Friday, May 28, 2010

A former LOST fan pans final episode as a "stunning act of creative cowardice"

Here's some really insightful and detailed commentary on what was wrong with the LOST finale. It's admittedly much better than my snarky take, which has been called immature, providing several contrasts with other films and stories and it doesn't run on for too long. The fact that the author, Doctor Zero (aka John Hayward), had been a fan in the early days is another benefit and his knowledge of key parts which represent serious internal inconsistencies show that his accusations of lies on the part of the show's creators are not merely lashings out. Example:

It’s not merely a question of riddles left unanswered. The show lied to its viewers, repeatedly. Remember Juliet saying “it worked” after the atomic bomb went off, followed by the last season’s opening shot of a submerged island in what appeared to be an alternate timeline? That wasn’t some sort of clever misdirection. It was an outright lie. The reason everyone immediately rewinds The Sixth Sense after seeing it for the first time is that it plays fair. It shows the audience certain things, with complete honesty, and the audience misinterprets what it’s seeing. It’s the difference between pulling a quarter out of someone’s ear with sleight of hand, versus knocking them unconscious and stuffing a coin in their earlobe. The kind of cheating indulged by the Lost writers will cost them their feet, if they ever run afoul of the madwoman from Misery.

The contrast with The Sixth Sense is perfect. It's the difference between skillful film-making and hoping people forgive you for your lack of skill. Here's the Doc's conclusion:

Too much of their collective story was left to our imaginations, and we aren’t the ones getting paid millions by ABC Television to write this stuff.

My thoughts exactly.

Thanks for reading my blog. For current commentary and what-not, visit the Est Quod Est homepage

7 comments:

  1. And they said Seinfeld was "a show about nothing". At least it would make you laugh once in awhile.

    ReplyDelete
  2. LOST took itself way too seriously, the whole way to the end.

    The first time I walked into the room and my wife was watching LOST, I said, "What is this, like Gilligan's Island?" But Gilligan's Island was way more fun, AND highly symbolic. The creator was asked about why the 7 characters were so good at representing humanity. He explained that they each personified one of the seven capital sins. Gilligan=sloth, Skipper=wrath, Ginger=Lust, Millionaire=greed, wife=gluttony, Professor=pride and Mary Ann=envy. I still use that to remember all of them, although predominantly I share Gilligan's faults the most.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Fascinating about Gilligan -- didn't know that. Better still, each of the characters were endearing; nobody was a villain of any sort. So we liked them all. And as it turns out, they each had their own weakness, which each of us share.

    And to think that when I was watching it as a 10-year-old, it seemed like just a funny show.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yes--I heard that years ago on a late night cable TV show when I couldn't get to sleep. They were interviewing Bob Denver and the actress who did Mary Ann.

    I'm reading this post with dismay--everybody saying that LOST was basically Catholic. Gimma a break....

    ReplyDelete
  5. regarding the akin link: I have a problem with tv shows described as "demanding". if a tv show is demanding, it probably pretentious and incoherent. reading a poorly written book is also "demanding". Shakespeare is demanding only b/c of the richness of the language, not any labyrinthine, clue-laden plot.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I'm going to go way out on a limb here, and say that the Lost writers did not have the ending in mind when the show first started. (Somehow I think Shakespeare had the endings of Hamlet, King Lear, etc. in mind as he put the stories together.)

    Which makes it a little difficult to ascribe much meaning to the ending of Lost. Just sayin'.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I'm going to go way out on a limb here, and say that the Lost writers did not have the ending in mind when the show first started

    Pik, that is *exactly* what I said to my wife after I clearly saw the plot gyrating out of control after about 12 or so episodes. Or at the latest in the second season. The fact that they had a few new hooks made people oblivious to the same-old same-old soap opera formula. They introduced a new hot chick every few episodes, along with a violent character death and some new weird intriguing science-fictiony attribute for the island to have. Of course, those things were never explained and were dismissed at the end as "not important".

    Ultimately the whole mess wasn't "plot-driven" or "character-driven"--it was 100% advertising-driven.

    ReplyDelete