Lost (Possible Spoilers)

Maybe the first half? I remember the second half being stellar.

Obviously for me the 6th is the weakest. I like the ending too, but the feeling of pointlessness to the flash sideways will always rub me the wrong way. Funny enough, this season also has one of my favourite episodes, which is Richard's flashback.

Despite the shows flaws, still one of my favourites and no other show has gotten me so invested in the mythology, nor has any show gotten me to come up with my own theories on what's going on. There are tons of imitators, but only one LOST.

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Suspect's Reviews

Just rolled into s5 on a rewatch. Still love this series and it still holds up wonderfully with age. Minor issues here and there but all in all I find the story tight and quite fantastic.

1.5 seasons to go. I hope to finish before the holiday travel kicks in.

I return to this thread shamefacedly to report that I am in the midst of yet another re-watch of Lost. At this point I will just admit that I will never get tired of this show, it never loses its shine, and it is without a doubt my favorite show ever.

This always starts the same way: someone will be at my house, they will state they have never seen the show when I randomly mention it, and they think it is "kind of like Survivor, right?" or something along those lines. I will put the pilot on, and about halfway through they will look over at me and say "Dude...this isn't anything like I thought it would be. I am binging this shit ASAP."

Some people stick with it, some people don't, but I invariably watch the entire damned show again. I am still surprised how many people I run into that not only haven't seen it, but missed the entire cultural zeitgeist surrounding it and really have no idea what it's all about.

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Oh man! Every week after a new episode there would be SO MANY discussions here at the house about WTF just happened, why they answered one question but asked ten more new ones, and what was going to happen next. (We were rarely right in our guesses.)

I own all the DVDs for this but it's currently easier to just stream it somewhere. Time for a rewatch here too! (To be fair, that twist in the final season still pisses me off. PISSES ME OFF. So few shows stick the landing, though, that I'll still rewatch.)

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Hmmm, wifey and I have never seen this and it appears to be on Netflix

The more I watch this, and it has been many times...



A few things didn't work in the show, but the ending works for me. You are talking about the ending, yes?

I meant the whole gist/twist of the final season, and into the ending. NOT COOL, man.



But remember that the ending of Battlestart Galactica also pissed me off.
And the ending of The Sopranos.

So apparently I get pissed off easily with series finales.

no no, you get pissed off by bad/quick/lazy endings. Lost ending was lazy.

No one on the show was lazy in their work ethic, but they had written themselves into a corner with really no other way out - Lindelof didn't/doesn't possess the talent or vision to grapple with the multi-layered nuttiness the show eventually became. Also, the ending we got was superior to any ending that just focused on tying up the mythology at the expense of the character stories, as far as I am concerned. I give tons of credit to the showrunners for just swinging for the fences and taking all sorts of risks and trying so many different ideas out. When you really analyze all the crazy chances they took and choices they made, I don't think there was any way they were going to stick any sort of landing. The show is about a plane crash, after all!

Remember, Damon Lindelof didn't even want to run Lost in the first place - he took the position so he could lobby JJ to get a job on Alias after the stupid island show crashed and burned, only to have the show dumped in his lap when JJ started hanging out with Tom Cruise. Yes, it's all Tom Cruises fault! Damon had several breakdowns by the time he was trying to write episode 7, and the guy totally um, LOST it when the first ratings came in and people not only liked the show, but it was breaking records. Everyone expected it to fail, they were totally making it up as they went along, and if Damon hadn't convinced Carlton Cuse to get on board to help him, the second season would have been about a TV writer that had a nervous breakdown and ended up in an insane asylum playing Connect Four with a bespectacled gentleman that kept repeating numbers over and over.

I mean, thinking about it, I think Desmond is Damon Lindelof, and that guy who left him in the hatch to save the world is JJ Abrams.

As to what @Austruck said:



I think when the show went fully into esoteric genre/sci-fi stuff, it abandoned its chances of keeping things contained in a way that would play out to an ending that would satisfy everyone.

Flawed show for sure, but it's me favorite, so I will die on this hill.

