LOST thoughts.

Consider this your obligatory spoiler warning.  Proceed at your own risk.

One line review:

A cheap, purely emotional ending to what had been (at least initially) presented as a smart, methodical narrative.

Detailed thoughts:

The writers made a point to say that “not everything would be answered” and that the show was “always about the characters” which, to me, is pretty lame.  Seinfeld was a show about its characters.  The Sopranos was a show about its characters.  LOST was a show about a magical mystery island full of surprise polar bears and monsters.

From the very beginning, it was structured such that the overarching narrative was preeminent and where the “point” of the entire affair was that there was a “Big Mystery” at the center of it all that would eventually be revealed.  For the first few seasons, it seemed to coherently move in that direction.  Clues were given, small mysteries were uncovered and then resolved.  Half the fun of watching the show was trying to piece the puzzle together.

Somewhere along the line (Season 4-onward, in my opinion) they stopped delivering satisfying explanations for ANYTHING and got tangled up in a mess of parallel, time-displaced narratives, followed by ACTUAL time travel and a slow, relentless descent into metaphysical vagueness and seemingly endless side-track narratives that never got resolved.

I think it’s pretty clear that the gag was ALWAYS supposed to be that the island was some sort of “Limbo” analog.  The fact that EVERYONE in the audience got that in the first season sent the writers down a largely fruitless path of trying to find a way to stick with that basic concept while not TECHNICALLY having it be “Limbo”.  After all, your “Big Mystery”-focused show is going to have a tough go of it if everyone figures it out from the very beginning.

It’s a hell of a problem and I don’t know what the right response would have been.  Stick to your original plan and likely lose a large chunk of the audience or deny the obvious and then try to layer on tons and tons of red herrings, subtle variations on the original plan and oodles of dead-end side-stories and hope for the best?  There’s not a good answer.  I CAN say that they never should’ve let it drag on for six seasons.

I definitely found the touchy-feely pseudo-religious focus of the final part of the finale to be DEEPLY disappointing.  Obviously, LOST was always a show with a pronounced sense of the metaphysical, but that was (at least initially) tempered with an effort at grounding everything in some sort of rational, “scientific” context.  The worst kind of deus ex machina is one that ACTUALLY just uses god to explain its loose ends.

Overall, I think that LOST is a noble failure, similar to Battlestar Galactica – another serial sci-fi drama that ran off the rails into confusion and that ultimate cop-out: “It’s up to the VIEWER to decide.”  Like BSG, its first two seasons were rock-solid and it ran into trouble when it became clear that the network wanted more than three seasons worth of storyline.  In addition, it was GREAT sci-fi that got ruined by bad pseudo-religious silliness.

In the end, I’m grumpy because I liked it a great deal and wanted to see it live up to its full potential.  Let me be clear: You can do MUCH worse than LOST.  Despite all its warts, it’s still better than most of the stuff on TV.

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