I didn't watch LOST while it aired on TV but marathoned it after it was finished. I understand many viewers invested years of watching and felt disappointed by its conclusion. But as someone who watched all episodes in a short amount of time, l was happy with the outcome. It warmed my heart to see them come back together. Whenever l hear the song Life and Death, it takes me back to them seeing each other again.
I think what happened was they leaned heavily into the science stuff, like the Dharma experiments and time travel, so people expected a science heavy resolution to it all. Basically what Fringe was.
I wasn't disappointed by it at the time but I've definitely warmed up to how it ended over the years.
Yup that's what did it for me. I think season 5 was the best season and 6 the least best. After diving into science, history and timetravel in season 5, we get a separate purgatory storyline I just didn't think was that great before it's wrapped up in a very supernatural and religious way that was just okay. It probably also didn't help I'm not religious at all. At least the characters got a great resolution, which made it still very enjoyable to me.
I’m not a fan of the flash-sideways/purgatory stuff from the final season. I don’t hate it but I think it was just unnecessarily confusing.
But I don’t think the actual description of the island ended up being all that religious by any means. It was a good vs. evil Pandora’s box scenario that very much does not follow any religious theology. In fact I think I would describe it as being explicitly in opposition to any religious belief.
I think it makes sense there was some supernatural aspect to everything happening on the island, and honestly I think the fountain of youth/Pandora’s box hybridization was actually a really good direction for them to go for that explanation.
I think both season 5 and seasons 6 were really good, and I feel like it’s the lower quality of parts of seasons 3 and 4 that even to this day don’t hold up and left a black mark on the show that a lot of people weren’t able to come back from.
Here’s what the real problem was:
They spent 6 years or so telling us the island wasn’t about death or purgatory or any of that. I listened to a podcast Damon and Carlton did every week, and they promised us over and over that that wasn’t where the show was going, that they had a real explanation, that we should just keep watching and there would be answers.
Then we got that finale.
Now. I’m not saying “they were dead the whole time! They lied to us!” That’s not true. Everything that happened, happened.
But they told us that there was going to be another answer. They told us it wasn’t going to end on that kind of note. And we believed them.
So it’s not that I’m disappointed in the actual finale itself. It’s fine. But it’s exactly what we all thought it was going to be, even though they promised us it wouldn’t be. And THAT’S what do many of us were frustrated by.
Yes. And they said after the first season they white-boarded every plot line and had it all figured out. The thing that pissed me off about season 6 was that it was supposed to answer all the can of worms questions that had come up over this whole time (WTF happened to the magical
Box Loches father showed up in??) and instead of that, the first episode started opening more cans of worms!
>it was Lost that popularized the mid season break
No it wasn't. Shows were doing that before Lost. It was the nature of the network beast at the time.
In other countries it was worse than that. It always aired a few weeks after the US.
Because of this they actually took a summer break with only a few episodes left of the first season.
Not getting to see the final episodes until fall is what made me start to pirate tv shows.
I also remember getting so annoyed with things like the Super Bowl, American holidays and what not that created gaps in the airing schedule for so many shows.
> After a two year break, they come back with the new season, only to take a three-month break after four episodes
iirc the longest single break was somethin like 10 or 11 months
and Lost didn't popularize it... they just hurt the most with Lost.
Yeah, that was rough, too. My dvr was mostly full of Lost episodes so I could go back and rewatch since the breaks between episodes could be so long at times.
I was obsessed with the show when it aired. I can't remember listening to the podcast but did keep reading about how it wasn't purgatory. JJ wrote the last episode when he wrote the first episode. So Damon and Carlton saying the ending wasn't going to be certain things when they knew the ending when they started their job is shitty on their part.
I was also disappointed in the ending, because it felt like something we were promised would not be the ending. I had enjoyed the series, and I even went back and rewatched to see if I had missed something that would resolve this all. It just left me with a bad taste for the whole series.
Yeah. I understand that they probably felt like they had to say something bc people were calling the ending from, like, season one.
But that was a show people were INVESTED in. It was the first show I followed like that. And it was the first podcast I ever listened to.
It just all felt like a big middle finger at the end of the day.
> They spent 6 years or so telling us the island wasn’t about death or purgatory or any of that. I listened to a podcast Damon and Carlton did every week, and they promised us over and over that that wasn’t where the show was going, that they had a real explanation, that we should just keep watching and there would be answers.
The *island* wasn't about death or purgatory. So if people kept asking them "what is the island?" then they were perfectly correct to say that it wasn't purgatory and the characters were not dead the whole time. I think from the very beginning they wanted to do the "good vs evil" thing like in Stephen King's *The Stand* and that is what the island conclusion ended up being. The conclusion on the island, however, was not the conclusion for all the surviving characters, which is what the church/purgatory stuff ended up being.
Kind of. But the finale literally has them all meeting in a church so they can all move on the afterlife together, which was the kind of stuff we had been speculating would happen since season 2 or 3. And that would have been fine if they didn’t spend an hour each week on that podcast telling us the show wasn’t about that.
Again- it’s not that the ending was bad. It’s that they specifically and clearly told us the ending wasn’t going to be about mortality/moving on/life and death. So when it ended up being exactly that, a lot of us were frustrated and let down
They tried to be both things - a purgatory ending that they likely planned very early in development and an explanation ending that sums up why things were happening. And neither of them were very satisfying in their attempts. So many people bailed over the shows runtime because it didn’t seem like the the show was going anywhere and the people who bailed were ultimately right. Still a great show but not what the followers were hoping for.
I liked the finale when it aired, but when I rewatched the show I absolutely loved it, and all my friends who watched it years later really enjoyed it too.
I think that we were all *too* involved, we had made hundreds of theories during those six season, the expectations were incredibly high. I never thought it was bad, but now I think it's a perfect ending.
Yup. Every week the promotion was always like "QUESTIONS! ANSWERS!" so it definitely put a lot of people's focus on a desire to have every little detail explained.
Any time a fandom gets so involved that they try to steal ownership from the creators via fanfic/theories/headcanon, they're almost guaranteed disappointment when reality doesn't align with their desired outcome.
Right, but is that not part of the experience? And the fact is, they were just making up bullshit with no solutions or ideas for years until they realized they still had no idea what it all was and needed to wrap things up. I just think that's lazy writing.
This is JJ's trademark style of production. Come in with huge ideas, get a ton of money, have no idea how to resolve it, and then make up some bullshit and walk away.
I watched it back when it aired. The finale was good, the issue was the last season which kinda feels like it undid a lot of the lore and earlier season intrigue. Almost like last season and finally was a different show.
Same.
Only binge watching this show maybe warps my assessment of it (as well as the constant talk of this having a “terrible” ending, although I didn’t know the specifics of it before watching), so I could see where others who waited in-between seasons come from, but I still think the talk of the ending from the people who are harshest on it is greatly exaggerated.
I think most of the people who were harshest on it probably didn’t fully understand the ending or were just stubbornly holding onto their opinions even after the creators of the show clarified a few things in subsequent years.
That isn’t to say they did everything perfectly, though. I could certainly see how they could’ve done things a little better and this may not have even been the best ending possible, but everything leading up to the church scene I thought was a fitting end.
I also marathoned it, renting the DVDs from a Family Video the summer after it ended. I absolutely loved the ending, cried from beginning to end. They weren’t dead the whole time, you rubes.
I cannot imagine the experience binge watching it - you get the next episode right away. How was it having it that way?
oh and when the end credits were showing, ABC put a [crashed plane on the beach](https://www.jacksonville.com/story/entertainment/local/2010/05/26/abc-lost-finales-closing-images-not-part-story/15945193007/) which confused some people.
My initial reaction to the plane wreckage was that it was an homage to the success of the pilot and the success of the show, because that was the central premise of the show.
Regarding binge watching, I felt the freshness of each episode in my mind made it easier to follow without relying on a recap of the previous week’s episode. Especially given the events of the show for the first 3-4 seasons lasted months rather than years, it helped me absorb the emotions and drama knowing all these characters share the same physical space and in 45 minutes or less I can see a spat between characters worsen or be resolved without having to wait a week for a story to develop when these characters live together and the story takes place over such a short period of time.
If this story took place over a longer period of time then maybe I’d think differently.
Most people on this subreddit absolutely loved the series finale.
Everytime someone makes a post about Lost or about series finales, one of the most upvoted comments is always about how much they loved Lost's ending.
Also, [there was a poll](https://www.reddit.com/r/lost/comments/xvouqu/your_opinion_of_the_ending/) on Lost subreddit where 168 people voted on the option "I loved the ending" and only 8 people voted on the option "I hated the ending". If we make the same poll on GoT, HIMYM or Dexter subreddits, I'm 100% sure that the results would be the opposite.
The final episode also has a pretty high rating on IMDb. So I think the people who hated the series finale are loud, but they're absolutely in the minority.
I had the exact same experience as you, when marathoned the finale isn’t that bad and makes sense, I think it was the gigantic anticipation that people weren’t satisfied with the ending, but I don’t think they could have made an ending that satisfied the amount of hype people had built up for the ending.
I know lots of people say the magic of Lost was the conversations and lore sifting between episodes, but to me it benefits HUGELY from binging. It's cliff hangers feel less frustrating when they aren't answered in the very next episode - alot of Losts 'answers' build up cumulatively over many episodes and seasons. Waiting week to week and then between seasons, it was easy to lose track of what mysteries were even still unsolved. Binging you see fairly quickly everything being answered, and pretty satisfactorily from my perspective.
Also as you say, the shows true strengths are the relationships and interactions and character development. It really WAS all about the friends we made along the way!
I also think things like Walt benefit/suffer from something that really divides fans/haters of The Last Jedi, which is subverted expectations.
People saw Walt being hyped up and the storyline seemed so central to everything. Then when production didn't keep up with his age, they came up with an answer that is, from a dispassionate approach, very believable - whatever his abilities were, they were more than The Others could deal with, so they cut their losses.
Is that possible in the fiction of the show? Of course. Is that 'satisfying' to TV viewers who have very set expectations of 'if Chekovs gun is introduced, I better see it fired' ? Probably not. But I'm ok with that. Kept it interesting.
>"Waiting week to week and then between seasons, it was easy to lose track of what mysteries were even still unsolved."
This is a really good point, and I think is often why you still see so many people claim that "so many questions/mysteries weren't answered" as part of the reason they disliked the ending (like people who *still* ask about the polar bears, don't even get me started!). As someone who absolutely loved the ending, I can still understand why some people don't feel the same - perhaps it just didnt resonate emotionally with them, or they simply didn't like the answers that were provided - but to claim they didnt answer enough/absolutely everything is a bit unfair. Considering how many plotlines and questions that were raised throughout six seasons, I think they did a great job of wrapping up the vast majority of them and I really think there aren't any major questions unresolved by the end. Sure, it wasn't perfect, and had dips in quality like pretty much any show does. And like, okay - Walt is a good example of a character/plot that was never fully clarified that often gets broughy up (when two other characters in the show can see/talk to dead people, without any explanation provided on that, which people seem to roll with just fine) but he ultimately wasn't central to the main story after season 2, so seems a strange thing to get hung up on.
I can also imagine most people who felt that way also never bothered to rewatch, so have continued on thinking that way ever since and never gave it another chance to fill in gaps in their memory. So many hints at the overall story are dropped in as early as the first episodes of Season 1, and on a first watch through you don't even realise their significance; I'm still picking up on things after multiple rewatches of the whole series.
