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Lost - The Bad

Posted by The TV Critic on 15 June 2010 | 8 Comments

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Hey everyone,

Here is the report on the "Bad" in Lost as a whole. I will record this as a podcast on the weekend of 19-20 June. You have till then to add your own comments below, send me messages or voicemails to go into the recording. The week after that I will republish the updated mysteries list and we can talk about that. The week after will be a chance to pick out your best moments (and best seasons, episodes, characters etc) and then we will have a final wrap up.

You can find the podcast for "The Good" under the pilot episode of Lost. At this stage I can only add a new podcast if it is connected to a review which is slightly annoying, but never mind. http://www.thetvcritic.org/casts/Lost_The_Good.mp3

Robin (The TV Critic)

 

The Bad

A lack of curiosity

For anyone who has read my reviews, you know I don't like it when people on TV shows don't ask questions. It's my experience in life that people ask relentless questions when they don't understand something. Take someone who turns up to find their train isn't running as expected. Question question question. Moan moan moan. That's life, people chatter. They also like to gossip. They like to speculate. Now I know it wouldn't make for compelling television if an episode of Lost had been entirely centred on Rose, Claire and Hurley eating some fish and mangos and debating who Kate really fancied. But at the same time, a scene like that would have pleased me no end compared to scenes of characters stoically accepting their fate on "crap hole island."

In general though, the Lost characters had an awful lot of serious stuff to be curious about. Now ignore time travel and levitating smoke. Just go back to basic survival. Imagine you are stranded on a desert island and no one comes to rescue you. I think it's fair to say that a certain desperation, panic and misery might set in. It was never going to be easy for Lost to present a likeable group of characters if everyone was permanently scared and crying. Fair enough but their lack of what I would call "normal" reactions began to grate more and more as the seasons went on.

The discovery of Ethan and Rousseau and the abduction of Claire early on, did not have the kind of impact that they should have done. These stranded and desperate survivors should have been excited and scared beyond belief that there were other people living on the island, especially a clearly normal looking North American like Ethan. Here surely is a source of answers as to where they are and how they can get off the island. The lack of curiosity gets even worse upon the discovery of the hatch. Here is actual evidence of fellow Americans having lived, worked and used technology on the island. Again every survivor should have rushed down there to scour the place for signs of communication or clues as to where they were. It's easy to ignore some lack of reaction but characters like Kate and Charlie make specific reference to how little time they spent in the hatch.

It's actually easier to excuse the reaction of the survivors to supernatural occurrences to some extent. With no basis for comparison it's plausible that a person would ignore or deny impossible things happening before their eyes. But it still seemed mad that Jack saw Locke dragged down a hole by the Smoke monster (125) and then refused to accept anything that weird had happened. Later in season two (210) Charlie and Eko get a full minute long look at the monster yet we never see them telling anyone back at camp as you might imagine they would.

The longer the show went on the more things happened which received little attention. More Dharma stations, more smoke monster sightings, more meetings with Others, the sky turning purple, a man who never ages, time travel and resurrection. It was time travel which really bothered me. It's so unbelievable and hard to imagine that the lack of reaction from our survivors became harder and harder to swallow.

For a show with such a good grasp on its characters for so long this oversight always damaged the show. I understand that at some point these crazy incidents become a part of life and the characters would accept them. But for me there is no excuse for the lack of reaction. I don't see how it's any different than when a character has any other kind of emotional reaction within the narrative. If Claire gave birth to Aaron and shrugged and showed no reaction the show would be pilloried, but a shrug for time travel is ignored?

The Others and Juliet

Connected to this lack of curiosity is the existence of walking talking mysteries, the Others. Here are people who have chosen to live on the island and therefore must know at least fifty facts which our survivors would love to know. Even if those facts were just where the island was geographically or the best way to clean yourself when the soap runs out.

One of the central running sores in the show was when our survivors wouldn't take the opportunity to ask questions of the Others. I couldn't disagree more with the argument that if they had asked questions the show wouldn't have been able to run for six seasons. Utter nonsense as shown by the sheer amount of information (we later discovered) that Richard and Ben clearly didn't know. Questions didn't have to receive answers but by not asking anything our characters were further damaged.

