What else are you going to do with your weekend?
August 12, 2022 3:07 PM Subscribe
There are people out there who have never watched LOST, who have LOST once, and who have LOST way too many times. YouTube's Billiam falls into the third camp, and he's bringing us recap episodes of the series. These aren't normal recaps, these get into the entire web of interconnections and intrigue and even the details of the production of the show, and give you the most complete picture of the series you might ever find. Season one is covered in LOST Was Weird: A Show No One Wanted To Make [3h], and seasons two and three in LOST: TV'S GREATEST MESS [6h20m]. I assume the remaining three seasons will be covered over the next year or two. 9 hours of YouTube recap is way shorter than three seasons!
LOST recap previously.
LOST recap previously.
qntm has an interesting analysis of the JJ Abrams school of storytelling
posted by knoxg at 3:27 PM on August 12, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by knoxg at 3:27 PM on August 12, 2022 [7 favorites]
The overlap of watching this show and BSG and having both arrive at handwavy garbage endings just makes me angry all over again thinking about it.
posted by kokaku at 3:35 PM on August 12, 2022 [19 favorites]
posted by kokaku at 3:35 PM on August 12, 2022 [19 favorites]
I watched the first episode (not when it was new) with friends and enjoyed it, but explicitly decided “nope, I don’t need to get addicted to that.”
I watched the first season boxed set not long after it came out and thought we were already trying to dig through the bottom of a very shallow barrel. Actually when the first season had just ended and I knew nothing of it beyond water cooler gossip, I thought I might give it a spin. I asked a then-friend who was the first person I knew (in the early eighties) with a VCR and also probably ultimately the last person I knew with a VCR. He kept taping things until he could no longer find tapes.
His machines would be going steadily for hours every day, taping things on the off chance he might want to watch them later. (As I mentioned once before on the blue, the guy has to this day a dozen hours of news coverage on 35-year-old Betamax tapes of the Challenger explosion in case he needs to refer to it... why yes, he does have a hoarding problem.)
Anyway, in 2004 he was still taping things and I had a disused VCR sitting on a closet. I asked him if he’d been taping Lost. “Of course. Fantastic show.” Could I borrow the tapes for a few days? “Sure, I’ll have a look for them.”
After about four days he told me, “Okay, I found episodes 1, 2, 4, the latter half of 6, 10, 11, 15, 18, 22, and 23, plus two that aren’t labelled. When do you want to pick them up?” Yeah, I may pass, thanks.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:44 PM on August 12, 2022 [5 favorites]
I watched the first season boxed set not long after it came out and thought we were already trying to dig through the bottom of a very shallow barrel. Actually when the first season had just ended and I knew nothing of it beyond water cooler gossip, I thought I might give it a spin. I asked a then-friend who was the first person I knew (in the early eighties) with a VCR and also probably ultimately the last person I knew with a VCR. He kept taping things until he could no longer find tapes.
His machines would be going steadily for hours every day, taping things on the off chance he might want to watch them later. (As I mentioned once before on the blue, the guy has to this day a dozen hours of news coverage on 35-year-old Betamax tapes of the Challenger explosion in case he needs to refer to it... why yes, he does have a hoarding problem.)
Anyway, in 2004 he was still taping things and I had a disused VCR sitting on a closet. I asked him if he’d been taping Lost. “Of course. Fantastic show.” Could I borrow the tapes for a few days? “Sure, I’ll have a look for them.”
After about four days he told me, “Okay, I found episodes 1, 2, 4, the latter half of 6, 10, 11, 15, 18, 22, and 23, plus two that aren’t labelled. When do you want to pick them up?” Yeah, I may pass, thanks.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:44 PM on August 12, 2022 [5 favorites]
Thanks for this post! I'm firmly of the belief that LOST is a show whose misinterpretation got enshrined in popular culture's memory as fact, to the extent that everybody kind of baked out their post-series-finale one-sentence Opinion Of The Show on a weird shared collective misremembering of the basic facts of what did and didn't happen in it over 6 seasons.
I mean, I totally don't begrudge anybody loving or not loving it, as the case may be -- personally I thought it was exciting, surprising television when at its best and pretty terrible when at its worst -- but it's just unique in how the opinions I hear about it seem to universally be about a demonstrably different show than what actually aired. Looking forward to this series and I suspect it may inspire me to re-watch it for the first time.
posted by churl at 3:45 PM on August 12, 2022 [14 favorites]
I mean, I totally don't begrudge anybody loving or not loving it, as the case may be -- personally I thought it was exciting, surprising television when at its best and pretty terrible when at its worst -- but it's just unique in how the opinions I hear about it seem to universally be about a demonstrably different show than what actually aired. Looking forward to this series and I suspect it may inspire me to re-watch it for the first time.
posted by churl at 3:45 PM on August 12, 2022 [14 favorites]
A huge part of Lost's success was, as pointed out in the first video, the huge production values and excellent casting. And it was a great show at creating mystery and tying together the little mysteries within a season while throwing in traditional sitcom drama. But it became clear pretty early on that something wasn't right, that there was nothing explaining the weirdness of the island and it was weird for weirdness sake. Towards the end I began to stop watching it and just kind of fast forwarded to get to a resolution.
I was going to go on a rant that the thing I hated most about Lost was that the showrunners said specifically stated it was not purgatory and the last scene ended up revealing ... it was purgatory. But apparently even though the last scene has them unaged in some weird multi-religion church that was purgatory the Island was not or something. Something about "flash-sideways" and I don't know. I don't think anyone knew and the writers were struggling to finish what was essentially just a really good pilot.
One thing I've learned from the early 2000s, from JJ Abrams and M. Night Shyamalan is that anyone can create a good mystery, but having all the loose ends make sense is something else. I guess that's why we still are reading and remaking Agatha Christie novels and why Lost won't ever be anything other than the last time we remember watching network television. Oh and having to explain to people what Kenneth from 30 Rock meant when he kept asking Jacob for more time.
posted by geoff. at 3:45 PM on August 12, 2022 [14 favorites]
I was going to go on a rant that the thing I hated most about Lost was that the showrunners said specifically stated it was not purgatory and the last scene ended up revealing ... it was purgatory. But apparently even though the last scene has them unaged in some weird multi-religion church that was purgatory the Island was not or something. Something about "flash-sideways" and I don't know. I don't think anyone knew and the writers were struggling to finish what was essentially just a really good pilot.
