outcastja

This is a great point. All my friends and co-workers never went to forums like this or lostpedia to try figure out what was going on, they just sat back and enjoyed the show, including the last season. Most of them think JJ Abrams was running the show the whole time. I think if you spend more time analyzing and discussing the show than watching it, you may end up disappointed and frustrated with the show.

wendersfan

I also think part of the appeal for many of us was arguing with co-workers all week long on the significance of this or that. I wonder how much it matters not to have that.

FWIW, I was not bothered by the ending one bit.

zuffy

I love the show till the ending. I would not watch it again nor recommend it to friends that haven't watch it yet.

amplified

Start watching now!

bcd

I thought that the first three seasons were interesting and had me wanting to see what happens next episode, after that the seasons got progressively worse and worse. I stopped watching after the fourth episode of season 6 and have no desire to see how it plays out.

BCD

cdollaz

As someone who watched the whole thing, I now wish I hadn't. I thought the entirety of season 6 was shit.

And for me, it was more about the mysteries and mythology than the characters.

Finisher

Season one as a standalone is good. Seasons two onward are rendered pointless.

The thing about Lost is the show essentially reboots every half season. They introduce a new concept and it's the most important thing ever .. until they introduce a new concept - usually in season finales/openers - and the previous concept is completely discarded winding up having almost zero importance.

It's frustrating as fuck but the show pot commits you because you need to know the point of the island.

I'd recommend watching season one and stopping.

Draven

My wife was a huge fan, so that's the main reason I still watched.

That and I liked the actors, the production design and know someone who worked on the show, who I wanted to support.

I also had this naive notion that the creators actually had a plan and would resolve things in some way. As the finale grew closer, I grew more and more nervous, yet incredulous that they actually wouldn't resolve any of the central mysteries of the show. By the time I got a few episodes from the end, I figured it was worth my time to be caught up on the pop culture influence the show would have.

Plus I work for an ABC affiliate and I needed to be up to speed for my job.

So don't be sad for me. I'm fine with how I spent my time.

bunkaroo

Life must be constant ecstacy with such low standards for TV.

bunkaroo

The X-Files had much better standalone episodes than Lost, but the mythology was right at the core of why people watched along with the characters, just like Lost. Both shows needed both elements to succeed, but in the end short-changed the story element. The X-Files movie was made to revolve around the mythology - that's how important it was to the series after four seasons (I know the movie was was released after the 5th but it was made after the 4th). If it wasn't, they would have just done a standalone story for the film. People didn't just want to see the monster of the week stuff. They wanted to see what happened to Mulder's sister, what the black oil is, anything about CSM, the clones, colonization, etc., etc.

As far as Pulp Fiction, the movie posters didn't say "Come see what's in the briefcase". If the whole movie was spent telegraphing an eventual revelation about what's in there, only to never reveal it, you'd have Lost. Instead, the briefcase actually is a proper Macguffin in Pulp Fiction.

Mr. Salty

That was your take on it. But I thought right from the start that the flashback structure of the show made it apparent that "Lost" was more about the redemption of all these flawed people who were carrying dark secrets.

riley_dude

To some extent but they sold the show on it's mysteries.

Superboy

True, but the dynamic between Mulder and Scully as well as their attitudes and approaches towards the MOTW was what made the show great. Some of the best episodes of the series had nothing at all to do with the mythology of the series: Triangle, X-Cops, Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, War of the Coprophages, Home, Pusher, etc etc.

Actually, thats precisely what the movie was doing. At the end of the movie (which is really the beginning), you think you're finally going to see what's in the briefcase, but it's made explicitly clear that's not what's important, or what the movie was about.

Like others have said, it was really the serialized nature of Lost that led to so much disappointment. People were so stuck on analyzing every little and big red herring in the show that they lost sight of the characters, which is really what made the series great. Even on Lostopedia, there are very few mysteries that are left unsolved.

bunkaroo

A little surprised to see X-Cops in that list. I'm not arguing their character interaction wasn't integral to the show's success - I'm just saying that's not the only reason it was successful. If the show was nothing but MOTW, it would have not been as successful IMO.

I disagree. Most of talk I've ever heard about this film did not concern the briefcase. I knew going through the movie it was about the characters - I think the film strongly leads in that direction. It's kind of an amusement that you don't see what's in there, but because the movie had integrity for what it was trying to do, you can accept not seeing it. With Lost, the writers beat us over the head with promises of revelations and ultimately copped out.

