Lost
Occasionally they had some very good character moments, but yeah, for me Lost was all about the mysteries.
@ Doofu:
I agree that some of the explanations for things were less than satisfying and I think I would have like it better had the island actually sunk to the bottom of the sea at the end.
SPOILER
But what other show had a complete 6th season where all of the characters were in a kind of purgatory existence and basically dead? That’s ballsy television.
Yes..Jack Shepherd…whose father was Christian Shepherd….a little bit obvious….yes..I agree.
The sci-fi elements of the show were less than satisfying (except for that excellent 5th season where they were stuck in the 70’s)..but the human elements were emotionally satisfying and this (for me) is what carried the show.
Basically the whole 6th season was them trying to reconnect and find each other……because their souls were knit together…..that’s pretty beautiful.
^ I guess we represent the two factions of Lost – those who liked the characters and those who liked the mysteries. Out of curiosity, did you watch it on TV or DVD?
i started watching lost because i was on bedrest for a few days, and i’m almost through with the first season. i am intrigued by all the mysteries. in the last episode the baby was born and the brother died, and i was upset because he was fine as hell but come on what kind of idiot would try a jungle blood transfusion.
^ Don’t expect most of the mysteries to be solved, Alex!
excuse me but i can work things out by myself
Fair enough – I just want to save you from the disappointments I faced!
@ Doofu:
I watched the first two seasons on DVD and then Seasons 3 through 6 on television. I have all 6 seasons on DVD now though and it’s surprising how re-watchable the show really is.
Yes..we do represent the two factions of Lost which explains our different reactions to the series finale.
The show constantly referenced fate and destiny….which is why I believe the mysteries were always 2nd to the characters.
^ I’ve got the first 5 on dvd (I refused to buy the 6th), so I will rewatch it someday, and maybe I’ll end up liking the characters more when I’m not as distracted by the mysteries…
hmm maybe i should pick this up again? i gave up in season 3 :\
I actually think the show benefits from the ability to watch 4 or 5 episodes in a row on DVD as opposed to waiting one week between each one.
Season 2 (to me) was the worst one though….I almost stopped watching it at that point. It just dragged and basically nothing happened.
^ We have pretty much opposite opinions about lost, Rgrimes!!
My favorite season was 3, then 2, then 1, then 4, then 5, then 6. You?
I’m the same as DFFOO except switch seasons 4 and 5.
Lost seasons in order of preference:
Season 1
Season 5
Season 6
Season 3
Season 4
Season 2
The last half of Season Three is the best the show ever got. Ruby, if you were’nt hooked by then, I don’t think the rest will do it for you.
The final’s controversial and certainly wasn’t what I was expecting. But if I get to watch 100 hours of exceptional TV, a less than ideal last hour is a small price to pay. It’s the journey, not the destination!
Seasons Ranked:
3
1
5
6
4
2
I’m not sure how to even rank the seasons, since it was all so tightly knit together. I think the best stretch of the show was the first half of season two, so maybe:
2
5
3
1
6
4
But that didn’t detract from the show for me when there were all kinds of mysteries to be solved. But then they solved them by saying “Magic island! The end!”
I disagree with that assessment. We knew it was a magic island from the fourth episode where we find out about Locke, the trick was understanding the magic. I think the frustration for a lot of people is that the scifi elements meandered too much into religious elements for their preference. They wanted it to be mages and it turned out to be clerics.
Also, they wanted a full explanation of what the island was, and instead just found out about the events that lead up to the state the island was in at the time of the plane crash. But what made the show work is just how character-driven the show was, even amid all the scifi elements. If you pay attention, every single mystery is explained except for the mystery of the island’s existence in the first place, even though some of those things were explained indirectly.
Also, (MAJOR SPOILERS):
One of the major issues for Jack’s character especially was being able to accept things on faith rather than trying to understand them rationally. In the first five seasons, he kept trying to force his will on the island, and do what he thought was right. What did that lead to? All but a handful of the original survivors died, and he caused the plane crash that stranded him there in the first place.
Then in season six, he steps back and follows the flow of what the island is steering him toward, and suddenly he’s an island-magic guru.
The same frustration was projected to the audience. They wanted an ‘AHA’ moment that explained everything. They wanted some ancient super-creature to step out and say “I created this island, because I wanted to save the world from this great evil!” They never got that, the closest they got from that was Jacob’s origin story, but it didn’t explain what happened before Jacob showed up. They key to understanding Lost is just accepting that there’s this magic island there that nobody can explain, and focus on the decisions characters’ make in their time spent on the island and their consequences.