This all might have been forgivable if it weren't for Juliet, the Other who came to stay. Jack claimed early on that she would reveal her secrets when she felt comfortable but that time never came. It seemed increasingly bizarre that she spent years living with our survivors and yet we never saw anyone quizzing her for answers.

Again it's more nuanced than just wanting to know what whispers or smoke monsters are. We see Ben explicitly asking Juliet to have faith in Jacob (406) and he clearly assumes she does. The Others are a group of people who have divorced themselves from civilisation. They have given up on their normal lives, given up their friends, families, careers and pass times. It's not unreasonable for the viewer to ask why. What is so important that they would give up their lives for? Although we have a vague idea we never really get a strong or convincing sense of it. For Juliet to never shed any light on this was frustrating and began to infiltrate the idea that the producers didn't have answers.

Again the argument has been made that the Others' beliefs are no different to our own world full of Christians and Muslims who have religious conversions and convictions based on things no one else can see. Again this would be more convincing if this weren't a bunch of very specific people not random individuals in the wider world. It also becomes difficult to take when these people are willing to kidnap, to blackmail, to terrorise, to imprison and to murder in the name of something which never gets explained.

The mysteries which did not pay off

What makes this argument particularly strong for a TV critic's mind is that many of these questions were built into the show in very significant ways. If the Others had been a permanently vague creation kept in the background you could argue that the producers owed us no answers. But instead Juliet, Ben, Richard and Charles in particular all became very important parts of the story.

Season three saw the Others society exposed to the viewer in a way which left far more questions than answers. Including Cindy, one of our survivors taking part in the judicial proceedings of the Others (309). Season four was built around the arrival of a freighter and the faking of the Oceanic plane wreckage. Season five saw the survivors having to return to the island together and then only some of them jumping through time as the island skipped. I would argue that none of these plot lines was adequately explained or resolved. As centre pieces of each season's storytelling I think that is pretty unacceptable. The producers liked to make light of certain details which the fans wanted explained but which they didn't see as part of their story. But in each of these seasons major details were built into the plot and satisfactory explanations were never given. They are black marks on the show's record. The producers are guilty of misreading and misleading their audience to some extent. I will get into specifics next week with "The Unknown." But for now let me remind you of Juliet's sister's cancer, Richard's role in leading the Others over the decades, Ben's time off the island and insistence on following the rules and Radzinski's map in the Swann station. All were presented as explicitly important details and moments yet were never adequately explored.

Season Six

The saddest thing for Lost was that for many fans they failed at the final hurdle. The producers gave us the real answer to the whole show in the final season. The flashsideways was from a continuity perspective entirely pointless. Detailed stories were devoted to each character which actually had no bearing at all on the plot of the show. The producers knew exactly how their fan base would react to these stories after five seasons of practise. So they do get the blame for deliberately fuelling their fans expectations and speculations only to admit that all those stories were irrelevant.

I don't see this act as a cruel betrayal but a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of the writers as to what a large section of their audience became invested in the show for. The producers clearly thought that Jack Shepherd or James Ford were intrinsically fascinating characters and that viewers would simply revel in seeing them presented in a different universe. But after conditioning its audience to piece together its characters lives from the past to the present to the future, many fans wanted the full story, not a new version of it.

Through season six the producers made it clear that the overall mythology of Lost was never their priority. They were more interested in the simple stories of each character. Redemption, hope and love were much more important to the producers than the interweaving continuity of what had been going on on the island. While that fundamental belief probably made Lost as good as it was, it also ended up leaving many fans feeling unfulfilled.

It's worth pointing out that the producers' good judgement rather deserted them on island as well as off it. The Man in Black's character was never as compelling as it could have been. The season was spent muddying the waters as to whether he was evil or just a bitter old man. In the end he was vanquished as you would expect evil to be but all season he remained vague and rather like Ben and Charles before him was a less enjoyable villain for the ambiguity which never paid off. Far worse was the treatment of Claire and Sayid who both became allegedly possessed and then managed to shake it off. In neither case did it do much for their overall story and again made you wonder if anyone had really thought it through.

