TVSquad

Sure Lost writers/producers did the show no favor by giving us a less-than-solid first six episodes *and* making us fans interminably wait, but the amount of backlash that the media (and some of the fans) has thrown at Lost, I think, is uncalled for.

After the winter break, the show has given us two great episodes and one solid one. And along with all the reasons stated in the above article, it's still one of the Watercooler shows out there.

So really ease up folks.

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Look, I'm not the biggest Lost fan in the world but I still watch the so although I don't know why. Most of the time it just plain bores me. There's only so many seasons I can go on watching a show that gives me no answers and with each episode they just give us more puzzles and cryptic messages.

I don't understand why shows like this have to continue multiple seasons. Lost would have been best served as a miniseries or a single season show. I didn't expect this show to continue as long as it has hence the getting bored with it. Give us one or max two seasons and plot out the entire thing and then just say goodbye. People don't know when to let go. Sometimes good things come in short form and this clearly should have been shorter not longer.

It's sort of like JJ Abrams other show Alias. He built up all these complex plot things and then it all kind of fell flat because he clearly hadn't really thought the whole thing through. I mean, it would be fantastic if these big mysteries were written so that they'd actually have some kind of conclusion otherwise it just feels like they've pulled somn out of their behinds. Same was with X-Files, Alias, etc.

The only big story arc I've seen that has clearly been plotted from start to finish before it started to air was with Babylon 5. The story's creator wrote the show to be 5 seasons long and he had an idea how it was going to start and end but with Lost, they clearly are just stalling and have no idea where they're going.

That's why people are dropping like flies, because they can only watch a show like this for so long before they get bored. It has nothing to do with bad press or bad reviews. People are just tired of being jerked around, that's all.

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Lost isn't sinking because of bad press... it's sinking because of the weight of ALL those unnecessary CHARACTERS!

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Do ratings matter as much anymore with the internet streaming by ABC and downloads through itunes?

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We, as consumers, are pretty well programmed to take news reports as fact. So, of course, we believe the show might be cancelled, and, furthermore, should be cancelled.

As long as it justifies the production costs with ad revenue, DVD sales, etc, I hope the show is allowed to continue to a good conclusion. I'm guessing it won't be allowed to lanquish like X-files did in the last season or two, but who knows.

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LOST is Lost...tehy don't know where to go..too many
characters coming in that cannot fit into the original story...now we find that the others don't live where the current episodes are..on this other island,,but wherever they live..they have "back yards" I am out.

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No. Bad writing is sinking Lost.

They don't need stunt casting or sexual tension; they need to quit stirring up new and outrageous red herrings, and stop pushing out episodes that do nothing to move the story forward.

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gooby at 11:46AM on Feb 25th 2007 makes the best point. The audience was led to believe that all these threads and intersecting lives were going to come together, but we learn in the DVD extras that they are really making it all up as they go along. The marketing folks at ABC love to hype up "answers" being provided most weeks, but nothing meaningful is revealed. And I know they are on an island, but the number of red herrings really puts a rotten taste in my mouth.

"Six Degrees", another Abrams show, has a similar setup in that all of the characters keep running into each other and there are untold backstories. I get the strong impression that, once again, it is more like an ongoing soap opera instead of a good strong story with a well-conceived ending.

(BTW - I had high hopes for the short-run of Daybreak because I figured it would be resolved in three months, but that got to be too long for all involved.)

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"That's why people are dropping like flies, because they can only watch a show like this for so long before they get bored. It has nothing to do with bad press or bad reviews."

Precisely. Just finish it off with this season, answer the f*cking unanswered questions and get everybody off the island. Or kill them all, whatever. Just end it.

But no - they have to keep on making money. The writers said somewhere that they know *how* it's going to end, but not *when*.

That's utterly shameless.

I'm afraid Prison Break is going down the same "neverending TV series" way. It's been great so far, but I cannot see it continuing beyond three seasons.

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"Lost" is a three-year-long drumroll.

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Are these comparisons fair?

Yes and No.

Yes because like Studio 60, Lost's characters motivations and resulting behaviours hardly make any sense and are entertaining only if you like or care for either the character or the actor *in spite of* the non sense they do and say.

Take Jordan's out of nowhere "I'm crazy about you" moment after telling Danny to stop pursuing her and then the next episode the two are talking about going "home" and are all mushy. I like and care about the characters and I do ship them but how does that make any sense?

