Incidentally, I'm throwing a baby shower for my brother Saturday (he will be a dad in April) and it is a LOST themed party. Pleanty of Dharma water, peanut butter, vines, numbers and all sorts of LOST-ie stuff. I'll post some pics later.
But back to LOST...anyone else watching it? I'm curious as to what other people are thinking about it.
Incidentally, I'm throwing a baby shower for my brother Saturday (he will be a dad in April) and it is a LOST themed party. Pleanty of Dharma water, peanut butter, vines, numbers and all sorts of LOST-ie stuff. I'll post some pics later.
But back to LOST...anyone else watching it? I'm curious as to what other people are thinking about it.
I'm not watching right now, primarily because it's off the air until January.
i am addicted to lost now, more than i like it, i think.
i watch/dvr it religiously, and enjoy to discussing episodes with friends, but i find each episode pisses me off a great deal in how utterly non-revealing they are.
a little bit of a tease is a good thing; it used to be they'd solve one mystery just as they started a new one. but now there are 500 open plot confusions versus 3 or 4 answered questions, and no one knows what the fuck is going on. annoying.
Season 2 was crap but once Jeph Loeb's name stopped showing up in the credits the show much improved.
Originally Posted By: Rob Kamphausen
i am addicted to lost now, more than i like it, i think.
i watch/dvr it religiously, and enjoy to discussing episodes with friends, but i find each episode pisses me off a great deal in how utterly non-revealing they are.
a little bit of a tease is a good thing; it used to be they'd solve one mystery just as they started a new one. but now there are 500 open plot confusions versus 3 or 4 answered questions, and no one knows what the fuck is going on. annoying.
Incidentally, I'm throwing a baby shower for my brother Saturday (he will be a dad in April) and it is a LOST themed party. Pleanty of Dharma water, peanut butter, vines, numbers and all sorts of LOST-ie stuff. I'll post some pics later.
But back to LOST...anyone else watching it? I'm curious as to what other people are thinking about it.
I'm not watching right now, primarily because it's off the air until January.
But when it was on I still liked it a lot.
Originally Posted By: Rob Kamphausen
i watch/dvr it religiously, and enjoy to discussing episodes with friends, but i find each episode pisses me off a great deal in how utterly non-revealing they are.
a little bit of a tease is a good thing; it used to be they'd solve one mystery just as they started a new one. but now there are 500 open plot confusions versus 3 or 4 answered questions, and no one knows what the fuck is going on. annoying.
whomod said: I generally don't like it when people decide to play by the rules against people who don't play by the rules. It tends to put you immediately at a disadvantage and IMO is a sign of true weakness. This is true both in politics and on the internet."
Season 5 of Lost, one of television’s most maddening but addictive and creative serialized dramas, starts tonight with a one-hour retrospective “clip show” covering the first four seasons (judiciously, one would assume) then the two-hour premiere of the new season. Let’s just say this much for starters — Season 5 is crazy complicated. And yet, if you’re an ambitious and eager person at heart, you could watch the one-hour clip show for helpful clues, and perhaps comb the Internet, starting with the Lost page on Wikipedia and then perhaps Googling “Lostpedia.” It might be a more efficient use of your time to study quantum physics in your off hours, however.
That should not be construed as anything remotely negative toward Lost, one of the few challenging series on mainstream television that doesn’t spoon-feed the American public a trite, easily predicted ending. The ambition and creativity — and yes, the confusion along those roads — are what fuel the basic greatness of Lost. It’s just that this is a particularly bad time to jump on the bandwagon as it’s rolling along. Renting or buying the DVDs and starting from the beginning? Yes, by all means. Tuning in tonight expecting to know what’s happening is like stumbling into a Latin class when all you’re really capable of doing is texting on your phone.
One of the myriad intriguing things about Lost in Season 5 is that it treats the flashbacks and newer flash-forwards as, well, flashcards. That is to say child’s play in the realm of following along with competency. Almost from the time the first frame comes into focus and the final credits roll two hours later, Lost enters a shifting realm of space and time, the after-effect of Ben (Michael Emerson) turning that super-cool wagon-wheel thingy and making the island disappear at the end of Season 4. Now, for those people still on the island, space and time are in your face and out of your mind. Just go with it. There’s joy on this ride.
Translation: This series just took a roller-coaster hairpin of a turn. If the latter stages of Season 3 and all of Season 4 marked a course-correction to the confusion that preceded it, the writers have apparently tired of making you feel comfortable in your grasp of what’s happening. When Jack (Matthew Fox) says, wearily, “How did we get here? How did all of this happen?,” you half expect the Talking Heads to be playing Once In A Lifetime in the background. Time has been “dislodged” in Season 5, and the operative words are not “where are we” but “when are we.” Seriously. They say that.
