VistraNorrez said:
He didn't say it was a bold artistic choice, he just compared it to life, which I think is valid.
And not something you could do with any story, obviously...
even the afterlife as presented in the show held tons of mystery, Erigu.
More like "contradictions" (just like the non-limbo parts of the show, really). The afterlife did have Convenient Christian to spell everything out in the end.
he didn't say critical people only wanted answers, he said a certain segment of the audience only wanted answers
Well, maybe critical people were the ones who realized the character arcs sucked anyway?
It's fine not to like the show and to have problems with it because it didn't do what one wanted it to do. But that doesn't mean it had to do any of those things.
Yeah, screw basic storytelling! Let's introduce a whole bunch of mysteries and unceremoniously drop them!
And another thing, it's super easy to give answers.
'Guess it's super easy to write a good mystery, then!
Oh, wait. No, it's not.
It doesn't matter anymore what [the show] started out as only what it became
It's neat how you can justify pretty much
any cop-out, with that sentence.
It would be like judging a book on it's first draft and being upset that the final draft is different.
No, it wouldn't. We're not talking about different drafts, here.
at the same time, if you enjoyed the majority of the show I don't think the disagreeable resolution erases those good times.
I enjoyed the whole show. As an unintentional comedy.
brandonh83 said:
Because that, on the other hand, is the core object that tied absolutely everything about the entire storyline together.
No, it was just a shitty cop-out when they realized they had no idea how / couldn't be bothered to explain the parallel timeline.
the title "Lost" also refers to the literal fact that the characters have no direction in their lives.
You could have said that back in season 1 already...
The point I'm making is that season 6 showed us first-hand what the characters truly need in order to be content and to move on.
Yeah, Ben had to get punched in the face to remember. A good old hit-and-run helped Locke quite a bit, too. As for Kate, she apparently needed a good look at Claire's vagina.
in addition to the afterlife reality showing us where the character journeys lead to, they also develop the characters even further than they already were
See Sayid, Sawyer, Jin, Sun... Oh, whoops, maybe that doesn't quite work after all!
we saw that Jack had a son in the afterlife, and in the Jack-centric episodes it was about him trying to be the father to him that Christian was not, and he was successful-- this was a prominent development for Jack, a struggle that he was finally able to overcome.
Until he completely forgot about the kid, that is. Because he didn't exist in the first place. "Hey, guys, I just overcame a great struggle of mine
in a video game!"
When everyone talks about how the show was about the characters and not the answers, that's 100% correct and on the ball.
Maybe next time, they should try
not setting the story on a magical island with abandoned scientific stations and supernatural beings,
not building their cliffhangers on a whole bunch of mysteries,
not come up with so many ARGs and other bonus videos related to those mysteries...
Or, y'know... Try to have the show be about
both. *gasp*
I wanted to know about the numbers. I got it.
No, you didn't.
I wanted to know about Jacob. Got it.
Hardly. He's the guy who took that other woman's vague job and even vaguer powers.
He wanted to keep his brother trapped on the island and for someone else to replace him... but waited until the end of the show to get to that. Considering "the end of the show" means "one season after
his own death", one could say we weren't dealing with a particularly efficient millennia-old overpowered dude.
I wanted to know why the island was special. Perhaps I didn't get the full story on it, but in the long run, I didn't want it. I learned that the island protects a mysterious light that may or may not be related to the afterlife.
So there's that thing you wanted to know but not really, and that other thing you may or may not know. Okay.
I learned that there are protectors of this light who bring people to the island, potential candidates to carry on the role. That, in effect, told me why the plane crashed in the first place
'Doesn't quite explain why Jacob couldn't simply choose one guy/gal and be done with it. Or let them choose before bringing a whole bunch of people to the island. Maybe the guy just really,
really likes collateral damage.
In the first season, a lingering thought I always had was that there had to be something more to Claire being pregnant when they crashed-- why have a pregnant character but not make that important? Well, they did. Kate helping Claire with the childbirth on the island would later play to fact that a lot of things that the characters would experience on the island would have been experienced in some form had they not crashed.
Are you arguing that Claire would have been pregnant anyway, even if the plane had not crashed (no shit?)? And that's why they put a pregnant character there in the first place? Gee, what a great justification!
Not that the flash-sideways really were a "what if they had not crashed" scenario anyway... Or would you say that, had they not crashed, Jack would have found himself with a teenage boy? And Sawyer would have suddenly been a cop instead of a con-man?
Aaron's birth, in the long run, ended up being the catalyst for three different characters in the afterlife: Kate, Claire, and Charlie. The writers talk about this in the behind the scenes stuff. Their paths were always going to intertwine
Of course, that's BS, as the only reason Kate and Charlie were there for limbo-Aaron's limbo-birth was Desmond, a.k.a. the writers' tool.
which also ties into season 5's time-traveling laws: whatever happened, happened. Whatever was going to happen will still happen no matter what.
It looks like you don't understand what "whatever happens, happens" really means anymore than the writers do... It's not "
important stuff has to happen no matter what, but the details... well, who cares about the details, right?"
I thought that was great because even beyond it being just cool time travel stuff, it still managed to tie in with the overall theme of the show: destiny.
I would have said "plot contrivances", but maybe I'm paying too much attention.
it answered things that I didn't even realize were really "questions" to begin with-- how do you take a story with as many great characters as the ones in Lost, and give them the sendoff they deserved?
Does not compute. Great characters? In
Lost? The sendoff they deserved?
So Locke, the guy who killed a woman he had never met in cold blood just because a ghost told him to (for some reason), deserved that last episode?
Ingeniously, they did so in a way that was organic to the integrity of the events on the island, and did it in a very beautiful and emotional way that gave us everything we needed to know, and we left the story knowing the fates of everyone and how they were able to be reunited together beyond death.
You could end
any show with that limbo thing (and in many cases, it would work just as poorly as it did there). It wasn't "organic" or "ingenious" in any way.
Emotional? Yeah, as in "cheap emotional manipulation". Bring dead characters back (well, the popular/available ones, anyway) and write tearful reunions. Gee, how "ingenious".
whether you like it or not, that's what the show was about
It's not that I don't like it: it's simply not true. Revisionist BS. The show obviously was about a magical island as well.
Read the first reviews of the show from back then and tell me the audience was hooked on the characters specifically. Tell me that's how the show got six seasons.