Now take Sawyer's "I love you too" followed by his "I know you did it because you thought I was a dead man" the very next day. Huh?
Kate's highten emotion over Jack also makes no sense as she had not worried about him for quite some time since the three of them were captured. OTOH her not listening to the doc's request not to come to his rescue is consistant as she never listens to what he says. Have a mango and shut up Kate.
Again I like and care about Sawyer and Kate and I do ship them but really their spat doesn't make any sort of sense.
And explain to me how Kate, who went to track Ethan seemingly a few *hours* after he took Claire, could not track Karl merely *minutes* after Sawyer had given him some shitty speech about finding Alex and possibly get killed in the process. Whaaaa???
Oh and wasn't there some security system on the island taking out trees and killing people? Think Sawyer and Kate worry about it when they make their way back to the beach camp in the freaking dark? And how do they know where that is exactly from where they've arrived on the island? *shakes head*
There's contrived convenience and there's "are they fucking kidding me with this shit?" non sense.

In both cases the characters go from A to Z without a rest stop at any other letter for the sake of the plot du jour but not the viewers' satisfaction.
The worst is Lost though since after three seasons, and only a few months island time, the characters flip flop on a whim of the writers without any goal and narely a purpose for any of it.
At least on S60 we know some time has passed and they address some of their issues (on Lost they barely speak to each other and when they do it's pointless in and out context), not that it helps much but still it's better than overnight change or contrived ignorance of what had come before.

The lack of subtelty in both shows is jarring and seals the deal of their fate imo.

Where S60 is preachy, Lost is vague and outright drifting without aim for the sake of "mystery" and contrived "tension".
Personally I much prefer S60 with its flaws to Lost's non sense any given day. Plus, the cast is much stronger than Lost's.


Where the comparison is not fair it's in comparing a show that has run for 2 and something seasons and one that has not even aired a single full season.
I also don't like to compare Lost as a whole thus far to Heroes but I will say that all Heroes episodes have been more entertaining that the same number of Lost's first season episodes. Lost started sucking at episode 11 when the Fists of Resurrection of Saint Jack of Ass saved the Hobbit. Save Outlaws, In Translation and Numbers, the rest of s1 was garbage after ep11 .

Now if you compare Lost and BSG it's a whole other creative ball game. BSG's writing suffered from the extended order of episodes in s2 and s3, delivering a few terrible episodes (worst offender the inane Black Market) but remains creatively fascinating but the ratings remain low. Lost has been creatively defficient, to say the least, starting in s1, then throughout s2 and the first arc of s3 had been a catastrophe which the ratings naturally show.

In the end, viewers accept to *be manipulated* by the programs they watch but I think that maybe people feel they've been *lied to* by both S60 and Lost as they've wandered away from their premise without much, if any, explanation and without being given any goal or direction to look forward to in exchange. Promises like dandling carrots are plenty however.

I know I want to scream anytime I hear Desmond and Ben are and have *always* been a big part of Lost's story when both actors have repeatedly said in interviews they had a 3 episodes contract that got extended only based on fans response.
Least we forget how Ana Lucia and Libby's arc was done and the actresses had only signed on for one year. *eyeroll*

Lost certainly isn't helping its case with the promotion made by its showrunners. They keep promising the moon and deliver peebles.

Can Lost be saved?
Not with those showrunners imo. They keep hammering that the show has an end point, that everything happens for a reason that will be explained "in due time" but what matters is making the journey entertaining and not dreadful and frustrating for the audience by hyping thin air in the "mean time".
The more these guys say they know where they're going and where they're taking the audience, the more they fail to prove it on film. The show has been drifting and getting by up until the s3 premiere and since then it's been hemorraging eyeballs. The ship is sinking it's obvious but should it be saved?

I'm not convinced. I'd rather see the actors in other shows and better parts. Monaghan could be in the Black Donnellys, O'Quinn could be fun in Grey's Anatomy, Holloway in Men in Trees or BSG, Garcia could be in Ugly Betty (wouldn't him and V. Williams verbally sparing over design be a hoot?), DDK could ,like Holloway, be in either Men in Trees (a Mai relative) or BSG (wouldn't he be an awesome final five Cylon?).

I'm just so done with Lost and its overhyped tripe. *shrugs*

Just my two cents. :)

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Do you have to ask why?

Isn't there a list of things somewhere where all the unanswered questions generated by the series? If the answer to some of these questions is, "It doesn't mean a damn thing" then people quit caring about wondering what the possible clues were -- because they realized that the clues led nowhere.

My wife is a fiction writer with over 30 published novels and is connected to a whole slew of other authors and all those creators will agree: if you create too many red herrings, people quit chasing the real answer. Reading over the shoulder on email loops, I've discovered that they've all either tuned out or are ready to and will only catch a recap if they learn something interesting happened on the show.

