Lost finale.
May. 26th, 2010 08:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
whathoMy brother and I agreed it was the worst ending we'd ever seen to anything ever, though to be fair we've never seen Crossroads. Mostly I'm glad I went off Lost back in series 5, and also on occasion in series 2, 3 and 4, 'cause I really wasn't expecting anything pleasing. But I do kind of feel it owed ME more. Me specifically. I've never watched a lengthy US series all the way through before as it was being produced (aside from LA Law, but I was kind of young and not hugely engaged with it at the time; otherwise I've done some Star Treks and M*A*S*H and Bilko, but years after they first aired), so Lost should've been setting an example. It set a TERRIBLE example. It's like it didn't care about me specifically at all. Now I shall punish it by never watching a lengthy US series again.
There were a couple of bits I liked. I don't recall them offhand. No, to be fair, there was something about their pleasure at all being back together after what they'd been through (I particularly liked Jin's grinning beautifully at Sawyer, who was baffled) and Boone was in it and as a viewer it was nice to see most of the main cast reunited except for quite a few who were quietly not mentioned, and I liked that Hurley got to be Number 1 and that everyone else's worst day ever was the best day in Ben's entire life. But mostly it was all completely undermined by their being reunited in a big glowy sentimental afterlife thing rather than in an alternate reality, a plotline that made some degree of sense until they chose to jettison it in favour of magic (I really miss physics) and by about 3% of the various drifting plot-strands' actually being concluded, and by Jack. Jack was on the screen so much. It was a grave error. There was a fight on a cliff between Jack and the monster that was so boring I found it quite hard to look at the screen.
It's vaguely sad that Lost turned out to be a collection of narrative cul-de-sacs and I'm sorry they never hired an editor and that their writers couldn't really be bothered to end their story properly and decided to blind us with a shiny light instead in the hope that we wouldn't notice, and quite a lot of the internet hasn't, which is odd. I'm impressed at how obsolete they managed to render much of their series in just one episode, particularly everything to do with time-travel, which was the whole of season 5. That made sense if it led to the creation of an alternate reality in which we could explore such questions as what happens if you destroy the island, but Lost cares little for sense. I like that. It's daring. And I like that no true purpose was ever established, because yes maybe they saved the world or what have you but we don't really know because we never got to see what happened in the wider world if the island was destroyed. And I like that Lost is excusing itself by going 'It's all about the characters! Don't you care about characters, you imagination-free answer-begging soulless little oddball?' as though giving everyone a nice heterosexual relationship and shooing them into a very stereotypical symbol of afterlife and ruining their development and motivation and all that by having a plotline that makes no sense is the essence of good characterisation, and as though they never wanted to be a properly plotted mystery show in the first place, why would you think that, what did we ever do to suggest such a thing?
I'm going to watch quite a lot of Mythbusters now. I feel it will cleanse my palate. They know what to do with C4.
There were a couple of bits I liked. I don't recall them offhand. No, to be fair, there was something about their pleasure at all being back together after what they'd been through (I particularly liked Jin's grinning beautifully at Sawyer, who was baffled) and Boone was in it and as a viewer it was nice to see most of the main cast reunited except for quite a few who were quietly not mentioned, and I liked that Hurley got to be Number 1 and that everyone else's worst day ever was the best day in Ben's entire life. But mostly it was all completely undermined by their being reunited in a big glowy sentimental afterlife thing rather than in an alternate reality, a plotline that made some degree of sense until they chose to jettison it in favour of magic (I really miss physics) and by about 3% of the various drifting plot-strands' actually being concluded, and by Jack. Jack was on the screen so much. It was a grave error. There was a fight on a cliff between Jack and the monster that was so boring I found it quite hard to look at the screen.
It's vaguely sad that Lost turned out to be a collection of narrative cul-de-sacs and I'm sorry they never hired an editor and that their writers couldn't really be bothered to end their story properly and decided to blind us with a shiny light instead in the hope that we wouldn't notice, and quite a lot of the internet hasn't, which is odd. I'm impressed at how obsolete they managed to render much of their series in just one episode, particularly everything to do with time-travel, which was the whole of season 5. That made sense if it led to the creation of an alternate reality in which we could explore such questions as what happens if you destroy the island, but Lost cares little for sense. I like that. It's daring. And I like that no true purpose was ever established, because yes maybe they saved the world or what have you but we don't really know because we never got to see what happened in the wider world if the island was destroyed. And I like that Lost is excusing itself by going 'It's all about the characters! Don't you care about characters, you imagination-free answer-begging soulless little oddball?' as though giving everyone a nice heterosexual relationship and shooing them into a very stereotypical symbol of afterlife and ruining their development and motivation and all that by having a plotline that makes no sense is the essence of good characterisation, and as though they never wanted to be a properly plotted mystery show in the first place, why would you think that, what did we ever do to suggest such a thing?
I'm going to watch quite a lot of Mythbusters now. I feel it will cleanse my palate. They know what to do with C4.