Having said all this, your post does make me want to rewatch and see if it hits differently after X amount of years. The last time I did a rewatch, I was surprised at how early the craziness started (the polar bear, etc.). Somehow I had the memory that those things crept in later than they actually did. So maybe I'll be less harsh with the ending now that my initial shock has had a decade-plus to wear off.

As a side note, the BEST series finale/ending of all time has to be the finale of Six Feet Under. That whole final episode was/is glorious. It is satisfying on multiple levels. Just, you know, if you haven't yet watched it and needed a nudge in that direction.

Looks like I'm gonna have to dig out the ol' DVDs. Nobody's streaming Lost for free ATM. Every so often I am rewarded for spending money on actual DVDs.

Well, for once I've caught the JustWatch.com website not being up to date. Apparently all six seasons of Lost are currently on Netflix. Huzzah!

I think "Lost" is a wonderful show that is very unique, and it clearly inspired later shows like "Alias", "Manifest", etc. but I do think it failed to deliver in the end. There were so many unanswered questions and dropped stories during "Lost" and a lot of it just was not fully understandable. For a show like that, it seemed like it should build to a big pay off, but it just didn't ever happen. So much of it was centered around the construction of a mythology that they never fully realized. I think that's the reason that the finale is so divisive. It's not just that the finale as a singular episode was unsatisfying for many people. It's that that type of show should ideally build to answering some of the questions and pulling together the story in a way that honored what came before it, and imbued it with new meaning that couldn't be reached until the full story had been told, but that never happened with "Lost".

I think Netflix has it, but I am watching it on disc, so haven't really looked around for it.

When you dig into the genesis (see what I did there?) of the show, much of the stuff in the pilot and the first half of season 1 was just sort of randomly thrown in there, as JJ basically said "OK, they crash on the island, there is weird stuff going on, and there is a hatch." and that was all they had to go on. They figured it would get canceled or not picked up at all, so they just sort of went crazy and tossed a bunch of ideas out without much forethought - they didn't even have everyone cast yet.

JJ Abrams famously has this magic mystery box that he bought when he was a kid. I forget the actual numbers, but it was something like 15 bucks for a box that had 40 dollars worth of magic tricks inside. He got it at a magic store and he loved the idea of not knowing what was inside - he said it taught him that mystery is sometimes more valuable and more compelling than knowledge. He has still never opened that box to this day. He had the idea to make a show like this, but never really had a great fit for it until he got the call to come in and "fix" a show that was not coming together for a group of creators at ABC. The network was hostile to the idea in the first place, wanted the next NCIS or Law and Order or whatever, and the people trying to put together whatever the show was (I forget the name of the show and the concept) were failing miserably.

Lost is special because it all comes together in this perfect storm of creative risk-taking: plunging a group of actors, writers, and producers into the ocean and stranding them on an island and saying "we don't think this is going to work at all, so just go crazy and let's see what happens."

Lost was special because it is a show that was about a group of people who had never met being thrust into a situation that saw them all stranded on a mysterious island together: they had to set up a camp, get to know one another, and forge bonds and alliances while exploring and discovering the land around them and the spiritual and human territories within. Those characters were played by a group of actors that had never met who were all suddenly on a mysterious island together: they had to set up camp, get to know one another, and forge bonds and alliances while discovering the land around them and the spiritual and human territories within. I mean...what other show had a setup like that?

Many of the actors are on record saying things like it was the best job they ever had (Terry O'Quinn), it helped evolve them from a girl into a woman (Maggie Grace) or it gave them an eternal bond with the ocean and the island itself (Evangeline Lily, who btw had never acted before in TV or film). Michael Emerson has praised the writing as brilliant and claims he loves the end, especially where Ben ended up.

With a such a big cast shooting in such a relatively remote (from the rest of the world) location, problems were bound to arise. Many actors and crew couldn't stick it out for the long haul, due to either other obligations, health reasons, or their lives falling under duress due to separation from family etc. Harold Perrineau famously didn't care for the direction his character was going, asked for changes to be made, and then was allegedly let go. He still seems to have a chip on his shoulder about this. The showrunners claim it just worked out that his character arc didn't have anywhere else to go, and that the actor that played Walt had a growth spurt that made it impossible for them to preserve the continuity of the show.

