SPOILER ALERT ---
SPOILER ALERT ---
SPOILER ALERT ---
SPOILER ALERT ---
SPOILER ALERT ---
if you haven't seen the finale of LOST yet, stop reading NOW. if you keep reading, it's your own dang fault cause this whole blog is about it. but when you do watch it, please come back and read.
and now, if you want to read more, just scroll past the only xkcd comic i could find that is somewhat relevant.
they're all dead. none of the drama means anything or makes any sort of sense because it's all just some sort of purgatory-ish daydream as they all cross the river styx to the afterlife.
here is an excerpt from one of my blogs titled "[I'm] LOST" from Thursday, March 4 2010:
"when LOST ends, it's going to be the biggest letdown ever. the collective sucking sound you will hear at that moment will be the public reeling from the shock that the story that they've spent countless hours speculating, formulating theories, and reading fan blogs about will have been for something so stupid. remember when seinfeld ended with what turned out to be essentially a clips episode? i'm talking ten times as much of a letdown as that...
...let me spell it out for you. THEY'RE JUST MAKING IT UP AS THEY GO ALONG."
so now with that being said, we come to the next order of business...
I TOLD YOU SO!!!!!!!!
so it turns out that LOST wasn't a sci-fi drama afterall. nope. all of us 18-34 year old male audience members have been suckered into the biggest prime time soap opera ever. there is no elaborate plot that twists and turns and finally comes together in the end. everybody said that the writers knew where they were going the whole time. well, it turns out they did. except they didn't have a plan on how to resolve all the unanswered questions. no, their pre-meditation was about how they were going to bait and switch us with the biggest crock on an ending they could think of. seriously, the whole "they're all dead but don't know it" was the first crackpot theory before everyone started having their own crackpot theories.
and ya know what? i'm not pissed at the writers. they pulled off a genius scam. they created a series that just made up random plot lines as they went along to keep ratings up without any forethought about bring it all together except for the cop-out "They're-All-Dead" trump card. they were creating questions all the way until the end. we never found out exactly what the light was, how it all worked, why a literal "cork" held it in, the sideways flashes, etc...
no, i don't blame the creators at all. they cashed in. they took all the intellectual sci-fi braniacs for a ride. how many of you spent hours on fan sites trying to find clues? how many spent hours trying to figure out what it all meant, the unifying theory to the LOST universe only to find out that it meant absolutely nothing. and the secret ending that nobody could figure out was the sort of obvious plot twist you'd see in a disney sitcom...well, ABC is owned by disney, so i guess that makes sense.
i mean seriously, you know you're lazy when you have a number 1 show for 6 years and your finale is borrowed from an M. Night Shymalan movie.
now don't get me wrong. i'm not a hater. i watched the show religiously. it was entertaining. they definitely knew how to leave you wanting more. but so does Days of Our Lives. that doesn't mean it's great writing. it only means they make stuff up to get people's attention. the standing joke about soap operas is that they make up ridiculous plot twists to keep people coming back.
"oh my gosh, she has a long lost brother! and she's been dating him!"
"i thought he died two years ago, but really he was kidnapped!"
"stefano is actually....HER FATHER!!"
the only reason i have an axe to grind is because so many people out there are completely in awe of how complex the storyline is. at a certain point it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. if a complex storyline equals awesome ending, then the more complicated a show is, then the ending's awesome-ness must be in direct proportion to how ridiculously complex it gets. while Heroes gets canceled because no one can follow the time traveling, LOST maintains its status as #1 with not on time traveling, but also with a completely alternate reality.
i saw a rather philosphical post today about the ending that said "we're all dead now. you just have to touch the right person and then you realize you lived on an Island with them at some point."
seriously? that is the biggest load of BEE-ESS i've ever heard. give me the instruction manual to assemble a cheap piece of IKEA furniture and i can put together some sort of reflective quote about "picking up the pieces of our broken life and making them into something great" or something like that.
and i can already hear one of the arguments against me. the writers have been quoted as saying that the details don't matter. they pointed to star wars:
"Take "Star Wars," for example. When the Force was a more ambiguous notion, it was more satisfying than when George Lucas tried to explain it as particles in the blood stream of a Jedi."
are they trying to say that because george lucas left out a few facts that it's some sort of a parallel for the black hole of answers that is LOST?? i mean, star wars was basically an inter-galactic civil war. LOST didn't even try to explain what the heck the island was, what the heck the light was, among about 1,000 other questions. a good story ties up all the loose ends in the end. they just ignored them and covered it up by saying, "hey, guess what....they're all dead. that other stuff about hatches and the others and alternate realities - ya, that didn't happen and we're not going to explain any of it because, well, we just made it up." it's like when a couple kids are playing basketball, one kid fouls the other, and when called on it, they just say it's their ball and they're going home.
but again, i give them kudos for cashing in and being such a success. they've written many more hit shows than i have. i just have a blog.
p.s. major props to @nathantbass for completely calling Jack sacrificing himself and Hurley taking over as the protector.
