Sunday, June 6, 2010

THE LAST WORD ON LOST



"Heaven,
Heaven is a place,
a place where nothing,
nothing ever happens."
- Talking Heads

What should be the last word on LOST? Cheesy? Lame? Cliched? Cheap? Vapid? Insulting? All good options, but I think there's really only one word that ends up describing what LOST became in the end.



Stupid.

I'm not trying to be smug, but I predicted it would turn out like this. I knew it. I think we all did. It didn't happen all at once, but gradually the sloppiness and laziness of this much anticipated season became obvious. There was the wrong date on Aaron's sonogram, then Kate's name not being on the cave ceiling even though it supposedly was on the cave ceiling, the pointless Temple subplot, the Stargate Lighthouse, finally the awkward, stiff, so bad it made me cry scene where Michael was trotted out to give the lamest possible explanation for the whispers.



This scene was when it hit me. I can pinpoint it as the exact moment in time when I knew that this grand finale season was going to suuuuuuuuuuck. I didn't want to accept it just then but as the weeks went by, there was no escaping the reality.



As LOST's finale season careened to its dreadful clusterfuck of a conclusion, carrying the reputation of a once great series on its back, even The Darlton tried to warn us away from hoping for too much. They started to say stuff like this:



"We're going to get killed," said executive producer Damon Lindelof.

They'd been all but screaming from the rooftops that we wouldn't be getting any goddamn Answers. It was all about the characters, yo. Those stupid questions were all red herrings! Not just the big ones, like Walt and Aaron and the Numbers. All of them!



At times they got downright insulting about it:


Not only did Damon inadvertently describe the process by which American kids grow up both stupid and fat, but he made it clear exactly how much respect he had for his audience. Which is to say - he thought we were chumps. He thought we weren't really interested in answers to the gajillion questions he'd posed. We didn't want to see the design behind the mysteries and characters revealed in a brilliant fashion that would reward us for our years of devotion. All we really wanted was cheap, generic junk food. So that's the way he ended his series.

To be fair, we should acknowledge that putting together a great series finale is a daunting project. The history of tv finale success is spotty. There are the famously poignant.



The famously funny.



The infamously awful.



The controversial



And the sublime.


Obviously the boy wonders knew everything LOST had ever been was hanging in the balance on May 23. Carlton Cuse himself described the metric by which he knew they'd be judged.


We don’t know whether the resolution between the two timelines is going to make people say, “Oh, that’s cool” or “Oh, fuck those guys, they belly-flopped at the end.”

So which was it? Cool? Or a belly flop?


I've been MIA the last third of this wretched finale season. It turns out it's not really much fun to hate on something that you once loved. It feels terrible actually.



I'm embarrassed to remember how naively I approached this season, described by Cuse as a precious Christmas present they were going to slowly let us unwrap. I even went back last fall and recapped the glorious Season One in excrutiating detail, believing the hype that we were finally about to revisit that masterpiece and watch all its mysterious potential be fulfilled.



I tried to imagine how cool, how fun, how satisfying, it would be to see the big clock come together under the hands of the master watchmakers.


Instead what we got were gears and springs and meaningless numbers strewn all over the floor like a fish kill of red herrings, while the "watchmakers" mocked the audience for ever mistaking them for people who cared. Yes, if you're wondering, I do feel kind of stupid. I had faith in these two bozos. What can I say?


As tempting as it may be, it's probably wrong to blame Darlton. After all, it was our own choice to keep watching. We decided all on our own to imagine that we were playing some kind of puzzle. No one told us to expect that! Why would we think that a story about six magical numbers that were magically connected to cataclysmic events, or a story about an island where diseases are cured but pregnancy kills, or a story that wove intersecting timelines into a vast interdimensional web of coincidences and fate - why would we think any of that was meant to be a puzzle??? We must really be stupid!


It was our own free choice to gabble away on message boards these last few seasons talking about wormholes and string theory and exotic matter and Schrodingers goddamn cat. We did it long after it became obvious that these two guys weren't able to write that kind of story. It was obvious they weren't quantum physicists. Or even the kind of guys who passed physics in high school.



No one told us we had to prattle like morons about determinism and gnoticism and Manicheism and Buddhism and Catholicism and Egyptology and Philip V. Dick. I mean look at these two guys. Why would we think they had some kind of wisdom to offer?


You know who these two really remind me of now? The two con men who pretended to be tailors in Hans Christian Anderson's The Emperor's New Clothes. They convinced the dopey Emperor he was getting a new set of gorgeous threads, but really he just ended up walking down the street with everyone laughing at the pimples on his butt. The Emperor, it turns out, was us.

At least we were in good company. In the days after the finale, I got calls and emails from pretty much every family member, friend, frenemy or casual acquaintance who had ever loved LOST, or knew that I once did. There were sighs, sad shakes of the head, muttered expletives, viral video exchanges and the always hilarious fancraft that LOST fans had raised to an artform.



The consensus was unanimous:



But how did the finale fare out in the land of media, both old and new? Did they stick their landing or did they ...

?

I realize there were some in the fast food media who, as expected, were bowled over by the cliche overload of the finale. USA Today not only found it "thrilling", " clever" and "profound", but they mocked those of us who'd bought into that silly mystery crap.
If you were looking for explanations for every twist and turn, you didn't get them. (Some viewers won't be satisfied until the producers churn out a multi-volume island manual that answers questions that were never actually posed.)
And as expected, both "I live next door to Damon" Kristin dos Passos and Cheerleader in Chief Jeff Jensen dissolved into predictably soggy heaps of teary satisfaction.
“The End” was an emotionally draining epic that had me crying with almost every single “awakening” and has left me mulling the true significance of the Sideways world, which was revealed to be a Purgatory-like realm created by the souls of the dead castaways themselves. (Purgatory! The irony!) I was so happy The Island was saved. I was so moved by Jack’s heroism and sacrifice and the glorious significance of ending where he began, as well as that Doubting Thomas allusion there at the end. … I loved Ben’s contrition. I loved Locke’s forgiveness. I loved it when Ben told him to stand up and walk again, and Locke did.


But if Darlton let themselves listen to anyone other than their friends in lowbrow places, they probably realized they're going to have to stay in that bunker a little bit longer than anticipated. The New York Times trashed it on both the Arts page:
But you have to think that the gauzy, vaguely religious, more than a little mawkish ending of ‘Lost’ – “Touched by a Desmond” — will not sit well with a lot of the show’s fans. ... The “Sopranos” finale was ambiguous and a bit of a shrug, but not puzzling; to me the “Lost” finale, in the immediate aftermath, felt forced and, well, a bit of a cop-out.


and the Editorial section:
Across six seasons, it’s true, we learned endless facts about the island — about its geography, its inhabitants, and what had happened on it across decades and centuries. But we never learned the whys behind the facts. And with the final season in the books, there’s good reason to think that we never learned them because the show’s creators never had a well-thought-out “why” for their story in the first place. The island wasn’t a real mystery — it was just a MacGuffin.


Max Read at Gawker thought "The Lost Finale was incredibly Dumb", which pretty much sums up the consensus of my inner circle:
Once upon a time, there was a television show about a bunch of people on an island. For six years it was one of the most fascinating things on TV. And then it ended, in the worst way possible. ... Lost ended tonight, and with it the hopes and dreams of millions of people who thought it might finally get good again. SPOILER ALERT: It didn't. What did we learn? Nothing. We learned nothing from two-and-a-half hours of slow-motion bullshittery backed with a syrupy soundtrack.


Televisionary's Jace Lacob tried really hard to hide his disappointment in this piece at The Daily Beast, but he couldn't quite do it.
“The End” didn’t so much answer the long-dangling mysteries—Why do pregnant women die on the island? Why was the character of Walt (Malcolm David Kelley) special? What is this island? What was with all of the Egyptian hieroglyphics? What was the character of Desmond’s ultimate purpose on the island?—as it did ignore them altogether....Considering how much time viewers have spent trying to figure out the relationship between the island timeline and the Sideways one, it is also frustrating that it turned out that there is none—or more precisely, that what happened in the Sideways timeline didn’t affect what happened on the island at all.


Aside from coining the pithiest descripiton of the finale - "a prom of the dead in a chapel of love where everybody is farting rainbows" - Chadwick Martin of Slate nailed one of the finale's main flaws:
There are second chances in life, but there are no do-overs. At least all the time travel, the donkey wheels, the smoke monsters were vehicles to explore the human condition. They were as fantastical as purgatory, yes, but they were also grounded in the terrestrial realities of life, death, and the pursuit of happiness. The show's purgatorial clusterfuck is not. It is a venue for wish-fulfillment. Thus, the finale wronged not just me, but the show itself.

As did Laura Miller at Salon :
A series like "Lost" doesn't need to solve all of its riddles, but it does need to address the right ones.... The comic-book paraphernalia and texture of the island -- its secret bunkers with their code names, Jacob's migrating cabin with its creepy paintings, the ersatz normality of the Others' compound ringed by those sonic pylons and the fantastically mechanical grinding and dragging sounds that used to accompany the appearance of the smoke monster -- were not peripheral to the heart of "Lost." They were the very essence of its appeal.
And the message of the Hero Quest in mythology is certainly not the gauzy, happy, angels-at-the-doorway one "Lost" fans had to settle for last night. Once Jack stepped into the church it looked like he was walking into a Hollywood wrap party without food or music -- just a bunch of actors grinning idiotically for 10 minutes and hugging one another.

Scott Mendelson's fine essay, republished at The Huffington Post, decided that the finale was so bad that it managed to nullify the series almost as a whole, although he - like me - hopes it will still be possible to enjoy the first three seasons before this series started its sad, end date driven decline:
By leaving everything unanswered right up to the end, and then pulling a narrative switcheroo instead of finishing the story that was being unveiled, Lost basically mocked those who bothered to watch from the very beginning, as such rabid viewership proved entirely unnecessary. Thus, the finale of Lost rendered the entire series run relatively pointless and effectively killed any and all rewatchability of the prior episodes. So, in the end, Lost ended for me with season three.
With all that and so much more being said, is there really any point in me writing anything else about this sad spectacle ? Is there anything left that really needs to be said? I'm over it. I could live without never giving LOST another thought. I'm literally itching to erase it off my dvr. But I promised I'd do this. Inquiring minds seem to want to know what it all meant to me. So, here we go, one last time, for old time's sake.