One thing I've learned from the early 2000s, from JJ Abrams and M. Night Shyamalan is that anyone can create a good mystery, but having all the loose ends make sense is something else. I guess that's why we still are reading and remaking Agatha Christie novels and why Lost won't ever be anything other than the last time we remember watching network television. Oh and having to explain to people what Kenneth from 30 Rock meant when he kept asking Jacob for more time.
posted by geoff. at 3:45 PM on August 12, 2022 [14 favorites]
I only saw the first show ('cause the guy getting sucked into an engine that was still running was so ridiculous) but this Billiam guy is way too off-putting to spend more'n a few moments with, sorry dude.
posted by Rash at 3:48 PM on August 12, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Rash at 3:48 PM on August 12, 2022 [3 favorites]
I still remember J. Michael Straczynski engaging with fans watching Babylon 5 in near-real-time on Usenet in the 90s. And he would never get baited into explaining where the story was going, but he'd always take it as an opportunity to teach general principles of drama. One of his posts was where I first learned of Chekhov's Rifle, just as an example.
And he had a post that I should probably go dig out of the Lurker's Guide some time, and basically he said "The problem with just stringing the audience along by adding new bizarre cliffhangers that introduce shocking new twists every episode is that eventually people get fed up with Twin Peaks never resolving anything and it gets cancelled."
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 4:09 PM on August 12, 2022 [7 favorites]
And he had a post that I should probably go dig out of the Lurker's Guide some time, and basically he said "The problem with just stringing the audience along by adding new bizarre cliffhangers that introduce shocking new twists every episode is that eventually people get fed up with Twin Peaks never resolving anything and it gets cancelled."
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 4:09 PM on August 12, 2022 [7 favorites]
I watched too many seasons of Alias to trust J.J. Abrams when Lost came out, or ever again
posted by taquito sunrise at 4:12 PM on August 12, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by taquito sunrise at 4:12 PM on August 12, 2022 [3 favorites]
geoff: My perspective on the show, watching it a season at a time through LoveFilm (basically the UK version of Netflix back when both of them mailed you DVDs) was that they'd laid down some pretty clear hints throughout the whole thing that there would be a Purgatory reveal, and a lot of people wrote articles and blog posts and comedy bits about how much they hated that idea. So they may have denied it to appease what they were worried was a flood of bad press, but may not have actually had anywhere to go other than that, when it came time to finish it off.
And recently Abrams was rather infamously quoted thusly, when asked about the Star Wars sequels:
And recently Abrams was rather infamously quoted thusly, when asked about the Star Wars sequels:
There are projects that I’ve worked on where we had some ideas but we hadn’t worked through them enough, sometimes we had some ideas but then we weren’t allowed to do them the way we wanted to. I’ve had all sorts of situations where you plan things in a certain way and you suddenly find yourself doing something that’s 180 degrees different, and then sometimes it works really well and you feel like, ‘Wow that really came together,’ and other times you think, ‘Oh my God I can’t believe this is where we are,’ and sometimes when it’s not working out it’s because it’s what you planned, and other times when it’s not working out it’s because you didn’t [have a plan].posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 4:16 PM on August 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
...
You just never really know, but having a plan I have learned – in some cases the hard way – is the most critical thing, because otherwise you don’t know what you’re setting up. You don’t know what to emphasize. Because if you don’t know the inevitable of the story, you’re just as good as your last sequence or effect or joke or whatever, but you want to be leading to something inevitable.
I watched about half of the first season before a friend said “It will jut break your heart” and I stopped. I don’t regret it.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:22 PM on August 12, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:22 PM on August 12, 2022 [1 favorite]
hey uh I'm four episodes into a 5-episode short video series about how much LOST rules: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLWJ2NADnW8uT-oKl6lKnlZtpbGPi5pJE
what I love primarily is how the show is essentially a "whaaaa" engine and eschews almost all other typical narrative priorities to just be weird, compelling, shocking, etc. this shtick definitely got old eventually as a rule but even to this day I think LOST's execution was thrilling
posted by Kybard at 4:28 PM on August 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
what I love primarily is how the show is essentially a "whaaaa" engine and eschews almost all other typical narrative priorities to just be weird, compelling, shocking, etc. this shtick definitely got old eventually as a rule but even to this day I think LOST's execution was thrilling
posted by Kybard at 4:28 PM on August 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
This series makes it clear that the entire show is about trauma that all the characters traumatized by crashing on the island suffered before even getting on the flight, so all the flashbacks are horrible and traumatic and relate to that character's place on the island. And it also traces individual character arcs across seasons and the series so I found it super interesting.
posted by hippybear at 4:30 PM on August 12, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by hippybear at 4:30 PM on August 12, 2022 [3 favorites]
How lost should have ended.
Was going to rewatch either Lost or Fringe
I'm at Brown Betty.
posted by clavdivs at 4:30 PM on August 12, 2022 [1 favorite]
Was going to rewatch either Lost or Fringe
I'm at Brown Betty.
posted by clavdivs at 4:30 PM on August 12, 2022 [1 favorite]
I liked the characters and learning more about them than I ever liked the puzzle-box aspect.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:58 PM on August 12, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:58 PM on August 12, 2022 [4 favorites]
Spoiler alert:
The "Smoke Monster" was really all of the crystal meth and crack that Abragraham and Shamemalaligned we're binge smoking in the writer's room as fast as they could cash the checks.
posted by loquacious at 5:06 PM on August 12, 2022 [1 favorite]
The "Smoke Monster" was really all of the crystal meth and crack that Abragraham and Shamemalaligned we're binge smoking in the writer's room as fast as they could cash the checks.
posted by loquacious at 5:06 PM on August 12, 2022 [1 favorite]
The problem with Fringe is that both I and the culture are in a different place WRT consent.
posted by wotsac at 5:11 PM on August 12, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by wotsac at 5:11 PM on August 12, 2022 [4 favorites]
qntm's piece is great; I am completely over the mystery box thing. It's hackery and is IMO shows contempt for the audience. IMO this is why people wound up loathing BSG so much - "...and they have a plan" my ass.
