Lost (spoilers)

Started by MacGuffin, October 07, 2004, 01:10:26 AM

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socketlevel

ya i'm really surprised by this as well, they're going for the stock answer without looking at the obvious narrative.
the one last hit that spent you...

MacGuffin

ABC clarifies that everyone on LOST was NOT dead the whole show
Source: SciFi Wire

Remember how confusing it was when Jack (Matthew Fox) closed his eye Sunday night at the end of Lost and the series' logo appeared on our TV screens, only to be followed by crash images of Oceanic 815? What the heck was that about?

Were we being told that no one had survived Oceanic 815's original crash landing—and that we'd invested our hearts in a show in which nothing we'd seen over the last six years had ever really happened?

ABC wants us to know—those final images had nothing at all to do with the Lost storyline, the Los Angeles Times reported. The network ran them only to soften the transition from the ending of the series to the news show that followed, and had never considered that any of us would think it related to the actual ending of the show. (Which some of us around here did!)

An ABC spokesperson wrote in an email Tuesday: "The images shown during the end credits of the Lost finale, which included shots of Oceanic 815 on a deserted beach, were not part of the final story but were a visual aid to allow the viewer to decompress before heading into the news."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

ElPandaRoyal

Jesus fucking Christ! They gave us one of the most entertaining TV shows ever, with plenty to discuss if you're into it (good or bad, that's up to each viewer), and people dismiss this saying that they were dead the whole time? Well, this is the kind of shit statement that separates the real fans from those who watched it only because they're network TV junkies.

On the other hand, if they really showed images from the 815 crashed somewhere, well, that's either the ultimate proof that networks are run by idiots who don't understand their own shows, or just a bad, bad idea.
Si

MacGuffin

Disney has officially set Lost: The Final Season for DVD and Blu-ray Disc release on 8/24 (SRP $59.99 and $79.99). The 5-disc set will include original scripted content produced by Damon Lindeloff and Carlton Cuse, bloopers and deleted scenes, audio commentaries, the Lost on Location and Crafting a Final Season featurettes and more. Meanwhile, Disney will also release Lost: The Complete Series on DVD and Blu-ray on 8/24 (SRP $229.99 and $279.99). That will be a 38-disc DVD set and a 36-disc Blu-ray set. Extras will include a full disc of exclusive-to-this-set bonus content (2+ hours) and all of the bonus content from the previous season sets. More details are expected to be announced soon.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Derek

On G4's "Attack Of The Show" today, Michael Emerson described the unaired sequence that will appear on DVD and Blu-ray Aug. 24:

"For those people that want to pony up and buy the complete 'Lost' series, there is a bonus feature, which is, um, you could call it an epilogue. A lost scene. It's a lot. It's 12 or 14 minutes that opens a window onto that gap of unknown time between Hurley becoming number one and the end of the series."
It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.

Sleepless

Quote from: Derek on May 26, 2010, 09:44:45 PM
On G4's "Attack Of The Show" today, Michael Emerson described the unaired sequence that will appear on DVD and Blu-ray Aug. 24:

"For those people that want to pony up and buy the complete 'Lost' series, there is a bonus feature, which is, um, you could call it an epilogue. A lost scene. It's a lot. It's 12 or 14 minutes that opens a window onto that gap of unknown time between Hurley becoming number one and the end of the series."


I am already disappointed that no-one's made a spoof intro sequence for the inevitable Hurley-Ben sit-com spin-off.
He held on. The dolphin and all the rest of its pod turned and swam out to sea, and still he held on. This is it, he thought. Then he remembered that they were air-breathers too. It was going to be all right.

MacGuffin

Dude! Lost's creators explain they actually IMPROVISED!
Source: SciFi Wire

Former Lost producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse are acknowledging that while much of the recently concluded show's mind-bending stories and puzzle-piece arcs were mapped out from day one, other stories and arcs were the result of action-reaction or were simply winged as needed.