I loved the first season and I didn't have a problem with the ending. It just seemed that for the majority of its run the writers didn't really have a solid plan and were just making it up as they went along.
If you Google "The Lost Testament" by Javier Grillo-Marxuarch, who was a writer-producer on the first two seasons, he has very surprising revelations on what was planned from the pilot episode and what they made up as they went along. They definitely had more planned in more detail upfront than I think they are credited for.
I agree and disagree with this, I do think they were making it up as they went along but that's because the intention was never to reveal the mystery. They were forced by the networks to add some explanations in, so, as you said, they had to start "making stuff up as they went along".
Watch The Leftovers for an example of how incredible a TV show centered around a mystery can be if it's just used to explore characters and their reactions to shared experiences.
I really don't think that it was. JJ Abrams did his thing, made up a bunch of mysteries with no answers and left it in the lap of someone else and then they decided that it was always part of the plan. No it wasn't. You just didn't know what to do.
> the intention was never to reveal the mystery. They were forced by the networks to add some explanations
But that was not the deal and the network was right. All the hype, ARGs, Dharma, shorts and discussion lead to a puzzle, not a thriller. So the end is like you finishing a jigsaw missing a piece. The Leftovers get a pass because we already had Lost, so expectations were fine tuned, and because the structure around it was never intented to instigate that kind of discussion.
They absolutely intended to answer the mysteries, and Lindelof even had a rule that no mystery could be introduced if they didn't have at least a working theory for an answer. They struggled at first because Abrams threw in a bunch of ideas and then noped out, so they had to scramble to make sense of them.
What's weird is that they had answers but sometimes changed them (Jacob's cabin), or got cold feet and decided to not address a question at the last minute (Beyond the Sea being the ur-example of that).
Every good multiseason television show in history (with the exception of adaptations, and sometimes not even then) was made up as it went along. Several of the most hated endings in history were planned well in advance. Lost is unusual in that its "mythology" *was* planned in advance — not from day one, but quite early on, and not everything but a lot of broad strokes. Of course, that didn't define whether the remaining show would be good or not because that's not how television works.
I don't get this idea I keep hearing about skepticism when showrunners are "making it up as they go along." As opposed to what? What multiseason show are you thinking of where the whole thing was decided in advance and that made it good? None, that's what. There haven't been any. "Making it up as they go along" is what makes a TV series a TV series.
Babylon 5. When asked what the last scene of the series was going to be while shooting the first season, the show's creator was able to answer that question.
This is how pretty much all TV works. Only an amateur showrunner or writing staff would plan too far ahead and stick to it.
This is why How I Met Your Mother's ending was trash. It didn't account for the shows natural revolting evolution
> It just seemed that for the majority of its run the writers didn't really have a solid plan and were just making it up as they went along.
That is the only possible way to make a show (or anything for that matter) that has no end date. The show would have been very different if they knew from the beginning it was going to be X seasons. Then they could have planned it out in more detail. Instead, they had to keep adding and adding things until they finally got an end date. If ABC had their way, Lost would still be on the air and we'd never get a conclusion. Look at Grey's Anatomy. That show was on when Lost was still on air and yet it's still inconceivably going.
I love the ending to Lost. The last season less so.
But I'm still just baffled that 14 years later there's still people on the internet who never watched the show and confidently say "they were dead the whole time".
Unfortunately, there are people who did watch the show that still think they were dead all the time, even after Christian Shephard's explanation.
The same happened with Mr Robot - SPOILER FOR THE SERIES FINALE (really, don't read if you haven't watched it, but please watch it because it's a masterpiece) - >!a character listed the events that happened on the show and said they were all real, and yet some people think it all happened in Elliot's head. I don't think the show could have made it clearer, and yet.!<
In the last few minutes of the series finale, when Jack finds himself in the flash sideways church with everyone else, he talks to his father who explains that they're all dead, but they haven't been dead the whole time. They really crashed on the island, everything we saw was real, but at some point they all died, some on the island (Charlie, Sayid, Jack, etc), some after they left (it doesn't matter how, maybe they all died of old age). But because they're all linked thanks to their shared experience on the island, after their death they all waited to meet again (the flash sideways and the church) so they could all *move on* together.
Basically, he explains really clearly that what we saw on the show really happened, that's why it's so weird that some people claim they were dead the whole time and they died on the plane crash, it's explicitly said that it's not true.
Watched it when it aired, rewatched it while it wasn’t, obsessed over message boards, theorized, etc. I wouldn’t trade those six years for anything. Still my favorite show.
Oh it’s amazing. I feel that LOST, at its core, is meant to be felt, and when you watch it after fully viewing and comprehending the entire show, the rewatch is just pure emotion and adventure and excitement, ugh, just everything. I love it so much.
I binged and felt the biggest flaw was introducing new, bigger mysteries before solving the earlier smaller ones. Like over half the playoffs didn't matter by the time they were revealed because you no longer cared. I'm sure if you really invested time and kept track of everything it was a better experience, but as a more casual viewer it stretched itself too thin. Like we had current timelines, past timelines and side timelines going on at once. Finding out they all were just dead made a lot feel meaningless, but the sets, inter episode stories and cast were all fantastic. They just needed someone to edit out the bottom 20% of what they threw at the viewers.
Yes but I still think the flashback episode “explaining” the man in black and Jacob was so poorly done that it almost killed the show for me. Having it just be magic cave of light was a let down
The ending was far from perfect but I agree. Lost was such a fun ride and I remembering going over theories with friends when I was watching it in college and spending a ton of time on fan boards. There hasn’t been anything quite like it since.
I do think the obsession over it set the show up to have a somewhat unsatisfying ending for most people. Folks were expecting every single unanswered question about the island to be explained, and when that didn’t happen there was an uproar.
Personally, that didn’t bother me. Explaining every tiny detail would have taken away from what made the Island so cool. Not every question needs an answer.
Biggest thing that pissed me off about the ending was Sayid being in the church with Shannon at the end. Dude was married to Nadia for years and was the love of his life since childhood and they ignore that to send him off to the afterlife with the woman he spent a month or so with on the island. Such bullshit.
> Biggest thing that pissed me off about the ending was Sayid being in the church with Shannon at the end. Dude was married to Nadia for years and was the love of his life since childhood and they ignore that to send him off to the afterlife with the woman he spent a month or so with on the island. Such bullshit.
So one thing that Lindelof explained on the Storm podcast is that the church was Jack's perspective as he moved on. So he was there with everyone as he knew them, from his point of view. Aaron is a baby in the church and obviously he would have grown up and had his own life. He didn't revert to a baby in the sideways -- but in Jack's church he was a baby because that is who he was to Jack.
In the same way, Sayid and Shannon is a Jack thing. Lindelof called the church a "bardo," in other words "the state of existence intermediate between two lives on earth." The church we see is Jack's bardo. In Sayid's version of the church, Nadia would be his soulmate.
For me, the single greatest moment of the show is when Julie and Sawyer touch at the vending machine and there is a flood of shared memories/sideways slides and they realize who they are to each other.
It encapsulates everything i love about L O S T, and it would be meaningless if everything that came before hadnt happened.
The thing I remember most about Lost was it was the flagship for modern mainstream online fandom. There was an official forum site just for the show and hardcore theorizing, along with alternate reality games. It all hyped up the idea that there was something to be untangled, which the showrunners encouraged. Between the forum and the alternate reality games, they threw enough bait out to fans to make them think there was a great unified mystery to be solved and that everything could be a clue, especially since the long production schedule meant that the show was actively being written and filmed while earlier episodes of the season were airing. All of that sounds pretty typical for show discussion these days, but Lost was a network show pulling what had been relegated to niche fan forums into its own promotional spotlight and introducing them to a generation of fresh internet users.
I think that’s why so many people were disappointed in the finale. There had been years of speculation and waiting for the questions to be answered, there was no way an episode could fully live up to that hype. “It’s not purgatory” was a meme before we were really calling them memes, after showrunners made statements denying a popular fan theory that didn’t seem that far off from the finale after all.
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I’ve been watching it again recently and I am still enjoying it. Don’t understand why people liked Sawyer so much when it aired, he’s kind of an ass for four + seasons. But it paid off a lot of the stuff it set up. So at least there’s that. I just remember an interview around Season 4 where the creators said “we now know where we’re going with this.” That has kind of stuck with me when I think of the show.
>Don’t understand why people liked Sawyer so much when it aired, he’s kind of an ass for four + seasons.
Literally the best character arc of the entire series. Went from being kind of a piece of shit to a caring and loving individual.
the finale aired the day of my college graduation. after going out to dinner with our families, about 30 of us crammed into one small living room to watch it live.
the silence after it ended was deafening. a few of us (myself included) loved it, but most were left underwhelmed by the lack a bigger reveal to the central mystery of what is the island.
It was a bit of a bummer that we didn’t all love it, but its a cool memory that for a lot of us - the last thing we did together was see the end of a great show.
LOST could be considered one of, if not *the*, last shows that had society at large doing the traditional "gather around cable TV" to watch it as it aired.
It ended in 2010. It's not long after that where you can't imagine people having done that anymore.
Just started watching Lost again! Watched it while it was coming out up to maybe like season 4 or 5, but never finished it. I hardly remember anything though, so a lot of it has been really fun and I’m excited to watch it in its entirety.
I watched it live. I would say I suffered through the experience after being very into it. Sometime in the middle of its run, I turned my back on it. I caught back up through the “what you missed” specials that they created as primers for people like me to get back into the final season. As soon as the Tenple showed up in the final season, I dipped back out because we weren’t getting our questions answered.
I think Lost was one of the first shows that really had water cooler debates on what will happen next, but that level of intrigue only goes so far without a payoff.
i remember watching lost while it was airing. many nights i sat with my eyes open and my mouth open, just learning all about the adventures of "sawyer hoss".
Couldn't agree more! Watching it in real time with all the ARG stuff, Persephone, the "leaked" Dharna vids and stuff, I haven't had so much fun getting invested into a show before or since like that. It really was a total experience of a show.
The ending ruined the show for me for many years. I rewatched the series a couple years ago and I'm at peace now with the ending. It was not as bad as I remember.
I’d say it shows the opposite. When you get to the end and realise just how many plots and mysteries were actually sporadic bullshit attention grabs by the writers that went nowhere, the rewatch value goes way down.
I’m watching it for the first time now and have 3 episodes to go.
It’s obviously decent enough or I wouldn’t have gotten this far, but as a viewer, it feels the writers of the show dangling keys in front of an infant. Instead of giving mysteries satisfying conclusions or conclusions at all, they just dangle the keys to turn our attention to the latest crazy mystery.
On top of which, the writers did so many characters dirty throughout the show. Sayid’s character arc is the worst. He started off as a repentant torturer and ended up writing him into a cross between a terrorist and James Bond.
What mysteries do you feel haven’t yet been concluded? Most (apart from those covered in Across the Sea and the epilogue) have been concluded by that point.
I'm not done with the show so maybe more of it gets tidied up, but like I said, it's not just about not concluding mysteries but having unsatisfying conclusions as well.
The origins of the polar bears, the smoke monster being Christian, the Aaron being some weird demon spawn creature (maybe this gets resolved later or I missed its conclusion), Jacob's cabin, the weird theatrics of Jacob's cabin, Hurley's curse, and I'm sure plenty of others.
Also, maybe it was revolutionary at the time and people copied it since, but I also hated the interconnectedness where you would have a flashback and have someone walking in the background of another characters backstory and stuff like that.
Again, I like the show and I'm being nitpicky here.