posted by microscone at 5:15 PM on August 12, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by microscone at 5:15 PM on August 12, 2022 [8 favorites]
Churl is right. Comments that focus on Abrams or how the ending was exactly what the showrunners said it wasn’t just tell me you didn’t watch the show. Happy for your opinion but, y’know, you didn’t watch it.
posted by Foaf at 5:19 PM on August 12, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Foaf at 5:19 PM on August 12, 2022 [3 favorites]
Spoilers follow
Indeed. The last season of the show had, instead of flashbacks, glimpses of a world in which they never crashed on the island, and that turned out to be purgatory. The main events of the show that took place over six seasons weren't purgatory, they were a strange story about a magic island and the war for control of it waged between its protector spirit and his evil brother and how various unfortunate people were drawn into and often destroyed by that conflict.
posted by timdiggerm at 5:37 PM on August 12, 2022 [11 favorites]
Indeed. The last season of the show had, instead of flashbacks, glimpses of a world in which they never crashed on the island, and that turned out to be purgatory. The main events of the show that took place over six seasons weren't purgatory, they were a strange story about a magic island and the war for control of it waged between its protector spirit and his evil brother and how various unfortunate people were drawn into and often destroyed by that conflict.
posted by timdiggerm at 5:37 PM on August 12, 2022 [11 favorites]
One thing I am unable to relate to people who weren't watching LOST as it aired on weekly broadcast was the ARG* aspect of the first few seasons. [Alternate Reality Game]
That was fun, and helped reverse the now-common effect of puzzle-box 'it's all about the lore' shows.
It was also, I suppose, a product of the late days of home video recording and early days of home internet and normies on web forums sharing fan theories and puzzle clues/solutions.
You're watching a show about the mysterious crash of Oceanic 815, and a commercial break contains an ad for Oceanic Airlines. You rewind and find a URL, and end up at a fake airline site sprinkled with easter eggs and little hints of what's coming next. Or 'Call this 800 number to apply for a position at The Hanso Foundation today!' with a recording of a numbers station that decodes to etc,etc.
That was quite fun, if you enjoyed that sort of thing. But it didn't last, and can't really be re-created binge-watching on a streaming service.
posted by bartleby at 5:45 PM on August 12, 2022 [6 favorites]
That was fun, and helped reverse the now-common effect of puzzle-box 'it's all about the lore' shows.
It was also, I suppose, a product of the late days of home video recording and early days of home internet and normies on web forums sharing fan theories and puzzle clues/solutions.
You're watching a show about the mysterious crash of Oceanic 815, and a commercial break contains an ad for Oceanic Airlines. You rewind and find a URL, and end up at a fake airline site sprinkled with easter eggs and little hints of what's coming next. Or 'Call this 800 number to apply for a position at The Hanso Foundation today!' with a recording of a numbers station that decodes to etc,etc.
That was quite fun, if you enjoyed that sort of thing. But it didn't last, and can't really be re-created binge-watching on a streaming service.
posted by bartleby at 5:45 PM on August 12, 2022 [6 favorites]
We don't *need* to go back, do we? Otoh, BSG was a pretty good rewatch - especially if you just ignore all the woo. Though that's basically impossible with Lost
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 6:05 PM on August 12, 2022
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 6:05 PM on August 12, 2022
Driveshaft was not a good band.
But I guess they were good enough that I remembered the name of Charlie's band, as well as the song name, You All Everybody."
I've never tried to rewatch Lost but this post might just get me off the fence.
posted by emelenjr at 6:12 PM on August 12, 2022 [4 favorites]
But I guess they were good enough that I remembered the name of Charlie's band, as well as the song name, You All Everybody."
I've never tried to rewatch Lost but this post might just get me off the fence.
posted by emelenjr at 6:12 PM on August 12, 2022 [4 favorites]
I didn't watch this when it first aired because I thought it was a reality show! Years after it wrapped up I found it and watched most of the way trough. Loved the beginning but ultimately didn't finish, mostly due to how the story got all weird and disconnected. I'm intrigued by the videos in the post but honestly as interesting as it sounds I doubt I'm going to make it through a 3-hour yt. Favoriting though for when the time comes!
posted by achrise at 7:05 PM on August 12, 2022
posted by achrise at 7:05 PM on August 12, 2022
@Deep - but the cylons... HAVE A PLAN..? Ugh. Well, despite actual lack of a plan, I have rewatched BSG multiple times. Enough of it is really good that it doesn't matter by the end. Actually if they just left PLAN! out of the intros it might have been ok. Well maybe all the weirdness with Starbuck and visions and Hera (somehow) could have been left out.
re: LOST - When it first came out I thought it was the best thing I ever saw on network tv up to the writer's strike.
posted by bitterkitten at 7:12 PM on August 12, 2022
re: LOST - When it first came out I thought it was the best thing I ever saw on network tv up to the writer's strike.
posted by bitterkitten at 7:12 PM on August 12, 2022
I always love the people who say, "If you thought the final season / episode sucked then you weren't watching it right!"
Seriously? 90% of people hated the ending. That doesn't mean they weren't good at watching. It means the writers weren't good at writing.
To this day, Damon Lindelof's name in the credits makes me instantly turn shit off.
posted by dobbs at 7:23 PM on August 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
Seriously? 90% of people hated the ending. That doesn't mean they weren't good at watching. It means the writers weren't good at writing.
To this day, Damon Lindelof's name in the credits makes me instantly turn shit off.
posted by dobbs at 7:23 PM on August 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
It was a fun soft sci fi puzzle box with a spiritual fantasy key. You can pick at how this detail or that is playing by the rules, but in the end it's like a team of American soldiers parachuted in, grabbed the One Ring with tongs and destroyed It with nuclear fire. Then flew Frodo, Sam and Sméagol directly into The West aboard a B29 Superfortres.
posted by wotsac at 7:37 PM on August 12, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by wotsac at 7:37 PM on August 12, 2022 [4 favorites]
Yeah, I watched every episode 3 or 4 times and I analyzed it and read other people's analysis and wrote my own.
And the LAST SEASON and LAST EPISODE were DEFINITELY BAD.
I did love the storytelling, the flashbacks and flash forwards and so on. It was a very good show until it wasn't.