Who survived the most easily? Rose and Bernard, because they didn’t try to intervene in the island’s will, they just tried to exist on it.
Hmmm – I guess I need to revisit it, especially since you say that all the mysteries are solved! I wish I could remember all the things that weren’t solved, cause there were so many, I thought.
But, yeah, I’m okay with it being a magic island, but the show kept teasing us that we would find out how the magic worked, and at the end it’s just “oh there’s this light in the island that does magic things.” But I guess you pretty much countered my whole problems in your last post, so I guess that’s where we are!
I’ll rewatch it someday…
All the mysteries are NOT solved, but the biggies are.
So I’m not going to read this whole thread, but did anybody else find themselves not liking Kate? She just always bugged me.
Overall, Lost was fun, though I wouldn’t put it up beside a lot of the post-Sopranos cable shows. But of the network drama shows I’ve seen (which probably isn’t that many), I would put it at 2nd behind Friday Night Lights.
i really hate locke, everything he does makes him even worse.
I guess there’s been some Lost related drama/news recently. Apparently Dominic Monaghan (Charlie) doesn’t like Matthew Fox (Jack) because he’s a woman beater. He says he’s does it often too. Well, I always hated Jack anyway.
I didn’t hear about about Matthew Fox. Is it confirmed or is it just gossip?
@DFFOO, Brad
Well, the show does a good job of answering the ‘What’ behind the magic but doesn’t offer up answers to why the magic works that way. For instance, we learn “The radiation that leaked from the swan site causes pregnancies to go bad”. We don’t learn why the hell it does that, but we learn that it does.
@Captain
I’ll give you Sopranos and The Wire, but I’m curious what other post-Sopranos premium shows you think are better than Lost. Most of them to me strike me as just as genre-pulpy as Lost except with a lot of swearing and fucking.
My favorite characters are probably Hurley and Sawyer. I can’t say I disliked Kate, I think I like the role she plays in the story more than I like her. For instance, her actions frequently make a lot of the better characters more fun. I also like Locke but I don’t like some of the directions the show took him in.
I never liked Locke much either….he was creepy right from that first episode where he put the orange in his mouth….but I understand his purpose on the show….he was the man of faith to Jack’s man of science.
Kate often got on my nerves….but I generally liked her character….not as much as Juliet, however, who was my favorite female character.
So…my favorite Lost characters….
1. Richard Alpert
2. Desmond David Hume
3. Juliet Burke
4. Hugo “Hurley” Reyes
5. James “Sawyer” Ford
6. Jack Shepherd
7. Benjamin Linus
8. Jacob
9. Charlie Pace
10. Rose Nadler
Least favorites:
1. Jin and Sun Kwon
….and the one big Lost misstep…
Paolo and Nikki……
..and still the best cliff hanger of all time…
You knew it was a “magic island” from the beginning with old “smokie,” or whatever they called on that rustling of leaves and strange disappearances, lurking around. Don’t you remember the polar bears? The first season held out a lot of promise, but it was one long journey into hell after that, with the occasional lively episode, such as the Dave episode from Season 2, to remind you that this really could have been a good show. I will only give Cuseloff credit for being able to string viewers along with their many plot shifts, interesting allusions and the rare clever episode. The show as a whole sucked, especially the final season, which seemed to play exclusively to the religious audience who watched the show. SPOILER All that stuff about Dharma was blown sky high in Season 5, which was the most interesting thing the show had going at that point. It was like Cuseloff ran out of ideas and decided to go back and pick up another thread entirely.
Back to these dreaded double posts. I wlll add that the best part about the whole show was Benry. Great character.
Drunken Father Figure of Old
Lost is one of the best shows that ever existed. It aimed for something higher than mere entertainment….what it means to be human…what it means to have purpose….what it means to interact and exist….it dealt with issues of faith in real ways…something that no TV show really deals with.
See, I did not get any of that from lost. Yeah, it addressed those issues, but didn’t explore them in a satisfying, or particularly deep way. For me, all the characters were just shitty archetypes. I mean “Jack Shepherd?” Come on! But that didn’t detract from the show for me when there were all kinds of mysteries to be solved. But then they solved them by saying “Magic island! The end!”