Sunday, May 23, 2010
Last Episode of Lost.
In the book "Misery" by Stephen King, there is a scene at the end, after Annie Wilkes has held Paul Sheldon hostage for a year while forcing him to write the final book in his series about her favorite character Misery. After keeping Annie at bay with page after page while getting strong enough to kill his captor with his bare hands, Paul tells Annie that the last page he has written contains all of the answers to her questions and her desires for the story characters. Paul then lights the page on fire to get Annie to dive after it while he bashes her head in with a typewriter. If he had allowed Annie to read 75% of the page fulfilling all of her hopes for the story before reading the last line which read "Misery Takes a Hot Runny Shit on Annie" before bashing her head in, I would have a perfect analogy for what I just saw.
I knew we wouldn't find out why Walt could move shit with his mind, or why Cindy took the kids in. All I wanted was to have closure. Good closure. Not that kind of ending like The Sopranos or X-Files where the writers say "Well what do you think happened?".
Well, fucksticks, if I have to write the ending... that makes you pretty shitty storytellers. So here it is SPOILER ALERT: THEY ARE ALL FUCKING DEAD. Some died on the island, some died later after living what I can only assume to be rich, meaningful lives. But they are all dead.
Okay, so they are all dead in the flash sideways, but that's still dead. The ending everyone guessed from season one, that all of the shows producers, writers, actors, and directors swore up and down they would never do, just got did. Meaning that anything that happened in the "alternate reality" had absolutely no bearing on the plot as it related to the island.Well shit shoot and howdy, thanks for stretching this shit out. The ending was a great ending for Season 6 but not the series as a whole. Great, Jack closed his eye. I knew how that was going to end, but just doing it was akin to not showing your work on word problem.
I gotta tell you, up until the Jack/Christian hugfest, I was in. I thought it was a great way to say goodbye. I damn near cried during Sun and Jin's "awakening" as I almost did during Claire/Chahlie's. Even the Shannon/Boone cameo which should have felt forced and ham handed got carried off with some genuine emotion. And then the ending.......
Look, I don't regret one minute of watching this show. I thought Cuse and Lindeloff told a pretty entertaining yarn while developing characters in a way no one really cares to do anymore. I was into it, really into it. I read Dark UFO, and the comments on Pop Candy, and I knew there was no way to really answer everything. But I would have liked to see them clear up these few loose ends (which , by the way, are all from beyond season four, when the writers had supposedly known their endgame)
* What was Widmore and Eloise's purpose? Why was Charles Widmore so interested in the island. He didn't seem to want to protect it, yet they never really showed him exploiting it either. When he returned, was he trying to kill Locke/smoke monster or just hold him at bay while Desmond did the uncorking?And why was that so important to him. And Eloise, keeps helping people get back to the island, telling Desmond where he needs to be, and seems to have left the island and sacrificed everything (her words) but for what?
* Why was Ben Linus so obsessed with Juliet? This wasn't some small story that didn't play out. Ben brought Juliet to the island under the guise of a fertility doctor only to reveal that she "belonged to him". Harper told her that "she looked just like her" and Ben went so far as to have Goodwin killed just because Juliet had feelings for him. I guess they just ran out of time, and decided it wasn't that important, but it sure looked like it could've been a big reveal about Ben's past.
*What was the purpose of "The Others"? I get that the Dharma initiative was studying the electromagnetic properties of the island and that they warred with the island's inhabitants who eventually destroyed the group in "The Purge". But why did they take over their experiments? And how did they disguise themselves as a company who recruited Juliet? Why are they all super strong and super fast? Now I'm just nit picking.
Awww fuck it. Now that I think about it, I'm sitting here writing a blog next to no one will read talking about my feelings for the end of a TV show. When is the last time any show made me this invested? I guess the fact that I am still re-running that episode in my head over and over is a testament to it's strength. I still maintain that just throwing questions at an audience and answering the ones you like can fool people into thinking it's great storytelling, and to be a truly great story teller, your ending should answer the questions you pose in the story's exposition. But I was a fan, and still am and it because Abrams, Lindelof, and Cuse created a world I could escape to once a week, no easy task, so thank you -truly and sincerely- for that.
See ya later LOST. It's like a good drinking buddy moved away, only to find out he opened a credit card in your name. Cue the "Somebody is about to Die" Piano, and hope the fan fiction about Hurley and Ben's adventures gets kept someplace far, far away.