I was deeply disappointed by the end of Battlestar Galactica but I feel like it's not fair to compare it to LOST. It wasn't nearly as bad as that.
posted by mmoncur at 8:54 PM on August 12, 2022 [6 favorites]
And the LAST SEASON and LAST EPISODE were DEFINITELY BAD.
I did love the storytelling, the flashbacks and flash forwards and so on. It was a very good show until it wasn't.
I was deeply disappointed by the end of Battlestar Galactica but I feel like it's not fair to compare it to LOST. It wasn't nearly as bad as that.
posted by mmoncur at 8:54 PM on August 12, 2022 [6 favorites]
The last season of Fringe was so bad that I gave up an episode in; it broke the show badly.
I think the ARG and mystery boxes around the island sucked a lot of the fan energy around Lost; the characters and adventures working with and against each other was entertaining enough without divining the big secrets.
The challenge with Having A Plan for serialized tv is how well is how well you deal with unplanned changes. Sometimes you lose key characters because the actor hates Hawaii or loves drunk driving. Sometimes you find Michael Emerson.
Specifically, only the last season non-island scenes were purgatory, the island itself wasn’t but if you had to read Sepinwall and TWoP weekly to follow it wasn’t executed well. A Being There-level end credits fuckup by abc didn’t make things any clearer.
posted by theclaw at 9:20 PM on August 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
I think the ARG and mystery boxes around the island sucked a lot of the fan energy around Lost; the characters and adventures working with and against each other was entertaining enough without divining the big secrets.
The challenge with Having A Plan for serialized tv is how well is how well you deal with unplanned changes. Sometimes you lose key characters because the actor hates Hawaii or loves drunk driving. Sometimes you find Michael Emerson.
Specifically, only the last season non-island scenes were purgatory, the island itself wasn’t but if you had to read Sepinwall and TWoP weekly to follow it wasn’t executed well. A Being There-level end credits fuckup by abc didn’t make things any clearer.
posted by theclaw at 9:20 PM on August 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
I have to also add Lindelof's insistence that "numbers don't matter" and it was how "Lost made you feel" was infuriating because they specifically position the numbers as mattering and how we feel is directly related to that. It was infuriating and a bit condescending, like we were all supernerds who were deconstructing some minutiae of special effects like why did the Millenium Falcon take wide turns if there's no air resistance in space. No one was turning into see if Kate and Jack would hook up. They're two hot people on an island by themselves of course they're going to hook up! You literally made numbers a major plot point of episodes, if not seasons, and then hand wave it away?!
posted by geoff. at 9:38 PM on August 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by geoff. at 9:38 PM on August 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
The overlap of watching this show and BSG and having both arrive at handwavy garbage endings just makes me angry all over again thinking about it.
I still have fond memories of Lost and BSG but also I wonder if Lost and BSG are the reasons why I've watched so little television since then. The disappointment of those two endings basically broke me. The only mystery-box-style show I've been able to stomach since that time is the first season of Russian Doll, and that's because Russian Doll had an actual thought-out story with a proper resolution that wasn't written partially on the fly like network shows often are. (I still haven't seen the second season because I am apparently so burned out on TV that I couldn't be bothered to renew Netflix for a month to watch however many episodes there are of it.)
posted by chrominance at 10:40 PM on August 12, 2022 [4 favorites]
I still have fond memories of Lost and BSG but also I wonder if Lost and BSG are the reasons why I've watched so little television since then. The disappointment of those two endings basically broke me. The only mystery-box-style show I've been able to stomach since that time is the first season of Russian Doll, and that's because Russian Doll had an actual thought-out story with a proper resolution that wasn't written partially on the fly like network shows often are. (I still haven't seen the second season because I am apparently so burned out on TV that I couldn't be bothered to renew Netflix for a month to watch however many episodes there are of it.)
posted by chrominance at 10:40 PM on August 12, 2022 [4 favorites]
Thank you hippybear! I have movers coming Monday morning and haven't even begun packing. This is perfect background noise. It's midnight Friday and I think I can start now.
posted by bendy at 12:13 AM on August 13, 2022
posted by bendy at 12:13 AM on August 13, 2022
As I mentioned once before, when I did watch Lost, it was mostly silent and closed captioned (houseguest asleep in the next room). After it was over and I was living solo again, I went back and rewatched a couple of episodes to see if I had missed something.
Michael Giacchino deserves huge credit for whatever people found engaging about the show — take away his music cues and the screenwriting gets revealed as the alternately crayon-obvious and the mysterious-for-its-own-sake twaddle it largely is.
“But... but why do Jack and Sawyer both have the same dream about Boy Scouts playing hide-and-seek in a cemetery?”
“Ah, why indeed?”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:59 AM on August 13, 2022 [2 favorites]
Michael Giacchino deserves huge credit for whatever people found engaging about the show — take away his music cues and the screenwriting gets revealed as the alternately crayon-obvious and the mysterious-for-its-own-sake twaddle it largely is.
“But... but why do Jack and Sawyer both have the same dream about Boy Scouts playing hide-and-seek in a cemetery?”
“Ah, why indeed?”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:59 AM on August 13, 2022 [2 favorites]
I admit it - I still get mad about LOST. I especially get mad about how the creators kept insisting they had a plan and were sticking to it, when in the end it was utterly clear (and they themselves later admitted) they didn't. LOST made me acutely aware of a writing phenomenon I'm sure there is a name for, but where the rate at which new mysteries/questions for the reader are introduced at a rate far exceeding the rate at which any are answered, thus guaranteeing the vast majority will be unanswered by the conclusion.
Now, I'm not someone who insists every single mystery in a piece be answered - if the journey itself is interesting enough, and the ending satisfies, lots of little lingering questions can be forgiven. But by the later seasons LOST had failed on both those counts, careening around like a drunken smoke monster and ruining any goodwill I had towards it from where it began.
posted by Zargon X at 6:10 AM on August 13, 2022 [4 favorites]
Now, I'm not someone who insists every single mystery in a piece be answered - if the journey itself is interesting enough, and the ending satisfies, lots of little lingering questions can be forgiven. But by the later seasons LOST had failed on both those counts, careening around like a drunken smoke monster and ruining any goodwill I had towards it from where it began.
posted by Zargon X at 6:10 AM on August 13, 2022 [4 favorites]
I only saw the first show ('cause the guy getting sucked into an engine that was still running was so ridiculous)...
