LOST: good riddance

I had this written up somewhere and thought I had posted it over a year ago. Guess not. Here it is.

***

Yes, you read that right. LOST is over and I am happy. No longer will I be embarrassingly hooked to this poor excuse for entertainment.

I have written about LOST elsewhere already. There I cried foul as the writers ruined whatever good thing they ever had by taking their show into a circular, impossible time-travel loop. That was season five.

Now for season six, the final season, the writers understandably steered back from the whole time-travel fiasco. It was wrap-up time. Time to give our fans all the answers they've been waiting for! Time to start answering all the questions and mysteries we've created over the last five seasons, right? WRONG! Suckers. Did anyone really think they were going to explain how things worked? Of course not. There was too little time. And besides, ending each episode with some suspenseful mystery that would never be explained had worked so well for them on every previous season--why stop now?

When I first started watching LOST, I was sucked in. The former psychology major in me was excited to see the psychological dynamics of a group of strangers isolated on a deserted island and how that would play out. I was, of course, quickly disillusioned of this hope as I realized that these characters actually weren't normal. In other words, they didn't act like normal people. They kept weird secrets from each other when a normal person would have just spit it right out. They fought over silly little things. They just....did things that made you go "What the...?" (And of course, you never got answers for those questions, either.)

Then as the show progresses, we discover that this is no ordinary island. We don't know why, but we trust that answers will be forthcoming. The survivors meet the natives on the island, who turn out to be hostile. We never discover why they are hostile. At first they all seem like crazy, primitive jungle-dwellers. There's talk of this "sickness" and "infection." Oooh, what is that all about? (Hint: we never find out.) Later, we discover that these natives are actually just normal people who like to play dress-up sometimes. Oh--and they all work for Jacob, apparently. You know, Jacob, the "good" guy we later found out BROUGHT all these people to the island, to help him or be his candidates or whatever.

You know what, I'm boring myself with this recap. If you've seen the show, then you know all this. If you haven't, then you don't care. Let's just move on to the stuff that bugs me.

To put it succinctly: Lost sacrificed story coherence for "suspense." The writers hooked their fans through this irritating practice of introducing one suspenseful mystery after another, without resolving anything. They expect and hope (and were not disappointed) that their fans forget that their story has no answers or resolution to it by introducing simply more mystery and intrigue. Fans forget that they never received an answer to their last questions because suddenly they have new questions to wonder about. And so it goes, episode by episode. More questions, no answers.

Take Sayid's death and resuscitation, for example. That was the big suspenseful ending to the final season premier. Did they tell us why or how that happened in the next episode? Of course not. Did we ever find out? Absolutely not. But the typical fan will have forgotten all about that a couple episodes down the line. The producers banked on the collective short attention spans of their viewers and fans.

The stuff I really take issue with involves the Lost storyline not following its own rules or producing impossible results. Lost tries to pass itself off as a story that more or less follows regular laws of physics. The island isn't a fantasy land, despite all its mystery. We're given the impression that there is a method to this madness. The characters aren't supernatural beings. They're mortal and can be cut and hurt and die just like everyone else. On that note, how do Desmond, Locke, and Echo survive the implosion? How are they tossed out into the jungle? Doesn't make sense. Don't make the hatch implode or explode if you want the people inside it to survive.

Another example. At one point, we find out that the smoke monster was in Jacob's cabin. He took Claire there after she went nutso (why did that happen, again?). But we also know that the cabin was surrounded with that ash substance that we later find out repels the smoke monster---it can't cross the stuff. If the ash stuff is supposed to keep smokey out, then don't go and put him right in the cabin. Play by your own rules or don't play at all. Or at least, don't make up stupid rules in the first place if you're not going to follow them. If you're going to produce impossible events, don't just ignore the obvious questions they create. Don't be lazy. At least make a respectable attempt to resolve the inconsistency according to the parameters of your own storyline. Don't just leave people guessing. Don't cop-out and say that part of the value of your story is that it leaves things "open for interpretation." Give me a friggin' break. How do I interpret my way out of Jin impossibly surviving an explosion of hundreds of pounds of C-4? Is he like Wolverine or something? Is this Heroes? Does he have superpowers? Please.

Oh Aaron, stop being so nit-picky! These are just minor issues. They pale in the context of the entire storyline. Okay, maybe, but what if there are hundreds of similar unresolved or unanswered holes? Do we just keep ignoring them? Do we accept the undoubtedly PR-inspired defense of declaring that LOST is about the "characters" and their development and relationships to each other? I'm sorry, but that is simply another cop-out. Good character development does not excuse a horribly convoluted storyline.

See, what I think happened is the writers were more or less making things up as they went along. This is one possible explanation for the story's lack of coherence. Remember when Ben Linus' character was first introduced? That guy was only supposed to be around for like three episodes. But then all of a sudden he's the leader of the "others." The writers were seriously just winging it. I can picture them going "Hey, I know what would be cool and trip people out, let's put POLAR BEARS on this island!" And yeah, it is kinda cool and trips people out, but then the writers ignore the part about it not really making any sense or fitting in with the overall theme and context of their story.

