Monday, May 24, 2010

Watched Lately: Lost

  • Well, that's over.

  • Not a lot to say. I enjoyed Lost the last few seasons, although it certainly lost its way there in the middle. And in some ways it never lived up to the promise of the first season.

  • In the finale preshow, Demon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse make the case that Lost was a character drama. If you view it as such, the whole series makes a lot of sense. People go through a bunch of stuff and they grow personally and as a group. Where the problem comes up is trying to make sense of all the stuff.

  • If you came into the finale hoping it would explain all the stuff, you were bound to be disappointed. The only answer we got was about the alternate timeline that just appeared in this final season. And from the producers' point of view, that's all we need to tell the story of these characters.

  • So what about all the unanswered questions? They don't really matter from a character point of view. My issue with the show is that the accumulation of all those questions tended to overshadow the narrative until that's the reason people kept watching and talking and writing about it.

  • I'm not unhappy about how the series ended. The characters matured and, in a way, they got their "happily ever after". I would be more disappointed if I was watching to see all the plot threads come together. Because in the end, that not the show they were writing. Those threads were really strings they could pull and make the characters dance.


© 2010 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.

2 comments:

  1. I watched Lost for the first two seasons, but I realized early on that the show wasn't about providing answers and I doubted that it ever will, and that's why I stopped watching.

    It was a little disappointing to see where the show went after that great start. My brother has explained to me everything that happened since I stopped watching though, so I also know what happened in the finale. I'm frustrated that the show ended without more answers, but I'm also glad the ending was a "happy" one.

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  2. While the ending was a happy one , it left me with a meh feeling . Lost has from the beginning woven the themes of spirituality vs science in its narrative , and it is that duality that i enjoyed .

    Though in the last few episode lately the dominance of the spiritual themes (good vs evil , light vs Dark ) & the reveal that the sideways world was sort of a stop on the way to the afterlife in the final , I thought it was kinda cheesy and a cop out to get the happy ending .

    in the end , and there was a lot of epic episodes 7 great story telling throughout the show & I thouroughly enjoyed it for its duration .

    Aloha Lost , Tuesday nights won't be the same !

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