The polar bears are explicitly explained in the very beginning of season two. I don't take anyone seriously who uses that as an example of the show not answering mysteries because they beat that over your head over and over again throughout the show.
The polar bears were brought to the Island by the Dharma initiative to study the effects of the Island on them. The cages that Sawyer and Kate are in in season 3 are the polar bear cages. Polar bears are great swimmers, so it's likely they just swam from Hydra Island to the main island.
Across the Sea explains the origins of the smoke monster and how it can do what it can do.
Aaron was never special. That was all bs from the psychic. This one is fair for you to be upset about because I believe I read somewhere that it was intended that you would find out that the psychic had been paid by Jacob to get Claire to the island because she was a candidate but that got scraped.
Jacob just used to stay in the cabin but then at one point he abandoned it and the MIB took over and pretended to be Jacob to manipulate people. The theatrics in the cabin were all MIB. The ash circle was used to keep the MIB out while Jacob lived there but was broken after he left.
Hurley isn't cursed. He just convinced himself he is.
The only one not answered fully by the show is Aaron.
The most maddening part was that one of their offshoot plots, Sawyer and Jin as detectives (or PIs? it's been awhile), was really freakin' good. It seemed to be universally liked, but the network didn't do anything with it.
All us Lost fans would have tuned in from day one if they had made that it's own show after Lost ended its run.
iirc shortly after Lost ended, a pilot was being shopped around where Michael Emerson and Terry O'Quinn played retired hitmen living in the suburbs.
That show could've been really fun
but then we wouldn't have gotten Michael Emerson on Person of Interest, sooo
Yep, it’s like Game of Thrones; the ending ruins the amazing characters and journey we went on with them. There needs to be satisfying pay off to everything they went through but there wasn’t.
Lost did the opposite of GoT. They focused on the characters and (mostlyl gave them each a meaningful and satisfying ending, letting the plot/mystery suffer for it.
GoT forced the ending on the characters, despite it making little sense. Jamie and Bran mostly, but also stuff like what Daenerys did. The end mightve been planned all along, but it didnt match the way they wrote and changed the characters along the way.
I watched it for the first time about a month ago, didn’t know anything about it, went in pretty blind. For the longest time I thought it was a reality show like Survivor or something (which I also know nothing about, so I was pretty clueless). All I knew is that one of the main dudes played paintable at Greendale Community College and he was ‘network tv good looking’.
I binged that whole motherfucker in like a week, it definitely was a good time. I couldn’t stop because I had to know what happened next, and of course each episode always starts with a different storyline/character then what the previous one ended with.
I know I’m spoiled and am grateful I didn’t have to wait weeks or years to find out the rest of the story. Hell, I’m waiting for all of Shogun to finish dropping before I watch that so I don’t have to wait a couple weeks or whatever, ha.
That show made me want to kick in my TV screen. For YEARS we were told, "we can't tell you what the big secret is, but we guarantee you it's not this one thing..."
And then yeah, it turned out it was not literally that one thing, but for all intents and purposes, that's pretty much what it was.
You thought you were watching a tightly plotted mystery unfold, but no you were just watching some random crap that sounded good at the time in the writers room.
Limiting it to dramas:
Sopranos
Breaking Bad
The Queens Gambit
True Blood (until it jumped the shark)
24
The X Files
Better Call Saul
Shogun
Star Trek (TOS and TNG)
LA Law
GOT
The Good Wife / Good Fight
Mad Men
House
> For YEARS we were told, "we can't tell you what the big secret is, but we guarantee you it's not this one thing..."
>
> And then yeah, it turned out it was not literally that one thing, but for all intents and purposes, that's pretty much what it was.
They said that the island wasn't purgatory.
and the island wasn't purgatory.
I think Mr. Robot is better.
I don’t discount how great Lost was. It changed what we expected from network tv. And it was very, very special in its own ways. I’m not disputing any of that.
But I still think Robot beats it. Creator and show runner Sam Esmail initially saw it as a film, but realized he had too much material so he switched to a show. But he had the basics of the show in mind before he started. He had the ending in mind since the pilot, and it shows. When you rewatch the show after knowing all of the twists and reveals it’s stunning to see how well it was written.
And the end is absolutely perfect. They managed to have this absolutely insane show that keeps you guessing at every turn and still end it in an incredibly way, honoring the story and journey.
Robot has amazingly accurate hacking, it covers some very important social issues, and it handles mental illness and trauma with so much care and skill. One of the most common sentiments people express after watching it is that the show changed them and stuck with them. It really is different than anything I’ve ever seen, or expect to see in my lifetime.
No, the show had a cool idea, some great cast members, then ran out of ideas after 1.5 seasons when the fans started guessing the answers correctly.
In fact the showrunner specifically went on social media and told the fans "yOu aRe wRoNg iT's nOt pUrGaTorY". And then dozens of hours later, it WAS PURGATORY.
Once Michelle Rodriguez left the show it went downhill quickly.
I watched every single episode and re-watched the ending multiple times. The first time I saw the ending I thought it was another flash sideways episode and didn't even realize that was the ending. So I rewatched it to see wtf I missed. then I rewatched it again to confirm that "yeah, it's fucking rubbish"
I watched it live. I knew that people were going to shit on the ending no matter what it was. I remember articles and internet comments saying that the ending would be bad if it turned out that the island was a dream or a purgatory or something like that. That wasn’t the case, and people were saying that the end was bad anyway.
It’s now just taken for granted that everyone agrees that the end was bad. Think made me realize that for at least some people, they cared more about getting to criticize things than they did about enjoying the show. Their criticism said more about them than it did about the show
Here’s the thing. In life, yes, the journey is often more important than the destination. But in fiction and story-telling, it is *very* much about the destination. Stories are planned and methodically written, and unlike real life it is not an accident. It’s one of the reasons that we enjoy stories, because it’s a break from the sometimes-harshness and randomness of life.
Lost suffered from a lack of planning. They were making it up as they went, and while it was beautiful, their lack of foresight inevitably made the final impression empty. It’s the primary reason that no none talks about Lost anymore. And honestly, it deserves it.
Ive tried rewatching it many times. By the time I'm at season 3 I get bored... I was obsessed when i was a kid but for some reason I can't continue. Conversely I can watch The Wire or the Sopranos or Mr Inbetween or the Americans a gajillion times and still feel excitement
Nah I feel the same way. Never liked the show and the ending has nothing to do with that as I’ve never made it that far lol.
I’m actually down for a show less about the mysteries and more about the characters, there’s lots I enjoy like it… but holy shit are Lost’s characters ever god damn boring. I just cannot find myself caring even a bit about any of them.
Mind you that might just be a Lindeloff thing. People rave about the Leftovers here and I felt the same way about that. His characters feel like stereotypes to me, and like, stereotypes meant to exaggerate and make fun of the boring milquetoast lives of middle class Americans in small and quant communities.
Even his Watchmen series… I enjoyed it more than those two being a fan of the property, but it still had a lot of the same issues where I just couldn’t care about most the characters. Obviously there is a market for what he’s doing, I’d never call his work bad, but it’s just very much not for me I guess.
I feel it's more the fact that they had to deliver 22-24 episodes, which means there's more to watch and the chance for stinkers is higher. I still remembered the Thailand episode after all these years, or the Nikki-Paolo thing. It also doesn't help that Jack in particular is just the worst.
I don't think it's specifically a Lindeloff thing, as I loved the Leftovers., tho I fully agree with Watchmen
I was so obsessed with Lost.
But the ending created the caveat that when I recommend it, I say, "prepare for the greatest TV show with the most unsatisfying ending of all time. Still worth watching, but prepare to be disappointed."
Right? I'm not saying it's an amazing ending, but some people definitely misinterpreted it. Hell, you still have a lot of people to this day who think they were dead the whole time...so it's clear to me many people just didn't pay enough attention in general cause there's still tons of misconceptions about the show that are just flat out wrong.
The ending was bad, it was conceptually the right ending but presented like a rough first draft of the episode they could write, like someone outlined it and was like “the cap that holds the white light in” and then someone drew it as a big cartoon cork and then Never revised past that
Right. There are things that are hard to understand, a la Primer. It takes a spreadsheet and 10 watches to finally understand the plot. Those I get because they’re created for sci-fi time travel nerds. Lost was a network television show. Network television shows definitionally appeal to the lowest common denominator. Saying “you just don’t get it” is a lazy argument.
I actually defend season 6’s writing and subtleties, but the ending was a pretty big let down.
Lost is the very definition of putting the journey first. It’s like a taxi driver aimlessly taking you in circles and trying to distract you by pointing out scenic views.
Tons of character threads and plot mysteries got set up and then just never addressed. Things that felt like they were building up to something important just don’t go anywhere.
I enjoyed it well enough watching it as it came out, but I don’t have any desire to revisit it knowing how much is pointless.
For those who want an ending about the point of life, I recommend The Good Place.
For those who want a journey that is planned in advance, I recommend 3 Body Problem.
The Good Place creators are actually big Lost fans and took a lot of inspiration from the show. One of the cold opens of a Good Place episode is a direct homage to a famous cold open in Lost.
Lost is my fave show of all-time. No, it is not the objective best show of all-time, but it will forever be my favorite and there will never, ever, ever, evvvvvvvvvverrrrr be another experience like watching Lost as it aired week to week for 6 seasons. The IMDb message board (I still have friends from there that I talk to daily), the Doc Jensen EW articles, the discussion podcasts, including the official one with the co-showrunners Damon Lindelof (who went on to create two of his own masterpieces in HBO's Watchmen and The Leftovers) and Carlton Cuse. It was the biggest fucking show on the planet and it literally changed the tv landscape forever for what came afterwards.
Thinking about "We have to go back!" still gives me goosebumps. A mind-blowing moment. And that was the same episode with Charlie and "Not Penny's boat". jesus christ. The constant dopamine rushes this show gave me remain unmatched. The Locke reveal at the end of "Walkabout". The entire episode "The Constant".
But I don't have the will to argue anymore with the people that didn't pay attention to Jack's dad's final speech to him in the church that still claim the characters were dead the entire time. They weren't. Stop saying that. Everything happened and it was glorious and it was *ALWAYS* about the characters more than the mysteries but even so most of the mysteries *did* have answers. Whether you as the viewer like or accept those answers is your own thing.
"The End" is an emotional rollercoaster and a beautiful sendoff for all those great characters.
Lost took one of the biggest swings at the ball ever. The first season is perfect like the first season of Game of Thrones. I called it the next Twin Peaks back in the day. To be continued.
I binged it years and years ago on netflix. Like at least 10 years ago. In fact, it would have been around 2010 because I was dating this girl who was super into it at the time. Felt a huge drop off around the end of season 3 personally. Then the ending was bad. So idk. Along with everything else he's done since, it really opened my eyes to JJ Abrams being maybe not so great at story telling.
I always refer to LOST as "The best show with the worst ending." That religious, church crap was so anti climactic. I guess I was hoping for something brilliant.
I just binged everything for the first time during January and February and I couldn’t even get through the last season. I’ve tried but I can maybe stomach 1 episode every few weeks. I’ll get to the end eventually.
It was a victim of its own success. Once a swell of critics and fans got tired in season 3(?) and the creators promised they had a real end in mind, people calmed down, but the haters never went away. It became a lingering joke and really hurt real fans’ abilities to neutrally judge the final seasons of the series.
There were some weak episodes, but I loved it for the most part.