I think others have pretty much covered the shameful way we were taunted with questions that were never intended to be answered, even as recently as the run-up to this season. They were running full speed ahead right up until late April, not only implying that we'd be rewarded for our detective work, but throwing new questions at us! Of course everyone was excited to see what the answer to the puzzles would be. And then we got this:


The superclunker episode Across the Sea. We found out the only thing worse than getting no answers was getting the LAME answers they came up with. Why did they even bother to answer the pointless Adam and Eve "mystery", for instance? Was that at the top of anyone's mind? As compared to things like - who bankrolled all Ben's trips off the Island, who was Penny's mother, why did Libby give Desmond a sailboat, what was the sickness, why did Rousseau's crew hear the numbers on the radio, why did Claire leave Aaron ... not to mention all those silly little trifles like why was Walt so special and why did pregnant women die and what the hell was up with those numbers? But nope. They didn't feel the need to address any of those mysteries. They needed to give us a bogus backstory for two skeletons that almost no one remembered. Why?



My guess is because Damon had stupidly bragged about it back in 2007:
Of course, in his hamfisted way, he managed to prove exactly the opposite. It added nothing to that remembered moment to find out that Jacob, the 40,000 year old virgin, buried his bad twin and his another raising mother in the cave after a night of interfamily murder. We just met these people. They meant nothing to us.



Their story was tacked on, like everything else in Season Six. In fact, the whole finale could have been slapped on at any random endpoint. It wasn't a culmination or an inevitability or a hard earned catharsis. The message that after death we'll all live happily ever after with our bestest BFFs could have been, as one reviewer noted, a perfectly good finale for Saved by the Bell or Happy Days. Or a kiddie cartoon, for that matter.



What's more, by bottom loading all the mysteries and saving them for the end, rather than building them organically into the fabric of the story, they belied the pretense that they were master storytellers. A good story needs pacing. I had assumed their need for a fixed end date was in order to allow them to pace their story. But we all know now that had nothing to do with it.


We could tell that Mama Clegg was not the Island's Eve. She was only another interim hermit guardian, just like Jacob. Someone came before her, maybe the people that carved the cuneiform marks into the big stone plug. Someone before Momsy built the light sealing contraption inside the big shiny hole. Who was that person? Why did they do it? We never really learned why the Island was special, what was the source of its power, what its power really was. We never learned why the Smoke Monster had to be contained on the Island, what would have happened if he'd escaped. We entered the final battle of the story without knowing the stakes.



We just knew it was really important for Jack. Because he used to be a man of science. And now he is a man of faith. Faith in the Island. OK. But why?


The story never created any meaningful metaphor for the Island. It was the "warmest, brightest light you've ever seen or felt." It was a little piece of "something that's inside of every man." The enemy was "evil incarnate". It would all "only end once", except that - since Hurley became Jacob - it didn't! It was a myth that was never told, a myth, if we can even call it that, that never coalesced into anything more than mawkish abstractons. It meant nothing. It was just pretty pictures.



What's more, the characters themselves experienced no consequences. The very same second that The Great Jacksus laid down his life, he was handed his eternal reward. His sacrifice wasn't a sacrifice at all, just the last step in him being handed all the presents and goodies and heavenly lollipops that anyone could ever dream of.



It was a pretty sweet deal. Save the world and go straight to heaven. Doesn't really tug at my heartstrings. Or make me feel anything at all. No stakes. No consequences. No metaphor. No myth.




But all this ground has been covered, and better, by others. Few disagree that in the end the LOST "storytellers" failed in their central mission - to pull together a coherent and satisfying end to the mysteries they themselves had chosen to create. But I was surprised to see how many, at least in the immediate aftermath, seemed to think that the finale succeeded in a different area - that of giving resolution to the characters. It became like the one good thing people could say about LOST - that it was a terrible ending, but at least the characters all got "satisfying resolutions". I don't know where they're seeing that. Maybe people just need to convince themselves that it couldn't possibly be as bad as it all really, really was.



To be fair, not everyone was fooled. But far too many were. If I have to pick what I consider to be the Number One Inconvenient Truth about the LOST Finale, it would be this:

It was NOT "about the characters."

The biggest secret that Darlton managed to hide from us was that the characters never really mattered. At all. Yes, LOST had a great cast of mostly wonderful actors, who emoted the shit out of the material they were given to work with, even if it was often insane nonsense. But charismatic acting is not the same thing as good characterization.


I think the primary failure of LOST's end story was its failure to respect and resolve its characters. Except for Jack, none of the characters got any better resolution than the mysteries did.



Let's start with a somewhat minor, but nonetheless pivotal, character. Claire and her baby, who she'd been apocalyptically warned must not be raised by another, seemed to be mystically connected to the Island.


But then Claire dropped Aaron in a cabbage patch. He got raised by another anyway. And Claire became a crazed axe murderer.




That was her character arc. We never saw how she went crazy. We never saw what happened when Aaron got his Mad Mama back. We missed every interesting thing that Claire's story could ever have been about. All we know is that Claire eventually died and re-birthed Aaron in her self created purgatory while she waited for her big brother Jack to arrive, so she could spend eternity with Charlie - the guy whose death she never even mourned.



How was this character arc resolved? What is satisfying about this characterization? How is it even a characterization? It's a collection of cutesy coincidences - She's Jack's sister! She's crazy like Rousseau! Only worse! - that ultimately went nowhere and meant nothing.


Ok, maybe you say Claire's a bad example, because she wasn't an important enough character. Let's take the great John Locke then. Because no one can say Locke wasn't an important character. How did this great character get his resolution in the finale?



Well, basically he stayed dead.



Until Jack came to fix him.



John Locke, who so wanted to be special and who came to the Island and had his legs magically restored and who had a child's faith in the beautiful Island and who tried and failed to convince Jack to stay and who left what he loved and sacrificed his life for the sake of his Island - his "resolution" was that he got to wait in Limbo Land until Jack - freaking Jack - got around to not only dying, but to accepting that he was dead.



Locke's character "resolution" was to further the glory of Jack, even in death. What once seemed like an epic duel between equally matched protagonists went out with a weak, faint sounding pfffffffft. By the time the big showdown happened, Locke wasn't even there.


Like so much of the audience, Locke got screwed. Sorry, John, you were just road kill on the Highway to Jack's Heaven.



But don't worry. Be happy! It's not like there's anything we can do about it now. Except maybe this ...



Sun and Jin's "resolution" came at the end of three long seasons wherein they both did, collectively, nothing.



Finally they reunited. Then they died the next day, with not even a passing acknowledgment of the daughter who had been at the heart of their story. In Purgatory, or Limbo, or whatever the hell that Sideways bullshit was, they had to wait - for Jack, of course - until they could speak English (the language of Jack's heaven) and follow their dear leader into the light.



We can also add Sayid to the list of screwed over characters.



In post-9/11 America, it was shocking to see an Iraqi soldier in the Revolutionary Guard presented as a sympathetic character. But Sayid worked his way into our hearts, despite being the sickest killer in the bunch, because he was a passionate man. Who loved Nadia.



Nadia was at the nexus of all his moral quandaries - he betrayed his country for her, he betrayed his boyhood friend for her, he struggled off the Island and married her, only to lose her again. And with her death, he lost his soul. His character resolution? Well, first - of course - he had to wait for Jack. Obviously. Then ... uh ... he hooked up with Shannon and he got to go to Heaven!



Did this make sense to anyone???? Was this supposed to be a joke?


Sadly no. They were serious about this shit. See, Sayid didn't really love the woman he'd devoted his life to, the woman his entire story had been about. He only wanted what all men want in Geekland - a blonde American babe.


Hurley apparently lived out his roly poly life on the Island, maybe for centuries, with Ben. Although that might have made a great season of LOST all by itself, we never got a glimpse of it.



Instead we learned that the only great thing in Hurley's extremely long life was Libby, the girl he once almost went on a picnic with the day before she got shot. Nothing else. So once he finally died, he - like everyone else - waited for Jack, and then finally, I guess, he got to have a girlfriend, even if they were both dead.


Sawyer's story ended in Season Four.


We had watched his evolution, one of the most beautiful in the show,



from guilt ridden, self loathing orphan to passionate lover and hero.



But in Season Four, fanboys everywhere rejoiced as Sawyer's hotness got sucked away and he was reincarnated as a neutered Deputy Dawg, flashing big buttery grins at his tall blond Dharma-wife.



And that was it for poor Sawyer. He got to scream and cry while Juliet died ... over and over again ... then he sat on his ass until it was time for Jack to save the world. Then he did absolutely nothing for all the rest of his life until it was time for the most anticlimactic and uninspired cup of coffee in tv history. And then he hugged Jack, and he too got to pass through the pearly gates.



Character? Resolution? I can't find either one in this story. The complex, charismatic character that stole my heart and first addicted me to LOST disappeared the day he jumped off the helicopter and saved the life of the woman he loved. I watched and I hoped and I put up with Carlton's insulting insinuations that we were only watching to see him take his shirt off, but the Sawyer that I loved never ever returned to LOST.



Kate didn't do any better. We don't know when she died but we know she never met anyone better than Jack. That's sad enough. You didn't deserve that, Kate.



This is where the poor character development leads straight into The Second Inconvenient Truth About the Lost Finale:

It had a very depressing message.

In order to believe in whatever the Shiny Happy Afterlife was meant to be, we have to believe that nothing that ever happened to Kate, Sawyer or Claire after they left the Island ever meant a damn thing. They had to wait TO DIE before they could live.



Well, technically, they had to wait for JACK to die before they could live again.


If we accept that the gang in the church had to be there together because they were the only people that truly mattered to one another, we have to realize that all these people lived HORRIBLE lives here on earth. Think of all those who didn't matter to them:



Charlie Hume didn't matter to his Mom and Dad, and neither did Ji Yeon, a fetus for all eternity.


Hurley didn't want to be with Grandpa Tito or Mami Carmen or any of the people who loved and raised him.

Helen was good enough for Locke's purgatory, but she didn't rank high enough to make it into his heaven.


Jack's alcoholic, philandering daddy was the High Holy Priest in his Heaven,



but the old Moms who put up with being married to this creep didn't rate any heavenly reward.



Sorry, Margo, your son just wasn't that into you.


Juliet had no place in her heaven for the sister and nephew she longed to see for so long.



Nadia? She was no biggie to Sayid. Just a passing fling.



Boone never had anyone in his life who meant anything to him at all and the greatest moment of Shannon's life were those few weeks she spent trying to breathe without her inhaler in the Rape Caves before she got shot in the gut.



Kate and Sawyer never missed their mothers either, or Tom, or Clementine, or Kevin, or each other.



The only thing this "heaven" proved is that all of these people lived sad, loveless lives on earth. But so what if life sucked for all the Losties? They got to be in a clean, perfect heaven with all the other pretty people, paired up like the giraffes and zebras on Noah's ark.