Yup. I saw the first episode when it originally aired, and I pretty much when I noped-out on it, too, at that same point. Just...stupid. And not in the “stupid fun” sense.
It was impossible not to be aware of the show over the following seasons, to the point of vaguely knowing how the plot was unfolding and, hoo boy, was I ever glad I bailed on it. Every so often, I be flipping through channels and accidentally land on the show, bit what I would see would reinforce my assurance that I did the right thing in the first place.
I did, for some reason, catch part of the finale. Given what I knew of the show up to then, I figured the fans were not going to be happy.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:16 AM on August 13, 2022
Yup. I saw the first episode when it originally aired, and I pretty much when I noped-out on it, too, at that same point. Just...stupid. And not in the “stupid fun” sense.
It was impossible not to be aware of the show over the following seasons, to the point of vaguely knowing how the plot was unfolding and, hoo boy, was I ever glad I bailed on it. Every so often, I be flipping through channels and accidentally land on the show, bit what I would see would reinforce my assurance that I did the right thing in the first place.
I did, for some reason, catch part of the finale. Given what I knew of the show up to then, I figured the fans were not going to be happy.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:16 AM on August 13, 2022
I watched Lost through to the bitter end and the only reason I’m not mad is because I think the lessons Damon Lindelof learned from that debacle helped him make The Leftovers what it was. And THAT was a hell of a show. It has one big, simple mystery with multiple complex repercussions. And what quickly becomes clear is that solving the mystery doesn’t matter.
posted by heyitsgogi at 6:19 AM on August 13, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by heyitsgogi at 6:19 AM on August 13, 2022 [5 favorites]
It gets really irksome when people insist that I didn't watch it right or whatever because I hate it.
I loved that show. I kept up with it, and if anything, paying too close attention is what ruined it. The showrunners lied to us. It would have been better (not great, but better) if they'd not said a thing.
The island was set up as a natural / sci fi / time travel phenomenon. What did the numbers mean? What was with the timer? What's with the smoke monster? We were told explicitly that there was an explanation for all of it, that it wasn't supernatural.
It was, of course, supernatural.
An audience can accept almost anything so long as you lay out the rules of your universe and then don't break them. It's not even about paying attention to which parts are purgatory and which aren't. It's about spirits and purgatory even being present in a show about a mysterious scientific facility on an island that defies charting due to purportedly non-supernatural phenomena.
posted by explosion at 7:43 AM on August 13, 2022 [11 favorites]
I loved that show. I kept up with it, and if anything, paying too close attention is what ruined it. The showrunners lied to us. It would have been better (not great, but better) if they'd not said a thing.
The island was set up as a natural / sci fi / time travel phenomenon. What did the numbers mean? What was with the timer? What's with the smoke monster? We were told explicitly that there was an explanation for all of it, that it wasn't supernatural.
It was, of course, supernatural.
An audience can accept almost anything so long as you lay out the rules of your universe and then don't break them. It's not even about paying attention to which parts are purgatory and which aren't. It's about spirits and purgatory even being present in a show about a mysterious scientific facility on an island that defies charting due to purportedly non-supernatural phenomena.
posted by explosion at 7:43 AM on August 13, 2022 [11 favorites]
As far as I know, J. Michael Straczynski was the only one in TV who ever planned ahead all the way to the end so well. I miss him on TV. Unfortunately, these days showrunners have to have it open ended so they can only plan so far, and certainly LOST and BSG had a whole "Future Ted and Future Marshall will figure it out!" aspect to it, which is why it ended up being purgatory, because what the hell else was left?
I do remember them saying that the episode on Jack getting his fugly tattoos was the nadir of the show and when they started saying to the network that they needed to be able to plan an ending, which is certainly true.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:24 AM on August 13, 2022 [3 favorites]
I do remember them saying that the episode on Jack getting his fugly tattoos was the nadir of the show and when they started saying to the network that they needed to be able to plan an ending, which is certainly true.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:24 AM on August 13, 2022 [3 favorites]
A huge eyeroll to the whole lot of you; Lost was a whole barrel of fun, and remains so on rewatch.
(And for me the problems with the final season are not the ending -- which is fine! and closing the circle on Jack lying in the forest is actually pretty elegant! -- but the whole wobbly mess of the Temple episodes and how poorly the show does Sayid and Claire. But the thing about a rewatch is: you can skip the occasional crappy episodes without losing much.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 8:38 AM on August 13, 2022 [10 favorites]
(And for me the problems with the final season are not the ending -- which is fine! and closing the circle on Jack lying in the forest is actually pretty elegant! -- but the whole wobbly mess of the Temple episodes and how poorly the show does Sayid and Claire. But the thing about a rewatch is: you can skip the occasional crappy episodes without losing much.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 8:38 AM on August 13, 2022 [10 favorites]
I will never say to anyone "LOST, up to and including its finale, was objectively great" (though I might say that in my YouTube videos, sorry for some reason the tone in those I went for is "punchy") but what I will say is that the finale just emphasized what I ultimately loved about LOST: it constantly broke its own rules and cheated narratively in service of wild swings for the fences, whether in the form of unresolved but effective-in-the-moment cliffhangers or huge, perhaps unearned emotional beats
it's pulpy, twisty, messy storytelling that bites off more than it can chew at all possible moments, with a stellar cast and high production values to make a shocking percentage of the end result not just workable but actively great fun
also: they may have planned it or not, but the full story of John Locke is still one of my favorite, most heartbreaking sci-fi character storylines, and the show does a genuinely beautiful job of clicking it all together by the end
also also: how can anyone dislike a show that gave us "The Constant"
posted by Kybard at 8:41 AM on August 13, 2022 [10 favorites]
it's pulpy, twisty, messy storytelling that bites off more than it can chew at all possible moments, with a stellar cast and high production values to make a shocking percentage of the end result not just workable but actively great fun
also: they may have planned it or not, but the full story of John Locke is still one of my favorite, most heartbreaking sci-fi character storylines, and the show does a genuinely beautiful job of clicking it all together by the end
also also: how can anyone dislike a show that gave us "The Constant"
posted by Kybard at 8:41 AM on August 13, 2022 [10 favorites]
Loved it, loved the ending. I think there are a lot of us out there, we just aren't writing long screeds about how much we loved it?
