Lost
Well, that’s six years of my life I’ll never get back.
Was it as bad as that? No, not exactly. But it wasn’t much good either. On the subject of the Lost finale — and the final season in general — I think Ross Douthat has the right idea (although, as usual, he’s more generous than the show deserves). It was mostly successful in the ways that the series was usually successful — as a vehicle for a syrupy but frequently gripping mix of pulp and soap set against a spooky island background. But even by that standard, it wasn’t a knockout.
So was I disappointed? Yes. But not too disappointed, because I was fairly sure that this was where the series was headed all along.
By the middle of the first season, it was fairly clear (at least to me) that the writers never intended to answer any of the major questions about the island and its mysteries that they raised. I scratched my head at the end of every season finale when I heard people talk about payoffs, about what we learned. What payoffs? The big “reveals” were almost always to questions we never knew we had (What physical mechanism caused the plane to crash? Where were the Others keeping the polar bears?). Only the interpersonal storylines were ever resolved in anything close to a satisfying manner. The only difference between Lost‘s banal storylines and the ones on numerous other forgettable network dramas featuring generically pretty faces was that Lost‘s took place on an intriguingly mysterious island. The show’s implicit promise, in other words, was of an epic, interconnected narrative. But what it delivered was small-time sentimentality.
This was especially true in the final season, which discarded most of the existing mythology in exchange for generic spiritualism and cheap emotional uplift. Even as a longtime skeptic, I was shocked by the degree to which the writers shrugged off the mythological elements they’d introduced in previous seasons. I was expecting minimal, vague, and unsatisfying answers to questions about the island’s origin, nature, and properties; about the Dharma Initiative and its goals, experiments, and technology; about time travel, the nature of the smoke monster, the various characters with supernatural abilities, or any of the many, many other mysteries. What I wasn’t expecting was that the writers would more or less decline to answer these questions entirely.
But in the end, it turns out Lost‘s writers had exactly one shtick: pile up the big mysteries to keep people hooked, but only ever resolve the banal, domestic conflicts. The series wasn’t a story. It was a gimmick, repeated over and over for six increasingly frustrating years.
So why did I keep watching? Curiosity, for one thing. A tough-to-suppress desire to “keep up” with pop culture for another. And because, for all its faults, the show could be remarkably gripping in its shallow, teasing way. It’s hard to string millions of people along for as long and as intensely as Lost did, a challenge to keep audiences coming back for answers while steadfastly refusing to deliver them. But it did, and if there was a way in which the show “worked,” it was that, on a scene-by-scene basis, it was textbook dramatic screenwriting. Each scene focused intensely on the immediate conflict at hand, gave the characters solid, playable goals, and never failed to raise the stakes and erect new obstacles whenever possible. So even when the show was at its most ludicrous and incoherent, it was almost impossible to look away.
The sad thing is that the show’s writers had the opportunity to deliver a far better resolution than they did. In particular, by negotiating a set end date three years out, they could have built towards a more satisfying, deservingly complex conclusion rather than the simplistic (and entirely beside the point) spiritual mumbo-jumbo they went with. During the show’s run, there was a lot of talk about the show’s depth and complexity, but it turns out this was mostly just a pose; the series served up an dizzying array of tantalizing plot points, implicitly promising to eventually connect them. But it never did.
If there was real complexity to be found, it was on the fan-run analysis sites and Internet forums where dedicated obsessives with philosophy books and screen grabs tried, in vain, to put together all the pieces. These folks were ready (and, in many cases, desperate) for a twisted, complicated, even difficult-to-follow answer — something, anything that would make all their effort and anxiety worth it. But the writers opted for easy sentimentality instead. Given the demands of network TV drama, that may be all anyone ever should or could have expected. But after six years of watching and waiting, even skeptically, I suspect I’m not the only one who is pretty sure it wasn’t worth it.
yeah, you basically nailed it
— paul h. · May 29, 04:52 AM · #
“During the show’s run, there was a lot of talk about the show’s depth and complexity, but it turns out this was mostly just a pose; the series served up an dizzying array of tantalizing plot points, implicitly promising to eventually connect them. But it never did.”
I agree, you basically nailed it. I stopped watching around the second season, so I feel somewhat vindicated that the faint promise of sublime reconciliation turned out to be a ruse. It raises some interesting questions about trust in the entertainment industry – the next gripping series of mysticism may be forced to call itself “Lost… and Found.”
— Walker Frost · May 29, 06:03 AM · #
It’s interesting how different people can watch the exact same thing and come to such different conclusions. There wasn’t a payoff in the last episode, but I thought the last season did a good job of answering a lot of my questions. Most of them, I would say. Who or what is the smoke monster and why was it doing what it was doing? What is Christian Shepherd doing alive and what does death on the island mean? Why were The Others doing what they were doing? Who or what is Jacob? Most importantly, what is driving the events on the Island? Why is The Island important?
