Fianl take on Lost

Ok yes it has been a couple months, but after much thought I've kind of reached a point where I need to dump on Lost. Sure it's old news, but with the complete season coming out on August 24th, there is still a little relevance to it.

Tony and I have had small conversations about the show and how he thought the ending was crap, personally I was ok with it, but like someone creeping into my dreams and telling me that I wasn't totally satisfied with the ending, the top has been turning in my head to the point where something has just been bugging me. And if you caught the Inception reference then that is a good thing because I'm going to be using that to talk about how I have a problem with Lost.

I was fine with the character resolution, I was fine with the purgatory ending, while I know a lot of people weren't satisfied with them, I was ok with it. The producers of the show always maintained that the show was about the characters and I think the ending actually did a good justice to resolve their arcs. What has been gnawing at me is the lack of explanation for all of the crazy stuff that happened on the show. Dharma, Time travel, the light, etc... all of the stuff that we spend so much time trying to decipher and here is why.

Over the last six years we spent a good deal of time wondering how all of these puzzle pieces would come together, in the end we never got to see the final picture, we were given clues to the end but never a full picture. Instead the producers would rather tell you that we should have given a crap about if Kate was going to end up with Sawyer or Jack, to which I think the majority of us that were there in the ending really didn't care about. I mean sure we had emotional investment into the characters, but were we really worried about how their stories were going to end? We just hoped that our favorites weren't going to die every week. I mean seriously after season 3 the growth of the majority of the characters had been locked down, so we cared, but we were more interested week by week by the mystery that was unfolding before our eyes every week. And if you really cared about the relationships between all of the characters then you're in luck, I'm going to do a write up next season for The Bachelor, oh yeah you read that correct, I'm going to rip that show apart since I end up watching half of the season with Jen anyway, should be a hoot!

Getting back to my point the mysteries were what keep us coming back, Lost was a sci-fi show at it's core, not Grey's Anatomy. And by making us spend so much time wondering about mysteries that didn't have answers I think all of us feel cheated. Sure any good show is about characters that exist in a fictional world, but we buy into the world where they live because the characters are a part of that world. If you buy into the world as a device to tell a story then you want to have faith that that world matters, in Lost it didn't. I've commented to Jen a couple of times that the key to a great fantasy or sci-fi world is the depth and detail that it contains. As examples:

Lord of the Rings - Those movies made that world come to life in a way that I really felt it actually existed.

Harry Potter - JK Rowling did such an amazing job with that world that you believe that it all takes place in some other world that she gets to visit and come back to tell us about. Talking about the books here, not the movies. If you want to be a part of a different world, read those books.

World of Warcraft - Ok ok, I know you're laughing right now but the amount of detail that goes into that world and the story itself are pretty impressive. And while I've been able to put it aside I could go into detail on the back story of the characters and places that exist in that world.

And I think that is the thing with me, when I invest my time into some form of media, be it movies, books, or games, I want to dive all the way in. I want to be swept up and taken away to another place so that I can get a glimpse of that world. Lost did that, but in the end the illusion was broken.

The simple explanation for feeling cheated is that they didn't answer the questions, but I don't think that is what really bugs me, I watched Inception (told you I'd get back to this) and while I didn't think it was the greatest thing I've ever seen, I really really liked it, even with the twist ending, which I won't ruin if you haven't seen it. But in the end, they left a major question for you to ponder as you walked out of the theater, and you're not going to get an answer to it. So why am I ok with that, but not with the Lost questions? Two reasons, one I think that Christoper Nolan actually knows the answer, and two it's a question that can be left to interpretation. The questions in Lost were events that took place that were never explained as to the context of how they took place in the world, instead they just happened. In the end the people that were saying that they were making it up as they went (thank you Jen) were given A LOT of creditability and the rest of us were left holding the bag of empty promises. But the producers never promised to answer our questions. True, but by presenting the events in the story they needed to have the ability to answer the questions, which after some time I'm concluded, they can't.

Another great movie with a twist ending was The Sixth Sense. What made the movie great wasn't the twist itself, it's that all of the clues to the twist took place right before your eyes on the screen. There was no magic taking place offstage, you got to see it, you could go back and see the evidence throughout the movie that supported the ending. While Inception doesn't answer the question like Sixth Sense did, I'll bet that you can go back through that movie and find support for whatever ending you like. And just how deep was it? Well I saw a clip where if you take the music that woke them up and slow it down enough it will sound exactly like the horn like sound that happened when something bad was taking place. Why you don't know what happened, there is enough detail hidden in the movie that you can have enough faith to believe that there is enough evidence to support an answer, Lost in the end didn't have that.

Well enough of my rambling, I've just felt Lost without my little blog so I had to put something up that had been bugging me for the last couple weeks.