The essential storylines created by the end of Season 4 remain in place — the six people who got off the island want (and need) to go back. When we last saw Ben and Jack, they were looking at Locke (Terry O’Quinn), very much dead in a casket in Los Angeles. Locke is alive on the island, however. And Ben is trying to put the world, or at least the island, to right.
If this sounds like insanity, then you haven’t been watching. If this sounds like it makes sense, then congratulations on being caught up with the narrative storyline, but it’s all about to go — what’s the word? — insane. Season 5 starts three years from the end of Season 4. Although it seems like every tiny, precious little hint is some kind of spoiler to Lost fans, there’s no joy in giving away many of the ingenious twists you’re about to witness in the show, but setting up the structure is essential.
A lot can happen in three years. But as only Lost can, the series makes that point seem moot early on. There’s so much time-shifting and characters from the past meeting characters from the present that time itself becomes Dali-esque unless you’ve got a lot of Advil.
Having seen the first three episodes, the most impressive achievement is not the various machinations of new and old characters or the mind-bending use of time. It’s the parallel plotting, which is relatively easy to understand amid the motivational mental chaos.
On the one hand, you’ve got people off the island who are trying to get back on it, though someone is either trying to stop them or beat them there. On the other, you’ve got the people on the island (who we are familiar with) experiencing time-space flux and meeting a lot of the island’s original occupants (many we’ve never seen before). When these two plots ultimately meet — which might not even be this season — it’s going to be a sublime migraine.
There’s merit in discussing the notion of what’s confusing to outsiders and fans.
In Season 5, both the producers of Lost and the network itself would be lying if they told you they expected to get new fans. Stranger things have happened (see: Arizona Cardinals in the Super Bowl).
But the remaining episodes of Lost are like the (lesser number of) remaining episodes of Battlestar Galactica in that they are a reward for die-hard fans. These are the engrossing, final chapters of complicated mysteries.
They offer only confusion to new fans who try to pick up the narrative thread. And yet, complicated plot twists being the mind candy of serialized dramas, they offer glorious conundrums and heretofore unheard-of turns to the loyal viewer.
These Rubik’s cube dramas are easy to smirk at if you’re out of the loop or prefer closed-ended series where all is well in the 59th minute of every episode — and you don’t need Internet annotations to follow along.
Lost is a different genre, one that may infuriate even the loyalists, but there’s something impressive and rewarding in the density.
big_pimp_tim-made it cool to roll in the first damn place! Mon Jun 11 2007 09:27 PM-harley finally rolled with me "I'm working with him...he's young but, there is much potential. He can apprentice with me and then he's yours for final training. He will remember the face of his father...
Some day, Knutreturns just may be the greatest of us all...."-THE bastard
I read somewhere that they've given up on new viewers. This was proof of that. It was almost pure fan service and I loved every second of it.
im glad they did this. the most they tried was when Hurley was trying to explain it all to him mom...
big_pimp_tim-made it cool to roll in the first damn place! Mon Jun 11 2007 09:27 PM-harley finally rolled with me "I'm working with him...he's young but, there is much potential. He can apprentice with me and then he's yours for final training. He will remember the face of his father...
Some day, Knutreturns just may be the greatest of us all...."-THE bastard
I read somewhere that they've given up on new viewers. This was proof of that. It was almost pure fan service and I loved every second of it.
At the fifth season mark it would be pretty ridiculous to expert new viewers to jump on given the nature of the show. Doing so would require a level of pandering that the show does not need.
BTW, this has probably been touched on before, but does anyone find it a little odd--if not off-putting--that, at this point, Ben is practically the show's lead character/hero?
Well seeing as he is the nucleus around which pretty much everything revolves, then no, I dont find int odd or off putting at all. Plus, theres always the factor that whatever he is doing, he does for his own reasons, and isnt always doing what you actually think he is doing.
Ben is all about manipulation, so I think its perfect that he has become the focal point of the show.
there are 5 "J" names associated with some main male characters on the show: jack, james (sawyer), john, jeremy (john), and jacob (possibly john). (and not including "lesser" characters, like jin).
in your typical "theory discussion" the other day, we were wondering if maybe the show bases stuff on letters as it does numbers.
You missed Julliet. How you associate Jacob (even if it is John, which still hasnt been proven) as a main character, and Jin as a lesser character though, I dont know. How many episodes has Jacob been in?
How you associate Jacob (even if it is John, which still hasnt been proven) as a main character, and Jin as a lesser character though, I dont know. How many episodes has Jacob been in?
not necessarily on an appearance-based scale, but a (perceived) importance-based one. jin is more subplot than jacob, who is essentially the controlling force of the island.