posted by BlahLaLa at 8:50 AM on August 13, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by BlahLaLa at 8:50 AM on August 13, 2022 [4 favorites]
Except for the guy who made these videos who spent 9 hours going through the first three seasons. He unambiguously loves this show.
posted by hippybear at 8:52 AM on August 13, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by hippybear at 8:52 AM on August 13, 2022 [2 favorites]
a product of the late days of home video recording and early days of home internet
Home computing--both the computing power available and the software and skills available to a motivated home user--had also advanced in general. Advanced to the point where a clever person could download a bootleg image and create their own boxes of Dharma Initiative Breakfast Cereal to amuse their friends at get-togethers.
posted by gimonca at 9:22 AM on August 13, 2022 [3 favorites]
Home computing--both the computing power available and the software and skills available to a motivated home user--had also advanced in general. Advanced to the point where a clever person could download a bootleg image and create their own boxes of Dharma Initiative Breakfast Cereal to amuse their friends at get-togethers.
posted by gimonca at 9:22 AM on August 13, 2022 [3 favorites]
The island was set up as a natural / sci fi / time travel phenomenon.Were we watching the same show? I remember the show as consistently ambivalent about whether what we were seeing was supernatural or scientific. It was a key conflict between John Locke and Jack Shepard.
posted by azarbayejani at 11:12 AM on August 13, 2022 [4 favorites]
LOST made me acutely aware of a writing phenomenon I'm sure there is a name for, but where the rate at which new mysteries/questions for the reader are introduced at a rate far exceeding the rate at which any are answered, thus guaranteeing the vast majority will be unanswered by the conclusion.
I've thought about this a lot with various media properties, and I find a lot of this kind of overly meandering, complicated for the sake of being complicated storytelling in Joss Whedon's projects - like Buffy. And M. Night Shyamalan has built an entire career on it to the point that the trope or idiom "What a twist!" was - for a time - the punchline to a lot of snarky jokes about him and his output.
Something that has often come to mind about why it personally irritates me is that it feels a lot like I'm eavesdropping on kids playing with toys in a sandbox and exploring world building or storytelling and freewheeling as they go. Or, perhaps, listening to or overhearing a particularly meandering DnD or other RPG session that keeps going off the rails.
Which in itself is fine. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Having fun with imagination is great.
That does not mean it's good writing or storytelling.
I think the part that personally sticks in my craw and rubs me the wrong way is I have a really hard time getting personally invested in these complicated plots because of how underdeveloped they are and how they ultimately never seem to go anywhere or have resolutions that warrant that kind of excessive complication.
I know another part of my personal irritation is how many times throughout my life I've tried to talk about this and I get a lot of weirdly intense and personal pushback from fans of various media properties who are invested in it that I just don't get it or I'm just not giving it a chance.
And when I take a big step back from anything like this I have to check myself and remember that I probably have a really rich imagination - likely due to the dubious superpowers of maladaptive daydreaming - so for better or worse I have exactly this kind of meandering and excessively complicated story-telling on tap any time I want it, which may explain why I can spot it from miles away and why it might personally irritate me.
Another part of it for me probably involves how awful some of these showrunners are as human beings. I remember really disliking Joss Whedon as a person way back in the 1990s and getting pushback about that, and here we are now, knowing more about how he was actually treating people during those times.
Pivoting and tangenting wildly, I felt that way about the TV shows like Friends when it was still in production and how many people were into it despite all of the shitty jokes at the expense of LGBTQ people. Or, say, Seinfeld.
I get similar vibes from J.J. Abrams. So far the only thing I've remotely liked from him is some of the new Star Wars movies but that might be in spite of Abrams and not because of him.
Shrug. It's complicated. Your mileage and enjoyment may vary.
posted by loquacious at 11:41 AM on August 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
I've thought about this a lot with various media properties, and I find a lot of this kind of overly meandering, complicated for the sake of being complicated storytelling in Joss Whedon's projects - like Buffy. And M. Night Shyamalan has built an entire career on it to the point that the trope or idiom "What a twist!" was - for a time - the punchline to a lot of snarky jokes about him and his output.
Something that has often come to mind about why it personally irritates me is that it feels a lot like I'm eavesdropping on kids playing with toys in a sandbox and exploring world building or storytelling and freewheeling as they go. Or, perhaps, listening to or overhearing a particularly meandering DnD or other RPG session that keeps going off the rails.
Which in itself is fine. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Having fun with imagination is great.
That does not mean it's good writing or storytelling.
I think the part that personally sticks in my craw and rubs me the wrong way is I have a really hard time getting personally invested in these complicated plots because of how underdeveloped they are and how they ultimately never seem to go anywhere or have resolutions that warrant that kind of excessive complication.
I know another part of my personal irritation is how many times throughout my life I've tried to talk about this and I get a lot of weirdly intense and personal pushback from fans of various media properties who are invested in it that I just don't get it or I'm just not giving it a chance.
And when I take a big step back from anything like this I have to check myself and remember that I probably have a really rich imagination - likely due to the dubious superpowers of maladaptive daydreaming - so for better or worse I have exactly this kind of meandering and excessively complicated story-telling on tap any time I want it, which may explain why I can spot it from miles away and why it might personally irritate me.
Another part of it for me probably involves how awful some of these showrunners are as human beings. I remember really disliking Joss Whedon as a person way back in the 1990s and getting pushback about that, and here we are now, knowing more about how he was actually treating people during those times.
Pivoting and tangenting wildly, I felt that way about the TV shows like Friends when it was still in production and how many people were into it despite all of the shitty jokes at the expense of LGBTQ people. Or, say, Seinfeld.
I get similar vibes from J.J. Abrams. So far the only thing I've remotely liked from him is some of the new Star Wars movies but that might be in spite of Abrams and not because of him.
Shrug. It's complicated. Your mileage and enjoyment may vary.
posted by loquacious at 11:41 AM on August 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
“ Loved it, loved the ending. I think there are a lot of us out there, we just aren't writing long screeds about how much we loved it?”
There’s dozens of us!