"It was a combination of both those things," Cuse said in an exclusive interview. "There was a big, mythic architecture which included a lot of what's in the finale, in terms of where we end the show, that we knew way back in the beginning. And then, before each season, we'd have a writers' mini-camp and spend a month without any pressure of writing other scripts, figuring out the architecture of the upcoming season. That'd sort of take the artists' rendering and turn it into blueprints, and then, during the season, episode by episode, we built the structure. We allowed ourselves a lot of flexibility to change things around as we were doing construction. It was impossible to have everything planned out, and so it was kind of built in stages."

On the phone with Cuse was his writing and producing partner Lindelof. He stressed that while everyone was thinking long-term, they had to do so without being presumptuous. After all, many a show—Lindelof cited Twin Peaks—fizzled out after a wildly successful first season. "We didn't want to be of the mindset in the first season to assume that people would want to watch the show for six years," Lindelof said. "That's a gift that the audience gave us, to be able to do the show as we did. To sit down at episode eight and start to talk about what you're going to do in the second season ... The guys doing FlashForward, for example, were being asked about the second season at the upfront last year. It's good to have a plan, but at the same time the most important plan is making the next episode really good. That's the only job that Carlton and I and everybody else on this show has ever had."

Lindelof added, "Sometimes in order to make the next episode really good you need to have an incredible superstructure and the blueprints that Carlton is referring to, but at the end of day it really wasn't until we negotiated the end date that we could sit down and in a very detailed way say, 'This is exactly what we want to do over the course of the next three years. We know exactly how many episodes we have to do, and we think people will probably watch us for another three years if we're able to execute this.'"

Now that Lost is in the history books, Lindelof is moving on to co-writing the next Star Trek feature. Cuse plans to take a break and then will seek out his next project. Meanwhile, for all the closure and answers the Lost finale provided, it also left many story threads hanging. What the heck was/is the island? Where was Walt, and what powers did he have, anyway? What did the Dharma Initiative actually want? Who built the statue, and why? In other words, there seems to be plenty more story to tell.

Cuse, asked if he'd want to be involved if Lost ever returns in some form, replied, "That's like when they interview boxers at the end of a fight and they say, 'Do you want a rematch?' and the guy is going 'No mas, no mas.' We are so exhausted ... that the only answer we can give you is that we have no plans to do anything else with the Lost franchise after this show. We're not setting it up. We didn't invent a sequel. We have no expectations that we will continue to do anything with the franchise. Right now we are viewing this as the end of our storytelling with Lost."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

polkablues

Dude! Lost's creators point out obvious things that shouldn't need to be pointed out, except that people are often DUMB!
My house, my rules, my coffee

cinemanarchist

My assholeness knows no bounds.

Derek

I like the box set, but those geeky trinkets will get tossed right away.
It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.

©brad

A Disappointed Fan Is Still a Fan
How the creators of Lost seduced and betrayed their viewers.
Emily Nussbaum
Source: NYMag


Just over a week ago, as the Lost finale loomed, the faithful made preparations. We baked "smoke monster" cakes; we watched cats on YouTube explain the plot. But mainly, we read interviews with the creative team of Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof (affectionately known to the online horde as Cuselof or Darlton), the show-runners who had, under creator J. J. Abrams, overseen one of the most interactive TV hits in history, a show designed to be mob-solved, scavenged for symbolism, and adored.

They were preparing us. In each interview, with a mix of humility and defensiveness, they repeated that they had "done the best they could." They had focused on the characters. And we, the viewers, shouldn't expect answers to everything—some we'd learn on DVD, others would never be resolved. So please stop asking about the four-toed statue. Let it go.

This kind of expectation management is, by now, a baseline responsibility of anyone steering a major TV sensation, and it's no easy task. Some (Aaron Sorkin) are driven crazy and write entire television series in response to audience critiques; others (David Chase) push back, brilliantly. But like a lot of genre writers, the Lost creators had always been more-forthcoming figures, warm and reassuring, regularly urging the audience that we, as fans, should trust them, and that we should be patient, that while there was no time to explain right now, if we hung on, all would finally be revealed.