Here's my "problem." I like internal consistency from the shows I watch. If they can't even play by their own rules, then I'm turned off. It's a sign of laziness. If you're a writer, and you've got a mysterious jungle island where people occasionally crash and it's nowhere on the map, then you're basically in a position where you can do whatever the heck you want with the story. But after you've set the stage a little bit, established some basic parameters and rules, well then you'd better follow them. If not, then it just means you lacked foresight in the beginning. You didn't give yourself enough room to work. You didn't plan well. You were unprepared. And so you're forced to break your own rules to make things interesting. Even then, you can make a colorable attempt to adapt the story line so as to assimilate new twists to the plot. But the LOST writers made no attempt to do this. They just broke the rules, and kept on breaking them. It's like when you tell a white lie. Each subsequent lie gets bigger and bigger. Either you have to come out and tell the truth (in this case, that your story is off its rocker), or you just have to keep making it more and more ridiculous so that people don't think to question all the lies you've been telling--they get too preoccupied with your latest tale. (Perhaps season five really was the writers trying to tell us the story was off its rocker, as they resorted to time travel. Maybe that was their cry for help.)

Eventually, something like that will blow up in your face. That's when you give it a nice, feel-good happy ending. Focus on the characters, which all your fans love and adore. Yay, they all go to heaven! Aww you were so nice to those characters, we'll forgive you for that crap story you just told us.

Have I made my point? I hope so. I'll leave you with a list of questions that I feel were left unanswered from the LOST storyline. A lot of these may appear trivial, granted. But again, I feel that as a whole, these unanswered questions represent the overall laziness and lack of foresight on the part of the writers, as well as everything else I've mentioned. It was just one question after another. The writers never let their fans crash off the "high" they experienced after a suspenseful mystery was introduced. Because then their brains might start working and they'd begin to question what the heck they'd been watching. So for all you LOST fans out there, now you know what it's like to do drugs.

***

WHAT is the island?

If the "others" were under Jacob's command, and Jacob is the good guy, why did they attack and murder the crash survivors? Why are they such jerks to the candidates?

How did Jack survive being hurled hundreds of yards from the plane crash, out of his seatbelt, into a bamboo forest?

Why are there polar bears on the island?

Why was Libby in the mental hospital where Hugo lived?

How was Locke cured of his paralysis after crashing on the island? Why did he suddenly become paralyzed again while hunting boars with Boone?

When Jack and Locke questioned the value of pushing the button, why didn't Desmond tell them about the System Failure he witnessed when the countdown timer reached zero? (another example of people not acting "normal")

Why did a dharma supply drop come in if the dharma initiative has been wiped from the island?

Why does the information sent via the pneumatic tube just end up in a pile in a meadow? How are reports being made if the dharma people aren't around anymore?

How did Locke, Echo, and Desmond survive the implosion of the swan station? If it imploded, how did they end up in the surrounding jungle?

Why did Walt tell Locke not to open the hatch? How did he know anything about it?

What did Walt see that frightened him enough to leave the island? How did he see it?

Why did the others want Walt? Why do they want children and only certain of the survivors?

What is the "sickness?" Why are people worried about being infected?

Who said "help me" to John in Jacob's cabin?

Why did women who were impregnated on the island die during childbirth?

Why do Shannon, Sayid, and Locke see Walt in places he cannot be?

Who lit the brazier? If it was Danielle, how did she do it while on the other side of the Island, and why did Sayid see no footprints in the sand around it? If it was the Others, what was the smoke's purpose?

When Ben pushed the wheel, why did the island start spinning through time? Why did it stop?

Why does pushing the wheel transport the person to Africa or wherever?

Why does Farraday have an American accent if he lived in England as a child, attended Oxford University, and both of his parents are English?

How did Miles know "Kevin" wasn't Michael's real name on the ship?

How did Locke's dad get on the island?

What was the "box" that Ben was talking about?

How did Widmore's mercenaries survive the black smoke when bullets are useless against it?

How did Jack, Kate, Juliet, and all them get zapped forward in time to "real" time when Juliet tried to blow up the bomb?

Why didn't Sun get zapped back in time with the rest of them on the second flight?

How did Sayid COME BACK TO LIFE? How did the others save him?

If the others want to kill Sayid, why don't they just shoot him? Why does he need to "willingly" take the pill?

How did Jin survive an explosion caused by hundreds of pounds of C4 explosives?

How did Miles' father survive the atomic blast if he was still on the island when it "sunk"?

Why did the island sink? Did it even sink?

If the blast never went off, what caused Jack, Sawyer and company to conveniently jump forward to "real" time?

How did the atomic bomb get down in the chamber where Sayid extracted the nuclear component?

Why was Walt "special?" Special in what way?

How did Jacob get off the island? What are Jacob's powers? Why couldn't he keep Ben from stabbing him?

How did Richard get off the Island to go see the young John Locke?

If Sayid was "claimed," why did he end up with his friends and not Locke? What does it even mean to be "claimed."

How did Jacob and smoke monster's mother kill all the villagers on the island and collapse the well? Was she the smoke monster back then? How did that wheel ever get put in place if she killed the project?

Why did Claire abandon Aaron? Why did the monster take her to the cabin? How did the monster get in the cabin with the ash stuff around it?

How did Jack survive putting the "cork" back in the hole, if he's not immune to electromagnetism, like Desmond?

If Hugo became the next "Jacob," why was he in purgatory with all the rest?