Lost

[maximaz]

I know I'm really late to the party but I just started watching Lost on this awesome invention called Netflix, which has all episodes on Instant Stream. I have never seen a single episode so I started from episode 1, season 1, and right now, I'm in the middle of Season 2.

Anyway, the show seems ok. Some episodes are great, while others make me want to just watch the finale to satisfy my curiosity and be done with it. The last few episodes had me surfing the webs, looking at eBay junk in a different tab.

So what I need to know is, if anyone has watched the series, is it worth sinking all this time into? Don't spoil it for me but is the whole premise really dumb and will make me feel like I've wasted my time? What's the general consensus on the show here?

 

[fedaykin]

It was interesting until about the start of season 4, I guess. Then it started getting more and more convoluted and ridiculous with each subsequent season. Many interesting plot lines were abandoned without any conclusion. I've watched all episodes but the series finale, which I still don't particularly feel like watching. I feel like at some point the writers just went "oh fuck it, we're just gonna put in all of that cool stuff that we came up with and mix it up without any explanation". Or that was the MO all along, who knows.

 

[SkuLL]

I watched the pilot and a couple of episodes after that. I saw the polar bear and thought I'd watch until they explain what it was doing there. When it was clear to me that no one gave a fuck about the script, I stopped watching (maybe 4-5 episodes in, not sure ).

 

[PlanHex]

I watched the pilot and a couple of episodes after that. I saw the polar bear and thought I'd watch until they explain what it was doing there. When it was clear to me that no one gave a fuck about the script, I stopped watching (maybe 4-5 episodes in, not sure ).

Heh. They didn't explain the polar bear until season 3 or something.

Don't spoil it for me but is the whole premise really dumb and will make me feel like I've wasted my time?

Yes.
There are a lot of good parts too though.

 

[Stanislao Moulinsky]

I watched the pilot and a couple of episodes after that. I saw the polar bear and thought I'd watch until they explain what it was doing there. When it was clear to me that no one gave a fuck about the script, I stopped watching (maybe 4-5 episodes in, not sure ).

I'm in the same boat. My brother kept watching it and from time to time he told me what was going on, and every time I thought that there was no way they could have made a good explanation for everything.

 

[Per]

I thought the end of s1e2, with the bear and the radio loop, was the coolest and most eerie thing since Twin Peaks.

Around the middle of season 2, with most of the driving plot elements from season 1 faded into the background, it became clear that they were content to treat the mysteries as plot devices to sustain instest because the subplots-of-the-week couldn't.

Around season 4, there was some promise because things were clearly happening yet they had three whole seasons left to develop amazing sci-fi premises. There was no way they could go back to a slow crawl after that!

The whole of season 6 was just winding down to nothing. (Except for the "Meet Dr Linus" episode. That was a fine character episode if you'd seen everything else up until then.)

 

[Cimmerian Nights]

I always thought the first season or so was a rip-off of Hell in the Pacific. Which is much better and only takes 90 minutes to watch.

 

[Atomkilla]

I only watched it to about Season 4, and I think it's good. There are better shows out there, but I guess this one was "fresh", at least to me.

 

[maximaz]

Around the middle of season 2, with most of the driving plot elements from season 1 faded into the background, it became clear that they were content to treat the mysteries as plot devices to sustain instest because the subplots-of-the-week couldn't.

This is EXACTLY what I'm thinking right now. At this point, it feels like all the weird crap is thrown in just to keep me watching and it never really goes anywhere exciting. It's all built up and introduced like something mysterious and crazy and then it ends up being just a random thing or an "ok, whatever" kind of thing.

The characters also seem to constantly forget or ignore some pretty crazy shit that happens to them recently. They seem to be less and less believable as the show goes on.

Oh and also, I have to say that one of the major reasons I'm starting to dislike the show is Ana Lucia. I simply won't be able to forgive it if she doesn't get bitch slapped at some point.

 

[SkuLL]

I liked the very first few moments of the show, as I was expecting a classic survivor situation. Slowly, it became another soap-opera clone, leaving me with a distinct feeling that the authors wrote the script as they went along.

