Lost perspective

“My problem with the ending it added more questions... mysteries which they said they would clear up just haven't.”

“Seems to me like they didnt have a clue how to end this very long series so cobbled a few ideas together... With that ending I feel like someone who was promised a big shiny toy at xmas and ended up with a piece of coal.”

“There never was a "proper ending" since the writers made it up as they went along. The writers/actors/producers are now rich. We were the victims of a elaborate theme-scheme that could not have ended intelligently.”

“Worst show ever, 115 hours waiting for some sort of satisfying ending to see if it was really worth it.... it wasnt. Waste of time and totally pointless. Thankfully i wont need to waste any more time on it. Wish it was cancelled years ago!”

“a big hoax, with promises of answers to wild concepts that not even the most genius of physicists can answer. I suppose that it was easy for these writers to swindle idiot masses to keep watching as the plots became more and more absurd. After all, the audience already had so much invested, they couldn’t stop watching.”

The above are just some of the negative comments taken from a messageboard after the finale of Lost, which I saw last night. Now, I’m not interested in discussing the events of the finale here as I fear the dreaded ~SPOILERS! as much as anybody. What does interest me is the negative reaction to a show which seems to have redrawn the boundaries between the product, its writers and its audience.

For me, Lost has been consistently high-quality, with the really bad episodes coming in the first couple of seasons when there was no fixed end in sight and they had to pad everything out. Once that set timeframe was in place, the producers ratched up the tension expertly, throwing in some real edge-of-seat twists and adding new condundrums just when you thought you’d got things figured out.

But it’s been this sixth and final season which has really got these folks worked up. Suddenly, a new alternate reality was added to replace the flashbacks/flashforwards, and a whole new layer of storytelling was added to the “real”, island world with the addition of the godlike Jacob (even though he was dead) and his unnamed, black-clad brother, who was now pretending to be John Locke. I shared the scepticism at the latter development, because it very much appeared that the rug had been pulled from under us, that much of the previous five seasons was somewhat irrelevant now that all the human characters were (seemingly) shown to be mere pawns in a much larger game.

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Well, maybe. But if the first five seasons had taught me anything it’s that these producers and writers knew what they were doing, and the least they deserved was our patience while we waited to see how all this would pan out.

Some hope. The howls of anguish have been coming thick and fast during most of season 6, most notably a couple of weeks ago in the aftermath of Across the Sea, an episode referred to as a “mythological download” by Exec Producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse (aka Darlton, as per the modern penchant for clunky abbreviations, or Clabbrevs as I don’t call them), which told a potted history of Jacob and his brother growing up on the island, featuring a hopelessly-miscast Alison Janney as their “mother” and none of the regular cast. In classic Lost style, nothing was any clearer afterwards and because people figured there ought to be some answers at this late stage, they let rip - most notably in a post-show interview with Darlton with lots of angry accusations of them treating us viewers like fools, lying to us about giving us answers and generally being crap writers and appalling human beings.

Darlton seemed pretty bemused by this (“Do any of these people like the show?” one of them rhetorically asks at one point), but the fact remains that this interactivity was pretty much an integral part of the show from the beginning. Creator JJ Abrams has a great track record with viral marketing (cf Cloverfield) and Lost treated fans to hidden websites, webisodes and an entire interactive gamey thing called the Lost Experience to ensure brand loyalty. The show's mysterious nature actively encouraged rampant speculation and analysis across the interweb. And once Darlton started doing regular podcasts after each episode, filling in background info and teasing fans with hints about what was to come, the process was complete - Lost had gone way beyond being a mere TV show.

TV never used to be this way. Back when, before everybody was online, we didn’t expect that much from a programme. We used to watch shows, discuss what happened in them with our friends at school or work or whatever, and that alone provided our entertainment. We didn’t really question the writers’ motivations, or how much we were being manipulated as an audience and we certainly didn’t crave producers’ pronouncements like tablets of stone passed down from on high. Broadly speaking, if you didn’t like a show you didn’t watch it. You may have thought a show was shit, but you’d never dream of accusing the producers of abusing their privelege and making a mug of you. This is the power of the internet - bringing over-opinionated geeks together and fostering collective paranoia since 1997 (or whenever).

Unquestionably this drive for fan-producer interactivity has its advantages, creating stronger connections to the show for those of us who appreciate that its creators are more interested in making compelling TV than attempting to hoodwink us. But Darlton really did make a rod for their own back in their interviews and podcasts when they made remarks, however offhand, about viewers’ questions being answered.

I am actually a science fiction fan - hardcore enough to have recorded every episode of Deep Space 9 off the telly, at least. But the biggest critics of season 6 seem to be those hardcore SF fanboys who crave specific explanations for everything that’s appeared in the show. Darlton now stand accused of LIES and HYPOCRISY by the “hardcores” becuase an awful lot of the show’s concepts have been left unexplained.
Interestingly, one of the central themes of the series was Man of Science vs Man of Faith. I normally come down firmly on the side of science and logic. For example, I can’t really enjoy a magic show for its own sake - however good a performer someone like Derren Brown is, the main feeling I get from watching his shows is annoyance because I want to know how he does it. And yet, I enjoyed the ending of Lost. Looking back at the six seasons in their entirety, there are a million unanswered questions and many plot points that seemingly make no sense, but Darlton kept insisting that they were writing a character-driven show and now I finally believe them.

If you always considered Lost to be a mystery-based show then you will inevitably feel disappointed by all the dangling threads. If, on the other hand, you regard the mystery format with all its cliffhangers as the way they chose to present their character-based show then the whole thing starts to make some sense. It might also pay to look at Heroes and Flashforward: two shows which would never have existed were it not for Lost, and yet they never came close to achieving the luxury of setting their own end dates. Both had plots which twisted and turned all over the place, but, crucially, neither had characters who you could genuinely invest in.

The fact is that Lost gained my emotional attachment almost by stealth, luring me in with the mystery element and keeping me hooked because, as it turned out, I cared about finding out the fates of those characters as much as the answers to all the questions. I don’t feel duped, just sad that a show which has given me so much pleasure is over. I find it somewhat ironic that these supposedly broadminded people who embrace high scientific concepts are now so angry at being left to sift through the details themselves and formulate their own explanations. Isn’t that what science is about? Plus, isn’t that what they were doing throughout the whole series, only to become FURIOUS when they weren’t presented with a nice package tied with a little bow at the end? These people would have been annoyed even if everything had been explained, because it would have inevitably been different to their own exhaustive hypothesis and therefore WRONG.

"We want the show to speak for itself for a while," Cuse explained after the finale. "The last thing we want is to take from the audience the ability to discuss and argue about what things mean. That's an important part of the community of Lost." In some ways, though, I bet he’d much rather see a return to the good old days.