THAT'S FOR TAKING THE KID OFF THE RAFT: If it's 8/15, it must be Lost Day, and these are some of Sepinwall's favorite scenes. Linda Holmes once wrote:
I'm always sad, I guess, when people feel jilted by creative works that show age or have flaws. Good things burn through their periods of greatest creativity and go down blind alleys now and then, while less complex things often don't, for the same reason real plants die and plastic ones don't. You know what never lets me down? Judge Judy, because it's a plastic plant. It doesn't change, and it's nobody's baby. It's there to decorate and specifically to require no upkeep and no attention.
Anything with the slightest breath of life — including Survivor, for crying out loud, anything that has ever had an idea to begin with — is statistically very likely to exhaust its best ideas, and even if it doesn't, those ideas will never be as interesting to you as old ideas as they were as new ideas. Even the second person who walked on the moon is not as famous as the first. Excitement over something genuinely new has a naturally short half-life.
It's not entirely them, in other words. It's also us.
I continue to think that the greatest insight I ever had about Lost was that the season finale or season premiere one year included subtly restaged versions of several key scenes from earlier season finales or premieres. The fact that I can't exactly remember what the insight was suggests that maybe it wasn't such a great insight, though.
ReplyDeleteOne of my favorite things about Lost was isaac's series recap after season 2 or 3 or whichever it was. The repeated "we must never speak of this again" was so great.
ReplyDeleteIt was actually Sepinwall linking to one of Isaac's series recaps that led me here in the first place a few years ago. And I've been coming back ever since.
ReplyDeleteSo here's the dirty little secret with Lost: it just wasn't a very good show. It had greatness in it (the episode Walkabout... "NOT PENNY'S BOAT"... "We need to go back"...) but it was far too frustrating and featured far too many uninteresting characters with Daddy Issues to actually cohere into something great.
ReplyDeleteAnd the longer the show went on... and the more back story we got about the characters and the island... the less interesting it became. My tolerance at the beginning of major characters like Jack, Kate, Sayid, Michael, Claire, Boone, Shannon grew to outright dislike as the series progressed. (The four characters I liked best - Desmond and Penny, Bernard and Rose - remained on the periphery for the most part.)
It's very difficult, dramatically, to make answers as satisfying as questions. Anytime there's a "why did she do that?" and your answer is more interesting than the one provided, it's disappointing.
ReplyDeleteI'd rather see an ambitious occasional-mess like LOST (seriously, CJ Cregg as The Mother Of It All?) than a hundred CSIs.
It's not that Lost wasn't a good show, it's that it wasn't a consistent show. The things that were great, were as good as anything on television -- in fact, until Breaking Bad, Lost was probably the most visually ambitious show in all of television.
ReplyDeleteLike Battlestar Galactica, the great was truly great and the parts that were less good were not very good.
It's always easier to establish a mystery than it is to explain one.
One thing that's really striking about BB, which a friend stressed in a Wire/BB argument, is that BB hasn't really had a bad episode or plot. If your weakest element is the mythic-ness of The Cousins and a few plausibility issues (use the hallway bathroom, Hank!), you're probably doing alright.
ReplyDeleteIt may be just because I'm there in watching now, but wasn't there some distaste for the framing device (which I find heavy-handed) used for Season 2 with the teddy bear and such?
ReplyDeleteThis one: http://throwingthings.blogspot.com/2009/05/found-objects-this-post-has-spoilers.html
ReplyDeleteYou're right about questions being more intriguing than answers are satisfying. And I'd probably forgive Lost a lot of my problems with it (because I LOVE shows with big ambitions) if the characters were more interesting. They're the root of the show and the root of most of my issues with it.
ReplyDeleteBSG's a really good comparison. Genre, ambition, making-it-up-as-they-go approach. But there are at least a half-dozen characters on BSG - Adama, Roslin, Boomer/Athena, Six, Baltar, Starbuck, Saul Tigh, probably more - that were more interesting and better written than any of the characters on Lost. (And that's including my issues with last-season Starbuck.) And I'd also say that BSG had a much better ratio of great to bad than Lost did. MUCH better.