P.S. my buddy peanut is a LOST fanatic and we disagree on how stupid the ending was. he'll be posting his assessment shortly at http://lookingforlike.blogspot.com/
SPOILER ALERT ---
SPOILER ALERT ---
SPOILER ALERT ---
SPOILER ALERT ---
if you haven't seen the finale of LOST yet, stop reading NOW. if you keep reading, it's your own dang fault cause this whole blog is about it. but when you do watch it, please come back and read.
and now, if you want to read more, just scroll past the only xkcd comic i could find that is somewhat relevant.
they're all dead. none of the drama means anything or makes any sort of sense because it's all just some sort of purgatory-ish daydream as they all cross the river styx to the afterlife.
here is an excerpt from one of my blogs titled "[I'm] LOST" from Thursday, March 4 2010:
"when LOST ends, it's going to be the biggest letdown ever. the collective sucking sound you will hear at that moment will be the public reeling from the shock that the story that they've spent countless hours speculating, formulating theories, and reading fan blogs about will have been for something so stupid. remember when seinfeld ended with what turned out to be essentially a clips episode? i'm talking ten times as much of a letdown as that...
...let me spell it out for you. THEY'RE JUST MAKING IT UP AS THEY GO ALONG."
so now with that being said, we come to the next order of business...
I TOLD YOU SO!!!!!!!!
so it turns out that LOST wasn't a sci-fi drama afterall. nope. all of us 18-34 year old male audience members have been suckered into the biggest prime time soap opera ever. there is no elaborate plot that twists and turns and finally comes together in the end. everybody said that the writers knew where they were going the whole time. well, it turns out they did. except they didn't have a plan on how to resolve all the unanswered questions. no, their pre-meditation was about how they were going to bait and switch us with the biggest crock on an ending they could think of. seriously, the whole "they're all dead but don't know it" was the first crackpot theory before everyone started having their own crackpot theories.
and ya know what? i'm not pissed at the writers. they pulled off a genius scam. they created a series that just made up random plot lines as they went along to keep ratings up without any forethought about bring it all together except for the cop-out "They're-All-Dead" trump card. they were creating questions all the way until the end. we never found out exactly what the light was, how it all worked, why a literal "cork" held it in, the sideways flashes, etc...
no, i don't blame the creators at all. they cashed in. they took all the intellectual sci-fi braniacs for a ride. how many of you spent hours on fan sites trying to find clues? how many spent hours trying to figure out what it all meant, the unifying theory to the LOST universe only to find out that it meant absolutely nothing. and the secret ending that nobody could figure out was the sort of obvious plot twist you'd see in a disney sitcom...well, ABC is owned by disney, so i guess that makes sense.
i mean seriously, you know you're lazy when you have a number 1 show for 6 years and your finale is borrowed from an M. Night Shymalan movie.
now don't get me wrong. i'm not a hater. i watched the show religiously. it was entertaining. they definitely knew how to leave you wanting more. but so does Days of Our Lives. that doesn't mean it's great writing. it only means they make stuff up to get people's attention. the standing joke about soap operas is that they make up ridiculous plot twists to keep people coming back.
"oh my gosh, she has a long lost brother! and she's been dating him!"
"i thought he died two years ago, but really he was kidnapped!"
"stefano is actually....HER FATHER!!"
the only reason i have an axe to grind is because so many people out there are completely in awe of how complex the storyline is. at a certain point it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. if a complex storyline equals awesome ending, then the more complicated a show is, then the ending's awesome-ness must be in direct proportion to how ridiculously complex it gets. while Heroes gets canceled because no one can follow the time traveling, LOST maintains its status as #1 with not on time traveling, but also with a completely alternate reality.
i saw a rather philosphical post today about the ending that said "we're all dead now. you just have to touch the right person and then you realize you lived on an Island with them at some point."