I listen to most of the questions on the video and most fall into one of a few categories: I can think of a few straightforward answers for that, that doesn’t matter, and that might have been interesting to know but I’m not sure I would have wanted screen-time devoted to it.
I guess I wasn’t looking for things to be spelled out for me as much as much as a relatively consistent narrative. I was looking for the avoidance of contradictions that cannot be explained. In that sense, the big question asked in the video that I would really like an answer on is how Christian Shepherd showed up at Jack’s hospital.
By and large, I never really cared all that much about the characters themselves. The character drama I thought was the weakest thing in the show. I was in it mostly for the plot. And I’m pretty satisfied.
— Trumwill · May 29, 08:57 AM · #
If I wanted soggy Christian parable, I’d watch goddamn Veggietales.
By the way – Lost-tradamus.
— Freddie · May 29, 01:02 PM · #
As someone who also stopped watching in the second season, I’m still kind of amazed the “brainy” show with sci-fi/horror trappings that was supposed to revolutionize television drama, ended up being just another mushy soap opera rooted in vaguely Judeo-Christian mythology.
— Erik Siegrist · May 29, 01:05 PM · #
I think the HBO shows have raised the bar on what we think is possible from entertainment delivered one hour at a time. I don’t know Lost, but I think Trumwill is mostly right — except that shows like The Wire (I loved) or The Sopranos (didn’t care about) have introduced us to the idea that we can watch the 55 hour show of a show with the same awareness of what happened in the third hour that we used to only think about in terms of minutes. It’s a big task, to write/produce something in 2007 and still be responsible for it in 2009.
I also remember a Roger Corman autobio I read maybe 20 years ago. With the advent of VHS people were able to study his films in a way they never had been able to before, noticing all sorts of details that they never would have been able to pick up at the drive-in in 1968. I think that makes the task of keeping the 58 hour consistant with the third hour all that more difficult — in an hour presentation you’ll rely on memory to tell you what happened in the 3rd minute, and the producer may be able to use some slight of hand and you won’t know until it’s all over.
But when you’ve got the whole think on DVD, plus a gang of fellows studying the work like a bunch of talmudic schools, how can you not have a bunch of inconsistancies?
And also, in The Converstations, Walter Murch gives a hierarchy of considerations for making a cut, and rates “how it feels” at being 51% of the equation. In other words, even if the cut contradicts all other considerations — eye movement, continuity, axis, etc — the “feel” will trump all of them.
Except that “feel” is illusive. It can’t be id’d & docuemented the way that rest of the considerations can be; and it won’t stand up to the DVD rewind.
But mostly I’m really excited by the idea of 12, 24, 50, 100, 200 hour cinematic forms. The 2 hour standard is mostly about how long people can go without eating/bathroom breaks, and how often you have to “turn the house” to make a movie house a going concern; and at two hours, most feature movies are really just short stories, even when adapted from novels. As producers and audiences both grow accustomed to the possiblities of longer time frames, we’re getting more and more cinematic works that are novel-like in their scope, and I think that’s pretty cool, even when they don’t quite work!
— Tony Comstock · May 29, 01:10 PM · #
Trumwill is a bit too generous, but I’m certainly closer to him than I am to Peter.
The ending is pretty obviously modeled after The Last Battle in The Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis does it better, in part because he wasn’t allergic to dogma like many are today – I don’t want to be forced to believe anything, about anything! – which leads to the “generic spirtualism” that Peter rightfully laments. [They should of just gone with Christian Sheppard as Jesus and rolled with it.] Still, some points for the attempt.
The excessive vagueness in some parts is probably an overreaction to the justly criticized “midichlorian scene” in Episode I. The creators and writers are Star Wars fans, and seem concerned that provividing too much information about something can cheapen a mystery rather than suitably resolving it.
“If I wanted soggy Christian parable, I’d watch goddamn Veggietales.”
By the by – this comment makes no sense.
— Matthew · May 29, 01:22 PM · #
Weren’t they just lamenting “generic spiritualism” over at First Things?
— Tony Comstock · May 29, 01:33 PM · #
“But when you’ve got the whole think on DVD, plus a gang of fellows studying the work like a bunch of talmudic schools, how can you not have a bunch of inconsistancies?”
By planning out where your story is going from the beginning, rather than making it up as you go along?
There are plenty of narrative forms that manage to stay consistent despite their complexity. There’s no reason, save laziness or arrogance, why a TV series can’t do the same.
