I just finished watching Lost. I didn’t watch it in the previous decade, because everyone told me the ending was super bad. Now that I’ve finished it, I don’t get it. What was so bad about it?
It didn’t explain 99% of the show’s mysteries and made everyone feel like they wasted hours of their lives watching the series. The entire series was complete dogshit and is a classic example of what happens when writers get their heads too far up their asses. They feel like they have to make every episode have like 8 “twists.” Complete garbage.
I also watched the series recently and didn’t see anything wrong with the ending. But I was told to go in with no expectations of things being entirely explained, so for me, I just accepted that the island was an unsolvable mystery and enjoyed the other parts of the plot. It was a great show IMO.
As I recall, the main point of contention was that this was one of the first big “there’s a big mystery and the whole series is one big story to unravel it and we totally have it all planned out, honest” series. And then it turned out that no, they didn’t totally have it planned out, and they were just making crap up as they went and most of the profound “clues” people were trying to cobble together were basically meaningless.
Maybe the show runners managed to cobble something together out of them that was satisfying regardless, but still, it felt like quite the betrayal. History repeated itself with Battlestar Galactica, where the show kept insisting “they have a plan!” When no, they really did not.
There was a big mystery from the beginning, they all died in the plane crash, and they were building an afterlife where they were all together. They did reveal it gradually, with a mounting number of conflicting facts.
Battlestar Galactica also had an overarching plan, that they would end up on Earth and restart the cycle.
BSG is an interesting example. I’m in the middle of a rewatch. Yes on the Earth aspect.
But the opening credits always mention that the cylons have a plan. After the show was over Ronald D. Moore, the show runner, admitted they made up that line because it sounded cool. There was no cylon plan. Disappointing as that part of the show’s mythology was teased and I would have liked to know more.
That line is dumb, I’ll agree on that point, but you can easily filter it out, and you’ll get a much better series. I didn’t remember that line until you mentioned it. If you need to cut out major plotlines for a series to be good, then it’s a bad series. But if your series is suddenly much better by willfully forgetting a single dumb line, then let’s all collectively forget it and enjoy it more.
You mean the Bob Dylan-ex machina didn’t do it for you?
This is all true but I think it was still a good show especially compared to what else was on non-cable TV at the time. There wasn’t any show that actually prompted conversation about it in my family the way Lost did. That they built its appeal on reckless overprinting of plot threads they could never satisfyingly resolve was a dirty trick, but everyone fell for it, so to me they still get credit.
In my personal opinion, the show went off the rails in season 2. I would have liked to see the show end with most of the main characters going back to their lives and taking the lessons learned on the island with them. I don’t like that most of them die on the island. But I’m clearly not a typical Lost fan. I can’t speak for those who liked most of the show and hated the ending.