The Rest

"The Cage matches" as they have become known, or some of the first six episodes of season three were a misjudgement. They rather turned Lost into something more generic where revenge and love fuelled the characters in a more predictable network drama style. They also exposed the Others as ordinary people with very ordinary emotions which killed off the terror that their bare legs marching silently through the jungle had once created.

The death of Artz and Frogurt and the presentation of Radzinski left me uncomfortable and annoyed. Both Artz and Frogurt's deaths were played for laughs, an emotion I couldn't relate to in otherwise innocent people. But in both cases the moral tone was that annoying people being killed is somehow acceptable. Not that the producers were trying to directly say that but it was a choice I was never happy with. Radzinski's presentation in a similarly dislikeable, brusque and unpleasant manner seemed to be needlessly pushing the audience to dislike him. In a show which did a good job of presenting morally ambiguous characters this seemed unworthy.

Walt's story was never satisfactorily resolved. The producers had a chance to wrap it up in season five and chose not to which was sad. Viewers understood that he would grow up too fast to play himself within the continuity but his mysterious "powers" were too super natural and intriguing to just be ignored.

Kate's character struggled to gain traction with many viewers. The contrast between her sweet empathetic side and her stone cold killer side was perhaps just too big to bridge. Her constant to-ing and fro-ing between Jack and Sawyer made a lot of sense (for her character) but again her behaviour didn't seem to be something viewers could easily relate to.

In the end Lost may have been a victim of its own success. In most TV shows mysteries are very easy to pick apart. Flashforward unravelled as soon as people began to respond ludicrously to the ludicrous. Prison Break became implausibly silly and 24 saw so many "normal" characters turn "evil" without warning that it went beyond cliché and into dogma. Whereas Lost was utterly masterful at feeding viewers enough information to make mysteries credible without giving the game away. That skill clearly built up unfair expectations in many viewers minds which the producers had never intended to create.

Take Daniel Farraday for example. Looking back his story was meant to be very simple. He was a man caught in a tragic time loop, destined to be raised by a woman who knew she would have to kill him. But instead of that simple tragedy being how he is remembered, he spawned a thousand questions. His role in Desmond's life, his relationship with Charles Widmore, his comatose ex-girlfriend, his memory lapses, his relationship with Charlotte, his actual role on the freighter, his time at Ann Arbour and so on. Instead of his death being a great tragic moment, many fans were left scratching their heads and asking whether he would make a comeback to address the "important" issues which his life had raised.  

But in the end I come down on the negative side when it comes to what the producers wrote for the second half of Lost's run. By the time they sat down to write seasons four, five and six they knew full well what their audience was thinking and yet they continued to build mysteries which had little payoff. I think they made too many miscalculations and their final season in particular condemned Lost to being a show which never fulfilled its potential. Of course I hasten to point out how gloriously high its potential had been built but it still came up well short of it.

Now over to you...


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Comments

  • Wow, I have to say I don't feel so alone any more in my criticisms of Lost! I neither fall into the camp of caring that they never answered who was shooting at the Losties in the canoe or the camp that cares about the characters but was not disappointed in the conclusion. I agree with Mike that they do get credit for boldness and mystery spinning and that is why I put that in the good section. Just to respond to what Robin said in response to my voicemail: I do think they explored Jack's character to some degree this season but indeed the focus on the main characters has been missing for the past two seasons. Also, I'm not sure how successful the flash sideways was in revealing his journey as it was for Ben's or Locke's and it definitely didn't add much to our understanding of Kate. Also, the example I gave of the lack of mention of Ji Yeon feels like a nitpick but you reminded me how important it was for Sun and Jin to escape her father and I think that's why it bothered me. It's only a long line of inconsistencies unexplained. First, Sun wants to get off the island and raise the baby in Korea. Why? Why would Jin agree to that? Then Sun takes over her father's company, which makes sense on so many levels. However, then Sun leaves her child with her mother (who she trusts) who is presumably still under the influence of her father (who she doesn't trust and who's basically a gangster) and this doesn't seem to bother her. Heck, even her dog she left in the care of her friend in Season 1, not her mother! And I don't even really care about Sun that much, let alone getting into things that bother me about characters I care about more!