That said, I also loved Lost. Including the ending. I love the characters, the craziness, and that it was a wild fucking ride from beginning to end. I’d way rather watch Lost than, say, Big Bang theory. (Edit: no offense if that show is your thing!)
posted by samthemander at 11:46 PM on August 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
There’s dozens of us!
That said, I also loved Lost. Including the ending. I love the characters, the craziness, and that it was a wild fucking ride from beginning to end. I’d way rather watch Lost than, say, Big Bang theory. (Edit: no offense if that show is your thing!)
posted by samthemander at 11:46 PM on August 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
I also loved Lost. I would have found a (pseudo!) scientific explanation more satisfying than a mystical one; I'd have preferred for the final season's island scenes not to have been full-on mysticism, and I'd have liked the flash-sideways to have been an alternate reality instead of purgatory. But it didn't piss me off the way it did so many. The final season didn't tell the story I was hoping for, but it told a story I was interested enough to watch, and that story hung together well enough. It's not streaming anywhere I've got access to, but I've got a full set of DVDs downstairs, and I'm sorely tempted to start a rewatch.
Battlestar Galactica, on the other hand, completely lost my good will with the Starbuck-as-angel business.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 5:33 AM on August 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
Battlestar Galactica, on the other hand, completely lost my good will with the Starbuck-as-angel business.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 5:33 AM on August 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
I can't help but think that if you think of something weird like the Opera House* or a random polar bear** on an island, it would behoove you to decide ahead of time what that is rather than hoping that future writers figure it out.
* okay, they tried.
** did better at this one
That said, we can also sadly argue that How I Met Your Mother absolutely knew and engineered their ending point in advance and unfortunately, the show being a giant hit and running for nine seasons threw that planned ending to hell.
Overall best ideas for show writing I can think of:
(a) plan ahead, a la Stracynski
(b) have "exit routes" planned ahead, see above
(c) write to a satisfying ending point for the end of each season, a la Whedon, so even if you end up finishing sooner or later than you thought you would
(d) don't just make shit up to be weird (Abrams--though really this show is Carleton and Cuse and not Abrams after the start of it) and then hope you figure it out later.
(e) don't claim you have a plan if you don't (Cylons).
(f) negotiate ahead of time how many seasons you'd like, if you can get that to work (Stracynski, Ted Lasso).
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:11 AM on August 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
* okay, they tried.
** did better at this one
That said, we can also sadly argue that How I Met Your Mother absolutely knew and engineered their ending point in advance and unfortunately, the show being a giant hit and running for nine seasons threw that planned ending to hell.
Overall best ideas for show writing I can think of:
(a) plan ahead, a la Stracynski
(b) have "exit routes" planned ahead, see above
(c) write to a satisfying ending point for the end of each season, a la Whedon, so even if you end up finishing sooner or later than you thought you would
(d) don't just make shit up to be weird (Abrams--though really this show is Carleton and Cuse and not Abrams after the start of it) and then hope you figure it out later.
(e) don't claim you have a plan if you don't (Cylons).
(f) negotiate ahead of time how many seasons you'd like, if you can get that to work (Stracynski, Ted Lasso).
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:11 AM on August 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
Javier Grillo-Marxuach (imdb) was a writer and producer on the first two seasons of LOST.
He wrote a great essay on the show, what the writers wanted to do, what the network wanted to do, and all sorts of behind the scenes stuff which I've never seen mentioned elsewhere. And it's really great because it's honest straight talk, and deals with subject matter which AFAIK the showrunners have never directly discussed.
THE LOST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF JAVIER GRILLO-MARXUACH ( it's a PDF )
posted by MetaGolem at 5:59 PM on August 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
He wrote a great essay on the show, what the writers wanted to do, what the network wanted to do, and all sorts of behind the scenes stuff which I've never seen mentioned elsewhere. And it's really great because it's honest straight talk, and deals with subject matter which AFAIK the showrunners have never directly discussed.
THE LOST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF JAVIER GRILLO-MARXUACH ( it's a PDF )
posted by MetaGolem at 5:59 PM on August 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
Okay, so I'm digging through that long PDF and it sounds like a case of "well, some planning went on and some did not." Notable:
JJ was more than happy to punt the decision as to what would actually be inside the hatch to the writers' room because of his deeply felt conviction that the mystery was as good a journey as the reveal and would be so tantalizing it would keep the audience clamoring - even if the subject to be eventually revealed was not forethought. It was at that point that I first heard Damon articulate - wisely, and for reasons of selfpreservation and sanity - the one hard and fast rule that heposted by jenfullmoon at 7:59 AM on August 16, 2022
lived by for the entire first season. He would not put anything
on screen that he didn’t feel confident he could explain
beforehand.
So the reason the hatch doesn’t come up until the end of the
tenth episode of the series (“All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy
Issues”) - even though JJ was stumping for it since before the
pilot was written - was because Damon didn’t fully believe in
any of the ideas presented to him for what was there.
Here are some excerpts that I found interesting:
even though JJ and Damon had sold a show about a mysterious tropical island full of polar bears and patrolled by a free-roaming cloud of sentient smoke, we had to continually promise during the show's development, the filming of the pilot, and even well into the first and second season, that - at most - our sci-fi would be of a grounded, believable, Michael Crichton-esque stripe that could be proven plausible through extrapolation from hard science.
it's hard for me to look at an episode like "Special" and not completely take from it that Walt is a powerful psychic who manifested the polar bear in order to test his father's love once and for all... but the execution of the episode apparently left plenty of wiggle room to give us plausible deniability - even as Damon would regularly come into the writers' room, throw up his arms and declare "Of course Walt's psychic."
As questions of mythology and backstory came up during the development of Lost, Damon and the staff - first in the think tank and later in the writers' room for the series - would come up with explanations. The ones Damon liked just enough to not dismiss outright would be discussed at greater length and eventually, something would become a kind of operating theory. Damon would eventually declare “it’s going to be that unless someone can beat it.” When we finally refined these ideas to the point where Damon was OK putting them on screen - committing to them as canon - then we would incorporate them into the show.
