Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Lost fans are idiots

No way! Did he just call us idiots? Yes. Yes, okay, I did and that's not nice, I realise. But I'm being cruel to be kind. I want to go into more on dreams and their abandonment, as I feel I have loads to add, especially with the comments that came from that. But first, I feel the need to reach out to Lost fans and stage an intervention.

You are the victims of a scam.

Seriously.

There was some finale that aired the other day and, like Big Brother back in the day, no matter how much I try, I can't avoid hearing (or reading) about it. And what I'm getting from Lost fans sort of goes like this -

Oh my God! That episode was amazing! Okay, so most of it was filler but that bit at the end... who was that guy?! Was that Ben's father's brother? Does that mean that the past is now the future and the present is the present only now reversed? How does that fit with the Phase 2 Dharma jelly? I have no idea what the deal was with that thing. He must be totally dead now. Unless that means that he'll come back because of that explosion time ahhhh....

Sorry, I lost interest there.

The writers must be laughing their god damn asses off at you guys. They write random shit that means absolutely nothing and then just read your websites to give them clues as to what to write next. Which, as it happens, will also make no sense.

It's a total scam.

I watched it at the start. The two-part pilot is stunning. And the premise - strangers having to survive on a mysterious island with nothing - was great.

Until that premise was pretty much dropped in the first season when they found a stash of everything they could ever want. By the end of the first season, I was disgruntled. It was increasingly clear that it was, in fact, going nowhere. The writers were writing stuff in before they actually had half a clue what it was they were writing. Earliest example was the monster in the jungle. A loud thing rampaging, tearing trees down. They were too afraid to go through the undergrowth.

For a few episodes.

Then it pretty much vanished, people had no problem going through the forests and, when some writer remembered about it, they wrote in some smoke. A tiny little wisp.

Scam.

And the entire first season was taken up with shit happening to people and those people not telling anyone for absolutely no reason whatsoever. The lack of communication was far harder to believe than any poxy polar bear.

But it was at the beginning of the second season when I figured out their system and stopped watching. The system? The secret?

It's a show of first acts.

Only first acts. Introduce a new element, a big mystery. That's the first act. But instead of that element going anywhere and leading to a second and third act, they'd just introduce another new element. Another first act.

And repeat.

Hence the stupid amount of people on this deserted island in the middle of nowhere. New character... ooh mysterious... new character (let's hope they forgot about that last guy so we don't have to explain any of the cack he was doing)... ooh mysterious...

And so on.

What a load of cack.

Lost is like giving someone 1000 pieces, each one from a different jigsaw puzzle. If you tell them they're supposed to fit, they may well make something interesting eventually. But it still makes you a prick for laughing your ass off while they sift through the pieces.

And that's what the writers (and I use that term very loosely) are doing to you.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Now all somebody has to do is write one of these for 'Heroes'.

But back to 'Lost', you just know they're going to drag out a couple more seasons of this, get canned and then pull a Twin Peaks while running off with their bags of money.

Red Pill Junkie said...

Haven't seen Lost. Been planning to, but I haven't found the time.

Somebody pointed out to me that the plot was loosely based on a true modern myth of Chile called Friendship Island, a place where a reclusive sect of scientists were waiting for the Apocalypse to end humanity, so they would gather the pieces and wait for the aliens to arrive. Who knows? I need to watch the show first to compare.

Mr. Trombley said...

Dear Sir,

Hey, I liked and still like Twin Peaks. Mostly because of the awesome Angelo Baladamenti soundtrack.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05xm2eN-1VA

I chose that one because Dance Of The Dream Man is my favorite track.

I suppose it worked because it was never supposed to answer any questions. At least, I never expected everything to just suddenly explained in one episode. The episode where they find out who killed Laura Palmer was good in it's own right, but the series started running on fumes. Agent Cooper had to stay in Twin Peaks, butt there wasn't any reason for him to. The writers kept trying to invent reasons, but they never had one big compelling one. So they just kept bouncing him from sub-plot to sub-plot hoping we wouldn't notice that he wasn't really doing anything in particular.

I suppose it's easy to say that now, now that we know there was never going to be a third season and no one would watch a movie based on it, because it would suck. Weird how Fire Walk With Me was no good considering Twin Peaks was basically Blue Velvet: The Series.

Anyway, I've never seen "Lost" either. Does it have any music as good as Angelo's?

Mr. Trombley said...

PS. Dance Of The Dream Man was cut out of that clip! This one has the song I like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0CGzPaJUOE

susan said...

Never seen Lost at all. But I have been turned on to Gordon Ramsay.......I wish I could swear like him!

American idol is over tonight. Hurray. The world can go back to living again

murrayb said...

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box.html

here's JJ Abrams' TED talk, basically admitting he'll never open the "mystery box". because ultimately, it's disappointing.

Bitter Animator said...

He's right. That's the problem when writers throw elements in without having to know what those elements actually are. The forest monster thing right at the opening was always going to be a disappointment. A digger? Rhino? Dinosaur? Almost any explanation would end up boring or stupid. They chose the latter.

That's why they have to bombard the show with new elements and hope people lose track of old ones. What really pissed me off in the early days was that so often they would do nothing for a whole episode and then end with a huge cliffhanger - a discovery or something. I'd wait for the next episode only to find that cliffhanger not even mentioned.

Scam.

As I said in the comments of my Battlestar posts, I'm far more forgiving of Twin Peaks because it established right from moment one that the entire cast and world were nuts. The show had no rules to break.

Lost, on the other hand, brought us into the show with a very real situation and real characters. Whatever weird stuff happened on the island, those characters should have been consistent. They weren't. The bizarre lack of communication and the knots that occurred as they wrote their back stories on the fly broke the characters. So they just kept on adding new ones.

The music, while not having the intrigue of Badalamenti, was actually pretty good if I remember correctly. Cinematic orchestral stuff I think. Same guy who composed for the new Star Trek. And possibly the most recent Metal Gear game (I'd have to check that).

Mr. Trombley said...

Dear Sir,

That makes me try to remember, did you ever see Babylon 5? I think you've mentioned it before.

There was a writer that knew where he was going. I say "a" because one guy wrote 84% of it.

Oh, have you ever seen HBO's The Wire? It's a very interesting and fun little series. It starts to split into a fractal in the third season that your mileage may vary on - I liked it, but it's hard to follow all the disconnected little subplots.

It's also kinda political, but not usually too preachy. I recommend it.

Anonymous said...

A show that just seems to throw ideas and backstories into a big pot is Bones, but it has the opposite effect, probably because the stuff they throw in makes sense plus there's the whole "mystery of the week" thing that happens while all these story points are going on.

The season 4 finale was a fucking trip, the best episode of any series in a long time - and it was a damn coma episode! They NEVER work.