    Posted by KC, 22/06/2010 1:44am (2 years ago)

  • Wow great report, so thorough and balanced.
    It's so interesting that people have such depths to explore on "the bad" of the show. I guess in a way that just shows how good lost really was.

    Posted by The G man, 20/06/2010 1:58pm (2 years ago)

  • All Robin’s points are well taken for me, some very much so – in particular about asking questions. The writers seemed from the very beginning to simply commandeer their characters' natural curiosity for the purpose of plot efficiency/flexibility and said to the audience, "Deal with it." I also personally find the overall direction the show took in its final seasons to be far from my ideal or expected path, though I am not sure how good a place we’re in to judge the show wanting for that (more on that in a bit). I do have some responses to Robin’s criticisms. I want to make clear, though, that they aren't meant to be taken as rebuttals or certainly as dismissals of the criticisms, but just as points of context that come unavoidably to my mind when I consider them. I realize that this is a bit out of the spirit of this review, since it is an assessment of Lost’s shortcomings that follows on the heels of a comprehensive discussion of its successes, so I thank him and his readers and listeners for their forbearance. Robin's criticisms by-and-large stand as valid in my view, and he presents them here in a way that is more than fair to the show

    First, while I agree that the characters’ initial responses to the supernatural was insufficient – Robin’s example of Jack’s reaction to the monster dragging Locke into a hole being the paradigmatic example, I think over time it should become much more acceptable. Especially after the characters had made a choice to return to an Island that they knew had an unfathomable number of extraordinary traits, I personally would have been more annoyed had a great deal of time been devoted to portraying their shock at each new. A bit more would have been fine, and perhaps just a bit would have been all that was needed for Robin to be satisfied with the show’s attention to emotional realism. But I think that at some point undiminished shock at the continual surprises of the Island would have become as unbelievable as the initial indifference. I also think there are potential ways that much of we saw could be seen as quite plausible reactions. For example, it's not clear to me that hopping around in time on a mostly undeveloped island would really be quite the overwhelming experience we might think (until you do it too much and your brain begins to scramble). The bright light and jet-engine sound seemed to be pretty much the extent of the sensory experience; the actual change, depending on surroundings might not be that great until encountering people who believe the year is 1956. Then, as it dawned that they had traveled in time, that should have been a big shock, but because the group had a clear and pressing sense of mission their thought processes and were prepared for the supernatural having returned by choice to an island they knew was supernatural, I think the reactions we saw were plausible. And once it happened once, to me it becomes quite believable that on subsequent shifts they would have begun to adjust to it.

    So then as to mysteries. This is obviously the most contentious point among critics and defenders of the show. I agree the writers were victims of their own success in creating mysteries and posing big questions that it was unclear they could answer. You might say that they were irresponsible in the way they introduced mysteries for short-term viewing value when their long-term ability to pay them off was in doubt. And I certainly don't begrudge anyone’s disappointment who kept watching because they expected the answers to come eventually when they didn’t. But I also think that it is important to recognize the central role that the posing of the mysteries – not their content or substantive importance to the plot, but simply the expert craft with which they were posed – played in creating the show’s appeal from the beginning and throughout the first few seasons. I don't condone adding more major mysteries in the last season. But I do know that my enjoyment of Lost’s mysteries always came, first, from an appreciation of the way they were presented (here is an excellent place to give Micahel Giacchino the credit he deserves), and then from the interesting possibilities they raised about wither the show or the world. I was never as interested in solutions, believing they could well prove deeply uninteresting by contrast to the mysteries they’d have purported to end. I also think this pattern - big questions, very understated answers - was evident very early on, so that anyone who chose to stay on through the finale did hav fair warning of the show’s m.o. by that time. I also am not prepared to say that I would be willing to live with a show in which a rule dictated that we would have had to live without mysteries that couldn't be paid off, even if it just applied to major ones. To take the example of Daniel Faraday, each of the questions Robin raises about him to which we did not get satisfactory answers is among the most stimulating parts of the show for me. Do I wish we had gotten more on some of them? Yes. But at the same time, I believe that the process of getting answers even to <i>most</i> of them would have bogged the show down and made it predictable or otherwise less enjoyable. Even then, the explanations might well have proved underwhelming or unsatisfactory as “answers”. Better, in my mind, to have the mystery itself survive the show and be fodder for infinite theorizing, than to have a lame answer that we’d prefer to ignore. Again, for me, the posing of each one of these questions, and the possibilities they raise both within the show and about hypothetical "real" world situations ("What if I were experiencing that?"), are uniquely valuable moments of Lost in and of themselves, regardless of answers or explanations. To get back to my assurance that I do take these criticisms as valid: it stands. But I guess the point of context I want to raise here is that for major mysteries not to have gone unsolved, there would have been very tangible trade-offs, namely (1) that the mysteries in the first place would have had to be not as dramatic, mind-bending and vivid, and (2) that we’d have had to accept whatever answers, however unsatisfying, we were given, and be left with only minor questions to ponder going forward.

