TVSquad

Good to see the flashforward was completely pointless and that I was right.

Alex is actually Ben's biological daughter.
False.

That to me is interesting, more so that he comfirmed it than anything.

Also glad to see why they killed Charlie was the same reason they killed everyone else, they didn't know what to do with his charater. That's called good writing... lol

"Are you expecting a fan backlash over this?
I hope so. I mean that honestly. I think that if people are like "we're glad you did it," that means we didn't do a good job of emotionally bonding the audience to Charlie and making them feel like his sacrifice is really tragic and heartbreaking."

I'm glad they killed him. :-]

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maybe charlie swam out of the hatch ...he can hold his breath for over 4 minutes...remember???

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Keith, he was lying!

A lot of people who watch Lost don't seem to understand the basic things.

Charlie lied about that and Desmond knew it, plus it was running out of air gonig to the hatch.

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From listening to Ron Moore's BG podcasts, "The decision to [fill in the blank] evolved organically..." seems to be a common event. I think Lost has general directions and themes set down from on high, but the fate of individual characters and even major plot arcs can still happen within those parameters.

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@KeitH: that was a lie he told so they would let him go. I guess that was sarcasm on your part?

@David: It's so funny to see you comment here after you bashed Bob in the other thread. You know Bob linked to this interview in his blog-entry. I really wonder why this needed summarizing in another post not by Bob so Jay could you explain why you felt this summary was needed? Do you expect your readers to be _that_ lazy?

Oh wait. Forget that question. All those lazy questions and obvious "ah now I get it" comments here in the past two days showed me that most of the time people who read this page aren't really thinking about this show, read a post and then ask silly questions - still not thinking about the show - and later on post another comment where they sort of write down the process of thinking.

Made me feel like listening to other peoples thoughts.

I really wonder if todays public really needs everything pre-chewed. They don't even take the time to visit imdb to look up the most basic information (like, for instance, the NAME of a character on screen) and even those people who record a show or download it via BT or can watch it on abc.com don't take the time to re-visit the scene they are talking about and often enough you hear statements like "They said something like (bla)" when a 10 second visit to abc.com would show them that they were wrong.

Somebody please point me towards a lost community that at least thinks about the stuff they suggest a little bit before posting. Google isn't really helping me with that at the moment...

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Bash, I have yet to find a Lost discussion area that has just that. You will always find posters who do think about things and discuss things logically but will always be filled with people who don't think or use their brain at all.

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not to sound like a dick, but goddamn do i ever hear ya, bash!

it drives me crazy that every single comment thread will hit purgatory at least once; it's like the lost version of godwin's law. hell, we can call it goodwin's law. drives me crazy... i guess that's what we get for being more than casual viewers.

and if a story has a definite end point with certain marks you want to hit during the progression of said story, which damon and carlton have repeatedly said Lost has, OF COURSE you make up the stuff filling it out as you go along. That's fiction, right?

what the actors bring to their roles also affects how they develop characters - i think ben was just supposed to have a three or four episode arc, and he's become one of the most intriguing people on the island. they wrote more for him because THEY ended up more interested in him, and look where that's brought us? (to a good place, i think)

I guess I just don't understand why people complain that they are somehow doing it incorrectly? it's their show! just sit back and enjoy the ride. or not... i'm having a lot of fun, though.

and bash, the fuselage is generally full of people that watch a little more closely than the average viewer:
http://www.thefuselage.com/

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Jay,
There is a difference between having an overall idea of how things are going to work out (Say The Dharma Initiative turns out to be the smart monkeys who came back from the space program and the planet is eventually populated by apes) and deciding in detail the fate of every character. Television is a fluid medium that by its nature must adapt to change. Lets say Matthew Fox gets into a car crash and is unable to work for a year. The show will have to work around that and it would naturally influence the storyline. That doesn't mean that the overall ending can't be met; it means that the way they get there will change. Unless you want to watch a TV show in which every line for every year has been written in advance, you need to accept that the story will go in various directions in order to get to the end point. While I'm not sure the Lost writers started with the end game in mind, I am pretty sure that they have one now, and have had it for quite some time. You may not like where it leads, but I do believe it is leading somewhere.

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"Good to see the flashforward was completely pointless and that I was right."

Yeah... huh??

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Eh..I think the flash forward in the end is sort of easy to have planned in Season 1.

Killing off Eko, I still feel that was a big mistake and one example of how outside factors pressed into the original route of the show.

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The writers next season will pretty much ignore the flashforward. A lot of fans started thinking that the show would become Jack wanting to go back to the island, it's not. Thus it's just useless shock value.