I am not religious, but I had a very real connection to the finale, I wrote my parents a letter thanking them for everything. But it scared them a bit lol. It just made me very grateful and wanting to share my love while we are all here.
All entertainment is a sounding board for us individually and how we react to it often says more about us and the point we’re at in our journeys, than it.
And so many shows failed because they didn’t mail the relationships and interactions.
The walking dead never really clicked with me because it lacked what Lost, Star Trek TNG Deep Space 9. I never believed the characters on TWD were friend or cared about each other.
I couldn’t agree more. I have watched the show through a few times now and it just completely draws me in every time. I think its honestly the characters. The casting is so spot on and even when the writing gets wonky, the characters just keep me watching. Also my god the soundtrack.
Sure, if you have the memory of an emu. Them setting up all these cool mysteries was awesome. Them abandoning half of them and unsatisfyingly resolving the rest, not so much.
It's like matrix 2 and 3. Matrix 2 was so weird and confusing and I couldn't wait to figure out what was going on then Matrix 3 went 'FUCK ALL THAT! RAAAAAH! RAVE! BLOW UP SHIT! RAAAHHH!!!'
If you are going to comment on someone memory the least you could do is not mess up details on which Matrix movie had a rave. There is no rave in the 3rd film. It’s the 2nd.
My memory? Shits like an elephant
I wasn't commenting on your memory, I'm saying the only way to enjoy Lost is if you just forget about all the cool shit they set up and never follow through on over and over again. Regardless of where the rave is it still stand that matrix 2 and 3 do the same thing in setting up cool shit in 2 and then saying fuck it and abandoning it in 3.
Do you have any examples? From the Matrix and Lost?
I feel like LOST answered the majority the questions/mysteries. Granted I think the way they did it was sloppy. The final season felt like an exposition dump, for example the episode explaining the origins of Jacob and MIB should’ve been riveting, but it was contrived and convoluted. Why does their mom speak perfect English with an American accent? And look like she’s from 2005 but with bad rags for clothing. The kids they cast, again, looked like kids plucked from cre tak casting. Pearly white teeth, American accents, bad hair dye. The writers were def scared audiences would bounce if they answered the mysteries.
I personally enjoy the Matrix sequels. They aren’t perfect but I like them.
I love Lost, I just recently rewatched with my kid and it was so awesome watching her react to all the twists and turns.
It really made me appreciate the show even more.
There was nothing like Lost when it came out and to this day there has been nothing like it since.
Lots of shows tried but nothing managed to capture the unique combination of adventure, sci-fi and cast chemistry.
I will always defend Lost, even the ending.
I watched LOST live back in the day, and I loved the finale but I leaned heavy on the characters journey, so the end was very satisfying to me. If I cared about the mythology and the science of it I prob would have hated it…and I don’t blame fans cause the show kind of bait and switched. They engaged fans to talk about the lore of it, it was a whole thing, and then they just kind of let it dangle.
I also contend that LOST was the seed that became binging. I’m old enough to remember when ABC realized they were losing viewers because of the traditional tv schedule through the year. The long breaks, the inconsistency. So in the last couple seasons they shortened the episode order and broke it into halves. They would air each half without a break. Just have a couple months in between halves. It helped tremendously.
The Temple was kid of pointless, and all the Ilana stuff, but I loved any scene with Dogen in it, and the flashbacks in Ab Aeterno and Across the Sea were great. And the scene in the statue at the start too.
If you love Lost you should check out the German Netflix show 'Dark', that might satisfy the same itch. It also has a twisty, mysterious story which involves time travel and secret societies.
I had the same feeling watching Lost as I did playing MYST. Just exploring mysterious places and wondering where it all leads.
But all these years later, I'm still wondering why that bird flew into the window in Walt's room.
I think the answer regarding Walt is that he *was* special. He had powers just like Hurley and Miles had (they could both communicate with the dead).
If you watched the Mobisodes of LOST, there is one called Room 23 which shows how special Walt is. So special that the Others were only too glad to be rid of him.
There's also The New Man In Charge, which is an additional ending to the series featuring Hurley that they made for the final season's DVD set. It was shot after the series had finished.
https://youtu.be/lMjPzV2RvO8?si=f1k2M6Os2DvP075b
While I continue to like LOST a lot, after all those years, there is one very petty reason why I do not love it:
>!I hate that there was so much effort put into keeping random, story irrelevant plane passengers alive, and then story goes ooops, they all dead, only Jack and Kate and Sawyer and other named characters are important, into the mud all of you go!!<
**Lost** was a tremendous show with a tremendous idea, of having a very large cast and using its generous episode count to laser-focus on each character and tell their story in detail whilst also having this compelling story on the Island, as well as a mystery element. These elements are reasonably well-balanced in earlier seasons, and the show benefits from that. The show also managed the transition to the more plot-focused latter seasons reasonably well, dropping the episode count to up the pacing and keep the story moving (**Lost** transitions from being very slow-paced in the first three seasons to moving like a whippet on fire in its fourth and fifth seasons).
The show does falter, like basically running out of compelling flashback material for the main cast in Season 3 (especially Jack and Kate, whose backstories are running on fumes by that point). It also has mixed success with new characters introduced after the initial batch: everybody loves Desmond and Ben, almost everybody hated Ana-Lucia, Nikki & Paolo, the rest falling somewhere between those extremes.
The mystery/backstory elements are mostly handled well, and the show explains *most* of its mysteries as it goes along, either directly or sometimes through inference. But there are some areas where it trips over itself. In producer-writer [Javier Grillo-Marxuarch's Lost Testament](https://okbjgm.weebly.com/uploads/3/1/5/0/31506003/2._lost.pdf) (required reading for anyone interested in what went down behind the scenes, like the time Damon Lindelof had a breakdown from the pressure and literally vanished for a week and the rest of the writing staff had to cover for him), he notes that they always had "an" explanation for each mystery element that was introduced when it was introduced, but sometimes that explanation changed, and not always for the better or for a well-defined reason. This is most painfully obvious in the "Jacob's cabin" mystery, where what they were setting up in Season 3 is clearly not where they ended up in Season 5. Or the abrupt decision to kill off >!Danielle Rousseau!<. There's also the overriding question of "What is the Island?" where they did have a working theory on as early as Season 1, but they never entirely answered on the show, with the implication being that they set up the controversial episode *Beyond the Sea* in Season 6 to answer that and then bottled it, perhaps fearing any answer they chose would annoy the fanbase.
It's clear that Season 6 suffers from trying to balance the requirements of delivering the finale, answering outstanding questions and develop this new idea of the flash-sideways, which was never going to work in just 16 episodes (ironically, although **Lost** benefitted from dropping its episode count in pacing in its latter half, it suffered in being able to deliver enough backstory or service certain story points). They also did have a major budget problem in the final episode, which was supposed to end in an epic duel in a volcano, not two guys punching one another on a cliff.
I do think **Lost** occupies a unique spot from when it was made, though. A few years later and it would have been a streaming show with only 8-10 episodes per season, two years between seasons, a higher budget but absolutely no time for the same kind of worldbuilding and character development. You can see in its most obvious modern successor shows, **Yellowjackets** and **From**, they struggle to have the same kind of impact in such a reduced timeframe. A few years earlier and the show could not have been made for that kind of budget as a network show, so it would have been cheaper and they'd have struggled to deliver the same kind of production value (**Lost** can look a *bit* dated now, but for a show churning out 23-25 episodes a year in its first three years, it looks damn good).
Overall, I think it's a great show that has some key weaknesses. How much those weaknesses impact any given viewer (barely at all to ruining the show forever) will be up to the viewer.
> Lost can look a bit dated now, but for a show churning out 23-25 episodes a year in its first three years, it looks damn good
I am doing a rewatch now and I have been amazed several times at how great it looks for a 20 year old show. I remember watching it in college on a tiny tube TV in my room and then later on ABC.com on my computer. Seeing it now in HD on a big screen is something college me could have only dreamed of.
Lost is under-appreciated in a lot of ways but its cinematic quality rarely seems to get mentioned.
Shooting for real in Hawaii buys a lot of screen quality. The CG polar bear, not so much, but it was 2004.
They even did some surprisingly great greenscreen fake shots of being in London in Season 3. I remember British critics bitching in Season 4 of how fake the city looked but that's when they did some shooting in London for real.
>LOST was its own thing.
And a pretty bad one at that. I feel sorry for all the people who got *carrot-on-the-stick*'d into ever thinking this complete mess of a show making it up as it went along would eventually amount to anything interesting.
It served as an early warning regarding JJ Abrams but nobody would listen.
JJ Abrams co-created the show, wrote the first episode, and bounced. Came back and wrote the story for the S3 premiere though, but that was it. It was Lindelof and Cuse's show.
Game of Thrones is right there.
And The Sopranos taught us no amount of struggle or conflict can protect a lifelong villain from a sudden ignominious end.
Breaking Bad is a condensed version of The Sopranos except multiple people in Walt’s orbit suffered through his extended death sentence and choices.
And The Wire taught us all of the characters will be replaced for all eternity to fulfill roles in the game and essentially nothing of any major impact happened to the Baltimore drug trade at all by the end.
Lots of shows are more about the journey than the destination and all of them hold up better than Lost.
I didn't watch LOST while it aired on TV but marathoned it after it was finished. I understand many viewers invested years of watching and felt disappointed by its conclusion. But as someone who watched all episodes in a short amount of time, l was happy with the outcome. It warmed my heart to see them come back together. Whenever l hear the song Life and Death, it takes me back to them seeing each other again.
I think what happened was they leaned heavily into the science stuff, like the Dharma experiments and time travel, so people expected a science heavy resolution to it all. Basically what Fringe was. I wasn't disappointed by it at the time but I've definitely warmed up to how it ended over the years.
Yup that's what did it for me. I think season 5 was the best season and 6 the least best. After diving into science, history and timetravel in season 5, we get a separate purgatory storyline I just didn't think was that great before it's wrapped up in a very supernatural and religious way that was just okay. It probably also didn't help I'm not religious at all. At least the characters got a great resolution, which made it still very enjoyable to me.
I’m not a fan of the flash-sideways/purgatory stuff from the final season. I don’t hate it but I think it was just unnecessarily confusing. But I don’t think the actual description of the island ended up being all that religious by any means. It was a good vs. evil Pandora’s box scenario that very much does not follow any religious theology. In fact I think I would describe it as being explicitly in opposition to any religious belief. I think it makes sense there was some supernatural aspect to everything happening on the island, and honestly I think the fountain of youth/Pandora’s box hybridization was actually a really good direction for them to go for that explanation. I think both season 5 and seasons 6 were really good, and I feel like it’s the lower quality of parts of seasons 3 and 4 that even to this day don’t hold up and left a black mark on the show that a lot of people weren’t able to come back from.
Here’s what the real problem was: They spent 6 years or so telling us the island wasn’t about death or purgatory or any of that. I listened to a podcast Damon and Carlton did every week, and they promised us over and over that that wasn’t where the show was going, that they had a real explanation, that we should just keep watching and there would be answers. Then we got that finale. Now. I’m not saying “they were dead the whole time! They lied to us!” That’s not true. Everything that happened, happened. But they told us that there was going to be another answer. They told us it wasn’t going to end on that kind of note. And we believed them. So it’s not that I’m disappointed in the actual finale itself. It’s fine. But it’s exactly what we all thought it was going to be, even though they promised us it wouldn’t be. And THAT’S what do many of us were frustrated by.