We worked under this construct - "this is the explanation until someone beats it" - during most of the first season, being careful to dollop the mythology very sparingly while trying to keep the show grounded in the rich characters we had created. When the show became an undeniable hit and moved into its second season - and we had to show what was in the hatch once and for all - it became necessary to take all of those ideas out into the sun. With success, we were freer to explore a lot of the sci-fi we had thus far kept beneath the surface... but not as free as one might imagine.
A good example of something that was never explained but for which there existed an internal explanation was the smoke monster. In think tank, we imagined it as a “security system” (which eventually became Rousseau’s line) and a sort of mechanism of judgment that policed the island on behalf of the strange powers that ran the place and called out the good and evil in humanity to come. As the smoke monster would come and go through the first season - and, for example, have a face-off with Locke but "decide" to not kill him - we would say that the smoke monster possessed an intuitive psychic ability, like the sentient ocean in Solaris, and would be able to look into the souls of its prey in order to determine further action.
there was definitely a sort of "operational theory" for what the island would be - it was liked by some and loathed by others - and since Damon and Carlton chose not to say it out loud in the series finale, I won't presume to do it for them. Suffice it to say there was a concrete reason that we openly discussed on several occasions about why the island had an exotic source of power in its core that was able to wreak such miracles as time travel, the motion of the island, and somehow connect with selected people on a psychic level.
Another great idea that developed on the fly during the sweep of the first season was the notion that all our characters had met or somehow crossed paths during their flashbacks. This eventually became a crucial part of the series -- that the world of Lost was one of ongoing connections between disparate people whose lives were on a path that would eventually reveal a common destiny -- but it was certainly not in the original designs.
That literally came out of us thinking during the earliest episode breaks that, "Wouldn't it be neat if, when we flash back to someone at the airport, you can see someone else from the cast in the background doing something interesting?"
There are also lot of things that developed long after I left the show
while the idea was that the island called out to people and brought them in as part of a greater Manichean conflict, I didn’t once in two years and change hear the name “Jacob” or “the man in black.” The idea that people were being recruited to come to the island as part of this greater agenda was never brought up during my time on the show, even though by all accounts it eventually became the crux of the series' final arc.
my initial response to the plot of the series finale was “why's Henry Gale still on this show and how did he become the most important man in the universe?"
First we built a world. Then we filled it with an ensemble of flawed but interesting characters -- people who were real to us, people with enough depth in their respective psyches to withstand years of careful dramatic analysis. Then we created a thrilling and undeniable set of circumstances in which these characters had to bond together and solve problems in interesting ways.
And then we made it all up as we went.
posted by MetaGolem at 10:46 PM on August 16, 2022 [1 favorite]
even though JJ and Damon had sold a show about a mysterious tropical island full of polar bears and patrolled by a free-roaming cloud of sentient smoke, we had to continually promise during the show's development, the filming of the pilot, and even well into the first and second season, that - at most - our sci-fi would be of a grounded, believable, Michael Crichton-esque stripe that could be proven plausible through extrapolation from hard science.
it's hard for me to look at an episode like "Special" and not completely take from it that Walt is a powerful psychic who manifested the polar bear in order to test his father's love once and for all... but the execution of the episode apparently left plenty of wiggle room to give us plausible deniability - even as Damon would regularly come into the writers' room, throw up his arms and declare "Of course Walt's psychic."
As questions of mythology and backstory came up during the development of Lost, Damon and the staff - first in the think tank and later in the writers' room for the series - would come up with explanations. The ones Damon liked just enough to not dismiss outright would be discussed at greater length and eventually, something would become a kind of operating theory. Damon would eventually declare “it’s going to be that unless someone can beat it.” When we finally refined these ideas to the point where Damon was OK putting them on screen - committing to them as canon - then we would incorporate them into the show.
We worked under this construct - "this is the explanation until someone beats it" - during most of the first season, being careful to dollop the mythology very sparingly while trying to keep the show grounded in the rich characters we had created. When the show became an undeniable hit and moved into its second season - and we had to show what was in the hatch once and for all - it became necessary to take all of those ideas out into the sun. With success, we were freer to explore a lot of the sci-fi we had thus far kept beneath the surface... but not as free as one might imagine.
A good example of something that was never explained but for which there existed an internal explanation was the smoke monster. In think tank, we imagined it as a “security system” (which eventually became Rousseau’s line) and a sort of mechanism of judgment that policed the island on behalf of the strange powers that ran the place and called out the good and evil in humanity to come. As the smoke monster would come and go through the first season - and, for example, have a face-off with Locke but "decide" to not kill him - we would say that the smoke monster possessed an intuitive psychic ability, like the sentient ocean in Solaris, and would be able to look into the souls of its prey in order to determine further action.
there was definitely a sort of "operational theory" for what the island would be - it was liked by some and loathed by others - and since Damon and Carlton chose not to say it out loud in the series finale, I won't presume to do it for them. Suffice it to say there was a concrete reason that we openly discussed on several occasions about why the island had an exotic source of power in its core that was able to wreak such miracles as time travel, the motion of the island, and somehow connect with selected people on a psychic level.
Another great idea that developed on the fly during the sweep of the first season was the notion that all our characters had met or somehow crossed paths during their flashbacks. This eventually became a crucial part of the series -- that the world of Lost was one of ongoing connections between disparate people whose lives were on a path that would eventually reveal a common destiny -- but it was certainly not in the original designs.
That literally came out of us thinking during the earliest episode breaks that, "Wouldn't it be neat if, when we flash back to someone at the airport, you can see someone else from the cast in the background doing something interesting?"
There are also lot of things that developed long after I left the show
while the idea was that the island called out to people and brought them in as part of a greater Manichean conflict, I didn’t once in two years and change hear the name “Jacob” or “the man in black.” The idea that people were being recruited to come to the island as part of this greater agenda was never brought up during my time on the show, even though by all accounts it eventually became the crux of the series' final arc.
my initial response to the plot of the series finale was “why's Henry Gale still on this show and how did he become the most important man in the universe?"
First we built a world. Then we filled it with an ensemble of flawed but interesting characters -- people who were real to us, people with enough depth in their respective psyches to withstand years of careful dramatic analysis. Then we created a thrilling and undeniable set of circumstances in which these characters had to bond together and solve problems in interesting ways.
And then we made it all up as we went.
posted by MetaGolem at 10:46 PM on August 16, 2022 [1 favorite]
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