JJAbrams has been quoted as saying that too much attention was paid to the Rambaldi mythos in ALIAS. This is mostly false. The screwup happened when the replacement wife was brought in and the series plot was put on hold for the most part while Sydney could reclaim her man -- there's other mistakes in there, but people were originally attracted to the series on the chance that some cool mythos was going to be revealed, and then... it was kind of forgotten. It was forgotten because the creators made it overly complex. Again with the red herrings. THAT'S why the Rambaldi stuff got out of hand. It was too obscure. To this day, my wife and I who watched every single episode of ALIAS didn't watch a single ep from it's final season. We climbed off the bandwagon.

The LOST mythos is the same way. We were shown some cool drawing of all the stations on the main island, revealed only when the door was shut, and how many of those were investigated? None. What seemed really cool to us in the audience and really cool to at least one of the characters has pretty much been forgotten.

Two years from now, we in the audience don't want to find out that most of the shows we watched meant nothing.

After watching the last LOST ep, I told myself I'm giving the show two more eps and then I'm climbing off the bandwagon.

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I couldn't disagree more with most of the posts here. We are only 9 episodes into a 23 episode season, give the writers a chance to tell the story. Producer Damon Lindelof said this in a recent Entertainment weekly artical.''I feel like we're playing a chess game,'' analogizes Lindelof, ''and in the first six moves, we've lost our queen and two bishops, and the audience is saying 'They are the worst chess players in the world!' What they don't realize is that we're nine moves away from checkmating you. If we lose, we lose. But that's the play, and we're standing by it.''

Patience people.

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"Lost" has fallen into the trap of virtually every other fanboy franchise: too many people want too many different things from it.

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It is over when we say it is over and the advertising disappears. 24 is successful because...they constantly write and re-write as they go after about 5-6 episodes..(Interview of Kiefer on TV 3 years ago)
..they always know it has to end in 24 eps.
Season 1, Nina was not going to be a mole..It was the writers discretion as they "wrote" along.
Lost is open ended in so many ways that only an escape by the good guys and nuking the island can end it at this point. It is like Iraq..a quagmire!!

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Personally, I just try to enjoy the ride on Lost. If you think you're going to get blown away by revelations about the story, you're probably going to be disappointed. But if you think you'll get twists and turns and good looking people and nice scenery and the occasional good line of dialogue, you'll enjoy it. If you think of the mythology as a side story, and let the show just entertain you, it generally delivers.

However, if they add Heather Locklear to the cast, I'm done.

http://popculturejunk.blogspot.com/

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Yes, the press can do what it wants to, it can sink anything if they say it often enough it becomes a movement. Soon there will be "kill lost" petitions and movements. Momentum builds until it becomes inevitable.

Now you know how the troups in Iraq feel.

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I think if people are writing Lost off they are missing some really good television in the last three weeks. I've really enjoyed these episodes. That doesn't mean there aren't problems. The cast is too large; the reveal too slow; and ABC's decision to put Lost on hiatus for the craptacular Day Break was a monumentally bad decuision. Like 24, Lost should run non-stop either in the fall or spring. The long beaks and never-ending repeats to save good shows for sweeps periods do far more damage than good. Finally, I think Lost should come to an end. It's been an interesting show, but it has become more and more obvious the writers are floundering. Next season should be the last and all the loose ends should be tied up. To drag it out for another two years, unless some major reveal is planned, will only hurt the show more.

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Two points:
These days it's not so hard for a viewer (or potential viewer) to simply say, "I'll see whether the series pans out in the end, and if so, then I'll rent or buy the whole series; why set myself up for disappointment?"
The other point has to do with The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan's 1967 series with similarly cryptic elements. That show is certainly memorable today not because there was always a plan for how the mysteries were to be solved in the end - clearly there wasn't - but because (in my opinion) the show had a unique style or design language, which I think Lost also has, and because the last episode ("Fall Out") was such a doozy that Lost can claim it as a precedent if its writers do something along those lines. "Fall Out" presents (or seems to) as many mysteries as it resolves, but it sure isn't a disappointment!

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To the guy complaining about the lack of investigation since the blast door map:

The map was discovered in S2E17 (lockdown)

The "?" hatch was discovered in S2E21 (?)

Since then, it has only been 11 episodes - most of which haven't taken place on the island. Locke's been in what, 3 episodes this season?

I think the big problem with everyone complaining about the show is that the season premiered in October, and yet we've only seen Nine episodes. It feels like we should know more by now because the first episode was so long ago. While I would agree with most of the world that this "alcatraz" storyline has been less than enthusiastic (and that Jack's latest flashback was probably the worst story ever told), I'm sticking with it because so far every time I've doubted this series the show has more than redeemed itself.

I also remember last season, which to me started out strong with "Man of Science, Man of Faith"/"Orientation" and skyrocketted to a new depth of boredom with every other episode until episode 10 ("the 23rd Psalm"). After that, I loved every episode of the season. Also, since seeing the early episodes again on DVD I've come to enjoy them as well. Here's hoping the rest of season 3 will do the same.

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