    Of the flash-sideways, and the sixth season in general, I was never a huge fan, at least in comparison to all the others. But it was a very bold direction to go in, and I give them credit for that, and I give them even more boldness credit for resolving the flash-sideways they way they did. In some ways it's just so far from where I would have ever expected the show to end up that I feel almost unable to judge it. I just have to stand back and say, well, okay. That's what that is. When I ask myself, "From the point at which they had come up with this idea, would I have wanted them to reject it, saying “No, we can't do that, that's just too out there.'?", the answer has to be no. I might have preferred something else equally out-there, or perhaps more restrained myself, but given the choice of living in a world where Lost went out with a quasi-Purgatory flash-sideways alternate-dimension way-station to the afterlife, a golden cork keeping evil plugged up underneath a magical Island, and rapid-fire, inconsistently-explained-and-experienced time travel, and living in a world where it tidily resolved only the mysteries created in seasons 1 thru 4 (or 5 at the most), I'm going to take the over-elaborate, messy, inconsistent one every time. If you're going to go nuts, go nuts. I definitely agree that the early seasons held the potential for a much tighter resolution that would have ended up making a really compelling four or five-year adventure-survival series, and that that would have been formally better television. But I just find myself not actually wishing to be living in the world where that is what was produced rather than in the world we do live in. I also absolutely wouldn’t want them to have told a story other than the one they wanted to tell for the sake of an Aristotelian preference for unity or simplicity, and I think we have to assume that what we saw can only be exactly the story they wanted to tell.

    This doesn't excuse the many ways in which they did not execute the last season as well as they should have even with the size and messiness of the material they created. In particular, I found the pacing of the on-Island story of season six to have been completely botched, with all the action back-ended into a couple of episodes. I also believe the story we were given in Across the Sea was simply unnecessary. In my version of Lost, the forces controlling the Island never take personal shape at all, though I think bringing in Jacob and the Man in Black proved ultimately successful. The story was about two things: the initial characters, and the Island. Jacob and the Man in Black were a transitory, outgoing regime on the Island, and a full episode dedicated to their backstory took too much time away from telling the story of how the main characters came ti understand and embrace their roles in this transition. This problem, though, stems from the larger one of time management in season six, as the origin story might have been more welcome if they didn’t seem to be in such a pinch for time at the end.

    But when I consider the ride the show took me on, I ultimately have to give a positive response even to the conclusion of Lost on its own terms. That said, it certainly raised a level of expectations in the early seasons that it was ultimately hard-pressed to fulfill entirely, and it is quite fair to point this out.

    Thanks to Robin for his great work, and to the other readers for enduring a deeply self-indulgent response to his very fair assessment of The Bad in Lost.

