It's Better To Have Lost
This week's Hollywood Reporter cover story features screenwriter and Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof. His film career is hot now, but it turns out the he was ready to quit in the first season of Lost--he was already feeling depressed and didn't think he could manage it.
Happily (for viewers) he stuck around. But then there's the highly controversial finale:
Lindelof is right that it's not universally hated. I'd guess as many as a third of Lost fans really like it, while a majority were disappointed or worse.
I'm with the majority, as readers of this blog know. I post regularly here, but if I had the time I'd rewrite every script from the final season, get some voice actors and animators, and put up an alternate timeline on YouTube where Lost ends differently.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:10 AM
8 Comments:
Simpsons meets Lost.
Wouldn't you also have to have the rights?
Rights?- we don't need no stinkin rights.
Fair use.
If you delete all the alta-world scenes from Season Six, the result is a much shorter S6 that isn't so awful. You still have to sit through Dogen and Lennon, and the Widmore arc takes up time but ends up saying very little, and the on-Island finale where the world is saved by a Flowmaster is still silly. But the viewer is spared the off-island Kumbaya finale. You can even add the pleasant "New Man in Charge" coda at the end, since that isn't dependent on the altaworld scenes at all.
And there are a few great scenes in S6: Sawyer realizing that the MIB isn't really Locke, and evil Claire surveying the destruction in the Temple with a creepy version of "Wish Upon a Falling Star" slowly playing!
Even so, I would subscribe to cable again to watch your remake of S6!
I've written quite a bit about season 6--mostly when it first aired. I feel it went in the wrong direction all around. There were some decent moments on the Island, but the best characters were sidelined, the Temple was a letdown, certain questions weren't answered and so on.
The alta-world was actually a good idea. After flashbacks and flashforwards, it was something new and promising. What it ended up being was the biggest mistake of all. As I noted then, it was emotional, and surprising, but it sacrificed almost everything else for this effect.
If I did rewrite things, I'd change a lot on the Island, but much of the alta-world I'd keep. I'd just move it in different directions, and definitely a different ending.
In other words, keep most of the alta-world, but offer a radically different explanation of what it was? That might work.
I think that deep down, however, I never viewed Lost in terms of its structure. I think the writers did: for them, the structure was semi-independent episodes, each of which spent about 70% of its screen time in the present and 30% of its screen time elsewhere and/or elsewhen.
But for me, the main purpose of the flashbacks in the first three seasons was not to give the show a dual structure, but to give the viewers a deeper understanding of the characters. But why would we want this? Why would I want to know about Sun and Jin's families? The only good reason, in my view, is because the main story is eventually going to build on this, either directly or indirectly.
But it didn't. Some of the backstories gave us payoff in early seasons (e.g., Charley, Locke, Sawyer). But Sun, Jin, and even to some degree Kate never had any forward movement to their characters, so their backstories ended up being irrelevant.
So, although I would still gladly watch your version of S6, I am skeptical about any version of an altaworld that takes time away from what happens on the island during season six. The backstories were all about showing how the characters interacted with people from their individual pasts. The altaworld shows them interacting with more characters that aren't tied to the main story (Jack's son, etc.). I think what was most needed was more interaction between main characters and other main characters.
And of course, brining back the real Locke would have been nice.
In the first season, the flashbacks were great--it was an ingenious was to get to understand these mysterious characters. By the third season, the producers understood we didn't need to know much more about them, and it was just slowing down the main story, so they switched to other tricks. Actually, they were using tricks earlier, such as flashbacks to what happened earlier on the Island, or flashbacks for new characters. But--and I think correctly--they decided they could never fully abandon the dual structure. (It's a problem that any show with flashbacks will get sooner or later. Look at the much weaker Once Upon A Time--the flashbacks are mostly there to conveniently parallel the present-day story, except then this "lesson" the character learns from the past in this episode doesn't apply to past and future episodes, even though these characters should always be aware of their entire past.)
My alta-world (and I've got a lot of ideas which I'll save for now) would be repurposed and its meaning would eventually become apparent, but not (I hope) in the lame way the show did. Even when it was first airing, I kept noting how it was time for the alta-world and the main world to interact, but they never did because, we found out at the end, they never could.
Makes sense to me. As I said, if you ever make it, I'll watch it!
I stopped watching Once Upon a Time at the midpoint of season two, although I figure I'll watch it someday, especially if I hear it's gotten good again. Jennifer Morrison had started to annoy me, and the plots were mostly predictable.
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