Did LOST leave you feeling dissatisfied last night? I know it did for me.
Now I promised myself I wouldn’t write a blog post about LOST—or even give the show another thought for that matter—but like Jack Shepherd, I guess I can’t help being sucked back into the vortex. Hopefully it works out better for me in the end.
This morning it hit me why LOST was so dissatisfying.
It broke the rules.
Here’s what I mean. Whether you know it or not, you’re mentally conditioned to expect certain outcomes from a story. I’m not talking here about answering all the questions. I’m talking about predictable outcomes. Since Greek drama and Arisotlian poetics, Western stroytelling really falls into two acceptable categories: The Comedy or The Tragedy (thank God I listened in Shakespeare 101). OK there’s that messy category called tragicomedy, but no one can seem to agree on what that even means.
The simplest definition I’ve heard for comedy and tragedy go as follows: In a comedy everyone gets married. In a tragedy everyone dies.
What you don’t get to do (or shouldn’t do) is write a story where everyone dies and everyone gets married. That breaks the rules. It panders to the everyone and ends up making no one happy.
And that’s the tragedy (to use a pun) of my LOST finale experience. I’m not passionately angry or exuberantly happy. I’m nearly indifferent and definitely dissatisfied. It was a messy mismash of genres that served as a front to generate huge advertising dollars.
And let’s face it, that’s what TV is all about anyway.
So this whole LOST is proof that TV doesn’t have to suck mindset can, well…suck it. This finale made LOST suck big time for me. Because I felt like the writers just gave up and didn’t have the guts to piss a lot of people off—and make a lot of people gloriously happy—by sticking to one genre. Instead they pandered. They mishmashed religions. And they mishmashed literary genres. And they even wrote crappy dialogue. It was a horrible way to end what was such a great and innovative series.
Of course, maybe I’m more angry than I thought!
What was your reaction?
I’m with you Jake. After losing interest I’ve followed the last two seasons from Susan’s reports back to me.
I think the Lost mystique was that there was this rich multi-genred tapestry that woven together expertly by JJ Abrams and company that when seen as a whole(in the finale) you’d finally understand what it was all about. I gave up on it when I suspected there was no such unity.
In the end the last 20 minutes played like the end of a Highway to Heaven episode with Jack’s Dad playing the Michael Landon character.
Oh man. Highway to Heaven has got to be the worst kind of sentimentalism in television history. You hit the nail on the head.
Agreed, it was the easiest of all endings. The most interesting character of LOST was the island and the writers left us with a half developed character and a bunch of group hugs.
Yes, but who will hug the island?
I totally agree. I think they answered all the wrong questions and left so many important questions unanswered. Season 6 was pretty much pointless. We really didn’t need to know about their time in Purgatory, it didn’t change anything in reality.
Well put Jake — and Jason. I think I’m most disappointed that they left the most interesting character, the island itself, half developed.