    Posted by Mike Drew, 20/06/2010 10:51am (2 years ago)

  • In my opinion the unresolved mysteries are “The Bad" of Lost. Specifically, the unresolved mysteries I’m referring to are the larger mysteries that were written and presented to the viewers week after week, season after season of the show. In the end I do not need answers to questions like "who built the four toed statue” or “how the Black Rock landed in the middle of the island”. I didn't even need to know what the whispers where. In my opinion those types of subtle mysteries add to the mythology of Lost and were better off without an explanation as opposed to the sometimes clumsy explanations we received.

    The mysteries I feel frustrated by are similar to what was outlined by Robin and other commenters. They were the larger mysteries at work in this show, such as The Others, Walt and his specialness, “The Rules" which islanders must abide by (returning to the island, leaders can not kill one another, etc). I even feel the “why didn't Jack become a smoke monster" puzzle was important considering the entire “good versus evil” of the show has been about the fate worse than death MIB experienced when he entered the cave (and according to Mother anyone who enters the cave would experience). I believe any mystery unanswered in the show is a mystery the writers didn't have an answer to, which lead's me to my next point.

    Throughout Lost I was bothered by the "cliffhanger" writing style which I consider to be lazy writing focused on creating tension in the current episode without an eye on the bigger picture. With this approach we are presented with a sense of danger through a "mystery of the week" which had nothing to do with the larger plot and would never be resolved. Most recently I feel this was the used in season 6 with "The Darkness" that had infected Claire and Sayid. In hindsight it was little more than a way to end one episode on a cliffhanger followed by a false sense of danger around these characters in subsequent episodes. While this approach works fine in an entertaining but average television show like 24, I do not believe it worked with Lost due to the continued reassurance from the producers that they had a master plan they were working from. Damion and Carlton continued to encourage viewers to look at every minor detail only to let many minor and major details go unnoticed by themselves and their writers.

    I still believe the good outweighs the bad, but I’m interested to see how the show’s following changes throughout the years. I have had conversations with people who are just starting watching Lost on DVD and they are excited by all the unexplained events in the first two seasons. I don’t have the heart to tell them that only twenty percent of what they are watching matters in the end.

    On a side note thanks for your all your hard work writing reviews and recording the podcasts, I look forward to follow TheTVCritic’s adventures in the future.

    Posted by TheOther48, 20/06/2010 4:05am (2 years ago)

  • Robin's write-up covers most of the important bases of the bad of Lost, so I will just expound on what I found it's most fatal flaw.

    The popular meme floating around after Lost got an end date was that it wouldn't fall prey to the typical Hollywood pattern of a show meandering around until it's cancelled. It could be conceived as a coherent story with an arc and an ending. I think Lost failed at realizing this opportunity.

    The writers spent countless hours setting up mysteries and storylines that were ultimately meaningless the the "character story". Time travel, Daniel Faraday, Walt, Ben vs. Widmore, The Others (both the J Crew catalogue and Crunchy Temple versions) were all set up and pitched to us as important and potentially revealing of the overarching theme of the show but all fell flat and were left unexplained and unimportant.

    They had plenty of time to conceive an ending arch that didn't feel rushed and overly pedantic in it's explanations but continued to meander instead and then crafted a season 6 that by itself I found less enjoyable then most of the past seasons.

    Most of the internet and podcast enthusiasm over the show was over unravelling the many mysteries of the show. The fact that the writers basically abandoned this large and vociferous group of fans with a casually dismissive "It's about the characters, stupid" was insulting and disappointing.

    I should have volumes to speak to on the unknown, so I promise I will return to voicemail format to save Robin's vocal chords.

    Posted by Lying in the Statue's Shadow, 19/06/2010 12:23pm (2 years ago)

  • Robin's review has hit the major weaknesses fairly and with supporting detail. I particularly agree with how frustrating it was when characters didn't ask questions, especially of people like Juliet.