In the LOST credo, it turned out the only thing that ever matters in life is finding a Schmoopie. Parents, children, lovers, friends - none of it means a damn thing. The key to life is The Schmoopie.



Throughout the years, LOST made a big show of flashing various religious symbols at us like stolen watches from under a trenchcoat. The Church of Shiny Happy People felt like self parody, what with all the spiritual tchotchkes stuffed into every available corner.



A dharmachakra, an aum, a menorah, a Ganesh ... I guess they couldn't find space to shove in any voodoo chicken feet or Rasta spliffs or Wiccan wands.



But no one should have been fooled. The religious message of LOST was conventional Judeo-Christian group think of the most joyless kind.



Humans must unquestioningly accept the will of a capricious, often vicious Higher Power, because he's Jacob and you're not. Life's a bitch and then you die, but in the religion of LOST, once you find your Schmoopie ... and once the great St. Jacksus arrives of course ... even cold blooded killers can all go to Hollywood Heaven together.


Damon Lindelof: This is the critical mystery of the season, which is, “What is the relationship between these two shows? ... Where’s Libby? Where’s Ana Lucia? Where’s Eko? These are all the things that you’re supposed to be thinking about.

Got that? The only question Darlton cared about answering in their finale season, the ONLY one, was this: What was the Sideways universe? The Sideways that didn't even exist until this season. And what was the big revelation about the Sideways? That it was a completely separate, non intersecting, non connecting afterlife that the characters "created for themselves" while they waited to enter Heaven, or the light, or what the fuck ever. After swearing for years their story wasn’t about Purgatory, they made their finale season all about ... frigging Purgatory! Haha! Gotcha!



It's not that making the story about Purgatory would have been such a terrible idea. It could have been a coherent theme to carry over the seasons, showing us each person's passage to Enlightenment after their death. But this mish mosh didn't even make any kind of theological sense as Purgatory. What was the point of it, except to bide everyone's time until Jackie-poo arrived? Sawyer did not create a purgatory where he could repent for the murder of the innocent sweet shrimp seller.



Kate did not atone for the wrongs she'd done. In fact, she made herself a world where she was innocent, wrongfully accused. All that bad stuff? Nevah hoppened.



Charlie was still on the junk needle in his self created purgatory, only richer than Croesus this time around.



Sun and Jin for some reason created a purgatory where they were even more miserable, where Jin killed people and Sun got shot.



And Sayid apparently filled his self created purgatory with even more murders – I guess the ones he didn’t get around to committing in his killing spree of a life.



By creating a trite, pat purgatory, all the stories we'd invested in suddenly felt shallow and pointless. In one fell swoop, they managed to dishonor almost every character and render their stories meaningless. It didn't reflect the reality of our human experience, where all our acts have real consequences, where we don't have an escape hatch into paradise, like we found out the Losties had. But this purgatory had other problems as well. Basically it just didn't make any goddamn sense.



Was the highpoint of Aaron's life really the day he was born? It's hard to imagine how horrifying this poor kid's life was if the first six hours were the highlight. Or was Aaron just a symbol, not an actual human baby with a soul of his own? Even in death, was Aaron just a prop in Jack's Heaven?




Why was Eloise worried that Desmond would take Daniel away?



If she was "awake" and understood that she was dead, why was she still in purgatory? And why didn't she understand how it worked? She had been paired with her Schmoopie, so why couldn't she get on the Ark?



What was Ben waiting for? Did he need Danielle Rousseau to wake up too?



Because of course Danielle would want to spend eternity with the mouse faced creep who made her life a living hell, rather than the dearly beloved father of her child. She just hadn't woken up yet and realized who her true schmoop was.



Why wasn't Michael allowed into Jack's heaven? He blew himself up with a bomb just like Sayid did. Why did he have to be trapped on the Island as a whisper? Was it because he didn't have a Schmoopie?



And what about poor Walt? Not only wasn't he special in any way, but none of the other 815-ers wanted him in the heaven they created for themselves. Can you believe it? They wanted Libby there, but they didn't want Walt! They wanted Penny there and most of them didn't even know who she was! Boy, they really, really held that puberty thing against him, didn't they?



Why was Juliet Jack's wife?


Seriously. Why in the hell would she create that for herself? And why would she have an imaginary son with him? Forget about the realization that her precious sister actually never meant anything to her. I'm more hung up on that numbingly redundant candy machine conversation. When Miles listened to her dead body, remember that he heard her say "it worked"? What was she talking about? The bomb worked? Her hope to never have met Sawyer worked? No! She was talking about the candy machine of course!



When Sawyer unplugged it and plugged it back in, it worked! Wow! How clever was that? I mean, that's why we all stuck with LOST, wasn't it? For stupid gimmicky shout outs and conversations written entirely in cutesy catchphrases.



See? Look! It was an Apollo candy bar! And Number 23! Holy moly! My mind, she is blown! Darlton, you iz geniuses!



So the whole Sideways/Purgatory/Bullshitland that the characters "created" for themselves after death was not about Redemption (except for Jack.) And it wasn't about Free Will, one of the other alleged "themes" of LOST. The characters may have created this place, but they didn't know they were doing it, and they didn't know why they did it, and most of the connections they unwittingly created for themselves meant absolutely nothing in the final denouement, just like all the connections built into the pre-crash flight and the off Island world meant absolutely nothing.



LOST wasn't about connections at all, you see.



It was all about how many times you can pull a meaningless WhatTheFUCK plot twist on the audience. It turns out, you can pull an entire show out of your ass based on nothing but constant gotchas and contrivances, and you'll be able to fool ... well, a whole lot of people. For a really long time. Like for six years.



I think so far we’ve established one thing: Thinking about the LOST finale is not a useful exercise. The whole Man of Faith vs. Science debate, as presented on LOST, was designed to undermine the value of thought and contemplation, to degrade intellectualism. Just believe. Just have "faith". And what we were asked to have Faith in on LOST was ... Nonsense. On LOST, the Faith argument was used to hide lazy thinking and cheap storytelling. The only thing we were having Faith in all along was Chuck E. Cheese.



So here's another Inconvenient Truth that we learned from the finale:

LOST had no intellectual design behind it.

In the past if I'd seen this image of the Monster being thrown off the cliff:



I'd have dug out my favorite Dore print of Lucifer being thrown out of heaven. But at this point that feels like it would only be giving them a respect they don't deserve. I wasn't impressed that Jack's hicky turned out to be a mark from the tip of a knife. I really didn't care that Jack stumbled to his death from a wound to his right side, like the wound Doubting Thomas pondered in the picture Jack gazed at in 316. I can't be bothered to dig out images to illustrate these things. I get it. Symmetry. Mirrors.


I always did love the visual imagery of LOST, but you can't just throw random symbolic elements onscreen and call that a story.

By the end, LOST had lost all its intrigue for me, 100%. Without a story behind them, symbols alone feel superficial, and cloyingly facile.


I had given up on the idea that there was an intelligent design behind LOST's Famous Thinker Namedropping, but I was still dumbfounded by how incredibly facile and superficial the use of imagery became.




Not only could we tell that a man was good based on whether he was blond and blue eyed (Aryan=Good) and wearing a white tunic, but we could even tell the moral destiny of a baby by the color of his blanket! And see! They were playing a game. Like how the LOST writers were playing a game with us.


I can't have been the only one who misread Damon Lindelof's New York Times editorial some years ago. Remember how he had the audacity to lecture J.K.Rowlings on how she should end the Harry Potter books? I think a lot of people thought he was advising her to be brave, to do the unexpected, to do the unpopular. But re-reading that thing, it's obvious he was saying no such thing. In point of fact, he was laying out exactly the way he planned to end LOST - catering to what he considered to be the stupidity and short attention spans of the American public.
THE BOY WHO DIED...

"We Yanks, however, do not want froufrou endings. We want things definitively tied up. And by “things” I mean lots of people dead."
"We really like gratuitous explosions."


"Because if there’s one thing we like more than explosions, it’s surprises."

I kind of wish, as an American, that people like Damon wouldn't speak for what "we Yanks" appreciate. I'd just like to let the global audience out there know that not all Yanks tell their kids to shut up and eat cheese and not all Yanks are proud of being stupid and unimaginative.



I am one Yank who became totally enchanted by the "froufrou" of LOST's endless literary, religious, scientific and philosophical allusions. Yes, I gradually recognized that it was an exercise in futility, but I still hoped against hope that there was some bare bones design behind it all, some order to the chaos. But the truth is out now: There wasn't any. Ever.

In other words, they were saying that great minds in history had addressed great issues and told great stories ... but Lindelof and Cuse weren't trying to do that. They were just copycats. Who didn't have the skills. Sort of like this:



I think Darlton should have taken this full disclosure thing one step further. The writers who influenced them weren’t Lewis Carroll or James Joyce or C.S. Lewis. Come on, guys! Be honest. The literary influences in your writing room were more along these lines, right?


Killer the dog WAS. Now Killer was born to a three-legged bitch mother. And he was always ashamed of this, man. And then right after that, he's adopted by this man, Tito Liebowitz. He's a small-time gunrunner and, uh, rottweiler fight promoter. So he puts Killer into training, next thing you know Killer's GOOD! He is DAMN good! But then, he had the fight of his life. They pit him against his brother Nibbles. And Killer said, "No, man, that's my brother, I can't fight Nibbles!" And he made him fight anyway. And then Killer, Killed Nibbles. And Killer said, "That's it!" And he called off all his fights, and he started doing crack, and he ffffffff-FREAKED OUT. And then in a rage, he collapsed, and his heart... no longer beat. Wow.
Anyone who ever followed Damon Lindelof on Twitter, begging people to vote up LOST on some poll where it was losing out to Ghost Hunters or something, knows that this dude believed in the power of the button pushers. He said as much in another inadvertent admission hidden in that infamous NY Times editorial:
"I read an article recently saying that 80 percent of American poll respondents said they thought Harry wouldn’t survive the final book. As is the case in many polls, there’s probably a degree of wish-fulfillment here. In other words, we want the little bugger to die."
I don't see how poll watching could ever be a good practice in any creative enterprise. It seems to me that "conventional wisdom" is in itself the death knell of originality. But we do know the boy wonders liked to follow polls, and given the dumbassery of the LOST fandom, this may possibly explain how LOST managed to fail so utterly. Let's look for a minute at the kind of fans who truly and deeply loved this LOST finale. First of all there's people like this lovely young Jate fan:
Fuck you all, dirty whores. Yes I'm talking abotu real people because you suck and fail at life. I loathe you all haters, you deserve all the spit and shit on your faces as you can get for all those years trolling the internet. Our fandom doesn't have any respect? STFU you son of a bitch you! Keep fooling yourselves that Skate was eyefucking the whole season. You're only embarrasssing yourselves, even some decent skaters can see. Yes, there are sane skaters out there who appreciate them sanely.

