Worthless and Weak

Where the show "Lost" me...

**Spoilers ahead**

After 6 seasons, ABC's hit show Lost came to an end, and, like most other people, I was quite disappointing with the ending. But looking back at it, and I'm sure this is not an original point, there was no way they were going to give satisfying answers to everything- although looking back at the final season, you can see it.

Where it really went downhill was at the end of season three, when they stopped doing flashbacks, and started doing flash forwards. Other than the one reveal the first time they did it (when you think its dealing with Jack in the past, and that he's calling his wife, but, surprise! He's in the future, and he's calling Kate) it accomplished nothing- no real reason to do it, other than perhaps that they ran out of material for flashbacks.

Once you start doing that, you destroy a lot of the suspense, you now know that people are going to get off the island, and you know who - yeah, you're still wondering about the how, but why?

The second thing that happened is you had to completely destroy all of the characters, and turn them into new characters. So Jack stopped being the man of science and basically turned into Locke, Kate stopped being the fugitive and instead became the Mom, Sayid became James Bond, only Hurely really seemed to have anything to do with his previous character, but now he sees dead people.

The third and worse thing they did with the flash forwards was that they had to start doing things because the island told them to. The island wasn't done with Jack yet. This was acceptable when it was just Locke doing it, because you don't really know if its actually the island of if Locke is just insane, but there's a very fine line between "the island wants us to do this" and "the script wants us to do this." Having a "destiny" in a movie (or cinematic TV show, as Lost was) is really a pet peeve of mine, it's nothing but an excuse to propel the plot, and (I know I'm repeating myself, but whatever), destroys the suspense.

The fourth thing that they did at the end of season 3/beginning of season four, was to fast track the action - now you've got a freighter full of armed soldiers waiting to kill everybody (I don't even remember why) and people who are going to get off the island (cause you already know that). What this did was changed the pace of the whole show. There was a feeling that there was time passing between the episodes, and that if they felt they needed to, they could slow down the shows to tell whatever story was being told that episode. Once the freighter arrived, it seemed to me like they changed that completely, and, not coincidentally, once the freighter was gone, they very quickly killed off the entirety of the non-starring survivors on the island - so there's no minor characters anymore.

Overall, the show succeeded most when it was about people we could relate to having the deal with being stranded on an island that they didn't understand, with little bits of mystery happening every so often. When it stopped being about "what the hell is out there" and started being about time travel or the war between Widmore and Linus, it lost what made it so special.

Another thing that killed it was that had this habit of using cliffhangers during the reveals, like the first time the hatch is blown open at the end of the first season, and people speaking in the annoying quasi-religious manner. For instance "You came to this island because you're special" or
"We're doing what needs to be done." While some of this is fine, especially for the setup, when you're trying to end the whole damn show, why not have a little bit of exposition? For instance, they kept referencing the "rules." Candidates can't kill themselves. Jacob and the Smoke Monster can't kill each other. Ben can't kill Widmore. Etc etc. Why not, instead of having a whole show which kind of explains one of the rules (oh, because Jacob/Smoke Monster's mother said so?) have ya know, a scene where Jacob maybe talks to somebody and runs down either the list of all the rules, or who made the rules and why they need to be followed. The show could have used a lot more exposition, at least when it was trying to end itself.

All that being said, the final episode (and season) was probably about as good as they could have done. Bottom line, Lost could have been better, but was great none the less. I don't write 800 word blog posts about "Chuck."

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