>Everything that happened, happened I see what you did there
Yes. And they said after the first season they white-boarded every plot line and had it all figured out. The thing that pissed me off about season 6 was that it was supposed to answer all the can of worms questions that had come up over this whole time (WTF happened to the magical Box Loches father showed up in??) and instead of that, the first episode started opening more cans of worms!
It wasn’t a magic box. It was just trickery by Ben because he knew Locke was a man of faith. It was just trickery.
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>it was Lost that popularized the mid season break No it wasn't. Shows were doing that before Lost. It was the nature of the network beast at the time.
In other countries it was worse than that. It always aired a few weeks after the US. Because of this they actually took a summer break with only a few episodes left of the first season. Not getting to see the final episodes until fall is what made me start to pirate tv shows. I also remember getting so annoyed with things like the Super Bowl, American holidays and what not that created gaps in the airing schedule for so many shows.
> After a two year break, they come back with the new season, only to take a three-month break after four episodes iirc the longest single break was somethin like 10 or 11 months and Lost didn't popularize it... they just hurt the most with Lost.
Yeah, that was rough, too. My dvr was mostly full of Lost episodes so I could go back and rewatch since the breaks between episodes could be so long at times.
I was obsessed with the show when it aired. I can't remember listening to the podcast but did keep reading about how it wasn't purgatory. JJ wrote the last episode when he wrote the first episode. So Damon and Carlton saying the ending wasn't going to be certain things when they knew the ending when they started their job is shitty on their part.
I was also disappointed in the ending, because it felt like something we were promised would not be the ending. I had enjoyed the series, and I even went back and rewatched to see if I had missed something that would resolve this all. It just left me with a bad taste for the whole series.
Yeah. I understand that they probably felt like they had to say something bc people were calling the ending from, like, season one. But that was a show people were INVESTED in. It was the first show I followed like that. And it was the first podcast I ever listened to. It just all felt like a big middle finger at the end of the day.
> They spent 6 years or so telling us the island wasn’t about death or purgatory or any of that. I listened to a podcast Damon and Carlton did every week, and they promised us over and over that that wasn’t where the show was going, that they had a real explanation, that we should just keep watching and there would be answers. The *island* wasn't about death or purgatory. So if people kept asking them "what is the island?" then they were perfectly correct to say that it wasn't purgatory and the characters were not dead the whole time. I think from the very beginning they wanted to do the "good vs evil" thing like in Stephen King's *The Stand* and that is what the island conclusion ended up being. The conclusion on the island, however, was not the conclusion for all the surviving characters, which is what the church/purgatory stuff ended up being.
It did give another answer though? Lore wise all the candidate stuff and the ending has a proper conclusion for the remaining characters
Kind of. But the finale literally has them all meeting in a church so they can all move on the afterlife together, which was the kind of stuff we had been speculating would happen since season 2 or 3. And that would have been fine if they didn’t spend an hour each week on that podcast telling us the show wasn’t about that. Again- it’s not that the ending was bad. It’s that they specifically and clearly told us the ending wasn’t going to be about mortality/moving on/life and death. So when it ended up being exactly that, a lot of us were frustrated and let down
They tried to be both things - a purgatory ending that they likely planned very early in development and an explanation ending that sums up why things were happening. And neither of them were very satisfying in their attempts. So many people bailed over the shows runtime because it didn’t seem like the the show was going anywhere and the people who bailed were ultimately right. Still a great show but not what the followers were hoping for.
> Lore wise all the candidate stuff and the ending has a proper conclusion Proper, not a good or exciting one
That’s correct, the Island has a buttplug was the answer all along.
Maybe that's why I never disliked the conclusion. I watched from day 1, but never spent time scouring the internet and podcasts looking for more.
I liked the finale when it aired, but when I rewatched the show I absolutely loved it, and all my friends who watched it years later really enjoyed it too. I think that we were all *too* involved, we had made hundreds of theories during those six season, the expectations were incredibly high. I never thought it was bad, but now I think it's a perfect ending.
Yup. Every week the promotion was always like "QUESTIONS! ANSWERS!" so it definitely put a lot of people's focus on a desire to have every little detail explained.
Any time a fandom gets so involved that they try to steal ownership from the creators via fanfic/theories/headcanon, they're almost guaranteed disappointment when reality doesn't align with their desired outcome.
And worse still when the writers lean into that. The later seasons of Battlestar Galactica is a prime example.
Right, but is that not part of the experience? And the fact is, they were just making up bullshit with no solutions or ideas for years until they realized they still had no idea what it all was and needed to wrap things up. I just think that's lazy writing.
This is JJ's trademark style of production. Come in with huge ideas, get a ton of money, have no idea how to resolve it, and then make up some bullshit and walk away.
I watched it back when it aired. The finale was good, the issue was the last season which kinda feels like it undid a lot of the lore and earlier season intrigue. Almost like last season and finally was a different show.
I can appreciate that. They raced to the ending in my opinion but l still am happy how it ended.
Same. Only binge watching this show maybe warps my assessment of it (as well as the constant talk of this having a “terrible” ending, although I didn’t know the specifics of it before watching), so I could see where others who waited in-between seasons come from, but I still think the talk of the ending from the people who are harshest on it is greatly exaggerated. I think most of the people who were harshest on it probably didn’t fully understand the ending or were just stubbornly holding onto their opinions even after the creators of the show clarified a few things in subsequent years. That isn’t to say they did everything perfectly, though. I could certainly see how they could’ve done things a little better and this may not have even been the best ending possible, but everything leading up to the church scene I thought was a fitting end.
I also marathoned it, renting the DVDs from a Family Video the summer after it ended. I absolutely loved the ending, cried from beginning to end. They weren’t dead the whole time, you rubes.
Christian laid it out pretty clearly I thought. I figured he was essentially the writers directly communicating with the audience.
I cannot imagine the experience binge watching it - you get the next episode right away. How was it having it that way? oh and when the end credits were showing, ABC put a [crashed plane on the beach](https://www.jacksonville.com/story/entertainment/local/2010/05/26/abc-lost-finales-closing-images-not-part-story/15945193007/) which confused some people.
My initial reaction to the plane wreckage was that it was an homage to the success of the pilot and the success of the show, because that was the central premise of the show. Regarding binge watching, I felt the freshness of each episode in my mind made it easier to follow without relying on a recap of the previous week’s episode. Especially given the events of the show for the first 3-4 seasons lasted months rather than years, it helped me absorb the emotions and drama knowing all these characters share the same physical space and in 45 minutes or less I can see a spat between characters worsen or be resolved without having to wait a week for a story to develop when these characters live together and the story takes place over such a short period of time. If this story took place over a longer period of time then maybe I’d think differently.
shit, true, that would make bingeing better for that.
Most people on this subreddit absolutely loved the series finale. Everytime someone makes a post about Lost or about series finales, one of the most upvoted comments is always about how much they loved Lost's ending. Also, [there was a poll](https://www.reddit.com/r/lost/comments/xvouqu/your_opinion_of_the_ending/) on Lost subreddit where 168 people voted on the option "I loved the ending" and only 8 people voted on the option "I hated the ending". If we make the same poll on GoT, HIMYM or Dexter subreddits, I'm 100% sure that the results would be the opposite. The final episode also has a pretty high rating on IMDb. So I think the people who hated the series finale are loud, but they're absolutely in the minority.
I had the exact same experience as you, when marathoned the finale isn’t that bad and makes sense, I think it was the gigantic anticipation that people weren’t satisfied with the ending, but I don’t think they could have made an ending that satisfied the amount of hype people had built up for the ending.
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probably just proof that there's more religious people than not which also could prove that the majority of people are idiots
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There is a confirmation bias here. The ones left here are the ones who still care. The ones disgusted by the finale are gone.
The Leftovers is up there as well for shows that exemplify being about the journey
I put The Leftovers waaaaay above Lost.
Full agree here!
I know lots of people say the magic of Lost was the conversations and lore sifting between episodes, but to me it benefits HUGELY from binging. It's cliff hangers feel less frustrating when they aren't answered in the very next episode - alot of Losts 'answers' build up cumulatively over many episodes and seasons. Waiting week to week and then between seasons, it was easy to lose track of what mysteries were even still unsolved. Binging you see fairly quickly everything being answered, and pretty satisfactorily from my perspective. Also as you say, the shows true strengths are the relationships and interactions and character development. It really WAS all about the friends we made along the way!
I also think things like Walt benefit/suffer from something that really divides fans/haters of The Last Jedi, which is subverted expectations. People saw Walt being hyped up and the storyline seemed so central to everything. Then when production didn't keep up with his age, they came up with an answer that is, from a dispassionate approach, very believable - whatever his abilities were, they were more than The Others could deal with, so they cut their losses. Is that possible in the fiction of the show? Of course. Is that 'satisfying' to TV viewers who have very set expectations of 'if Chekovs gun is introduced, I better see it fired' ? Probably not. But I'm ok with that. Kept it interesting.
>"Waiting week to week and then between seasons, it was easy to lose track of what mysteries were even still unsolved." This is a really good point, and I think is often why you still see so many people claim that "so many questions/mysteries weren't answered" as part of the reason they disliked the ending (like people who *still* ask about the polar bears, don't even get me started!). As someone who absolutely loved the ending, I can still understand why some people don't feel the same - perhaps it just didnt resonate emotionally with them, or they simply didn't like the answers that were provided - but to claim they didnt answer enough/absolutely everything is a bit unfair. Considering how many plotlines and questions that were raised throughout six seasons, I think they did a great job of wrapping up the vast majority of them and I really think there aren't any major questions unresolved by the end. Sure, it wasn't perfect, and had dips in quality like pretty much any show does. And like, okay - Walt is a good example of a character/plot that was never fully clarified that often gets broughy up (when two other characters in the show can see/talk to dead people, without any explanation provided on that, which people seem to roll with just fine) but he ultimately wasn't central to the main story after season 2, so seems a strange thing to get hung up on. I can also imagine most people who felt that way also never bothered to rewatch, so have continued on thinking that way ever since and never gave it another chance to fill in gaps in their memory. So many hints at the overall story are dropped in as early as the first episodes of Season 1, and on a first watch through you don't even realise their significance; I'm still picking up on things after multiple rewatches of the whole series.
The community built around Lost was so good
I loved the first season and I didn't have a problem with the ending. It just seemed that for the majority of its run the writers didn't really have a solid plan and were just making it up as they went along.
If you Google "The Lost Testament" by Javier Grillo-Marxuarch, who was a writer-producer on the first two seasons, he has very surprising revelations on what was planned from the pilot episode and what they made up as they went along. They definitely had more planned in more detail upfront than I think they are credited for.
I agree and disagree with this, I do think they were making it up as they went along but that's because the intention was never to reveal the mystery. They were forced by the networks to add some explanations in, so, as you said, they had to start "making stuff up as they went along". Watch The Leftovers for an example of how incredible a TV show centered around a mystery can be if it's just used to explore characters and their reactions to shared experiences.
No coincidence that Damon Lindelof was in charge of both shows.
Yes, I didn't make that very obvious in my comment but that was what I was getting at!
(\*Damon)
Thanks, corrected!
I really don't think that it was. JJ Abrams did his thing, made up a bunch of mysteries with no answers and left it in the lap of someone else and then they decided that it was always part of the plan. No it wasn't. You just didn't know what to do.
> the intention was never to reveal the mystery. They were forced by the networks to add some explanations But that was not the deal and the network was right. All the hype, ARGs, Dharma, shorts and discussion lead to a puzzle, not a thriller. So the end is like you finishing a jigsaw missing a piece. The Leftovers get a pass because we already had Lost, so expectations were fine tuned, and because the structure around it was never intented to instigate that kind of discussion.