These are your fans, Damon. You own them now. Don't look now, but they may be all you got left. We've learned now that fanmail campaigns and obsessive poll rigging pay off when the writers have neither balls nor any kind of plan. Sure, you managed to destroy your show's reputation and legacy, and sure, your name will be mud to any LOST fan who ever tried to follow the show on an intelligent level, but you did manage to satisfy geniuses like the poster quoted above. So, uh ... Congrats?



It would be wrong for me to blame the batshit Jate/Suliet fans entirely for how inane and angry the LOST online discourse became. By far the bigger culprits were the vicious, often misogynist fanboy types who camped out at the site run by my old friend DarkUFO. Given Darlton's addiction to pandering to the lowest common denominator in the fandom, there's no way they weren't aware of the whims of Fanboy Central. On that loud, big, spoiler whoring board, any sensible disagreement or alternate viewpoint about LOST was systematically shouted down, mocked to shit and banned out of existence by the torch and pitchfork carrying villagers.


It's sad to think that LOST was once considered cutting edge precisely because of the cyber-conversation that had grown up between fans and writers, a conversation that may have ultimately destroyed the integrity of the story. Laura Miller's Salon piece makes a great case for another Inconvenient Truth:

LOST was "Ruined By Its Own Fans"
From statements the producers of "Lost" have made over the past five years, they developed a dynamic with die-hard fans (and disillusioned fans and skeptical non-fans) that was infinitely more complex than any of the personal relationships among the series' characters. Could it be that in resisting the geekiest, nitpickingest, most Aspergerian demands of their audience they swung too far in the opposite direction, dismissing as trivial everything but the cosmic (the tedious and largely unnecessary Jacob-Smokey background) and the sentimental (making sure that every character receives his or her designated soul mate or therapeutic closure of the most banal Dr. Phil variety)? If so, "Lost" may be the quintessential example of a pop masterpiece ruined by its own fans.
Infintely more complex, indeed. DarkUFO was despised, and rightly so, by the LOST inner circle, because of his thoughtless and selfish spoiling of their big Season 3 and 4 finale surprises. So, was it REVENGE that made Darlton write an endgame that fanboys hated even more than Skaters? If so then the irony of Fanboys and Skaters being on the same side is delicious. Nice job, dudes.



Fanboys and Skaters were the natural enemies of the LOST Fan Kingdom. Aside from Andy Page's smarmy egotism, the defining feature of his site was his petty vindictiveness towards Skaters, most likely because we were the ones who unmasked him for the poll rigging liar and all around skeevebag that he was. How petty was he? I don’t think anyone outside of Fishbiscuitland quite understands. For years he lurked 24/7 on our board under his chosen alias:
mary2009!



Miss Mary mostly just used our site as one of the many from which he’d steal spoilers or pictures or media mentions, all of which he’d post on his own board without credit. But in the run up to the finale, his juvenile pettiness was on full display. One night, when I guess he was getting bored down in that basement bunker, he put on his best squealing imitation of what he thought a dumbass Skater fangirl would sound like:
I juust had my friends sister email me about the finale. She works on the set if LOST She told me that in the finale that Kate tells Jack she loves him Uve now given up on this show after the Juliet kiss scen
And then a few moments later:
They are sending me scans tomorrow. And they will send to dark UFO tomorrow as well I promise I am not lying and this is real I wish it was not: (((((((((
I busted him right away, explaining that even squalid fangirls were smart enough to trace an IP, and he ran straightaway, skirts flying over his head, to erase the evidence that he was, in fact, every bit the petty, juvenile twit we’d always known him to be. Apparently he didn’t want anyone to know that the great and powerful DarkUFO loved to troll among the squalid shippergirls he always claimed to despise. We banned the bastard after that, but Lord knows how many other sock puppets this douchebag had over the years, or how deeply into the pie his poll rigging fingers really were. It’s all water under the bridge now, thankfully – one more reason to be happy that LOST is over.


LOST is over, MaryAndy. Suck it up. You have to go out and get a job now.

MaryAndy may have just been one of the creepy curiosities of the LOST fandom, but his Skate Hate was something that was shared by most of the fanboys who followed LOST, including, it seems the Alpha Nerds who wrote this dreck. It brings me to one of the biggest downers of my LOST experience. Maybe it doesn't quite count as an Inconvenient Truth, but it's a Truth nonetheless.

Nerds hate romance.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that most nerds wouldn't know Romance if it jumped up and kissed them on the mouth. That’s part of what makes them nerds, after all. Sci Fi and Fantasy genres have never been a romance friendly milieu. Romance, when it appears at all, is generally very stilted and unrealistic, and caters to the male sensibility exclusively. Most women in this genre are blond. All women are beautiful, although beauty is completely optional for the male half. It is common, and preferable, in Nerd Romance, that the female abjectly worship her mate. Strangely, though, Nerd Romance rarely features ... s.e.x.



I'm sure many are wondering how I feel about Sawyer and Kate being left flat in the finale, about them being the only couple left out of the great cosmic circle jerk. Every obscure, asexual couple in the show's history, from the non starter of Daniel & Charlotte to the anti-romance of Ben & Danielle got some kind of validation in the story, yet the long romance of Sawyer & Kate, deeply embedded into the fiber of the story, was ignored completely. I was disappointed, but not shocked, and not all that broken up over it. It's hardly the only thing that didn't make sense, and it’s not like it made the finale any worse. I don't think there was any way it could have been any worse, to be honest. It may well have been a blessing in disguise that they didn't pander to Skaters. If they had, I might have been tempted to watch it again, and this way I'm forever protected from that fate.


The gloopy cheese-bubbles that were meant to signal eternal schmoopiness in the "The End" made the Gray's Anatomy's finale look like Shakespeare. I don't think LOST could possibly have trivialized the idea of romantic love more if they tried.


Basically, the way Romance ended up being depicted on LOST, the uglier a romance was,


the less we saw it happen,



the less sensual it was,



the more weird and shallow and gimmicky it was



- the more likely it was to end up depicted as Twu Wuv in the finale.



Sayid and Nadia's series long love story, just like Sawyer and Kate's, ended up meaning nothing. In both cases, the women were swapped out for the leggy blonde at the last second. Meanwhile, Jack and Kate, who spent the last two seasons in a deep funk of apathy towards one another were magically transformed with one last WTF into the most vapid kind of Nerd Lovers imaginable.



These writers had no intuitive sense of how to write romance, and what's more they seemed to have a strange antipathy towards the concept of passionate sexual love. It's incredible, but true, in the entire run of the whole series, there was only ONE deeply romantic, loving sex scene in the full six years.


Yes, it was one of the greatest tv love scenes ever and yes, it will be remembered long after this dreadful finale is forgotten, but still ... Only one! In six years! That's shocking. It almost makes you wonder what other issues these guys were repressing. Women were never important to these writers as anything other than babymakers and schmoopies. Sex for the most part was invisible, except when it was making women pregnant so they could die. But when it came time for the Darlton to imagine what the secret in the bowels of the Island would look like, they created a big rod. And a shiny wet hole.



I know. Ew. But don't blame me. I didn't write this shit. The ultimate denouement of this phallic fantasy was that the big hero man had to stick his rod back into the hole. Then the world was saved. And Jack was bathed in an orgasm of light.



Sheesh. These two guys should have just taken their Jack Action Figure and gotten themselves a room.



The LOST writers, of course, chose to make a love triangle central to their story from the very beginning, and to keep it there and promote it until the bitter end.



For years, we heard - from the mouths of the Darlton themselves - that Sawyer was their Han Solo. Even a Star Wars neophyte understands that Han is the romantic hero of the story. He's charismatic and sexy and adorable in all the ways that Luke is not and can never be. It's a type, an archetype, and an especially entertaining one, in my opinion.



But LOST, since it couldn't be original in any other way, decided that this well loved archetype would be the one, the only one, that would stand on its head. They de-sexed their Han Solo and made sure that he ended up getting gotz in the end of the story. There could be no romantic victory for Sawyer, just like there could be no heroic victory, because nothing could be allowed to deflect any light from the greater glory of the magnificent Jackass. Sawyer's fate, and the fate of Sawyer and Kate as a love story, was one more casualty of LOST's Revenge of the Alpha Nerds.



And here's the last saddest, most Inconvenient Truth :

LOST was never anything more than The Jack Show.

All of it was just passing time until it was time for Damon's surrogate, Jack Shephard, to win all the marbles. The only character that got any true resolution in this story was Jack. Jack became Jacob! Then he gave up being Jacob! Then he killed the bad guy! Then he saved the world! Then he died a great hero, knowing he'd saved the world! Then he won the Kate trophy! Forever! In heaven! If you ever doubted that this was The Jack Show, check it out: No one could go into Heaven until Jack got there. He was even the most important person in Heaven!



It's a very inconvenient, but unavoidable, truth that these two rich, mainstream Hollywood white guys could only envision a story that revolved around a privileged mainstream white guy like themselves. It's laughable to think back at how LOST was once considered a groundbreaking show because of its multicultural cast. As the years went by, the black people disappeared, the Asians learned to speak proper English, the Middle Eastern man became an evil beast and the females all became interchangeable schmoopies. Even the lesser white men had to take a backseat to the Great Jacksus. Locke ended up inert,



Desmond ended up not being very special after all,



and Sawyer was kept around as nothing but eye candy.



The decks had to be cleared to make sure no one, at any time, outshone the Great White Hero. Face it, even Purgatory was Jack's Wet Dream. Who besides Jack got a damn thing out of this Sideways world we're told they all allegedly created for themselves?



Claire was still the unwanted bastard stepsister who was pregnant with a baby she didn't really want. Kate was still a fugitive. Sayid still a killer. Charlie still a junky. Locke still crippled. In Jack's wet dream, Sawyer couldn't even get a woman! If nothing else, that proved that we were living in Jack's fantasy world.


But look at what Purgatory was like for King Jacksus. He was the generous kindly brother to Claire that he had never been in real life. He got both of Sawyer's women before he did, and even impregnated one! He magically cured Locke’s spine. Who needs a miraculous mystical Island when you’ve got St. Jack? Miracles were just all in a day’s work for him.