— Erik Siegrist · May 29, 01:35 PM · #
“There are plenty of narrative forms that manage to stay consistent despite their complexity. There’s no reason, save laziness or arrogance, why a TV series can’t do the same.”
This is so (willfully?) ignorant of how television is made one hardly knows where to start, so I’ll simply say that “laziness or arrogance” are but one of a 1000 reasons why something produced in 2006 might jam up with what is being produced in 2009.
— Tony Comstock · May 29, 02:08 PM · #
And again, going back to Murch/The Conversations, one of the things he specifically addresses is the fact that unlike a read of a book, a movie audience can “turn back the pages” to check what they’re seeing on the screen at one moment against what they saw one minute, two minutes or two hours earlier, and how an editor can use that to the movie’s the audience’s benefit.
But no doubt that’s “laziness and arrogance” on Murch’s part, right?
— Tony Comstock · May 29, 02:23 PM · #
Sure it does-the world is full of shitty Christian allegory (and faux intellectual discussion of same like yours). If I wanted that, I’d watch the kind that’s aware it’s juvenile, thanks.
— Freddie · May 29, 04:11 PM · #
Cuse & Lindelhof have been saying since S3 that this was about the characters more than it was about the mythology, so that the show ended the way it did isn’t any surprise.
NB: I liked the mythology as well, and as Matthew, I think they were avoiding a midichlorian resolution. Did they go far the other way? Maybe. But it’s not as if we didn’t get any answers to the show’s mythological questions.
— Chris · May 29, 04:30 PM · #
I mostly agree with your analysis. People really are too kind to the show; it promised tons and delivered soupy bleep. But. But—you saw through the show halfway through the first season?????? I’m trying to be generous (repeatedly erasing what I write, trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, etc.), but I don’t believe you. At the end of season two they rolled out The Lost Experience and it had tons of bleep about the Hanso Foundation and clues about stuff; they also had several interviews saying that they had everything planned out, etc; and season three was perhaps the best season to air. I believed until a couple episodes into season four that they had their bleep together and they knew where they were going. Then I gave up and decided I would watch because my wife liked the show and because I was already invested. But I knew they wouldn’t make good after that. But that was after episode three or four of season four. I really don’t know how you could watch a few episodes of season one and say, “Na, they’re not going to deliver on this.” You knew bleep at that moment. Bleep! And yet somehow you knew?! Maybe I’m missing something…but…. I feel more like you missed something that was looking like it was going to be big. I really don’t think you are as prescient as Krugman or Roubini.
— Gerry · May 29, 05:08 PM · #
Tony, I appreciate that you must have read Ondaatje’s book on Murch fairly recently and that it’s had a big impact on you, but trying to compare Murch’s philosophy of editing to Lost’s plot inconsistencies doesn’t even rise to the level of grasping at straws. It’s grasping at discarded paper straw wrappers.
Murch understands the value of using footage beyond its original intention — throwaway moments and outtakes that can be re-purposed and turned into something greater. That’s basically the complete opposite of what Lost did on a plot level. Lost didn’t look back at a throwaway line of dialogue from Season Two and turn it into a major bit of foreshadowing about a key element of Season Six; it took what were presented as major bits of foreshadowing from Season Two and chucked them in the bin, not even attempting to have them pay off.
I stand by my description of that as lazy or arrogant. The “realities” of episodic TV shows — multiple writers working semi-independently, forced casting changes, budget constraints etc etc — are no excuse for those kinds of lapses. To pick one random example off the top of my head, Babylon Five had to deal with a lot more behind-the-scenes crap than Lost ever did, and still managed to stay far more consistent. Hell, one of the reasons shows have producers and show runners at all is to avoid exactly those messes and keep some sense of focus.
I guess you can credit Lindelof and Cuse for brazening through exactly such a mess and still coming out the other side with an audience. But to try and claim after the fact that it’s what they meant to do all along, that it was intentional… that’s nonsense.
— Erik Siegrist · May 29, 08:48 PM · #
Tony, you are simply underestimating the importance of answers for Lost’s narrative. These aren’t incidental facts which a skillful show pleasantly wraps up later on and which are mildly annoying when left hanging. They aren’t even the clumsy retconning of inconvenient narrative history. Lost repeatedly and blatantly had its core narrative driven by characters acting in ways that made no sense except if they knew something the viewer didn’t. This belief that there was some deeper logic is all that made the characters’ actions even remotely intelligible—see, among many many other examples, the Others with Walt or Ben and Widmore. Furthermore, the show (as well as the show’s producers) actively encouraged the belief that information explicating this logic would be forthcoming in the future. Therefore, either the show owed us at least some answers and thus the finale sucked, or the show didn’t owe us answers and therefore the entire show sucked because its entire cast was constantly acting like irrational, arbitrary madmen.