The point being, Lost was a ridiculously complex show to produce, took major risks, redefined how TV shows were made as well as the expectations people had for them, and also helped usher in a methodology of show running that flew in the face of the norms of the time. With so much working against it and with all the risks it took, we ended up with one of the most creative and influential shows of all time. Will we even have another show like it?

Disagree.

And btw Alias came out in 2001, which predates Lost by a few years.

I think what many people (myself included after the first time through the show) had trouble coming to grips with, was that the show did start out a show driven primarily by the mythology and mystery, but sort of got lost in its own puzzle box, at least as far as some of the mysteries were concerned. I think the failings in that regard expose the inherent issues with mystery box shows and I understand that perhaps the format can't really ever work perfectly. I also understand why people just wouldn't like shows that lean into this format too heavily.

What I came to realize was that once I embraced the show as a character-driven show, those loose ends with the mythology just didn't matter as much. The character stuff was still very engaging and compelling, and I think the show runners eventually realized that the character arcs, moral lessons and life journey stuff was more important and is what would be remembered after the show was done. That is the stuff that keeps me coming back to watch the show, not the polar bears or the Valenzetti Equation.

I do think they story did build and reveal meaning, but not is a way that can have every little piece fall perfectly into place. I am not sure a mystery box show like that can ever exist. That said, I hope it does some day!

isn’t it kinda lazy to write yourself into a corner, tho? i think so. i mean, make a plan. i wouldn’t eat an elephant without a plan.

This sort of thing is a false dichotomy, if you ask me (as a writer and a reader and a viewer). You can (and should) have a character-driven story that still satisfies on the STORY level. Sure, I loved all those same things about Lost that you did: the characters were fabulous, their backstories made the island story far more interesting and gave it more gravitas (for lack of a better term), and we cared what happened to each of them. DEFINITELY character-driven in all those ways.

But you can't just throw strongly written characters into a nonsense story that never resolves correctly. You want to see resolutions to all the things that plagued them, that perplexed them. You need it. If this were a book series, readers would really get pissed at an ending like that. Once you invest yourself into these characters and this story, you cannot just give up on the story aspects in favor of whatever you're calling character-driven. Character-driven what? STORY.

They need to coexist properly for a full-orbed, satisfying, *complete* series, IMHO.

It's worth a rewatch, though, because it's only in that final season that things just fall off the rails in terms of story. Part of the reason we kept eagerly returning to this show each week, even rerouting other areas of our daily lives to make sure we didn't miss a current episode as soon as it was aired, was to see whether some of our most intriguing questions would be answered. We never really went into each episode thinking the entire series would end *without* those answers.

I'm with @John McClane on this one: it's lazy writing. (Not the characters, the storyline.)

But still, I am rewatching (already on episode 3 of season 1).

Fair, but I also see it as the guy not having the skill or experience to deal with it properly, From all accounts, he worked hiss ass off day and night on the show, which is the opposite of lazy. I think doing something poorly and being lazy aren't the same thing.

Wait only one guy wrote all of Lost? That explains why it’s a mess. Should have had a team of writers. lol

everything i’ve ever read says they knew exactly what their ending was gonna be right from the start. so i stand by what i said: lazy.

No, they had other people writing episodes, but initially Damon got the job of doing the entire season breakdowns dumped in his lap. Later, Cuse came on to help him do it. Not sure how much input the rest of the staff writers had on the over-arching plot, but I am sure they had at least some input. The documentary I watched inferred Damon was the guy who had to take Abrams' hatch idea and come up with what was inside etc. and was the one that concocted all the Dharma Initiative stuff etc.

They come right out and say they thought the show wasn't getting picked up or would get canceled immediately, so they definitely didn't have the ending in mind right away.

The doc is called Letting Go. I will take what they say at face value since they are the ones that made the show. All the evidence points to the show being thought of as a failure from the start, and the network went as far as to fire the guy who greenlit the show at the beginning. I presume they did this before it became a smash hit.

I would be interested to see the info on them knowing the ending from the start and would be curious to see an interview with one of the showrunners where they state that.