seriously? that is the biggest load of BEE-ESS i've ever heard. give me the instruction manual to assemble a cheap piece of IKEA furniture and i can put together some sort of reflective quote about "picking up the pieces of our broken life and making them into something great" or something like that.
and i can already hear one of the arguments against me. the writers have been quoted as saying that the details don't matter. they pointed to star wars:
"Take "Star Wars," for example. When the Force was a more ambiguous notion, it was more satisfying than when George Lucas tried to explain it as particles in the blood stream of a Jedi."
are they trying to say that because george lucas left out a few facts that it's some sort of a parallel for the black hole of answers that is LOST?? i mean, star wars was basically an inter-galactic civil war. LOST didn't even try to explain what the heck the island was, what the heck the light was, among about 1,000 other questions. a good story ties up all the loose ends in the end. they just ignored them and covered it up by saying, "hey, guess what....they're all dead. that other stuff about hatches and the others and alternate realities - ya, that didn't happen and we're not going to explain any of it because, well, we just made it up." it's like when a couple kids are playing basketball, one kid fouls the other, and when called on it, they just say it's their ball and they're going home.
but again, i give them kudos for cashing in and being such a success. they've written many more hit shows than i have. i just have a blog.
p.s. major props to @nathantbass for completely calling Jack sacrificing himself and Hurley taking over as the protector.
P.S. my buddy peanut is a LOST fanatic and we disagree on how stupid the ending was. he'll be posting his assessment shortly at http://lookingforlike.blogspot.com/
7 comments:
It's hard for me to agree with you more. There are so many unanswered questions, though, even in the explanation we did get. How exactly did Ben and Juliet figure into the final scenes? And, what does Daniel Widmore have to do with this? What was up with Frank Lapidas? Richard? And on, and on, and on...
Sadly, even the cop-out is unsatisfying, even for those of us accepted all along that it was the only possible explanation.
If you were expecting Damon and carlin to wrap it up in a nice neat package for you at the end I think you didn't truely understand the show in the first place. I read a blog from a radio show host. I don't agree with everything but this is what he had to say....
http://www.whoradio.com/cc-common/mainheadlines3.html?feed=150515&article=7153394
*Carlton ...iphones
I think you are mistaken with the whole 'they were dead all along' thing. I think that everything we saw the entire series actually happened. But this season, the whole 'sideways' flashes weren't sideways. In a way, they were future flashes. All of that stuff happened after everyone died. Kate, Sawyer, Claire, Miles, Richard and Lapidis all made it off of the island and finished their lives. We don't know how long (or short) they lived after that time, but we know they escaped. This is hinted at when Kate tells Jack (when he finally remembers) that she has missed him for a long time. He died on the island; meanwhile, she escaped and lived her life. I like to think that she lived with Clair and helped her raise Aaron.
Hurley and Ben lived on the island with Hurley in charge. Thats made clear when they exchange words outside of the church/temple place that they were good #1 and #2's. Its possible that these two lived an extra long time--centuries even.
So after everyone died, they all kind of started their lives over in this purgatory where nothing on the island ever happened, even from centuries before with Jacob and his brother. They were able to live their lives free of the island, Jacob and his influence. However, they were all supposed to eventually find each other, connect and remember. This happened, with Jack being the last to do so. They all went to the church/temple to move forward into the afterlife together.
This is also a good article to read. It was supposedly written by a guy named Greg who works for Bad Robot, JJ Abrams production company. I think it is accurate, and I also think it provides some great insight.
http://forum.lostpedia.com/someone-bad-robots-take-finale-t59261.html
I don't know you, but I read and value your opinion.
The only thing I want to do is offer a different view on the actual meaning of the show, along the lines of Katie McNeil's post.
Everything on the island actually happened, but the sideways reality was a future "purgatory." When Christian said they all died, some before and some after, he was referring to how some of them died early on the island, and then some had died later on the island.
Also, when Hurley tells Ben he was a "good number two" and Ben returns with "you were a good number one," it refers to their time on the island after Jack died, in which they protected the island together.
So in my opinion, the island and all its mysteries was real, they just didn't resolve many loose ends.
thanks for the comments everybody. katie and mr./ms. anonymous, you bring up some very good points. i'll concede that the story was left open enough for the interpretation that the island events were real. but if so, then that creates the problem of explaining those real events. and christian, i don't need it wrapped up with a bow on it, but maybe if they'd answer at least a couple of the major questions like what the heck the island really is, what is the light, etc., then i'd feel better.
good thoughts all around from everyone though. thanks for reading.
you nailed it
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