 

[Blakut]

They lost me after the third or fourth season: they died, they got well, got off the island, on the island... i just couldn't cope with the fact that so many storylines remained unexplained... they were really making stuff up as they went along. I remember in the beginning they were saying that the plot has nothing to do with time travel, which was obviously wrong... at least after a few seasons... I didn't even watch the finale. I just don't care.

 

[.Pixote.]

Get out NOW Maximaz...this show will leave a big turd taste in your mouth. It was clearly a case of a show that had two seasons fairly well designed on paper, and not much after that. After season 2 the thing just throws everything at the viewer in a vain attempt at keeping the audience engaged.

Grab a copy of The Wire - or The Shield - or Breaking Bad...and forget you ever watched LOST.

 

[maximaz]

I have to say that I enjoyed the last couple of episodes quite a bit. The show has really been hit or miss so far. When it's good, it's great; when it's bad, it's like watching snot become a bugger.

One thing that keeps me annoyed is how irrationally everyone acts. I know they are going through some shit but a lot of it just makes no sense like all the pointless secrecy, the general disinterest in seeking answers and just the lack of any real communication. As the result, there is always someone who fucks shit up for no good reason and that gets annoying.

Also, I find most characters highly unlikable, which is fine, I guess. Surprisingly, I have come to like most episodes that feature Sawyer. Never expected that. He seemed and looked like the last character I would like.

From what I gather, the show will go into the direction that will make me feel like I wasted my time so I'm ending it on the episode Dave right now, which actually ties the show up nicely and makes as much sense as I think this show can possibly make. I will watch more if I really feel like it but moving on for now.

 

[Per]

From what I gather, the show will go into the direction that will make me feel like I wasted my time so I'm ending it on the episode Dave right now, which actually ties the show up nicely and makes as much sense as I think this show can possibly make.

Actually, ...

[spoiler:5d589a4b46]... they will never follow up on that episode except to retroactively declare that all ghostly manifestations were actually the smoke monster even though this means its actions throughout the series are entirely random and inconsistent (now I want to arbitrarily kill you! Now I want to arbitrarily trick you into killing yourselves! Now I want to arbitrarily help you! Now I want to arbitrarily save you! Help I have smoke for a brain and it's not doing me a lot of good!) but you could have guessed that. Also they will have a cursory reference to the "Libby in the mental hospital" thing in season 6.[/spoiler:5d589a4b46]

 

[maximaz]

Well, since I don't have TV anymore, I went ahead and finished the series. I honestly don't know what to think of it. If someone put a gun to my head and told me to summarize the plot, I would give them a blank stare and then just close my lids, watching my life flash before my eyes.

I haven't been this confused since I saw the finale of Twin Peaks. In this case it's different in that I understand what the show told me, it just didn't tell me much of worth. The magic light? The parallel afterlife? The brain time travel? The who? What? The show just went into every direction possible, with so many pointless episodes (considering the "explanation"). I did enjoy quite a bit of it though so I don't regret riding along.

ALSO:

 

[Walpknut]

I didn't watch Lost at all, I got X-file vibes from the premise, I really don't trust live action tv writers when they try to have some overarching conspiracy, Prison Break is another good example of why I don't trust most tv writers. And it was a JJ Abrams series, the guy that wrote the screenplay of Armageddon.

 

[Stanislao Moulinsky]

Taken from Cracked:

he thing with Lost is that fans didn't just assume all the mysteries had an answer -- they were explicitly told so by the creators.

In a 2005 interview, co-creator Damon Lindelof said: "Every mystery that we present on the show ... all of those are questions that we know the answers to." He also said that "nothing in the show is flat-out impossible" and that everything so far could be explained by science. Sure, he was talking in the present tense -- but the present tense included the Smoke Monster, who ended up being the ghost of a 2,000-year-old guy who can impersonate dead people, and Michael's 10-year-old son, Walt, displaying supernatural powers that turned out to be ... actually, we have no idea, because that was never explained.

Fortunately, some of the writers have been a little more up front. You know the sequence of numbers that kept recurring in the show? The numbers that seemed to have so many mysterious influences (from making one man win the lottery to causing a plane to crash) that an explanation seemed almost impossible?

