Lost about L O S T

Before I start, I will be discussing Lost spoilers. If you plan on watching it, stop reading, because I'd feel like a right ass if I ruined it for you.

I finished Lost about 2 weeks ago. I haven't said anything much about it because I wanted to let it marinate. All 6 seasons in about a month. That's a ton of TV: 121 episodes at about 42 minutes each. There was good and bad to watching Lost like this. I could recall things that happened in prior seasons pretty easily. But I didn't give myself time to fully process each episode with a week's worth of reflection. This kept me from forming too many of my own theories; instead, I just processed what I saw. Now, that's not to say I didn't wonder about mysteries and twists. I just figured there was a master plan. How naive!

I'm going to flashback now, to a time when I was new to UNCW and Creative Writing. I was sitting in CRW 207, Intro to Fiction. On the first day, the TA, Tim, gave us a couple of rules: No killing, no dreams. The latter was about the cheesy/cliche/horrible/misleading/amateur "it was all a dream" trash. Just for emphasis, I'm going to repeat a few things. On my FIRST day of INTRO to Fiction, I was taught not to deceive my audience. Before I even put pen to paper for my first story, this is what I heard. Flash forward to a day or so after I finished. Imagine my dismay, after I got over the emotional high of the finale, when I realized what Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse had done. If I had followed the series from the start, I'd have been angry. Because what they did equates to waking up at the end of it all, and everything being OK. It's one of the cheapest tactics in storytelling. But they did it masterfully. Up until the reveal of what was actually going on at the church, Cuse and Lindelof were manipulating our emotions by showing us what these lives could've been if they hadn't crashed over the island. That first mega-episode of season 6 broke my heart. A lot. It hurt me to see John Locke again, but confined to that damn wheelchair. And that's what a lot of the flash sideways was, but never again to the same effect as that first episode. I wish I had recognized what they were doing while it was happening, but alas.

What gets me about the way it ended, was the way Cuse and Lindelof handled it. How did they handle it? Like dicks. They were smug about the lack of answers, about the mysteries left wide open. They implied the fans were stupid to have expected reveals. Excuse me? I was stupid for thinking that after you spent an entire season talking about how special Walt was that you might tell us what that was all about? We had some crazy guy screaming at Claire that she was the only one who could raise her baby. And then it's promptly forgotten a few seasons later. It just doesn't seem right to me to introduce mystery after mystery after mystery, and then scoff when the audience expects answers. And I don't need concrete explanations. I don't want things spelled out. That's one of the reasons I loved Inception: Chris Nolan didn't have to explain why certain rules existed, or why they could be broken, or how different levels worked. He gave us just enough to let us know that he knew. But these guys threw twist after twist after surprise after surprise with no real plan or over-arching theme or anything that resembles how you should go about something this intricate. Ever since I got over how rad lightsabers are, this has been my major critique of every last Star Wars movie: Lucas never planned things out. He made it up as he went, and Lost followed suit. Difference being, Lost's creators saw the nerd-rage focused at George once we wised up to the fact that he's a terrible writer and storyteller. And the thing is, they had time to figure all this out. By the middle of season 3, they'd been given an end date. They knew how many more shows they had left. But instead of looking back at the past seasons, at all the things they introduced, and seeing how they tie in together, and what ought to be explained and what left a mystery, they just kept on making it up as they went. (Oh, I don't in any way buy that they planned out the bodies in the cave. Especially since when Jack finds them in season 1, he says the decay on the clothes is somewhere around 40-50 years. When they flashback to that episode in season 6, they conveniently left that dialogue out.)

Good, I got the super-negative out of the way first. Mostly, anyways. I can't guarantee I won't spin-off into a long-winded rant about Jacob being an idiot without a plan or Ben being a better character without Jacob existing, or about how they just threw the whole science vs. faith out there, with nothing to really say about it, or how Sun told Claire a mother would never leave her child and promptly LEAVES HER CHILD and instead of knocking sense into her husband so he raises their daughter, lets him die with her. Ahem. For the first bunch of seasons, I want to say 1-3, character was ballin'. Between Sun and Jin's developments, Locke vs. Jack, the development of the Others, there was a ton to be excited about. Season 4 did some cool things, and had one of the greatest episodes in The Constant.

Season 5 introduced time travel, and I thought they handled it well. Daniel Faraday explained the rules to us, without going into the mystery of how the island was doing it, and it worked. The island all over time was rad, even if why it moved didn't fit with that (or why Jin was somehow within range but the helicopter wasn't). What confused me about it, though, was why Hurley thought to "fix" The Empire Strikes Back. Of all the movies needing improvement, that is one at the bottom of my list. If anything, fix Return of the Jedi. Regardless, they handled it well, and the idea that hopping through the timestream could kill you was a nice touch.

Obviously, I've got problems with the mystery aspect of the show. I stand by that I don't need my hand held, or everything explained. That sort of thing would've ruined the show. Just like too few answers ruined the show. It hurts to type that. But that's just the truth. The way the series ended keeps it from being great. I want to love the intrigue. I want to wonder about the mystery. But the ending said none of that matters. The ending said this is a show about characters, when in fact, only one character developed past where we met them. Sawyer in season 6 may as well have been Sawyer in season 1. Not necessarily a bad thing, until you remember the character he was in season 5. Kate was never allowed to be anything more than a reason for Jack and Sawyer to fight. Sayid just killed people, and loved Nadia (don't get me started on Shannon being with Sayid in the church). It's frustrating.

That one word describes my feelings on Lost: frustrating. It wouldn't have taken much. Every time these guys got together to plan out a season, come up with a few explanations. They don't need to be in the show, but knowing them informs your writing. But they didn't, and the show ended how it did. To hide their problems, they used the emotional pull of a reunion. And it worked. I cried. I was so glad to see everyone together again, even if it didn't make sense. When I stopped to look back at it, there were too many glaring problems. I want to love the show, and I think I can love about half of it. When I rewatch it, it'll be with a smarter eye and lowered expectations.