Purgatory was so custom made to make sure Jack would be comfy in his new afterlife that he even got a whole fake person tailor made for him - David.



Now, David, of course never really existed. Poor kid, I'm sure it would ruin his day to find that out. Once Jack had been convinced that he would have been the bestest daddy in all the world, David, I guess, just poofed away. Jack was done with him, he returned to the void to which all things go that Jack no longer has any need of. His only function was to help Jack work out the all important Jackiness of being Jack.



I really can’t think of any way they could have undermined their quasi-spiritual “message” any more completely than by focusing the entire endgame on the glorification of only one character. I know LOST prided itself on making pseudo-religious pudding out of all the world’s great faiths and philosophies, but I’d really like clarification on which mutant religion they drew their inspiration from for this final act. In what faith is the individual ego considered a viable path to salvation or nirvana or enlightenment? Make no mistake: this final episode was about about one person and one person only. It was about Jack fulfilling all of Jack’s dreams,



about Jack becoming the hero that Jack always wanted to be,



about Jack not being a drunk or a stalker psycho ex husband,



about Jack having the perfect son who loved him perfectly,



about Jack getting the respect from Dad that Jack always wanted,



about Jack fixing everything for everyone just like Jack always obsessed over,



and about everyone loving and wanting and waiting for Jack before any of them could start their eternal afterlives. The message wasn't "Live together or die alone". It was "die alone and wait for Jacksus to lead us into paradise."


With this predictable, but disastrous, narrative choice to focus on only one character above all the others, Lost managed to destroy the last hope that LOST could ever have been a great story with a message that was universal or transcendant. The strength of LOST had once been in the variety of its characters, in the way, that each one of them represented a slice of humanity, a slice of heroism, a slice of each of us. If there had been a truly humanist vision behind the LOST story, each of us could have seen ourselves in some incarnation within the story. We could have come away with some unifying vision of what it means to be human and to be connected to other humans. I think this is what many of us had hoped for. I know I wasn’t the only one who imagined that's what we were witnessing. This TIME Magazine article gives a great interpretation of what LOST could have been, what so many of us thought it would be, but what it sadly decided it didn't want to be:
But Lost has not a single protagonist but a huge ensemble of heroes and antiheroes with checkered pasts. The loser, the con artist, the arrogant doctor, the fugitive, the junkie: each has his or her part in the quest, which has less to do with good beating evil than determining how to be good, less to do with getting the happy ending than finding out what it means to have a happy ending. Collectively, they are — to borrow the title of Joseph Campbell's classic study of myth — the Hero with a Thousand Faces, or at least a dozen or so. It's a concept of heroism for our complicated, connected world, where problems are too complex for a single savior.



LOST's problems weren't too complex for Jack. He solved them all, all by himself. Locke tried to save everyone but only ended up giving the Monster a body to use. Desmond thought he could do it, but he couldn’t. Sawyer, Kate, Sayid, Sun, Jin, Charlie, Claire, Hurley, Ben – they may have moved the problems along, but none of them helped to solve or fix a damn thing. It was Jack, all Jack, only Jack.


The Geniuses in Chief liked to say that the show was telling them what it wanted to be about. We couldn't hear it, being mere peons of the audience, but I guess what the show was telling them was that it wanted to pretend for a really long time to be about cool, intriguing characters and ideas and mysteries ... but then at the last minute it wanted to be about Jack getting his ass kissed, his balls washed and a big fat halo super glued on to his head.


So, LOST is over. Finally. And good riddance to it. Sometimes I still find questions popping into my head. Like:



Why did Kate wear a dress into the church but then showed up inside wearing pants?



Or, if Michael said the whispers were souls trapped on the island, why was Duckett who died in Australia trapped there telling Sawyer “it would come back around”?



And like why did Hurley and Ben have to stay behind on the Island if the Smoke Monster was finally DEAD?


But then I slap myself and realize – I don’t have to think about this shit anymore! Ever! And that’s good, because finally it's safe to admit what many of us suspected, but never wanted to say: It was all bullshit.



Is there anything good to say about LOST in the wake of this debacle? Well, the music of Michael Giacchino was always stirring and emotional. The visuals of this show were magnificent. All kudos to the Art and Cinematography departments of LOST. The acting was often stellar and I hope to follow many of the actors into bigger and better careers. And of course, I’ve made some great friends, some of the smartest and wittiest people on the internet, and we made a home at Fishbiscuitland, which is staying open for business. But that’s about it. This was the kind of finale that nullifies a series, that ruins it forever, that renders any rewatch moot. And that’s not an easy thing to do. That kind of failure comes around only once every few decades. So I guess Darlton can claim that distinction. However, I really don't think they should ever show their faces at another Comic Con.



It occurs to me we still haven’t settled on an actual, literal last word. I think we know what Darlton's last word to the fans was:



But as for myself? I always enjoyed sprinkling quotes on my LOST recaps. How about this? LOST was ...


... a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Oh, well.

950 comments:

«Oldest   ‹Older   801 – 950 of 950
WJay said...

"Anonymous said...

After I read this again to me it sounded like a very long and clever joke. And that I just turned it around the opposite.

In a lot of ways LOST is based of Earth.
The Island, well, lets just say anyone who made it to the island was very special.
Beside of course, those who manipulated their way to the island, that is a big no no.
The Island was a place where people from Earth, were who were chosen to 'ascend to a higher dimension'
were tested their final time.The Island, was the final test. Other people it was not their turn,
that was why you could not have a baby on the island, it would die because it was not chosen to ascend yet,
not without genuine 'love'. As you can see, The Island very much dictated if
you were going to be stuck as a voice there, or get your chance to walk through the door of light at the end. If you
did bad on the island there were many options, one was becoming a voice that gets stuck on the island such as Michael. This
can also be viewed as a redemption, as he is able sooner able to have his 'final test' and incarnation back to the island faster
than some people who still remain on Earth.The show actually sets up perfectly for a new show to be born.

Sayid did not see Nadia, and rather saw Shannon, because, once you walk through that door, you could have to wait millions of
years, to find that one person who 'made it to the island'. This of course all based off the idea that the island is very special,
and people would expend an extraordinary large amount of money to get to it if it were real. Was not Nadias turn.

Michael is a voice stuck on the island like others who have basically messed their chance up but still get to chill out on the island,
awaiting their next incarnation on the island.

...
...
...

The End."

Okay... I don't want to be mean, but are you just a kid? Because if you aren't this bunch of garbage that you wrote insults not just me, but any adult with an iq over 100.

Pa said...

Kyle, Anonymous probably thought you tweeted @ Lindelof for over two years (basically, constantly after the series finale) and that he blocked you just now.

LOL

Don't worry about it!

Anonymous said...

Guess who typed this long ago: "I will never ever ever ever watch anything that Damon Lindeloff is remotely involved in ever again."

And yet you continued to view his tweets. For such strong feelings, seems like you would have unfollowed him.

Anonymous said...

Hey Skaters.

Sawyer was a Jater in the finale too. Read the script circling online. Darlton really crushed Skate. :D

Kyle from Kentucky said...

touche anonymous.

Why do you find it so hard to believe?!
Why do you find it so easy?!
It's never been easy!!

At least there were some great lines from the show.

Kyle from Kentucky said...

Been watching mad men on netflix just finished the 2nd season last night. Pretty damn good. Not the greatest show I've ever seen but it's probably a little better than LOST. Of course the series finale could squander the entire show. Right Damon?

Pa said...

Mad Men is great, although not to everyone's liking. Unlike some other shows, it's truly character-driven. Fantastic dialogue, too.

Anonymous said...

vlavelle42@yahoo.com

to anonymous who is so happy that Darlton crushed Skate in the end

what are you so happy about??? I'm sorry that Jate was completely lame for 6 seasons and made NO sense as endgame. I'm sorry you didn't have any love scenes. I'm sorry you have to be so happy that the one of the only real love stories on the show was crushed to make room for the passionless nonromance that was Jate. I'm sorry you were a Jater, must suck to be you!

Kyle from Kentucky said...

I swear Don Draper gets more ass than a proctologist.

I watched LOST. Never cared about the shipper wars. Jate always felt so forced upon the audience. There was nothing special or natural about it. Skate was ooozing with passion. The only bad things I could say about skate were maybe it was a little immature. "If you want to use me freckles then just use me." "That's right run back to Jack. I know you'll be back here in 2 weeks. SMACK." "I wasn't meant to be that girls father anymore than I was meant to be your boyfriend Kate."

Those are the only negative lines I can remember in their entire relationship. On the other hand I remember many times when Jack screamed and berated Kate and treated her like a child or a dog even. He just always acted like IM BETTER THAN YOU. Sawyer said something like "A kids like a dog. You treat them bad enough for a long time theyn they think they did something wrong." thats close to the quote but thats pretty much how i felt about Jate. He just plain did not treat her well 90% of the time. Sawyer never once treated her like garbage. They were best friends first. She was the only one who understood him. He protected her and defended her even jumped off a helicopter for her. Jate was just forced. Really really bad. I could be wrong that's just my opinion thats how I felt when I was watching the show.

But hell. Good for the creators to make Jate fate. They screwed up on many a storyline. Might as well screw the relationships up too.

Anonymous said...

Those of you saying there were more "Suliet" or "Jate" "shippers" based on anecdotal experience, just something to think about. Neither of these "couples" was together long enough for anyone to remember much about them. Juliet in particular has low recognition numbers, and she only had one scene with Sawyer before she became jealous of Sawyer's continued attraction to Kate. There were a lot of "Jaters" pretending to be "Sulieters" for obvious reasons. And a lot of fanboys who wanted Kate to die. Both groups felt threatened by Sawyer as he was originally written. Smart showrunners know that shippers and fanboys are only a small percentage of the viewing audience. Furthermore, they are for the most part too young to be targeted viewers (they are mostly under 18 years old). Also they know shippers and fanboys have an amplified presence on the web (for example, they know polls are unreliable, and they are aware of sockpuppets). In the business, you go mainly by ratings. In real life "Skate" was very popular. That's why it's all you hear about now. They knew all of this, they just backed themselves into a writing corner and they weren't creative enough to find their way out. Jack had to be the hero in the end.

Anonymous said...

"Neither of these "couples" was together long enough for anyone to remember much about them."

And the skate pairing was? GTFO! Sawyer and Kate were "together" how long?

"Juliet in particular has low recognition numbers"

How in the fuck would you know this?

"Both groups felt threatened by Sawyer as he was originally written."

You Sawyer fan girls like to think everyone was "threatened" by the greatness that was the Sawyer character. Paaafuckinglease! Anyone with half a brain could tell, post mini arc, that he was being "written" as Kate's play thing. The distraction from her feelings for her ultimate choice, Jack.