Season 1 writer David Fury (there's that guy again) says he has no idea what "the numbers" meant, and he's the one who came up with them.

"I can't tell you what they are now, but I can tell you what they WERE. They were supposed to be the Others, lurking in the jungle. At that time, we hadn't yet settled on what the Others would be."

Well, what about that episode that implied Walt could summon animals, and even made a polar bear appear on the island after reading about one in a comic book? Fury says:
"That was the intent. But then ... things have changed since my time."

OK. Well, how about that Smoke Monster then?

"There was no mythology to speak of in place during the early episodes of the series. We were building it as we went along, discussing possibilities. ... Some thought of it as a monster of the id, much like in Forbidden Planet -- that maybe it appeared differently to everyone who saw it. The most tangible thought, as explained later by Rousseau, was that it functioned as a security system set up by the island's creators/early residents ... whatever we later decided the answer was."

Whatever, indeed.

I hate this kind of writing and when the last episode aired I was suprised (to say the least) that a lot of people are instead completely fine with it.

 

[Hellion]

Lost is, simply put, the TV series that defined the past decade as far as I'm concerned. It's first 3, maybe 4 seasons, are beyond anything that's been released in the last years.

Just for that, it's worth watching even if the finale and the last few episodes might leave you tasting a bit of "meh" in your mouth. But still, with the epic proportions this series had reached, probably every finale they could have released would disappoint.

 

[maximaz]

Taken from Cracked:

he thing with Lost is that fans didn't just assume all the mysteries had an answer -- they were explicitly told so by the creators.

In a 2005 interview, co-creator Damon Lindelof said: "Every mystery that we present on the show ... all of those are questions that we know the answers to." He also said that "nothing in the show is flat-out impossible" and that everything so far could be explained by science. Sure, he was talking in the present tense -- but the present tense included the Smoke Monster, who ended up being the ghost of a 2,000-year-old guy who can impersonate dead people, and Michael's 10-year-old son, Walt, displaying supernatural powers that turned out to be ... actually, we have no idea, because that was never explained.

Fortunately, some of the writers have been a little more up front. You know the sequence of numbers that kept recurring in the show? The numbers that seemed to have so many mysterious influences (from making one man win the lottery to causing a plane to crash) that an explanation seemed almost impossible?

Season 1 writer David Fury (there's that guy again) says he has no idea what "the numbers" meant, and he's the one who came up with them.

"I can't tell you what they are now, but I can tell you what they WERE. They were supposed to be the Others, lurking in the jungle. At that time, we hadn't yet settled on what the Others would be."

Well, what about that episode that implied Walt could summon animals, and even made a polar bear appear on the island after reading about one in a comic book? Fury says:
"That was the intent. But then ... things have changed since my time."

OK. Well, how about that Smoke Monster then?

"There was no mythology to speak of in place during the early episodes of the series. We were building it as we went along, discussing possibilities. ... Some thought of it as a monster of the id, much like in Forbidden Planet -- that maybe it appeared differently to everyone who saw it. The most tangible thought, as explained later by Rousseau, was that it functioned as a security system set up by the island's creators/early residents ... whatever we later decided the answer was."

Whatever, indeed.

I hate this kind of writing and when the last episode aired I was suprised (to say the least) that a lot of people are instead completely fine with it.

As the series went on, I was getting the vibe that the creators never had a complete story in mind but rather wrote as they went along and were not sure where they were going eventually.

So, by season 4, I stopped caring too much about the main plot altogether and decided to sort of go with it. It was still enjoyable half the time. Not a bad show.

 

[TheWesDude]

actually they knew how the series was going to start, and how it was going to end.

but after mid-way through season 2 is all they had planned, and everything up to the last couple episodes was mostly "filler"

it was originally ONLY supposed to be a 2-3 season show because thats all they planned for because...


sci-fi shows do NOT do well in prime-time.

the only way lost got away with it is because they snuck it up on the viewers so well. it was a sci-fi show that did not start as one. from the viewers perspective.

once i read up on the finale and what the reasoning was for it, it horribly dissapointed me that people were still pulling ( and quite successfully it seems ) another st. elsewhere on people.