It was successful precisely because it was serialized. People tuned it to see what would happen next. The writers just bit off more than they could chew. I've said before I didn't need to know the little crap, but there are key fundamental truths about the island for example that deserved a more detailed and creative answer. Instead we got the Happy Heaven Friends ending.

That'sAllFolks

Season 1 is GREAT. Season 1 got the Emmy win for best drama. And it deserved it. The other seasons feel like they didn't know what the hell they were going to do next. They kept introducing clues with little payoff. They majored ad nauseum on stuff that could have been dealt with a lot better. They introduced characters they killed off for little to no reason. The journey was very frustrating to me and the ending was very unsatisfying to me. Some liked it. If you like season 2, then continue with it. Otherwise, drop it.

davidh777

I'd say yes. Uneven for sure, and I always resented the implication that I needed to be listening to podcasts and crap to figure out what was going on, but some great moments and, as others have noted, probably the best-looking show on TV.

It was even worse with the earlier seasons, like you'd have to kill three weeks with research etc. before the next new episode. It was better when they switched to a January-June schedule.

RobLutter

It's a great show that really hits it's stride between then 2nd and 5th seasons than falls on its' face in the end. I loved the time travel stuff in Season 5 myself... the Dharma Initiative stuff is the best stuff in the series, imho.

It really means absolutely jack by the end of the series though.

conscience

I say go for it. IMO, the first three seasons are beyond excellent. For the fourth and fifth seasons I did not like the way many of the plot points went - my brain started to ache a little - but they were compelling enough to (try and) keep up with. The sixth season is really convoluted but I didn't want to give up so close to the finish line.

Would I rewatch the show? Nah. But I'm glad I watched it once.

milo bloom

Would you folks compare the Lost ending to the BSG ending? I was fine with that one, and I've been looking forward to Netflix'ing Lost eventually.

thanks

bunkaroo

I thought the BSG ending was better by far, even with its unanswered questions (which were not as numerous as Lost).

JuryDuty

I agree. Really, one of the biggest mistakes they made with LOST was the marketing of it. Once they realized people loved the mysteries, they marketed the "secrets" on the Internet, through repeat TV pop-ups, etc. It created a culture of LOST mystery-finders as is proven by the LOST wiki's, web pages, etc.

Unfortunately, in the end, the show really wasn't about the mysteries. But by selling it as a show about mysteries--since that's what brought the viewers--they left many viewers unfulfilled.

I enjoyed it for what it was: A well-produced show week after week. But if you watched it thinking it was going to end up with some grand answer to all the questions, you were sorely disappointed.

JuryDuty

BSG ended MUCH better, but that's also partly because it was MUCH more of a character show than LOST and it had FAR fewer mysteries.

spainlinx0

I still don't understand peoples' screams that it was a character-driven show, ignore the mysteries.

The show doesn't work as a character-driven show. They rarely ever act according to their nature, but simply do whatever the plot requires them to do.

I loved a lot of the show, but there are many times when I wanted to just jump ship at the absurdity of it all. So many times you just scratch your head going "that really makes absolutely no sense with what they established previously."

A lot of the fun was dissecting scenes in these threads after, and without that, I don't know if I would have stuck around as long.

Lost had great elements, but overall I don't think I would rank it as a "great" show. It's probably a C+ show at best. The acting wasn't consistently good, the writing was extremely uneven, but you are drawn back in again and again at the mystery of this world they created. That was the lure for me. Unfortunately after it's all over you feel like you got a fishhook through the eye.

Ayre

Screams. Hyperbole much?

The flash backs, which comprised a lot of the show (at least half), were character driven. We had this same discussion on the other thread. First and foremost this wasn't a show about a plane crash, but a group of people stranded on an island.

EDIT: For spoilerizing

JuryDuty

Ayre, I think you're right...but the buzz and the marketing and the community didn't view the show that way. That focus was almost entirely on the mysteries. So even if the show were about the characters (I could argue either way), most people didn't watch it for the characters. They watched it for the mysteries, because that's what they sold us.

And that's what's unfortunate. Because in the end, I think their own marketing efforts over the course of the seasons left too many viewers unsatisfied.