Yet as the seasons passed, Darlton were also clearly unnerved by their most passionate devotees, who were busily compiling databases, freezing images for hints and clues, and generally acting like a particularly deranged, faintly Aspergian breed of forensic detectives. In 2007, Lindelof argued that "the really good critics" were fans at heart. "I find there is a very rare instance where your fan brain is having one reaction and your critical brain is having another. The level at which questions are asked of us is polarizing. You can tell it's personal. If they don't like it, it's like they're offended in a way."

Real fan-hood, in other words, is, at its purest level, love. As in Corinthians, fan-hood is patient, kind, not rude, etc. (It is also not easily angered and it keeps no record of wrongs.) The Fan of Faith is superior to the Fan of Science, and while it's natural to have questions, the ideal viewer should behave less like a nagging critic and more like a soul mate, supportive and committed even when doubts creep in.

At one point, during a New York Times panel on the Thursday night before the finale, Lindelof made this romantic-relationship metaphor explicit. In response to a question about fan disappointment, he described a first date that begins with the wrongheaded question "Are you going to disappoint me?" "Just see how it works out!" said Lindelof, in the voice of the show-slash-date. "If you're going to fall in love with somebody, you have to put aside that fear of disappointment."

Then again, if you build a show to be loved, heartbreak is always a risk. I'm a serious Lost fan—I watched every episode, I recapped the show online for years, I'm one of the fools who combed Egyptology sites to determine whether that damned statue was Tawaret or Subek—and yet I'm also someone who now thinks of the show as a failure. That fact doesn't erase the pleasure I got from Locke's orange-peel grin, but it does change the context. Because like so many, I hung on long after I had doubts: through cage sex, through the successful (but in retrospect nonsensical) time-travel gambit, through those great sequences among the Dharma hippies and into the drippy realm of the last season's alternative-reality time line (a.k.a. the Sideways Universe), in which the characters learned and grew. This wasn't a first date, after all; it was a six-year marriage. You don't just give up.

In the run-up to the finale, Lindelof posted to Twitter, expressing his love for the fans. But he also sent out a message directed at some online video artists I had never heard of: "But Fine Brothers? You shat on the show and that is not cool. I hereby revoke your status as 'fans.' "Lindelof's followers offered support, but there was also this: "I'm as big of a fan as you can be, and I think Fine Brothers couldn't have put it better. A disappointed fan is still a fan."

I spent the afternoon watching the Fine Brothers videos, of course. They were, as it turns out, hilarious: sharp, prickly satires "acted" out by action figures. In each one, characters from Heroes, Twilight, Battlestar Galactica, and other genre hits invaded the Lost universe to make rattled critiques. (In one, Spock simply started screaming, "I refuse to live in a place without logic!") With their South Park–style brass, a few of the satires were more fun to watch than the Season 6 Lost episodes, many of which boil down in my memory to bathetic baseball monologues and such camp lines as "I don't like the way English tastes on my tongue."

To Lindelof, the Fine Brothers weren't fans anymore. To me, their clear agitation and radical engagement with every element of the story meant that they were the most dedicated kind of fans: They cared enough to be pissed off. And who was to blame for that?

What made Lost fail? It's possible Cuselof's story was simply so Byzantine no one in the creative team could connect the dots, even with a two-year head start. It definitely didn't help that the show shifted from a diverse cast to the repeated tableaux of white guys bickering about fate while the female characters were either shot or (worse) congealed into bland love interests. But to me, one central problem—which we had hints of early on, back when the show was still pulling off one masterful structural coup after another—was that the series had become obsessed, in both overt and unconscious ways, with manipulating its own relationship with its fans, alternately evading and reflecting their critiques, and then finally satisfying them in the most condescending possible way, with sentimental sleight-of-hand.

Built as it was from video-game aesthetics, comic-book plots, and science fiction, Lost had always included witty internal acknowledgments of its own geek appeal, including characters who acted as stand-ins for Lost fans. Hurley began the series as an actual character, but he quickly became our avatar: the sci-fi geek, full of Star Wars references, loyal and positive, like Cuselof's ideal. In contrast, Arzt, the wicked fan, was a science teacher full of gripes, but he hilariously blew to bits in season one. Later, we got snarky Miles and Frank Lapidus, an outsider who made bemused remarks about the melodramas around him.