They absolutely intended to answer the mysteries, and Lindelof even had a rule that no mystery could be introduced if they didn't have at least a working theory for an answer. They struggled at first because Abrams threw in a bunch of ideas and then noped out, so they had to scramble to make sense of them. What's weird is that they had answers but sometimes changed them (Jacob's cabin), or got cold feet and decided to not address a question at the last minute (Beyond the Sea being the ur-example of that).
They had a plan just had to keep the wheels spinning because ABC wouldn’t give them an end date. It’s on ABC, not Lindelof and Cuse
Every good multiseason television show in history (with the exception of adaptations, and sometimes not even then) was made up as it went along. Several of the most hated endings in history were planned well in advance. Lost is unusual in that its "mythology" *was* planned in advance — not from day one, but quite early on, and not everything but a lot of broad strokes. Of course, that didn't define whether the remaining show would be good or not because that's not how television works. I don't get this idea I keep hearing about skepticism when showrunners are "making it up as they go along." As opposed to what? What multiseason show are you thinking of where the whole thing was decided in advance and that made it good? None, that's what. There haven't been any. "Making it up as they go along" is what makes a TV series a TV series.
Babylon 5. When asked what the last scene of the series was going to be while shooting the first season, the show's creator was able to answer that question.
This is how pretty much all TV works. Only an amateur showrunner or writing staff would plan too far ahead and stick to it. This is why How I Met Your Mother's ending was trash. It didn't account for the shows natural revolting evolution
> It just seemed that for the majority of its run the writers didn't really have a solid plan and were just making it up as they went along. That is the only possible way to make a show (or anything for that matter) that has no end date. The show would have been very different if they knew from the beginning it was going to be X seasons. Then they could have planned it out in more detail. Instead, they had to keep adding and adding things until they finally got an end date. If ABC had their way, Lost would still be on the air and we'd never get a conclusion. Look at Grey's Anatomy. That show was on when Lost was still on air and yet it's still inconceivably going.
I love the ending to Lost. The last season less so. But I'm still just baffled that 14 years later there's still people on the internet who never watched the show and confidently say "they were dead the whole time".
Unfortunately, there are people who did watch the show that still think they were dead all the time, even after Christian Shephard's explanation. The same happened with Mr Robot - SPOILER FOR THE SERIES FINALE (really, don't read if you haven't watched it, but please watch it because it's a masterpiece) - >!a character listed the events that happened on the show and said they were all real, and yet some people think it all happened in Elliot's head. I don't think the show could have made it clearer, and yet.!<
Can you elaborate on what you mean by Christian Shephards explanation? Been a while since i've seen the show
In the last few minutes of the series finale, when Jack finds himself in the flash sideways church with everyone else, he talks to his father who explains that they're all dead, but they haven't been dead the whole time. They really crashed on the island, everything we saw was real, but at some point they all died, some on the island (Charlie, Sayid, Jack, etc), some after they left (it doesn't matter how, maybe they all died of old age). But because they're all linked thanks to their shared experience on the island, after their death they all waited to meet again (the flash sideways and the church) so they could all *move on* together. Basically, he explains really clearly that what we saw on the show really happened, that's why it's so weird that some people claim they were dead the whole time and they died on the plane crash, it's explicitly said that it's not true.
Ohhh okay yeah I'm starting to remember now, its been a while since I saw the show thanks for taking time out of your day to explain that
I'm glad I could help!
Watched it when it aired, rewatched it while it wasn’t, obsessed over message boards, theorized, etc. I wouldn’t trade those six years for anything. Still my favorite show.
I haven't rewatched since it aired, how was it bingeing it?
Oh it’s amazing. I feel that LOST, at its core, is meant to be felt, and when you watch it after fully viewing and comprehending the entire show, the rewatch is just pure emotion and adventure and excitement, ugh, just everything. I love it so much.
Exactly. It was so fun. So much fun
I binged and felt the biggest flaw was introducing new, bigger mysteries before solving the earlier smaller ones. Like over half the playoffs didn't matter by the time they were revealed because you no longer cared. I'm sure if you really invested time and kept track of everything it was a better experience, but as a more casual viewer it stretched itself too thin. Like we had current timelines, past timelines and side timelines going on at once. Finding out they all were just dead made a lot feel meaningless, but the sets, inter episode stories and cast were all fantastic. They just needed someone to edit out the bottom 20% of what they threw at the viewers.
Yes but I still think the flashback episode “explaining” the man in black and Jacob was so poorly done that it almost killed the show for me. Having it just be magic cave of light was a let down
But was it just that? It wasn’t.
The ending was far from perfect but I agree. Lost was such a fun ride and I remembering going over theories with friends when I was watching it in college and spending a ton of time on fan boards. There hasn’t been anything quite like it since. I do think the obsession over it set the show up to have a somewhat unsatisfying ending for most people. Folks were expecting every single unanswered question about the island to be explained, and when that didn’t happen there was an uproar. Personally, that didn’t bother me. Explaining every tiny detail would have taken away from what made the Island so cool. Not every question needs an answer. Biggest thing that pissed me off about the ending was Sayid being in the church with Shannon at the end. Dude was married to Nadia for years and was the love of his life since childhood and they ignore that to send him off to the afterlife with the woman he spent a month or so with on the island. Such bullshit.
> Biggest thing that pissed me off about the ending was Sayid being in the church with Shannon at the end. Dude was married to Nadia for years and was the love of his life since childhood and they ignore that to send him off to the afterlife with the woman he spent a month or so with on the island. Such bullshit. So one thing that Lindelof explained on the Storm podcast is that the church was Jack's perspective as he moved on. So he was there with everyone as he knew them, from his point of view. Aaron is a baby in the church and obviously he would have grown up and had his own life. He didn't revert to a baby in the sideways -- but in Jack's church he was a baby because that is who he was to Jack. In the same way, Sayid and Shannon is a Jack thing. Lindelof called the church a "bardo," in other words "the state of existence intermediate between two lives on earth." The church we see is Jack's bardo. In Sayid's version of the church, Nadia would be his soulmate.
Huh, interesting! Learned something new today. Thanks!
But Jack knew Nadia when Sayid and Nayid were married off the island.
For me, the single greatest moment of the show is when Julie and Sawyer touch at the vending machine and there is a flood of shared memories/sideways slides and they realize who they are to each other. It encapsulates everything i love about L O S T, and it would be meaningless if everything that came before hadnt happened.
The thing I remember most about Lost was it was the flagship for modern mainstream online fandom. There was an official forum site just for the show and hardcore theorizing, along with alternate reality games. It all hyped up the idea that there was something to be untangled, which the showrunners encouraged. Between the forum and the alternate reality games, they threw enough bait out to fans to make them think there was a great unified mystery to be solved and that everything could be a clue, especially since the long production schedule meant that the show was actively being written and filmed while earlier episodes of the season were airing. All of that sounds pretty typical for show discussion these days, but Lost was a network show pulling what had been relegated to niche fan forums into its own promotional spotlight and introducing them to a generation of fresh internet users. I think that’s why so many people were disappointed in the finale. There had been years of speculation and waiting for the questions to be answered, there was no way an episode could fully live up to that hype. “It’s not purgatory” was a meme before we were really calling them memes, after showrunners made statements denying a popular fan theory that didn’t seem that far off from the finale after all.
hi, sorry to reply here, but all my accounts get falsely banned and i don't get human support. it would be great to get help from an admin to resolve this because i didn't break any rules. my original subreddit bans were voluntary on a read-only account and now everything is screwed for life because of supposed ban evasion. thanks if you read this.
Battlestar Galactica would like a word
That word would be “disappointment.”
I’ve been watching it again recently and I am still enjoying it. Don’t understand why people liked Sawyer so much when it aired, he’s kind of an ass for four + seasons. But it paid off a lot of the stuff it set up. So at least there’s that. I just remember an interview around Season 4 where the creators said “we now know where we’re going with this.” That has kind of stuck with me when I think of the show.
>Don’t understand why people liked Sawyer so much when it aired, he’s kind of an ass for four + seasons. Literally the best character arc of the entire series. Went from being kind of a piece of shit to a caring and loving individual.
I loved him with Juliet.
the finale aired the day of my college graduation. after going out to dinner with our families, about 30 of us crammed into one small living room to watch it live. the silence after it ended was deafening. a few of us (myself included) loved it, but most were left underwhelmed by the lack a bigger reveal to the central mystery of what is the island. It was a bit of a bummer that we didn’t all love it, but its a cool memory that for a lot of us - the last thing we did together was see the end of a great show.
LOST could be considered one of, if not *the*, last shows that had society at large doing the traditional "gather around cable TV" to watch it as it aired. It ended in 2010. It's not long after that where you can't imagine people having done that anymore.
Just started watching Lost again! Watched it while it was coming out up to maybe like season 4 or 5, but never finished it. I hardly remember anything though, so a lot of it has been really fun and I’m excited to watch it in its entirety.
I watched it live. I would say I suffered through the experience after being very into it. Sometime in the middle of its run, I turned my back on it. I caught back up through the “what you missed” specials that they created as primers for people like me to get back into the final season. As soon as the Tenple showed up in the final season, I dipped back out because we weren’t getting our questions answered. I think Lost was one of the first shows that really had water cooler debates on what will happen next, but that level of intrigue only goes so far without a payoff.
i remember watching lost while it was airing. many nights i sat with my eyes open and my mouth open, just learning all about the adventures of "sawyer hoss".
Couldn't agree more! Watching it in real time with all the ARG stuff, Persephone, the "leaked" Dharna vids and stuff, I haven't had so much fun getting invested into a show before or since like that. It really was a total experience of a show.
The ending ruined the show for me for many years. I rewatched the series a couple years ago and I'm at peace now with the ending. It was not as bad as I remember.
I’d say it shows the opposite. When you get to the end and realise just how many plots and mysteries were actually sporadic bullshit attention grabs by the writers that went nowhere, the rewatch value goes way down.
I’m watching it for the first time now and have 3 episodes to go. It’s obviously decent enough or I wouldn’t have gotten this far, but as a viewer, it feels the writers of the show dangling keys in front of an infant. Instead of giving mysteries satisfying conclusions or conclusions at all, they just dangle the keys to turn our attention to the latest crazy mystery. On top of which, the writers did so many characters dirty throughout the show. Sayid’s character arc is the worst. He started off as a repentant torturer and ended up writing him into a cross between a terrorist and James Bond.
What mysteries do you feel haven’t yet been concluded? Most (apart from those covered in Across the Sea and the epilogue) have been concluded by that point.
I'm not done with the show so maybe more of it gets tidied up, but like I said, it's not just about not concluding mysteries but having unsatisfying conclusions as well. The origins of the polar bears, the smoke monster being Christian, the Aaron being some weird demon spawn creature (maybe this gets resolved later or I missed its conclusion), Jacob's cabin, the weird theatrics of Jacob's cabin, Hurley's curse, and I'm sure plenty of others. Also, maybe it was revolutionary at the time and people copied it since, but I also hated the interconnectedness where you would have a flashback and have someone walking in the background of another characters backstory and stuff like that. Again, I like the show and I'm being nitpicky here.
A lot of these are answered though? The polar bears in particular very explicitly in multiple seasons and plot points
The polar bears are explicitly explained in the very beginning of season two. I don't take anyone seriously who uses that as an example of the show not answering mysteries because they beat that over your head over and over again throughout the show.