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Spot on Chris! I liked the ending but it did leave me a little bummed that more questions didn't get answered
ReplyDeleteChris,
ReplyDeleteI agree with most of what you said, but I think once they got pretty far through this season without really answering that many questions, I resigned myself to thinking that they just aren't going to have the time to answer a lot of the questions, but if they can answer some of the big ones and tell me a good story I'll be fine with that.
This was one of the better things I've read online about the show:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2010/05/lost-if-you-come-with-me-ill-show-you-what-i-mean.html
I think the two key parts of this posting were:
"One of the reasons I think "Lost" worked was that it was always more interested in the box and the person holding the box than what was in the box."
and
"One of the things that's made the last six seasons of this show so fun is the way that it's kind of a Rorschach test for who you are. Your answers to the questions the show presented were as important to the experience of watching the show as anything else."
I think I was more willing to "let go" with LOST and just enjoy the story for what it is and not worry so much about them tying up loose ends. It was always very interesting to me to see how people could have such widely varying viewpoints on each episode. I only started watching it last year on DVD and Blu-ray, and it was like TV crack. I couldn't just watch one episode a day. As opposed to a show like "24," I think LOST did the best job that it could in keeping the story moving forward AND maintaining some semblance of internal consistency. This season I've watched some of season one and you can see they had a plan all along, even if it often appeared they did not. "24" is a great show, but really, as long as Jack lived to torture the hell out of more terrorists and save the country, most folks were willing to suspend our disbelief and not care at all about loose ends. As an aside, I think the perfect ending to "24" tonight is Jack eating, going to the bathroom, and taking a nap. :-)
I also think that LOST practically demanded a group experience and further study to get the most that you could out of it. I enjoyed the water cooler conversations with friends at work, and also enjoyed reading the various recaps and blogs of fans of the shows. It really kept me guessing, and it often stuck with me and made me think about the ideas and concepts presented, and there were times it made me actually reflect upon and draw parallels to my own life. That's WAY more than anyone can expect of a TV show, and I'm thankful I was alive to go along for the ride. Anyway, those are my thoughts. I guess I'm just a total LOST groupie.
See you in another life, brotha.
OK Leroy, I'm going to answer your post because you brought up the "the show was always more interested in the box and the person holding the box than what was in the box." group. And I think that's a fine way to build an audience for the show. It's even a fine way to end a show with Lost's weight if they had gone on for another year or two and then just realized the story couldn't go on any further. But that's not what happened. Abrams, Cuse, and Lindelof made a conscious decision to end the show in 2010 specifically so that they could end the show as a full story arc and not have to make shortcuts.
ReplyDeleteSince that time, they have been answering lots of small questions. Why was the Dharma Initiative there? Why was Desmond so important? What is the Smoke Monster? All building toward the answer to the question that they said over and over in interviews was the most important: What is the island and why were the Oceanic Survivors there? And if this were a show like Twin Peaks where everything had always existed in some dreamlike ethereal plane I think the show ended 100% perfect. But to build that story arc with so many facts built on history created in this world, and then funnel your viewers down that tunnel with ideas based on those facts you created only to end it with a "It is whatever you wanted it to be" seems a little disingenuous.
Obviously I have a deep connection to the show. It was about the only appointment TV I've kept over the last few years. Make no mistake, I was emotionally moved during the show and I thought the characters received proper send offs. But for a show that based its entire gimmick on, "If you don't watch very closely you wont be able to understand the story" I thought the ending was sort of made for casual viewers, if there is such a thing. Anyway, I guess it's been so long since I've really gotten into a story like that (Star Wars, maybe) that I felt the show's creators owed their audience an ending that didn't necessarily tie up all the loose ends, but did definitively say this is what we think and this is how our story ends. Rather than "Years later, we all meet up in heaven".
Saddest of all? I will never devote this much thought, writing, or discussion to a show in the foreseeable future. I will miss this show for a lot of reasons, but mostly because there won be anything else on to let you know how good TV can be if it is done right. The End.
I'm right there with you. I actually didn't bother watching this last season. I was beginning to detect a trend in the storytelling. Every episode answer one question and pose four more. When I heard they were wrapping it up this year, I knew they couldn't possibly provide any kind of satisfactory conclusion. Therer was a glimmering moment when network television looked like it may have provided some really thought provoking science fiction. The first season of heroes was amazing. Lost started out strong. Guess they had make way for Legend of The Seeker and the twenty fith incarnation of Dr. Who.
ReplyDelete