"In real life "Skate" was very popular."

In "real life" Jate and Suliet were popular as well.

"That's why it's all you hear about now."

"now"? The show has been over. Its done with. Nobody is talking about anything LOST "now". Except for the diehards. And amongst them, skate is only a fraction of the discussion. "all you hear about" GTFO!

"they just backed themselves into a writing corner and they weren't creative enough to find their way out."

No. They didn't back themselves into anything. They new what they were doing with Jack/Kate all along.

"Jack had to be the hero in the end."

Yes he did. That's the way the story was set up.

Kyle from Kentucky said...

"They didn't back themselves into anything. They new what they were doing with Jack/Kate all along."

^ thats a good joke. I laughed pretty hard.

I noticed i posted the 815th comment on here. I was totally unaware of it until after I posted. I'm pretty proud of myself. Of course the odds were in my favor...

Anonymous said...

"^ thats a good joke. I laughed pretty hard."

You know its true. Your just too stubborn and bitter to admit it. They were shooting for the tragic/sacrifice ending from the get go with Jack & Kate. It was never going to be Sawyer & Kate. Where the writers backed themselves into a corner was with Sawyer. They didn't have anything for him. So they gambled and put him with Juliet.

Kyle from Kentucky said...

maybe. i dont know what was going through the writers minds. i just know what i would have liked to be going through their minds

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I hear you Kyle. I would have liked it to be GOOD. Everything about LOST ended up sucking. Those who are happy about the Jack and Kate thing are happy with one more of the shitty things about what LOST became in the end.

Lyle from Louisiana said...

Jack's journey and growth remains the pinnacle of TV drama.

Jack was the show, and all the other characters and mythology were just filler. Sorry to anyone out there that got caught up in the junk food and missed the meat of the show.

Best ending ever!!

Kyle from Kentucky said...

lmao wow. I'll reply to that later when I can stop rolling on the floor laughing

Kyle from Kentucky said...

Ahh. Lyle from Louisiana. Funny funny. At least I put my name on all my posts. So I'm guessing that wasn't a serious post then. darn.

Lyle from Louisiana said...

Kyle - Of course I was serious. Do you doubt that the show was focused on Jack and that his story was the central and most important of the show? This review by fishbiscuit clearly demonsrates that it was all about Jack.

Sorry if you focused on a tangent and missed the central focus and meaning of the show. Embrace Jack and his journey and you will appreciate Lost as never before.

Anonymous said...

What ever happened to Fishbiscuitland? Still writing anywhere else?

Kyle from Kentucky said...

"Where's Fish?"

She said she would possibly continue reviewing "other projects" and that this site would stay up - but I would say with 100% confidence that if she WAS reviewing other shows or whatever that her observations would be posted on this website for sure. So Fiona's not exactly in hiding I would think that she checks this discussion page out probably weekly since it says that comments have to be reviewed before posted.

Hell I could be wrong maybe she never checks this comments page maybe the comments post automatically after submission.

I know that she hasn't posted a comment on this review since like early Fall 2010 or late summer that year.

Another "Where's Fish" Possibility: maybe she does check this comments page weekly and nobody has said anything intriguing enough for her to reply in nearly 2 years...

Or MAYBE she works in Andy Page's mother's basement for him spoiling certain shows season finales. Ha. I never did like that guy...

Anonymous said...

new comments not showing up...?

Kyle from Kentucky said...

yes but its not easy to view them

Anonymous said...

test

Anonymous said...

i only see the 1st 200 comments... maybe if I post, I will see the rest????

Kyle from Kentucky said...

Nope you cant see them. The new newest button on the first page is gone. The only reason I can see this page is because i saved it to my desktop.

Then again you won't be seeing this comment either so idk whats going on.

Kyle from Kentucky said...

also ive noticed that the comments page has a different caveman website design

and the words to identify you're not a robot are much more difficult

Anonymous said...

I guess this is "the end"

Kyle from Kentucky said...

NOOOO i can still see it. hehe

Anonymous said...

Hey - where did all the more recent comments go...?

Anonymous said...

RIP fishbiscuitland comments...?

Anonymous said...

vlavelle42@yahoo.com

IDK haven't been on in awhile but i did just recently get the box set of LOST for my birthday and am enjoying a rewatch and see if it makes any more sense the 2nd time around lol. of course i know the tragic outcome of 'Skate', which does make it hard to watch but only a little bit because that forced Jate-Suliet ending just made NO sense. yes i know Jack and Kate were always intended as endgame but next time writers make a 'love' story an integral part of their show, they should actually have something resembling a love scene and perhaps some epic moments between the couple such as jumping out of a helicopter to save the woman you love, emotional reunions and some chemistry. The LOST writers wrote the best stuff for 'skate' and should have saved some of this for their intented love story! just sayin'

MeriJ said...

vlavelle42 -

Here's what I do about Skate and numerous other disappointments in the final seasons:

Although the writers' final intent is clear, I just ignore it. LA X makes so little sense on so many levels, I decided to believe it was Jack's dreamstate as he died. All in his head. The son he never had, etc.

So the only thing I accept as known is that Kate and Sawyer and the others left together on the plane. Whether they made it as couple is a mystery I choose not to solve.

I know my willful interpetation is not what actually happened in the series and would not stand up to close scrutiny, but neither does LA X. And I put too much into that show to remain bitter. So this works for me.

Meriwether said...

Anonymous wrote:

In real life "Skate" was very popular. That's why it's all you hear about now. They knew all of this, they just backed themselves into a writing corner and they weren't creative enough to find their way out. Jack had to be the hero in the end.
------------------------------

You exagerate, but I agree overall. The sad thing is that I think they could easily have written themselves out of this corner. Jack dying gave them the opportunity to shine the spotlight on him as the hero, selflessly freeing up the way for Skate.

I think the trap the writers got stuck in was wanting to end the series with the two final scenes JJ and Damon had drafted at the end of season one. Simply because it would be cool to say they had stayed true to that ending and to imply that they weren't making everything up as they went along.

The church scene was the problem. LA X could have been interesting, if it didn't have to end with those specific pairings in the church.

As it turned out, LA X had no meaning other than as a season-long setup to explain the church scene. They were just dreaming, and none of the events in LA X mattered? Seriously?

To set up that one pony trick, they abandoned years of complex backstories that appeared to be interweavig toward a climax of OMG revelations. A la Charles Dickens, another genious who made it up as he went along.

The moral of the story: better to write well than to care about appearing to be clever.

-MeriJ-

Meriwether said...

Also better to check your comment for typos before you post. Sigh.

merij_7600@yahoo.com

Meriwether said...

Kyle from Kentucky:

I just watched the latest trailer for Prometheus, the Alien prequel. Great trailer. You're seriously not going to watch this movie because Damon L was involved?

Kyle from Kentucky said...

@ Meriwhether

No. I seriously will not watch another Damon Lindelof project again. I poured time, money, and emotion into his product of LOST. The last few comments that have been made continue to be true the LAX storyline was meaningless. It meant nothing to the story we actually cared about which is the things happening on the island. Damon built up a GREAT mystery and story with great characters and it was mostly meaningless in the end. It wasn't just skate it was pretty much everything.

Anonymous said...

Come on Kyle, you sound like a jilted 15-year old girl! Damon could come up with a great project (and Prometheus might be it)... and it's only 2 hours of your life -- not 6 seasons!!

You've got to let go, son.

Kyle from Kentucky said...

Desmond David Hume when talking to Kelvin Inman in the hatch about why he needs to "let go, live a little" about shaving every single day for 3 years" -

"I'll never let go, brotha."

Anonymous said...

Nice quote.... except good ol' Des did eventually let go, right?

Anonymous said...

Irony: quoting Damon's show in order to try to justify your hatred for anything that comes from Damon.

Kyle from Kentucky said...

"I'll never let go brotha" is a reference to Penny and his relationship which he obviously never let go of.

And hatred is too strong a word. I never said HATE i don't believe. Its a trust issue. I do not trust that Lindelof can ever finish anything well because in my opinion he did not finish LOST well. So no I will not get involved with any other Lindelof project because I do not trust his writing ability. Not because I hate him.

Meriwether said...

I hear your distrust, but a two-hour movie does not require the same act of faith as a TV series. A movie is what it is by the time it comes out.

Even so, I don't begrudge your choices. We all do what makes sense for who we are.

Lyle from Louisiana said...

Irony Part 2: Kyle coming back on the 2-year anniversary of "The End" to continue his Lindelof boycott.

Kyle from Kentucky said...

Irony Part 3

Lyle from Louisiana said...
Jack's journey and growth remains the pinnacle of TV drama.

Jack was the show, and all the other characters and mythology were just filler. Sorry to anyone out there that got caught up in the junk food and missed the meat of the show.

Best ending ever!!


Well not ironic but obviously sarcastic

Lyle from Louisiana said...

Sorry, what part did you think was sarcastic?

I take it that you disagree with the premise?

Pa said...

Why hasn't anyone commented the twitter feud between Dominic Monaghan and Matthew Fox' fans?

It reminded me of some old posts Fish wrote back in the day.

It turns out she wasn't far off with her comments about the Lost lead and his fans.

Kyle from Kentucky said...

http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/06/06/e3-jorge-garcia-on-lindelofs-recent-lost-finale-chat

Pretty good interview

Kyle from Kentucky said...

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/gossip/la-et-mg-matthew-fox-beats-women-dominic-monaghan,0,971677.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MinistryOfGossip+(Ministry+of+Gossip)

Yea I saw that. Dominic says that Matthew Fox beats women and that it has happened a lot and was is not 1 isolated incident. No surprises here most of us knew what kind of man Fox ALLEGEDLY is, if the stories are true, the character Jack aside.

Fromo said...

Who cares about washed-up bitter hobbits?

Kyle from Kentucky said...

the Mad Men season finale was a little disappointing

Pa said...

Yeah, I wasn't thrilled with the Mad Men finale either.

So, has anyone seen Prometheus?

Anonymous said...

Prometheus was very good. Not great, but makes you think long after leaving the theater.

But if you already hate Lindelof, I'm sure you'll find a reason to hate this movie too.

Anonymous said...

I miss Jack.

Anonymous said...

I mean... I realy, really miss Jack.

He was like a compass.

Jacknostalgia said...

I miss him too. Especially his tears. And his tattoos.

Anonymous said...

I sleep better at night knowing that Jack completed his journey and saved us all in the process.

Jack will always live on.

Anonymous said...

