping and brief cameos of old dead faces), giving us a tightly written exciting epic Final Chapter and a series finale that did more things right than wrong with a heaping dose of emotion, excitement. So I guess I should say kudos to Behr!

LOST should have been as tightly focused and built up to a fever pitch paying off in the finale but they sort of just walked into it with very little fanfare beyond the artificial kind done by much more effective promos and ads--sadly the ads jazzed me more than the episodes themselves over the last few weeks.

Like I mentioned a few weeks ago I enjoyed the series but judging it isn't going to be easy and I might not ultimately know how I feel about it until a few years from now once I get some distance. It had so many good episodes, such a long running streak of consistency in the middle years, lots of great isolated moments, lots of wonderful twists, lots of inventive mysteries, OMG moments, striking memorable visuals and visual reveals and S3-5 built well on things however since LOST has always been a Six act massive Story/Mystery you kinda realize that build-up and suspense and non-answers will get you so far eventually time comes for payoff and if we use the one hour mystery analogy for LOST the series you have to say that its last 15 minutes of payoff so far has been rather underwhelming and not the equal to the build-up and work done in the middle seasons. So that is going to color things to a degree.

It just seemed like they were poised at the end of season 5 to take everything set up and pulled together that extra mile this year and build on those successes instead they reverted back to the malaise of the early weaker seasons of the show.

I'm not happy more wasn't done with Dharma, Eloise was noteably absent, the Sayid arc was mishandled, Widmore was brought in this season and didn't do much and in this episode they just pretty much rushed it to wrap it up, the Claire/Kate stuff went nowhere, Jacob and Smokey's origin story was disappointing, the muddle of Jacob and Smokey and their motivations sucked etc so that hurts. So it will ultimately be a mixed bag I think. Best show this decade? Yes. Could it have really much so much better? Yes. Will a weak final season ruin it? NO.