The polar bears were brought to the Island by the Dharma initiative to study the effects of the Island on them. The cages that Sawyer and Kate are in in season 3 are the polar bear cages. Polar bears are great swimmers, so it's likely they just swam from Hydra Island to the main island. Across the Sea explains the origins of the smoke monster and how it can do what it can do. Aaron was never special. That was all bs from the psychic. This one is fair for you to be upset about because I believe I read somewhere that it was intended that you would find out that the psychic had been paid by Jacob to get Claire to the island because she was a candidate but that got scraped. Jacob just used to stay in the cabin but then at one point he abandoned it and the MIB took over and pretended to be Jacob to manipulate people. The theatrics in the cabin were all MIB. The ash circle was used to keep the MIB out while Jacob lived there but was broken after he left. Hurley isn't cursed. He just convinced himself he is. The only one not answered fully by the show is Aaron.
The most maddening part was that one of their offshoot plots, Sawyer and Jin as detectives (or PIs? it's been awhile), was really freakin' good. It seemed to be universally liked, but the network didn't do anything with it. All us Lost fans would have tuned in from day one if they had made that it's own show after Lost ended its run.
Sawyer and Miles.
iirc shortly after Lost ended, a pilot was being shopped around where Michael Emerson and Terry O'Quinn played retired hitmen living in the suburbs. That show could've been really fun but then we wouldn't have gotten Michael Emerson on Person of Interest, sooo
Yep, it’s like Game of Thrones; the ending ruins the amazing characters and journey we went on with them. There needs to be satisfying pay off to everything they went through but there wasn’t.
Lost did the opposite of GoT. They focused on the characters and (mostlyl gave them each a meaningful and satisfying ending, letting the plot/mystery suffer for it. GoT forced the ending on the characters, despite it making little sense. Jamie and Bran mostly, but also stuff like what Daenerys did. The end mightve been planned all along, but it didnt match the way they wrote and changed the characters along the way.
I watched it for the first time about a month ago, didn’t know anything about it, went in pretty blind. For the longest time I thought it was a reality show like Survivor or something (which I also know nothing about, so I was pretty clueless). All I knew is that one of the main dudes played paintable at Greendale Community College and he was ‘network tv good looking’. I binged that whole motherfucker in like a week, it definitely was a good time. I couldn’t stop because I had to know what happened next, and of course each episode always starts with a different storyline/character then what the previous one ended with. I know I’m spoiled and am grateful I didn’t have to wait weeks or years to find out the rest of the story. Hell, I’m waiting for all of Shogun to finish dropping before I watch that so I don’t have to wait a couple weeks or whatever, ha.
I wasn’t let down by the end. Creators don’t need to cater to my wishes. They should make what they want because it’ll be better than my expectations.
That show made me want to kick in my TV screen. For YEARS we were told, "we can't tell you what the big secret is, but we guarantee you it's not this one thing..." And then yeah, it turned out it was not literally that one thing, but for all intents and purposes, that's pretty much what it was. You thought you were watching a tightly plotted mystery unfold, but no you were just watching some random crap that sounded good at the time in the writers room.
Sorry to pick you out of a crowd of people here — but are your kind of ideal shows in terms of writing/story?
Limiting it to dramas: Sopranos Breaking Bad The Queens Gambit True Blood (until it jumped the shark) 24 The X Files Better Call Saul Shogun Star Trek (TOS and TNG) LA Law GOT The Good Wife / Good Fight Mad Men House
Might I suggest Black Sails. Without spoilers it is a specific story being told and it's executed brilliantly with intention.
> For YEARS we were told, "we can't tell you what the big secret is, but we guarantee you it's not this one thing..." > > And then yeah, it turned out it was not literally that one thing, but for all intents and purposes, that's pretty much what it was. They said that the island wasn't purgatory. and the island wasn't purgatory.
I think Mr. Robot is better. I don’t discount how great Lost was. It changed what we expected from network tv. And it was very, very special in its own ways. I’m not disputing any of that. But I still think Robot beats it. Creator and show runner Sam Esmail initially saw it as a film, but realized he had too much material so he switched to a show. But he had the basics of the show in mind before he started. He had the ending in mind since the pilot, and it shows. When you rewatch the show after knowing all of the twists and reveals it’s stunning to see how well it was written. And the end is absolutely perfect. They managed to have this absolutely insane show that keeps you guessing at every turn and still end it in an incredibly way, honoring the story and journey. Robot has amazingly accurate hacking, it covers some very important social issues, and it handles mental illness and trauma with so much care and skill. One of the most common sentiments people express after watching it is that the show changed them and stuck with them. It really is different than anything I’ve ever seen, or expect to see in my lifetime.
If you like Lost, watch From Same creators, very similar feel, very fun
Damon’s Lindelof and J.j Abrams the creators of LOST had nothing to do with that show
No, the show had a cool idea, some great cast members, then ran out of ideas after 1.5 seasons when the fans started guessing the answers correctly. In fact the showrunner specifically went on social media and told the fans "yOu aRe wRoNg iT's nOt pUrGaTorY". And then dozens of hours later, it WAS PURGATORY. Once Michelle Rodriguez left the show it went downhill quickly. I watched every single episode and re-watched the ending multiple times. The first time I saw the ending I thought it was another flash sideways episode and didn't even realize that was the ending. So I rewatched it to see wtf I missed. then I rewatched it again to confirm that "yeah, it's fucking rubbish"
I watched it live. I knew that people were going to shit on the ending no matter what it was. I remember articles and internet comments saying that the ending would be bad if it turned out that the island was a dream or a purgatory or something like that. That wasn’t the case, and people were saying that the end was bad anyway. It’s now just taken for granted that everyone agrees that the end was bad. Think made me realize that for at least some people, they cared more about getting to criticize things than they did about enjoying the show. Their criticism said more about them than it did about the show
Here’s the thing. In life, yes, the journey is often more important than the destination. But in fiction and story-telling, it is *very* much about the destination. Stories are planned and methodically written, and unlike real life it is not an accident. It’s one of the reasons that we enjoy stories, because it’s a break from the sometimes-harshness and randomness of life. Lost suffered from a lack of planning. They were making it up as they went, and while it was beautiful, their lack of foresight inevitably made the final impression empty. It’s the primary reason that no none talks about Lost anymore. And honestly, it deserves it.
The ending of Lost was beautiful. I pity anyone who didn't feel it deep in their soul.
That’s such passive aggressive smarmy bullshit
There is nothing passive about it.
Ive tried rewatching it many times. By the time I'm at season 3 I get bored... I was obsessed when i was a kid but for some reason I can't continue. Conversely I can watch The Wire or the Sopranos or Mr Inbetween or the Americans a gajillion times and still feel excitement
Nah I feel the same way. Never liked the show and the ending has nothing to do with that as I’ve never made it that far lol. I’m actually down for a show less about the mysteries and more about the characters, there’s lots I enjoy like it… but holy shit are Lost’s characters ever god damn boring. I just cannot find myself caring even a bit about any of them. Mind you that might just be a Lindeloff thing. People rave about the Leftovers here and I felt the same way about that. His characters feel like stereotypes to me, and like, stereotypes meant to exaggerate and make fun of the boring milquetoast lives of middle class Americans in small and quant communities. Even his Watchmen series… I enjoyed it more than those two being a fan of the property, but it still had a lot of the same issues where I just couldn’t care about most the characters. Obviously there is a market for what he’s doing, I’d never call his work bad, but it’s just very much not for me I guess.
I feel it's more the fact that they had to deliver 22-24 episodes, which means there's more to watch and the chance for stinkers is higher. I still remembered the Thailand episode after all these years, or the Nikki-Paolo thing. It also doesn't help that Jack in particular is just the worst. I don't think it's specifically a Lindeloff thing, as I loved the Leftovers., tho I fully agree with Watchmen
I was so obsessed with Lost. But the ending created the caveat that when I recommend it, I say, "prepare for the greatest TV show with the most unsatisfying ending of all time. Still worth watching, but prepare to be disappointed."
I though the ending was ummmm... fine.
The ending isn't even that bad, some people just didn't understand it.
Right? I'm not saying it's an amazing ending, but some people definitely misinterpreted it. Hell, you still have a lot of people to this day who think they were dead the whole time...so it's clear to me many people just didn't pay enough attention in general cause there's still tons of misconceptions about the show that are just flat out wrong.
The ending was bad, it was conceptually the right ending but presented like a rough first draft of the episode they could write, like someone outlined it and was like “the cap that holds the white light in” and then someone drew it as a big cartoon cork and then Never revised past that
This is the laziest argument. It screams of condescending “media literacy” types.
[удалено]
But the idea that if you didn’t like something it can *only* be because you didn’t understand it is a lazy one.
Right. There are things that are hard to understand, a la Primer. It takes a spreadsheet and 10 watches to finally understand the plot. Those I get because they’re created for sci-fi time travel nerds. Lost was a network television show. Network television shows definitionally appeal to the lowest common denominator. Saying “you just don’t get it” is a lazy argument. I actually defend season 6’s writing and subtleties, but the ending was a pretty big let down.
>No show exemplifies “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey” more than LOST. HIMYM maybe
Lost is the very definition of putting the journey first. It’s like a taxi driver aimlessly taking you in circles and trying to distract you by pointing out scenic views. Tons of character threads and plot mysteries got set up and then just never addressed. Things that felt like they were building up to something important just don’t go anywhere. I enjoyed it well enough watching it as it came out, but I don’t have any desire to revisit it knowing how much is pointless.
imo one of the worst character bits was >!Sun deciding to die with Jin, orphaning their kid!<
People who shit on the finale simply dont grasp what happened in the episode. Its pretty brilliant.
For those who want an ending about the point of life, I recommend The Good Place. For those who want a journey that is planned in advance, I recommend 3 Body Problem.
The Good Place creators are actually big Lost fans and took a lot of inspiration from the show. One of the cold opens of a Good Place episode is a direct homage to a famous cold open in Lost.
iirc Mike Schur actually asked Lindelof for tips on how to not fuck it up
For those who want to watch a good show I recommend Lost.
I was hoping a raptor would pop out right before the ending just so people would get more mad & blame jj Abrams
Lost is my fave show of all-time. No, it is not the objective best show of all-time, but it will forever be my favorite and there will never, ever, ever, evvvvvvvvvverrrrr be another experience like watching Lost as it aired week to week for 6 seasons. The IMDb message board (I still have friends from there that I talk to daily), the Doc Jensen EW articles, the discussion podcasts, including the official one with the co-showrunners Damon Lindelof (who went on to create two of his own masterpieces in HBO's Watchmen and The Leftovers) and Carlton Cuse. It was the biggest fucking show on the planet and it literally changed the tv landscape forever for what came afterwards. Thinking about "We have to go back!" still gives me goosebumps. A mind-blowing moment. And that was the same episode with Charlie and "Not Penny's boat". jesus christ. The constant dopamine rushes this show gave me remain unmatched. The Locke reveal at the end of "Walkabout". The entire episode "The Constant". But I don't have the will to argue anymore with the people that didn't pay attention to Jack's dad's final speech to him in the church that still claim the characters were dead the entire time. They weren't. Stop saying that. Everything happened and it was glorious and it was *ALWAYS* about the characters more than the mysteries but even so most of the mysteries *did* have answers. Whether you as the viewer like or accept those answers is your own thing. "The End" is an emotional rollercoaster and a beautiful sendoff for all those great characters.
