Lost: The Final Season (Premieres Feb. 2)

I, for one, only cried through my eyes not penis.

 

G4 is starting Season Six right now with LA X Part 1.

What a great opening, with the submerged island. There were so many possibilities, and even just a "this is a parallel universe where the plane landed" would have been fine.

Liked the aspect that was a clever nod to the Purgatory idea that they eventually came up with, but wow . . . would anyone really have complained (as much as they/we ended up complaining) if they had just said "The Sideways universe is a parallel universe created by the detonation, done because we thought it would be fun for fans to see what would have happened if Jughead went off and the plane never crashed."

Think a lot of us wouldn't have minded that as a love letter for fans. It would have been cheesy, but once they moved past the Temple the Island drama was solid for the most part, and the flashbacks in that final season were great. So, you do the parallel, then abandon it for the stretch of the season and finish the story.

But to end with everyone in a church . . . unnecessary.

 

I realize I am definitely in the minority, but I enjoyed the finale.

Jack's death march is something that still makes things dusty for me.

 

God, all that Temple shit and the baseball stuff, seriously what the fuck, Lindeloff? All that time in the Temple and Sayid's "transformation" is it's just all fucking moronic.

I want some fanboi to edit a copy Season Six so that Jughead goes off, there are some sideways flashes, a reunion at the candy machine for Sawyer and Juliet, some other bullshit, then the church. Screw everything else.

 

I agree. Ultimately, the creators painted themselves into a corner though, where anything they did was going to piss off a large portion of the fan base. (Like, if you could come up with rational answers for all of the mystical elements, they'd cease being mysterious and mystical and thus interesting, but just handwaving them aside with, "Magic island!" isn't satisfying completely either.)

 

Lazy and shoddy writing in that final season. It was still a great ride though.

 

I've also been watching it again since I read the Sepinwall book. I think what frustrates me is, there was a hole they had sort of dug themselves out of in Season 4 and 5, with the time travel stuff. Whether they made any sort of sense I don't even now know, but they were good TV for me. I'm not sure satisfying answers could've come out of it, or answers that made sense. But I think if they'd continued in the mode they seemed to be building to after Season 5 in Dharma-ville, with less of the outright religious hokum magic and more of the pseudo-science-magic, I would not have been actively displeased with the final season. It would have been a destination that made sense to me, even if it wasn't the destination I'd wanted.

The last season, even distance hasn't improved it. The only parts I don't just want to throw in the trash are the Richard episode (which is awesome even if it can't be divorced from the Jacob nonsense), and that final shot of Jack dying on the island with the dog that mirrored the pilot.

 

Anybody else think the last season and the payoff would have improved exponentially if Brian K. Vaughan had stuck around?

 

Yes.

I've also wondered how the show would've been shaped differently had David Fury stayed on board, but he left so early it's impossible to know how much of the first season he had a hand in.

 

My biggest problem with the show was the clear lack of vision for the future. It's one thing to say "Well, plans change" and have things develop as the seasons move on but to spend SO MUCH time hammering home the importance of certain aspects of the show (I.E. Why Walt was special) and then try to backpedal when you get caught in a hole you can't write your way out of is just evidence of poor writing and direction.
I was never the guy that needed every answer to every mystery and I was willing to jump on board with the time travel stuff based on the show's credit with me but, now that the series is over and you can look at it objectively, this has to be the most poorly planned and executed wrapup of a show of all time. (Not counting shows that got suddenly canceled and didn't have time to say goodbye/wrap up plot points).
There are entire chunks of this series that are just massive, gigantic plot holes now. And that's a shame because, for a while, this was the best thing on television. By far.

 

They sold it as having an interesting backstory that made most, if not all, of the weird stuff tie together and make sense. It turned out they were just throwing as much weird stuff out there as they could just for the sake of it.

 

Been rewatching the show on G4 lately, as I said. Would argue that the fifth season was probably the best one. Full of masterful moments, with all of the characters making important moves across the board. And we got Island history filled in. Whole thing has a sense of gravitas to it. Season four probably second best, with the great drama of the freighter people coming to the island.

Season three probably worst, but also as a late stretch that includes Linus' origin, the resolution of Sawyer and Locke's issues, the flash forward revelation, Charlie's death . . . it was like they caught fire from the point where they were told to find a resolution, so they wrapped up all the loose ends in the flashbacks, and this roll continued until the end of season five.

Yet there are, as Sepinwall wrote, multiple narrative dead ends. There are also things I did not catch the first time around that fill in some holes, and create others.

I would be interested in a list of what you refer to above.

Since the DVD epilogue filled in to me the biggest mystery, why there were no children, I was very satisfied with that. It was the simple "too much electromagnetism after The Incident" answer, and I would have preferred it was more related to the two Greek Gods of Jacob and The Adversary and their machinations, but at least they addressed it. And while I enjoyed that jacob aspect, I can't complain about scientific explanations.

The main mysteries that still elude me are:

- What exactly happened with The Incident and the hydrogen bomb?
- Yeah, just who was in the other outrigger?
- Why would The Adversary get turned into a Smoke Monster, while Desmond and Jack were not?
- Why couldn't they just do a fun "This is a parallel universe where the plane landed" for the first few episodes of season six, then get to resolving the island drama?
- And why did some of season six' island drama reek of the writers having run out of ideas? I mean, it wasn't as bad as the middle part of season three, but that should have been the most streamlined season.

Oh, and since I know schieza is gonna bring it up: Those still wondering about further answers regarding "The NUMBERS!!!!!" are concentrating on unimportant minutiae, an Easter Egg by any other name. There was a clear explanation for their purpose, and they were subsequently used as a fun thing. The writer who wrote the original episode said he just needed a set of numbers to win Hurley the lottery.

Rewatch season one. It was there. But if you prefer something deeper:

http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/The_Numbers