This was fun in the early seasons, when Darlton felt like they were in communion with their audience, but as the show began its final slide, these characters increasingly operated more as venting devices for fan frustrations—a way for the writers to let us know they heard us, but also to joke about logic problems or clichés instead of addressing them. The snarky chorus stood in contrast to the main ensemble, which, with a few exceptions, devolved from archetypal (but layered) characters into action figures, their aims narrowing, like video-game heroes, to a single goal: Find Sun, find Jin, find Claire, return to the island, get off the island.

Then, in the run-up to the final season, Cuselof suddenly inserted a shocking new framing device, a tactic that radically simplified their entire series: the twin dei ex machina of Jacob and the Man in Black. We'd gotten hints of Jacob's existence earlier (who was that man in the cabin? Who??), but Cuselof's reveal went beyond exposing the wizard. It redefined everything we'd watched as a game played by manipulative gods. Jacob smirked and wore Jesus robes. His brother, the Man in Black, was the evil Smoke Monster. While the pair were not named Cuse and Lindelof, it was hard to ignore the resemblance, since Lost's characters—like its fans—had been revealed as the pawns of narrative overseers who spoke in riddles, were hard to trust, and continually reassured them to be patient, the end was near.

Within that endgame, Cuselof introduced the MacGuffin to end all MacGuffins: a glowing pool of embarrassing special effects, unexplainable because, as we learned in another meta line, "every question will just lead to another question."

The peculiar thing about all this was that throughout its seasons, one of Lost's most appealing ambiguities had been that, for all those debates about science versus faith, the show had never been in the camp of credulous trust. It was an island full of con men and women, after all, emotional seducers (from Sawyer to Ben to Nikki and Paolo) who fleeced those who believed in them. John Locke, the show's Man of Faith and its most original character, was wrong again and again, and, in the end, died confused and despairing. His was an uncompromising plot within a show that increasingly pulled its punches, giving once-complex characters sacrificial and heroic outcomes. Jacob himself turned out to be in thrall to a lying, manipulative parent. On Lost, saying "trust me" was a red flag.

And yet, we had to trust Cuselof: That's what a good fan does.

Then came the finale, which amounted to a moving, luminous, tear-inducing, near-total bait-and-switch.

Now, I realize many people enjoyed the finale. The episode was visually lyrical. It was audacious, in its way. It was almost radically crowd-pleasing, designed to be viewed with the fan brain, not the critic brain. With its witty structure, it allowed the creators to download fusillades of old clips: montages that in the literal sense stood in for each character's memories, but which also worked as sentimental flashbacks for fans, reminding us of how much fun it had been to watch Lost itself. Meanwhile, on the island, we endured a series of thrilling but nonsensical unpluggings and then pluggings of a Freudian sinkhole. When the plot and the island stopped shaking, Hurley, the Good Fan, was handed the keys to the donkey wheel, as if he were being trusted to protect the legacy of the show itself.

I don't have a heart of stone: The acting in the otherwise terrible finale was so good that in several cases (the reunion of Sawyer and Juliet) it made the endless romantic pairings desperately poignant instead of numbing. (Although not with Charlotte and Daniel: Lose the skinny tie, dude.)

But when those warm feelings wore off, it was hard to ignore the unsettling message we'd received, which was that nothing in the series had actually mattered. That mysterious island? The one we'd obsessed over for six years? We should remember it, as through a happy mist, as the place where our characters learned to love one another.

As for the Sideways Universe—featuring tweaked variations on each character's story—that was also not important, at least not in any detail. It was a mystical way station, like weak fan fiction with a therapeutic kick. Most of the Sideways stories boiled the survivors' stories down to morals like "Love your family" and "Believe you are a good person," and if we wanted to enjoy the show, we needed to accept these truisms as closure for story arcs rather than Oprah-tinged parodies of them.

Finally, in the last fifteen minutes, the writers—in an emotionally powerful and also mawkishly manipulative turn—gathered our characters in an interfaith church, the antechamber to heaven. There Jack's father, now a loving guide (rather than an abusive drunk), told him, and us, to let go. No wonder it was touching: It was grief therapy directed at us as fans.