ReplyDeleteI can go with that argument, and they have similarly polarizing endings, but I found the BSG ending much more of a hand-waving copout than Lost's.
ReplyDeleteI don't remember anyone disliking that framing device. Mostly, it was nicely evocative of some inevitable tragedy. Vince has talked about how tough it was to write to that endpoint, and to have the episode titles hint appropriately. He's approached the other seasons in a much more make-it-up-as-we-go way (let's paint the characters into a corner, then figure out how to get them out!), and they've almost always pulled it off amazingly.
ReplyDeleteThis is my favorite: http://throwingthings.blogspot.com/2006/10/recap-of-show-i-barely-remember.html
ReplyDeletePossibly one of my favorite things on the internet, ever.
I loved LOST at the time, but I've come to think that Abrams/Lindelof/etc. just were never really all they were cracked up to be. Whether it was LOST, Alias, or Prometheus, they (in different combinations, to be clear) consistently failed to think things through until the end, and it winds up hurting the final product. It was still a good product, with excellent moments. And I actually enjoyed the finale, which was a triumph from an emotional point of view. But its failure to follow through on its mysteries really did cheapen the overall experience, at least for me. And LOST’s failure looks all the more disappointing in the light of series that have done much better at conceptualizing the endgame earlier on.
ReplyDeleteI agree with both of you. Had BSG ended one hour earlier -- after the massive space battle but before the recolonization, it would have been much better (though still unable to explain Kara's return well).
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed LOST for what it was, even though it was a flawed show. And it had enough characters that I found interesting and cared about, even if I found some of them (e.g., Kate) really annoying. Personally, I think that it would have been substantially better if it had gotten a definite number of seasons at the outset, or when it was renewed for season 2, say, maybe 5. That would drop a lot of the flabbiness and running in place.
ReplyDeleteMy big problem with the BSG finale was Apollo's "Let's throw all our technology into the sun!" which I'm sure the rest of them really appreciated the first time they got sick. I'm even fine with the Mitochondrial Eve stuff and the flashforward - I just wish they had gotten there a bit differently. (And, yeah, the Kara stuff was nonsensical.)
ReplyDeleteI'm liking my Locke/box comment from back then!
ReplyDeleteTolerance of Sayid? And Shannon improved quite quickly until VIncent killed her.
ReplyDeleteI'm obviously a little bit ahead of Matt in season 3 and I agree on that framing mechanism....it just got a little overmuch after a while.
ReplyDeleteStill, Go Team Skyler.
Really? It was only used in three eps before the season finale (the ones whose titles form three words of the four-word secret phrase, with the finale providing the final word). I don't really think that's too much.
ReplyDeleteAlias has a bunch of problems in the later seasons (some for reasons beyond the creative team's control--most notably, Garner's pregnancy, which limited things in Season 5), but I do think it stuck the final episode with SpyDaddy and Sloan--man, that is an enormously appropriate ending.
ReplyDeleteReally, that little? Feels like a lot more in retrospect.
ReplyDeleteRandy - I had almost the opposite reaction to your summary of BSG. I thought so many of the characters were wooden or cartoonish (basically everybody except Six, Gaeta, and some of the fringe characters), and that it was the plotting, not the characterization, that carried the show.
ReplyDeleteRe the finale, I'll forgive just about anything for two arcs as utterly riveting as New Caprica and Gaeta's Mutiny.
ReplyDeleteIt's tough to think things through to the end when the network wants you to be on for 10 seasons, and you think the show can support 4 at most. Things get dragged out unnecessarily and the show becomes confusingly bloated.
ReplyDeleteI'm into S4 now, and all this black ops nonsense is trying my patience. I am putting my faith in that finale. ;)
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure that the device was used only in 757, Down, Over, and ABQ. I remember reading something to that effect, though I didn't go back to check. Randy, you've rewatched more recently. Do you recall?
ReplyDeleteI honestly cannot remember ANYTHING from the last three seasons of Alias. First two are kind of burned into my brain, but after that, not so much.
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