    As I have mentioned in comments during his episode reviews in Season Six, the lack of explanation of the motivation of the Others was a real weakness. The writers had a great start with truly mysterious and menacing characters such as Ms. Klugh who was willing to make a child suffer, Mikhail Bakunin (named after a famous Russian Anarchist) and dedicated to his cause despite risk and pain, Ethan's violent hanging of Charlie, and the likeable but merciless Goodwin who kills Nathan to protect his cover. Most important of all we had the grasping, violent Widmore, the dedicated and passionat Eleanor Hawking, and the most untrustworthy and manipulative Ben. What great characters and what a "nemisis" they formed. The writers added nuance with characters we could like such as Tom or even Goodwin and Juliet, but then, ultimately, the "others" remain largely unexplained. Were they simply pawns of Jacob and the Man in Black? Perhaps this questions should be for the "Unknown" series review; but I place this comment here because not knowing more about the motivation and finance and structure of the Others ultimately really let us down. If the writers never meant for the Others to have such a large roll then why escalate the conflict between Widmore with his mercenaries and the Others. Why did they want Ben in Season 4? Why was Alex killed? Where was Dogen and the others who resided in the Temple when the island was under assault by Widmore's freighter team? Ah once again I seem to be asking questions about the unknown but the fact that these points remain so vague means that the show itself set up tensions and rivalries so unexplained that rewatching the show will not be as enjoyable as it could have been had these relationships been developed more.

    Similarly, why is Ben using Sayid in Season 5 to kill people on a list? Were these all people related to Widmore or was it possible that there were yet other players set in motion by Jacob (Ilana and Bram), people Ben did not know, but would have blindly wanted to attack to defend the island? So many great action episodes that now in retrospect seem empty and pointless.

    I agree with all of Robin's other points and will just make one more. I don't think the writers thought enough about the way they used some of the women characters. At times, they seemed to create women who were multidimensional, capable of self-determination and fierce action and at other times, they seemed to always define the women in relation solely to those they loved. Kate loves Aaron so much she leaves him with his grandmother quickly and so strangely to attempt to find Claire. Then in her sadness and her confusion she makes passionate love to Jack and tells him she won't ever explain it. This is odd behavior and added a degree of mystery or bad judgment to Kate that made her very hard to defend. Sun, is a complex female character living in a society that constricts her roles but then, after we see her take charge of her father's company and seek out Widmore, she lapses back in much of the last two seasons to an undeveloped role. We only see her as the grieving wife searching for her husband. Why did the writers suggest she had a secret alliance with Widmore and then not even have Widmore directly acknowledge her when he comes face to face with her in the cages toward the end of Season Six. And of course, Claire is the character that they really failed to develop as well as they could. After Charlie's death we never had a full scene with Claire grieving. Claire's mysterious appearances in Kate's life in Los Angeles, was it dreams, was it visitations, was it manipulation by one of the forces, remained unexplained. We understand that Claire would have been disturbed and perhaps even very violent after she was left alone on the island for three years and interrogated by the Temple Others, but her ruthless killing of one of the Temple people seems to be completely put aside by the end of Season Six. What made Claire "claimed" and then potentially recovered is not fully explored. And finally, I dislike the idea that only people who are mothers, as opposed to those who are fathers, have special status. Kate was struck off the candidate list because she became a mother. Perhaps Sun and Claire were also struck off for this reason. But Jack was uncle and surrogate father, Sawyer was father to Clementine and Jin father to Ji Yeon. Fathers were often the problem in the show but I don't think the writers sufficiently explained in these and other examples why only mothers should be exempt in some of the critical plot points.

    I don't mean to disown my enchantment with LOST by these comments. I just think it is a shame that the writers didn't pause to really consider the plot lines they developed --especially in season 3 through 5 -- and use the time more fully in the final season to explore the character in the context of their larger alliances and motivations.


    Posted by Lenni, 18/06/2010 4:20am (2 years ago)

  • I think you wrote a very informative piece here about the bad. Most of which I agree with. I look forward to your Unknown review.

    It's no wonder D&C went on Radio silence.

    For any future Mystery show to work well it will require a fully conceived arch which must be comprehensibly visuallized and reasonably executed. Only then can the journey of LOST be surpassed by an amazing conclusion

    But TV production may not be set up to handle that just yet.

    Posted by Yogabon, 17/06/2010 4:23am (2 years ago)

  • It's amazing that there hasn't been one comment on the bad so far!

    Posted by Ilene, 17/06/2010 3:04am (2 years ago)

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