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@Mel:

Eko was supposed to die. He only agreed to appear on the show if it was a one-year thing. Ana Lucia's death was planned like that as well, the actress' DUI problems had nothing to do with that.

Eko's actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje in one podcast where he was interviewed said that he did not want to be tied to a TV series too long because he thinks that you should never do one thing for such a long period of time as well as he wants to do other things like movies. I personally think because Africa currently is on the rise when it comes to movies and because Agbaje wanted to transport more of his heritage to the "fist world" (let's call it DVD Region 1 and 2) via his acting he chose not to sign a longer lasting contract. Damon Lindelof in one other podcast also talked about Eko and Ana Lucia, strictly explaining that those two two storylines were planned exactly like this but with the difference that they asked Agbaje to stay on the show for a period that was a bit longer - namely that Eko would be carried over to season 3 to die there but pretty early on. Otherwise the two main "Tailies" (Ana Lucia and Eko) would've both died in season two and that would have been too predictable or you could say bland. It would have been "too easy".

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@ David: why is it "useless"?

Are you kidding me? They just managed to show us how bad it would be to get off the island after they made us want for all of the survivors to get OFF the island for three years.

So why was that "useless"?

It's not even "pointless".

I can understand that this story frustrates you but that does not make it bad.

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"The writers next season will pretty much ignore the flashforward."
Well, we don't know what the writers *will* do next season. It's possible that the flashforward won't be directly referenced. But our knowledge of Jack's anguish after leaving the island will hang in the background as we watch the Losties try to get rescued.

"A lot of fans started thinking that the show would become Jack wanting to go back to the island, it's not."
No, it's not. So what?

"Thus it's just useless shock value."
The flashforward was hardly usueless. Jack's depression and drug addiction post-island raise a moral question goes to the heart of the series: Should they be rescued? It appears that Jack sacrificed his well-being to get himself and the other Losties off the island. Does anyone else suffer because of the rescue? These questions will resonate over the next 48 episodes. I'm looking forward to all of them.

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During Jack's argument with the other Dr. in the finale, he says something like "go upstairs and get me dad to see who's more drunk, then you can fire me..." If this is the future, wouldn't his dad already be dead?... Did he come back from the island too or is Jack just confused from anguish and drugs?

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The flash forward wasn't useless, but I for one am glad it was cleared up that next season isn't Jack pulling a Mel Gibson in Los Angeles. The mysteries derived from this flash will probably be addressed in on-island events, which is good, and as stated by Lindelof before, without the island, there's no show.

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just confused, mon

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Re #1: "That's called good writing... lol"

Actually, it's very good writing.

When you're able to construct, develop and nurture characters that come to life and take the writers down unexpected paths, it's very damned good writing.

And there's not nearly enough of it on TV.

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@Ken: totally right.

Jack is, like the new chief told jack "you are someone who needs to fix things".

We now basically saw that getting off the island does NOT fix things - this is what Jack believed while still on the island. He did everything to achieve this. He thought he could help everybody and later got back to the real world to find out that he could not help everybody and basically turned to alcohol and drugs over it - with a final contemplated suicide after that person in the coffin died AND loving Kate knowing she will be together with another man - who that is we don't know - it's just not Jack and basically after he "just" told her he loves her, this is why the future is complete and utterly BAD for Jack. Getting off the island is what is absolutely wrong for Jack. WE now know that. We like Jack. We most likely also want him and Kate to be together (and not with Juliet *yuck* and, because Sawyer is a petty murderer, most likely at the moment most of us also don't want Kate and Sawyer to be together). So now WE know that the only way for them to be together is if they stay ON the island.

If that is "useless", please tell me another way for the viewer to be told that Locke is right? That BEN is right? That Jack should NOT want to get off the island? How if not through a flash forward is THAT possible?

So honestly, basically, if you STILL think that this storytelling mechanism was useless, please oh please David tell me how that could've been done in a different way on a series where we should not believe what we see until one of the writers later on in an interview told us that it was, in fact, this or that way.

And again, saying that this was all for naught is just idiotic. At least think A LITTLE about it befor saying stuff like that. Or at least add that it frustrates you. At the moment, you absolutely have no point at all.

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Some called previously that not knowing what to write next for a character is 'Good Writing'.

I think it is in fact 'Bad Planning', very Bad Planning. Before the show started he was the main star, the only actor having shined in a previous production (Lord of the Rings). It is true that his purpose was to portray a drug junkie coming out of his vice, but still they could have thought: 'Jeeze, while we are writing about smoke monsters and apparitions, could we focus for 5 minutes on what to do with the actors we have working for us at the moment.'


I think the production of lost don't even know where they are heading. Wouldn't surprise me to learn that one of them runs off with the production money to this immaginary island.

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