The sad thing, really, is that this wave of nostalgia, however powerful it was in the moment, sunk the show it was meant to mourn. Once upon a time, Lost faced outward, toward the world. In its early seasons, it wasn't just dumb, feel-good fun; for all the fantasy trappings, it had resonant, adult themes, ones set in the context of a global community traumatized after a plane crash. Post-9/11, the show spoke, for a while, more thoughtfully (or at least less angrily) than 24 to the moral questions that unsettled many Americans: Why does everyone consider themselves the "good guys"? Is it ever okay to torture? How do we choose, and should we trust, our leaders?

But by the end of its run, Lost, for all its dorm-room chatter about good and evil, had become something different: It was a hit series about the difficulties of finding an ending to a hit series. Cuselof had a deadline for years, which should have allowed them to pace out their puzzle's solutions. Instead, we got cheesy temple vamping and a bereavement Holodeck. It became a show about placating, even sedating, fans, convincing them that, in the absence of anything coherent or challenging, love was enough.

The day after the finale, Lindelof tweeted again, in the soothing cadences of a preacher: "Remember. Let go. Move on." Hey, Lindelof: Done.

Pas

Quote from: ©brad on May 30, 2010, 03:22:05 PM
A Disappointed Fan Is Still a Fan
How the creators of Lost seduced and betrayed their viewers.
Emily Nussbaum
Source: NYMag


the show shifted from a diverse cast to the repeated tableaux of white guys bickering about fate while the female characters were either shot or (worse) congealed into bland love interests.

Ugh... please. So to her Kate is just a housewife. Jin and Sun are white, too.

The rest of the article is good though.

Fernando

Quote from: socketlevel on May 25, 2010, 11:05:43 AM
i don't know why people keep saying that the island was purgatory... the island happened, it's just that in purgatory there is no timeline. this is stated by christian Sheppard directly. also Kate says to jack that she's really missed him, because she escaped the island and lived the rest of her life. so for her the events in purgatory are after the full life she lived. This isn't a subjective device, it was quite clearly laid out.

wow, just saw it again and can't believe how right you are, I never thought the island was purgatory but had my doubts of what it was after the bomb, but as you well say it is laid out so clear that there can't be any room for another interpretation but that the events on the island were very real, my only theory about how everyone lives except juliette after the bomb is that the magnetic fields on the island absorbed the blast and in the meantime it sent everyone to present time.

socketlevel

Quote from: Fernando on May 31, 2010, 10:33:58 AM
Quote from: socketlevel on May 25, 2010, 11:05:43 AM
i don't know why people keep saying that the island was purgatory... the island happened, it's just that in purgatory there is no timeline. this is stated by christian Sheppard directly. also Kate says to jack that she's really missed him, because she escaped the island and lived the rest of her life. so for her the events in purgatory are after the full life she lived. This isn't a subjective device, it was quite clearly laid out.

wow, just saw it again and can't believe how right you are, I never thought the island was purgatory but had my doubts of what it was after the bomb, but as you well say it is laid out so clear that there can't be any room for another interpretation but that the events on the island were very real, my only theory about how everyone lives except Juliette after the bomb is that the magnetic fields on the island absorbed the blast and in the meantime it sent everyone to present time.

good to see you agree, and good theory on Juliette actually, I'd vote for that being the answer to the (non-)explosion.

Another thing to ponder is that Daniel Faraday essentially stood for nothing. the importance of his mission (from his character to his plot importance) is utterly trivialized with the reveal of purgatory.  simply put, he was wrong about everything and convinced pivotal characters to do things that indirectly killed many people.  i kinda like this, in the end he's a nice guy who holds intellectual esteem with incorrect, pseudo-scientific backed up, concepts. Something insightful can be learned from that parable. that a morally good and assertive motivator can still be destructive and incorrect.
the one last hit that spent you...

socketlevel

that box set is kinda cool, but i kinda just want a blu ray set with the smallest box possible. i'm kinda past bells and whistles these days, and dvds/blu rays are bulky. w/e can protect the product and take the least amount of space the better. i do care about bonus material though, i still want all of that.
the one last hit that spent you...