Yes!!! So glad to finally hear the Jack fans persevere over all of the Jack haters out there.

There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think of some great Jack quote or action to help guide or inspire me.

People, he completed his journey and made the ultimate sacrifice... a little respect!!

Meriwether said...

One senses irony in the air.

Anonymous said...

Irony? IRONY??!!

Irony is the cynicism that clouds the vision of the Jack haters. As George Bernard Shaw said: "The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."

Jack's story was an epic journey of growth, struggle, triumph and sacrifice.



Meriwether said...

I had no problem with Jack. But I can guarantee you that most of those comments were teasing you and your tribe.

Man these captchas are becoming impossible.

Anonymous said...

You know you want it!
https://www.biddingforgood.com/auction/item/Item.action?id=176323870

(yes, I mean you too, Kyle!)

Meriwether said...

10I love the "estimated price" on that baby.

Meriwether said...

As for those insanely difficult captchas, who knew there were so many robots trying to post to this blog? (No "bad robot" jokes, please.)

Anonymous said...


Jack for President!!

In these trying times, we need a true leader who is willing to sacrifice everything for the greater good. In Jack We Trust!

Anonymous said...

Jack's wisdom for our times:

"... and we're all still waiting. Waiting for someone to come. Well, what if they don't? We have to stop waiting. We need to start figuring things out... we can't do *this*. Every man for himself is not gonna work. It's time to start organizing. We need to figure out how we're gonna *survive* here... last week most of us were strangers. But we're all here now, and God knows how long we're gonna be here. But if we can't live together... we're gonna die alone."

Jack-haters... it's time to realize that Jack was right!

Kyle from Kentucky said...

Yes! I loved that Jack Speech. but as we all know it was Locke who pushed jack from a place of insanity to the clear leadership role. And he also saved him from falling off the cliff. White Rabbit is one of the top 10 episodes.

Anonymous said...

Kyle - of course Jack didn't do it alone. Many others helped and provided good and bad examples along the way on Jack's journey. Yes, Jack's journey. Above all else, Jack was the one that was "Lost" and it was his journey that was the central idea of the show.

Meriwether said...

>Jack was the one that was "Lost" and it was his journey that was the central idea of the show.

That's probably my biggest beef with how they ended the series. It had been great because it was a tale of many interesting people who were lost. How their back-stories overlapped was what kept it fascinating and tantalizing. They abandoned all that in the end.

Kyle from Kentucky said...

8 years since the premiere of LOST. I feel old...

Anonymous said...

Yes Kyle... and for all its flaws, Lost looks even better compared to current crap like Revolution.

Beachmama said...

It looks as if the website has been shut down, the message I get is 'This Account Has Been Suspended' with no clue how to contact anyone to find out why. I suspect the bill needs to be paid and would be happy to do so. Several others have said they would lead a hand as we08ll when the subject came up some time ago.

HELP. Does anyone have any idea who was hosting the site, who to contact to reinstate service or who might know who to contact? I hate to see it just disappear!


Cheers, Ann

Anonymous said...

Ann, it was nothing to do with payments. We've contacted the web host about it but no response from them yet.

I'll post a message about it here if there's any news. I want the forum back as soon as possible...if at all possible! I will check out options in the meantime. If anyone is asking about it that you know, I'd be grateful if you can tell them to check in here for news.

~ Midnight

Anonymous said...

YAY...the forum is back in action! See you there! :)

Midnight

Meriwether said...

I saw just Prometheus. It was much better than I had been led to believe.

Anonymous said...

With the passing of each day, we should all appreciate the wisdom and sacrifice of Jack.

Meriwether said...

C'mon, he wasn't that bad.

Meriwether said...

Am I the only person who is reminded of Jack when I see Romney speaking?

Anonymous said...

"Am I the only person who is reminded of Jack when I see Romney speaking?"

We have to go back!!!! We have to go back to the same failed Bush policies!!!

Meriwether said...

Ha ha. Good one.

Anonymous said...

The Real Hope & Change = JACK

In the aftermath of the US elections, the expectaion of 'Hope & Change' has faded. But if you need inspiration, look no further than our own Jack Shephard for the embodiment of real hope and change. It was only through his regaining hope and willing himself to change that he was able to save all of us... and gain his own salvation.

Long live Jack, at least in our hearts!!!

Anonymous said...


As we approach Thanksgiving, it is important to remember the truly important people and events in our lives... the people who really made a difference and the events that give meaning to it all.

In that spirit, we should all give thanks to Jack Shepherd... he demonstrated all the good that we can strive for and the growth and sacrifices that we should be ever thankful for.

Never let go... of Jack.

Anonymous said...


As we approach the Christmas season, it is so important to remember the the great one who died for us....

Jack.

Anonymous said...


All Lost fans NEED to read this:

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8670609/alan-sepinwall-origins-lost

(even Kyle!)

Meriwether said...

Photo of Romney and Obama at their lunch meeting. My god, Romney really is Jack:

http://www.euronews.com/2012/11/30/romney-and-obama-do-lunch/

Meriwether said...

Thanks for that link, anonymous.

Very interesting article, full of stuff I've never heard before.

Anonymous said...

No problem Meriwether. That is just an excerpt from 1 chapter in Sepinwall's new book. I understand that he goes on to discuss similar stuff for subsequent seasons. The book also deals with lots of the great shows from the past 10-20 years.

Meriwether said...

I want to read his comments on LAX and the final season.

Kyle from Kentucky said...

Wonderful article.

Whos going to watch The Hobbit

Anonymous said...


Hobbit? Hell, yeah! Although the bad news is that Evangeline Lily isn't in the first movie very much... Jaters will get more of her in the next 2!!

Meriwether said...

I had no idea EL was in The Hobbit.

I was excited because I love the recent BBC Sherlock series.

Anonymous said...


Yeah, it's kind of funny that EL and Dominic Monaghan both ended up in LOTR or Hobbit.

I guess it's clear why their romance didn't last -- hobbits and elves just don't work as couples!!!

Kyle from Kentucky said...

There was no Evie at all. Boo. Theres so few women in Tolkiens writings. Loved the movie though

All_Hail_Jack said...


Damon involved in new sci-fi project, "1952" (along with Jeff Jensen). Some tease in the link.... let the guessing begin!

http://www.hitfix.com/motion-captured/brad-bird-and-damon-lindelof-give-us-a-sneak-peek-inside-their-sci-fi-project-1952

Meriwether said...

And JJ will direct the next Star Wars episode.

Annie said...

E. Lilly is on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/EvangelineLilly

Meriwether said...

Thanks, Annie. I enjoyed this video, which E. Lilly mentioned:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9zvPGlHPvc

Meriwether said...

Damon tweet:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/13/lost-ending-explained-damon-lindelof_n_2679329.html

Jack RULES! said...

Have you given thanks to Jack yet today? After all, he did save us all. He achieved the ultimate growth and understanding and made the ultimate sacrifice. And some remain fixated on Sawyer and Kate??! Wake up (LOL)!! Jack was the point of the show, and his lessons should guide you for the rest of your days.

JoRose said...

Giving thanks to Jack is how I start and end my days.

Damon is still explaining how Lost ended? Why? It was pretty simple like the show itself.

JoRose said...

Evangeline Lilly said on her Twitter that she has only stayed in touch with Jeremy Irons and Elizabeth Mitchell.

How will Jaters and Skaters deal with this?

Anonymous said...

JoRose... Jeremy DAVIES???

Anonymous said...

In this Lenten season, it is important to remember and honor the sacrifices of Jack Shepherd.

He struggled and grew and made the ultimate sacrifice for us all.

Thank you Jack.

All Hail Jack said...


Jack,

Thank you this day and every day for your wisdom, leadership and sacrifice.

Meriwether said...

HuffPo ran a hash tag on how people feel, three years later, about the ending of Lost:
.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/23/lost-finale-three-years-later_n_3327757.html

Pa said...

I, for one, still don't like the ending. But I always thought the show had way too many flaws even before.

BTW I think I liked Lost actors better when they weren't on Twitter.

Meriwether said...

I find it's best not to know too much about any professional entertainer. They are rarely as interesting as people as they are as musicians or actors or whatever.

Take THAT you haters!! said...


LOST ranked #27 of 101 all-time best written TV series.

http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=4993

Kyle from Kentucky said...

"Locke's character "resolution" was to further the glory of Jack, even in death. What once seemed like an epic duel between equally matched protagonists went out with a weak, faint sounding pfffffffft. By the time the big showdown happened, Locke wasn't even there."

Happy almost 9th birthday LOST.

Anonymous said...

My english writing is not good,but I've just readed this perfect recap and I have to give my opinion about Lost.I am a new fan.I started and finished Lost in 2 weeks.I am still shocked and disapponted after 2 months and i can't moving on."The End" is not a real end for me and seasons five/six are the worst.I am not a shipper,but I loved immediately Skate's lovestory because is the ONLY ONE that make a sense until "the end".Anyway I'll re-watch Lost,but "the end" doesn't exsist for me.Poor Lost,it was a great show.

All Hail Jack!! said...

On veterans day, we should also pause to honor the noble Jack Shepherd, who fought for us all and made the ultimate sacrifice.

We all owe Jack our undying gratitude.

All Hail Jack said...


I hope that all of you gave proper thanks for Jack on Thanksgiving. Now as we approach Christmas, all should celebrate the sacrifice that Jack made for all of us, a Christ-like sacrifice that is second to only one.

Anonymous said...

LOL - Love reading all this petty bitterness after all these years.

Jack got Kate in the end, as he was ALWAYS meant to.

It was set up from the beginning and just because you didn't see the obvious set up, doesn't mean that didn't make sense.

Par said...

The Lost set must not have been very pleasant work place if I were to judge by the actors' tweets and entertainment news.

Anonymous said...

In case anyone from FBL forum checks in, we have had issues with the server as you are now aware. Hoping to rectify this as soon as possible and will post a comment here when the site is back in action.
~ Midnight

Unknown said...

Thank you so much for that Midnight, I was wondering what was wrong, and I even checked here earlier, so glad to see your comment :-)

Anonymous said...

Came here to check on what was going on with FBL and I am happy to see your post Midnight. I'll checked back later for updates.

Ann (LostTVFan)

Anonymous said...

Glad to see at least a couple of you have checked here for an update. We're still working on it although the initial unexpected issue turned into a bigger one...hence the reason it isn't back up and running. I can't tell you anymore than that right now since i don't know what the final outcome will be, sorry... Fishbiscuit's nine lives are long gone i'd say but I've been hoping we were on our 99th one this time. Will definitely post a comment here if ...when (pray for miracle!) we get it back.
- Midnight

Anonymous said...

