Lost: The Long Con

A heap of mixed feelings on the Lost finale. I fall squarely in the emotionally satisfied, intellectual disgruntled camp. I'm not complaining about the way it ended. That was apt, iconic, symmetrical, etc. Well done there. A bit speechy in the church, but I can live with that. When the show wants you to know something, it always highlights it in neon.

My complaint is with the gross mismanagement of the entire series. I haven't been with it since the beginning. I watched the whole thing mostly in a caffeinated marathon run in the hiatus between seasons five and six. As a result I'm freshly aware of the myriad of dead ends and enough plot holes to fill the Albert Hall.

The writers have been trying to cover their tracks by insisting "it's a character-driven show." First of all, it's not. These are flimsy characters who are moved around like chess pieces to serve the plot. A character will get angry for no other reason than the story needs an angry character at that point. We're not talking Madame Bovary here. But even if it was true, this excuses nothing. There's no reason to have an entire episode devoted to Jack's tattoo, meanwhile you can't take five minutes to show who was in the other outrigger. That's just poor planning. The reason I got sucked into the show was because of the elements of mystery. What's under this hatch? Who were the Dharma Initiative? What's with all the Egyptian motifs? That's what made the show unique. Without it, Lost is just another piddling soap opera.

While season six may have ended powerfully, I accuse the writers of pulling a bait and switch. They ended with a grand flourish of explaining what the Sideways world was, but that's not a question I was asking until this season. They were counting on their audience to have short attention spans. I'm fine with mysteries being left unexplained. But I want that to be an artistic choice, and not because the writers concocted a mystery without knowing the answer and then, when they couldn't figure out how to wrap it up, decided it wasn't important. Ends remain loose not because of any artistic integrity but because they were set into play with no knowledge of where they were going. That's disingenuous, and because of it I feel vaguely conned. And so does a large portion of the audience, if the internet message boards are any indication. It's like a detective story in which the plot became too convoluted for the author to figure out, so in the last chapter he kills off an entirely new character and has his detective dramatically solve that murder, then stand back triumphantly and hope we are sufficiently distracted enough to have forgotten what drew us to the story in the first place.

I feel towards the show like I do the New York subway system. Glad it exists but pissed off at the bad management, endless construction, fare hikes, & complete disregard for its customers.