In short, you can’t argue that a consistent explanation is unrealistic in defense of a show whose entire raison d’etre is the promise of consistency.
— salacious · May 29, 11:42 PM · #
“I guess you can credit Lindelof and Cuse for brazening through exactly such a mess and still coming out the other side with an audience. But to try and claim after the fact that it’s what they meant to do all along, that it was intentional… that’s nonsense.”
I never claimed it was intentional, and in fact explicitly disavowed knowing anything about Lost. What I’m interested in is the challanges adn opportunities of extremely long-form cinema, and how that plays against the sort of fandom that technology makes possible. The fact that Lindelof and Cuse “came out the other side with an audience” suggests that they got the “feel” right, even if they got everything else wrong.
“In short, you can’t argue that a consistent explanation is unrealistic in defense of a show whose entire raison d’etre is the promise of consistency.”
But that’s not what I’m arguing at all. I’m merely observing that it’s a lot harder to maintain the appearance of consistency over a 5 year 100 hour narrative, both because of the form itself and because of the degree of scrutiny the form is subjected to.
I don’t think that scrutiny is a bad thing, it’s just a fact; like being able to put on your own Roger Corman weekend marathon and notice that he used the same stock footage over and over again. Does that ruin the movies? Well maybe in some ways, but in other ways it makes Corman seem that much more brilliant. Whether you want to apply the same to Lost/Lindelof and Cuse is your call. I don’t care either way.
— Tony Comstock · May 30, 12:48 AM · #
I think the idea of planning where your story will end – especially with so many elements – is alien not only to how television works, but to how any longer-form storytelling works – unless you’re Mickey Spillane or Agatha Christie. One can create organic and satisfying endings without planning them. If your narrative universe is coherently ordered and fully enough imagined, you can point things in the right direction, and endings can be fashioned. The thing that put me off of Lost fairly early on was that the ordering principle of the narrative seemed, from the beginning, to be a kind of plot-technology, a principle of movement for its own sake. The mysteries seemed transparently mechanistic, contrived, and, thus, manipulative. I felt like some carny was trying to sell me on watching his ingenious contraption long enough for him to run out for a corn dog.
— Matt Feeney · May 30, 02:16 AM · #
“I felt like some carny was trying to sell me on watching his ingenious contraption long enough for him to run out for a corn dog.”
This is the real problem. It used to be coke and hookers; now it’s a corn dog. :-/
— Tony Comstock · May 30, 10:29 PM · #
if I wanted soggy Christian parable, I’d watch goddamn Veggietalesd
— clothing store · May 31, 02:47 AM · #
“Sure it does-the world is full of shitty Christian allegory (and faux intellectual discussion of same like yours). If I wanted that, I’d watch the kind that’s aware it’s juvenile, thanks.”
Lost is not a Christian allegory.
— Matthew · May 31, 03:23 AM · #
Tony,
I, too, am interested in the possibilities of long-form cinematic storytelling that increasingly seem to be opening up on TV. And maybe that’s why I was so frustrated with Lost. Abrams, Cuse, and Lindelof found an audience for multi-year, incredibly complex narrative — and they wasted not only the time of many of the fans, but the opportunity to do something really innovative.
But yes, you’re right that the form makes planning these things incredibly difficult. It’s not just the format — it’s the culture and business of TV writing and production, both of which prize moment-to-moment attention grabs over anything that truly tests an audience.
One of the ways that HBO gets around this is by guaranteeing that every show they order gets to play out a full season. And in many (maybe most?) cases, the seasons are finished in their entirety before the first episode is aired. So David Simon gets to craft each season as a complete work. Network TV producers don’t have that option. I seem to recall one of the guys who writes 24 saying that they’re usually only thinking 2-3 episodes ahead (the first season, IIRC, they planned through episode 8 up front and then sorta winged it from there). Not sure what the AMC/FX model is (I suspect it’s more like HBO’s), but HBO’s business practices end up allowing for significantly greater authorial control and planning than any network TV producer typically gets.
That said, Lost‘s producers brokered themselves an end point… and huge budgets and far more creative freedom than most network TV creators have. But, as with their audience, they wasted it all on cheesy psuedo-spiritual sentimentality. Ugh.
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— fairy · Jun 1, 01:17 PM · #
“HBO’s business practices end up allowing”
This, of course, gets at the very heart of my most beloved interest: how underpinning socio-economic conditions dictate creative outcomes.
— Tony Comstock · Jun 1, 02:55 PM · #