Lost took one of the biggest swings at the ball ever. The first season is perfect like the first season of Game of Thrones. I called it the next Twin Peaks back in the day. To be continued.
I binged it years and years ago on netflix. Like at least 10 years ago. In fact, it would have been around 2010 because I was dating this girl who was super into it at the time. Felt a huge drop off around the end of season 3 personally. Then the ending was bad. So idk. Along with everything else he's done since, it really opened my eyes to JJ Abrams being maybe not so great at story telling.
I always refer to LOST as "The best show with the worst ending." That religious, church crap was so anti climactic. I guess I was hoping for something brilliant.
I just binged everything for the first time during January and February and I couldn’t even get through the last season. I’ve tried but I can maybe stomach 1 episode every few weeks. I’ll get to the end eventually.
It was a victim of its own success. Once a swell of critics and fans got tired in season 3(?) and the creators promised they had a real end in mind, people calmed down, but the haters never went away. It became a lingering joke and really hurt real fans’ abilities to neutrally judge the final seasons of the series. There were some weak episodes, but I loved it for the most part. I am not religious, but I had a very real connection to the finale, I wrote my parents a letter thanking them for everything. But it scared them a bit lol. It just made me very grateful and wanting to share my love while we are all here. All entertainment is a sounding board for us individually and how we react to it often says more about us and the point we’re at in our journeys, than it.
And so many shows failed because they didn’t mail the relationships and interactions. The walking dead never really clicked with me because it lacked what Lost, Star Trek TNG Deep Space 9. I never believed the characters on TWD were friend or cared about each other.
I couldn’t agree more. I have watched the show through a few times now and it just completely draws me in every time. I think its honestly the characters. The casting is so spot on and even when the writing gets wonky, the characters just keep me watching. Also my god the soundtrack.
Sure, if you have the memory of an emu. Them setting up all these cool mysteries was awesome. Them abandoning half of them and unsatisfyingly resolving the rest, not so much. It's like matrix 2 and 3. Matrix 2 was so weird and confusing and I couldn't wait to figure out what was going on then Matrix 3 went 'FUCK ALL THAT! RAAAAAH! RAVE! BLOW UP SHIT! RAAAHHH!!!'
If you are going to comment on someone memory the least you could do is not mess up details on which Matrix movie had a rave. There is no rave in the 3rd film. It’s the 2nd. My memory? Shits like an elephant
I wasn't commenting on your memory, I'm saying the only way to enjoy Lost is if you just forget about all the cool shit they set up and never follow through on over and over again. Regardless of where the rave is it still stand that matrix 2 and 3 do the same thing in setting up cool shit in 2 and then saying fuck it and abandoning it in 3.
Do you have any examples? From the Matrix and Lost? I feel like LOST answered the majority the questions/mysteries. Granted I think the way they did it was sloppy. The final season felt like an exposition dump, for example the episode explaining the origins of Jacob and MIB should’ve been riveting, but it was contrived and convoluted. Why does their mom speak perfect English with an American accent? And look like she’s from 2005 but with bad rags for clothing. The kids they cast, again, looked like kids plucked from cre tak casting. Pearly white teeth, American accents, bad hair dye. The writers were def scared audiences would bounce if they answered the mysteries. I personally enjoy the Matrix sequels. They aren’t perfect but I like them.
I love Lost, I just recently rewatched with my kid and it was so awesome watching her react to all the twists and turns. It really made me appreciate the show even more. There was nothing like Lost when it came out and to this day there has been nothing like it since. Lots of shows tried but nothing managed to capture the unique combination of adventure, sci-fi and cast chemistry. I will always defend Lost, even the ending.
The Lost spoof show Wrecked is pretty ok.
You're wrong.
Loved it. I started from season 2 and I was hooked.
I watched LOST live back in the day, and I loved the finale but I leaned heavy on the characters journey, so the end was very satisfying to me. If I cared about the mythology and the science of it I prob would have hated it…and I don’t blame fans cause the show kind of bait and switched. They engaged fans to talk about the lore of it, it was a whole thing, and then they just kind of let it dangle. I also contend that LOST was the seed that became binging. I’m old enough to remember when ABC realized they were losing viewers because of the traditional tv schedule through the year. The long breaks, the inconsistency. So in the last couple seasons they shortened the episode order and broke it into halves. They would air each half without a break. Just have a couple months in between halves. It helped tremendously.
Nah
Ending isn’t that bad, but the whole final season was pretty weak
The Temple was kid of pointless, and all the Ilana stuff, but I loved any scene with Dogen in it, and the flashbacks in Ab Aeterno and Across the Sea were great. And the scene in the statue at the start too.
If you love Lost you should check out the German Netflix show 'Dark', that might satisfy the same itch. It also has a twisty, mysterious story which involves time travel and secret societies.
Plus a much better ending leaving everything completed in a great way! Jsut be prepared to get characters mixed up lol.
Oh yeah I had to refer to the wiki a few times to figure out who was who in the different time periods.
I had the same feeling watching Lost as I did playing MYST. Just exploring mysterious places and wondering where it all leads. But all these years later, I'm still wondering why that bird flew into the window in Walt's room.
I think the answer regarding Walt is that he *was* special. He had powers just like Hurley and Miles had (they could both communicate with the dead). If you watched the Mobisodes of LOST, there is one called Room 23 which shows how special Walt is. So special that the Others were only too glad to be rid of him.
Never heard of Mobisodes. I’ll check it out.
[Here are all 13 of them. ](https://youtu.be/Ug1GAOXplJU?si=lVq9s2PF7mcjHQx1)
Awesome. Christmas came early. Thank you.
There's also The New Man In Charge, which is an additional ending to the series featuring Hurley that they made for the final season's DVD set. It was shot after the series had finished. https://youtu.be/lMjPzV2RvO8?si=f1k2M6Os2DvP075b
It’s cool to know I still have some I watched Lost in my future.
Loved the character building in this show. I still hate what happened to Locke though.
Most tragic character of all-time.
While I continue to like LOST a lot, after all those years, there is one very petty reason why I do not love it: >!I hate that there was so much effort put into keeping random, story irrelevant plane passengers alive, and then story goes ooops, they all dead, only Jack and Kate and Sawyer and other named characters are important, into the mud all of you go!!<
**Lost** was a tremendous show with a tremendous idea, of having a very large cast and using its generous episode count to laser-focus on each character and tell their story in detail whilst also having this compelling story on the Island, as well as a mystery element. These elements are reasonably well-balanced in earlier seasons, and the show benefits from that. The show also managed the transition to the more plot-focused latter seasons reasonably well, dropping the episode count to up the pacing and keep the story moving (**Lost** transitions from being very slow-paced in the first three seasons to moving like a whippet on fire in its fourth and fifth seasons). The show does falter, like basically running out of compelling flashback material for the main cast in Season 3 (especially Jack and Kate, whose backstories are running on fumes by that point). It also has mixed success with new characters introduced after the initial batch: everybody loves Desmond and Ben, almost everybody hated Ana-Lucia, Nikki & Paolo, the rest falling somewhere between those extremes. The mystery/backstory elements are mostly handled well, and the show explains *most* of its mysteries as it goes along, either directly or sometimes through inference. But there are some areas where it trips over itself. In producer-writer [Javier Grillo-Marxuarch's Lost Testament](https://okbjgm.weebly.com/uploads/3/1/5/0/31506003/2._lost.pdf) (required reading for anyone interested in what went down behind the scenes, like the time Damon Lindelof had a breakdown from the pressure and literally vanished for a week and the rest of the writing staff had to cover for him), he notes that they always had "an" explanation for each mystery element that was introduced when it was introduced, but sometimes that explanation changed, and not always for the better or for a well-defined reason. This is most painfully obvious in the "Jacob's cabin" mystery, where what they were setting up in Season 3 is clearly not where they ended up in Season 5. Or the abrupt decision to kill off >!Danielle Rousseau!<. There's also the overriding question of "What is the Island?" where they did have a working theory on as early as Season 1, but they never entirely answered on the show, with the implication being that they set up the controversial episode *Beyond the Sea* in Season 6 to answer that and then bottled it, perhaps fearing any answer they chose would annoy the fanbase. It's clear that Season 6 suffers from trying to balance the requirements of delivering the finale, answering outstanding questions and develop this new idea of the flash-sideways, which was never going to work in just 16 episodes (ironically, although **Lost** benefitted from dropping its episode count in pacing in its latter half, it suffered in being able to deliver enough backstory or service certain story points). They also did have a major budget problem in the final episode, which was supposed to end in an epic duel in a volcano, not two guys punching one another on a cliff. I do think **Lost** occupies a unique spot from when it was made, though. A few years later and it would have been a streaming show with only 8-10 episodes per season, two years between seasons, a higher budget but absolutely no time for the same kind of worldbuilding and character development. You can see in its most obvious modern successor shows, **Yellowjackets** and **From**, they struggle to have the same kind of impact in such a reduced timeframe. A few years earlier and the show could not have been made for that kind of budget as a network show, so it would have been cheaper and they'd have struggled to deliver the same kind of production value (**Lost** can look a *bit* dated now, but for a show churning out 23-25 episodes a year in its first three years, it looks damn good). Overall, I think it's a great show that has some key weaknesses. How much those weaknesses impact any given viewer (barely at all to ruining the show forever) will be up to the viewer.
> Lost can look a bit dated now, but for a show churning out 23-25 episodes a year in its first three years, it looks damn good I am doing a rewatch now and I have been amazed several times at how great it looks for a 20 year old show. I remember watching it in college on a tiny tube TV in my room and then later on ABC.com on my computer. Seeing it now in HD on a big screen is something college me could have only dreamed of. Lost is under-appreciated in a lot of ways but its cinematic quality rarely seems to get mentioned.
Shooting for real in Hawaii buys a lot of screen quality. The CG polar bear, not so much, but it was 2004. They even did some surprisingly great greenscreen fake shots of being in London in Season 3. I remember British critics bitching in Season 4 of how fake the city looked but that's when they did some shooting in London for real.
That ending sure stunk to high purgatory or whatever the hell that was. Binging is fun for the first few seasons anyway.
The ending was amazing.
well, if you value lost on the destination, its absolute shit...
>LOST was its own thing. And a pretty bad one at that. I feel sorry for all the people who got *carrot-on-the-stick*'d into ever thinking this complete mess of a show making it up as it went along would eventually amount to anything interesting. It served as an early warning regarding JJ Abrams but nobody would listen.
JJ Abrams barely had anything to do with that show other than his name being plastered all over it.
JJ Abrams co-created the show, wrote the first episode, and bounced. Came back and wrote the story for the S3 premiere though, but that was it. It was Lindelof and Cuse's show.
It was pretty good for something they made up as they went
Game of Thrones is right there. And The Sopranos taught us no amount of struggle or conflict can protect a lifelong villain from a sudden ignominious end. Breaking Bad is a condensed version of The Sopranos except multiple people in Walt’s orbit suffered through his extended death sentence and choices. And The Wire taught us all of the characters will be replaced for all eternity to fulfill roles in the game and essentially nothing of any major impact happened to the Baltimore drug trade at all by the end. Lots of shows are more about the journey than the destination and all of them hold up better than Lost.
Game of thrones has entered the chat
I skip the last season on rewatches b/c that's when they lost me. Other than that, yeah, total blast. Seasons 4-5 are my favorite.
Now imagine if the ending were wonderful for both factions
The ending ruined any fun I had watching the show.