Huh? What?

Anonymous said...

Hoping the forum will be back up within the next couple of days... a bit late I know, but may as well try ..and hope that former members will still try to check in. I'll post a comment here if there are any updates.
- Midnight

Anonymous said...

Midnight: Looks as if FBL is back in business as of this morning!

Ann (LostTVFan)

Anonymous said...

I'm so happy to say that it is indeed Ann! :)
http://www.fishbiscuitland.com/fishelage/

Just a warning though...we have to do another transfer in the next day or so that may take the site down for a day or two at most. I'll have no worries this time around because it's a final fix that is simple. After that, we'll be well and truly back in business. :))))
- Midnight

Meriwether said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Meriwether said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Meriwether said...

I still check in from time to time.

Mostly to prove I'm still not a robot.

Anonymous said...

I've avoided Lost during the 4 years since it ended. I tried watching an episode here or there, but could only remember how badly it ended. A family member gave me the last two seasons on DVD a couple of years ago (I'd never purchased them and had even told them I didn't like the way it ended), but I never cracked the cellophane.

Last year, I started back at the beginning and went through "I Do" and then stopped. I disliked Jack even more than before and couldn't bear to watch the rest. Until just now. The last month or so, I've rolled through the rest of season 3, seasons 4 & 5, and am now down to the last few episodes of the series. I've been rereading the recaps here as I go, which has been just as great as reading them the first time. As I watch, I'm still grousing some about how dumb things got, but I'm also much more disconnected - maybe binge watching helps; no time to dwell, and now I just don't care about Jack.

Like many admirers of Fishbiscuit's work, I was a Skater. I still think it was one of the best stories they told. And that's where most of my remaining disquiet lies. In rereading the finale recap, Fishbiscuit talked about how they didn't know how to write real, adult romance. Except, they did.

They wrote Sawyer and Kate through nearly the whole show. Yes, Kate bounced back and forth, but they still gave all the great romance to her and Sawyer. They developed the relationship and had it mean something, right up to nearly the end. Even with the Juliet non-romance, as soon as Kate came back, it returned to her. Within days of Juliet's death, Sawyer was calling her Freckles again and making sure she got off the island with him in the sailboat. Even in the afterlife-sideways world, they had a fated connection and "got" each other. And then Darlton simply dropped it.

It wasn't that they couldn't write a long, slow-burn, chemistry-laden, amazing romance, because they did (and the actors certainly helped a lot). They just dropped it at the last minute. Plenty of other characters got shafted as well, which Fishbiscuit rightly pointed out in the finale recap. It was all about Jack, and I guess that's why he ended up with Kate in the afterlife... even though they never showed them as a viable couple in the whole series. They only showed them as dysfunctional. For the last two seasons, they barely looked at one another. There was no connection in the afterlife-sideways world (still have a couple episodes to watch, but there's basically been nothing). So, WTF with ending up together?

I cared about the mysteries. The fact that they wove such intricacies and kept dropping them is bad storytelling, but I can let much of that go, even as *annoying* as it is. However, to say it was about the characters and then screw over almost every single one of them... that's another matter.

It *is* all about the characters. The storyteller sets out an arc, and the events could go in many directions -- characters can take the journey a million ways. It's about who they begin as, who they are along the way, and who they become. And face it, they created great characters and set up some wonderful journeys. But the story has to serve the characters, at the least, and follow through for them. For a long time, it did, but then it didn't. The mysteries as they related to characters were the ones that were most irritating when dropped or left unresolved (ex: Walt, Aaron, Desmond); the ones that were just thrown in to be "cool", I can let go of more easily. But I can't dismiss character assassination, and as Fishbiscuit pointed out, there was lots of that.

To be continued...

Anonymous said...

Continued...

I've heard/read people bitching about the ending of Battlestar Galactica because it was spiritual or God-did-it, yet spirituality was woven throughout the whole series. The same could be said for Lost. The fact that they ended up in heaven didn't bother me. I believe in an afterlife, and all the different symbols they showed weren't a problem because I don't personally think the path matters. Again, it's the journey and the people, not as much about the specific details. The time on the island was pivotal in all their lives, whatever else happened before or after, and having them all gather isn't a terrible idea even if it all hinging on Jack is a bit much.

However, to betray so many of the characters in the run up to that and in the end, to disregard what was important to them, their personal journeys... and to drop, at the last minute, the biggest love story, the one that started in the pilot and continued almost to the end... just... no. To me, dropping the ball with the characters is why Lost ultimately failed despite a great deal of beauty in many episodes.

I'll probably keep the DVDs; I'll probably watch again sometime, or at least some of it. Now, having gotten the rest out of my system with this rewatch, I'll keep what's relevant, what speaks to me, and drop the rest. Heh. I guess that's exactly what Darlton did. Except, IMO, they weren't faithful to what they began, and as the storytellers, that's bad form. In the end, the story only served one character, and that's just sad.

Paula said...

I really appreciate your comment. It might be because I share the same feelings about the show.

I really hate seeing the Lost finale described as being character-oriented because I feel it where it failed the most.

All Hail Jack !! said...

Keep watching and re-watching. Someday all will see and appreciate greatness of Jack and the ultimate sacrifice he made.

Lost is the Story of Jack, with some interesting diversions along the way.

Meriwether said...

Great post, Anonymous. You are totally correct about Sawyer and Kate. I wasn’t much of a ‘shipper, but Kate and Jack would never have worked romantically, that much was clear. Whether she and Sawyer could have made it work over time would have been the kind of romantic challenge any of us might face when the routine of day-to-day sets in; but at least they would have started with great chemistry.

I continue to be annoyed with what the writers did to the show in the last two seasons. I didn’t care about the meta-mysteries nearly as much I cared about the characters’ complex back-stories. I was expecting to see that massive investment pay off, a la a Charles Dickens novel where all the individual strands come together in amazing ways at the end. Instead, they just walked away from them.

Despite that, I enjoyed the last two seasons. Mostly because I cared about the characters and because the actors did the best they could with what they were given. Also I kept telling friends, “Think about much time a movie director has. Two-three hours in which to introduce and wrap up everything. These guys still have 15 hours left. Plenty of time.” Because I hadn’t realized they were no longer planning to wrap up the things I cared about.

continued...

Meriwether said...

...part two

I still think the problem was that they felt too much pressure to end in a way that suggested they knew where they had been going all along. Because that would have been so “awesome,” right?

However the show had evolved far beyond what they could foresee as of the end of the first season – back when when Abrams and Lindelof supposedly wrote the church scene -- so it wasn’t awesome at all. To get to that ending they pretty much started over with an entirely new storyline – and that took a veeery long time to build up from scratch. As a result they abandoned the promise of most of what had happened between those two endpoints.

Too much desire to appear clever and not enough love for what they had already created. Sigh. I too should watch it again.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous,

"They wrote Sawyer and Kate through nearly the whole show. Yes, Kate bounced back and forth, but they still gave all the great romance to her and Sawyer. They developed the relationship and had it mean something, right up to nearly the end. Even with the Juliet non-romance, as soon as Kate came back, it returned to her. Within days of Juliet's death, Sawyer was calling her Freckles again and making sure she got off the island with him in the sailboat. Even in the afterlife-sideways world, they had a fated connection and "got" each other. And then Darlton simply dropped it. "

I think we need to step back and get some perspective. Sawyer and Kate had a fling (not a great romance), it didn't work out because Kate was in love with someone else and they were too much alike to bring out the best in themselves. They had their chance and it failed.

Darlton didn't drop Skate, they placed it away as they had always intended to. Skate was fun, the women got all wet in the pants over Sawyer and brought in the ratings. But he was never going to get the girl that the main hero was in love with. That is just obvious.

The writing was always on the wall. People just got sucked in by some cheesy flirting and sex scenes.

The finale was great, the show was amazing. You didn't get your Skate ending, but that shouldn't really be a surprise.

Meriwether said...

Ha. Excellent counter point.

I never thought of Jack as THE hero, though I accept that the writers did. (Why do we need A hero?)

But more to the point, Sawyer really did seem happy with Juliet. That was a relationship that would have lasted. Those were probably the only peaceful years in his life.

Anonymous said...

Meriweather,

I think there was plenty of heroic deeds performed by a number of characters. But, I think it is safe to say that Jack, with his final confrontation with MIB - good vs.evil, he was the central hero.

Meriwether said...

It certainly ended up that way.

I never had a problem with Jack. Dude could have lightened up a little, but then he wouldn't have been Jack.

Anonymous said...

DL and CC chat it up 10 years after it all began

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/lost-creators-interview?utm_source=zergnet.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=zergnet_177519&dom=zerg&src=syn&mag=esq

Meriwether said...

Thanks. Interesting comments here by Lindelof on how he felt about the intense criticism over how they ended Lost:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/magazine/damon-lindelof-leftovers-lost.html?hpw&rref=magazine

All Hail Jack!! said...


As we approach the national holiday of Thanksgiving, everyone should pause to reflect on the selfless sacrifice of Jack and be ever thankful for his heroism and humanity.

Anonymous said...

Wow, just discovered this wretched blog. I wonder if it was with some bitter comeuppance to have to swallow the ending of the series after expending all that energy into hating a character and his fans. Oh, well.

Meriwether said...

It wasn't about that for the most part. Those who continued to comment long after tended to be more bitter.

Anonymous said...

"It wasn't about that for the most part. Those who continued to comment long after tended to be more bitter.

March 18, 2015 at 7:47 PM"

Gonna disagree with you . This is the most nasty, bitter Lost blog out there. The "fans" having some weird obsessive hate for a fictional character and then with the show runners because they chose to end it with Kate being in love with Jack, which was the most predictable thing in the show.

All Hail Jack!!! said...


I hope that with the passage of time, everyone out there finally understands that Jack is the hero, the savior. It was Jack's story and the world owes him a debt of gratitude.

Thank you Jack.

Anonymous said...

Hi, I know this is six years too late, but I wanted to say something. I was a Suliet supporter who probably contributed to Skate not being endgame. Since then I shipped another couple on another show and they were the two leads and had tons of build up, but in the last few episodes their relationship was destroyed and they both ended up with other people. I know how Skaters felt now, and I'm sorry.

I really regret all the nastiness on all sides during the Lost shipper wars, and as the ending showed Lost wasn't worth it anyway.

Peace to everyone.

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All_Hail_Jack said...

In this Christmas season, we should all look back on Jack as the closest thing to the second coming that we can hope to see in our lifetimes.

All Hail Jack!!!

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