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"Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

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    "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

    SEASON 6

    I can't find last years lost thread.

    saw episode one and two today. Can I talk about them?

    #2
    "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

    Not yet - I still haven't seen the last two episodes of Season 5. Or I could just keep my big nose out of this thread.

    Comment


      #3
      "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

      I watched the opening double episode in the US last night.

      Luckily (as I lost touch with 'Lost' somewhere around season 2/3) it was preceded by a very detailed hour long "story so far" programme.

      Unluckily I still lost interest somewhere near the middle of the second hour of the new stuff.

      Comment


        #4
        "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

        I watched last night for the first time in two years, it seemed as repetitively preposterous as ever.

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          #5
          "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

          I had the same experience as Amor and Harry.

          There are so many knots in the string that I can't imagine the undoing of any of them will be as ultimately satisfying as was hoped for.

          A confusing mess.

          Comment


            #6
            "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

            I think I only continue to watch because of my interest in many of the characters, because the storylines are crazy. After last night's episode, I lay in bed, trying to figure out how many groups have been connected to the island:
            *the original castaways
            *the tailies
            *the Others, meaning Ben's people
            *the Dharma Initiative people
            *the Hostiles (some overlap with the Others, and are they the same as that 1954 group?)
            *the freighter people
            *Daniel, Charlotte, Miles, and Frank (and Naomi?)
            *the people on the Ajira flight that are now carrying around the crate full of Locke
            *the Temple people

            Really, I think the creators don't know where to go and so are creating random new tribes.

            Comment


              #7
              "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

              Harry, what on earth were you doing that you had to watch three straight hours of telly in the States?

              Comment


                #8
                "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

                I watched the first season and thought it was just random, pointless shit - getting more random, more pointless, and exponentially more irritating as it went on. Instead of actually expanding the characters and exploring any interesting dramatic possibilities, they just kept piling on the random, meaningless crap. There can't be any surprises in a show that has created a world with no rules and no limits on preposterity (which isn't really a word, but you know what I mean).

                It is to TV what that one drawer in the kitchen where you have all the rubber bands, 30 year-old Green Stamps, and bottle openers, etc. is to kitchen drawers.

                Comment


                  #9
                  "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

                  I watched a few of the first series and was never that interested.

                  But after reading Reeds posts here, why dont the script writers have a secret door where they can occasionally go through and be in the bar in Cheers or something. Or maybe walk into a room where JR and Sue Ellen are having a row.

                  The idea would be a homage to Mr Benn, but so what.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

                    Gangster Octopus wrote:
                    Harry, what on earth were you doing that you had to watch three straight hours of telly in the States?
                    Er;

                    - I had been out until the early hours the three previous nights

                    - I had got up early to work some UK office hours before a day of meetings

                    - I had no interesting offers for a night out and didn't really want one

                    - There was nothing good on at the movies

                    So I had a night in watching TV and room service dinner. I like to do it at least once on any trip to the US of a decent length.

                    You din't really want to know, did you?

                    Comment


                      #11
                      "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

                      Gangster Octopus wrote:
                      Harry, what on earth were you doing that you had to watch three straight hours of telly in the States?
                      Er;

                      - I had been out until the early hours the three previous nights

                      - I had got up early to work some UK office hours before a day of meetings

                      - I had no interesting offers for a night out and didn't really want one

                      - There was nothing good on at the movies

                      So I had a night in watching TV and room service dinner. I like to do it at least once on any trip to the US of a decent length.

                      You didn't really want to know, did you?

                      Comment


                        #12
                        "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

                        Maybe once...

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                          #13
                          "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

                          This thread is rather dominated by people telling us why they're NOT watching it.

                          For those that are....

                          *********************SPOILER ALERT************

                          Are we to take it that Juliet ("!the dice were loaded from the start!" [sorry])'s last words: 'it worked' means that what we are seeing in the flashes (not flashbacks...or forwards...can you have a flash-sideways?) is a parallel universe in which they never reached the island?

                          I guess when you've had flashbacks and then flash-fwds structuring earlier seasons, it works to use sidieways ones this time.

                          I'll cling on to the end anyway. Better than wading through another season of 24, in any case.

                          Comment


                            #14
                            "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

                            Felicity, apologies upfront, but I'm in the against camp.
                            And my camp is on a mystical island where I see sounds and hear colours, and a monster made of dubbin is mocking me gently.

                            The director and writers created their own noose when it came to lost.

                            The way that every single scene and every single line is stretched out to its excruciating, and often anti-climactic conclusion is jarring to say the least.

                            It leaves me thinking 'I have 80 years of precious life on this beautiful planet if I'm lucky and this is taking too much of my time up!'

                            My work colleagues have a notion that some incredible conclusion that will afford them some inner knowledge of the universe will reveal itself in the final episode, they really do, and I haven't the heart to tell them any different.

                            And that's what jars most of all with series such as these, it is the way that some people are expecting to find some meaning, in a fictional TV series, all the while admitting that the second series made no sense...

                            This people, is why the human race goes around in circles so often.

                            The dialogue or the drama that lies within each episode isn't inventive enough to hold my attention for the kind of story it is trying to tell. And the drama that takes an hour to unfold, all in glorious tediovision could be compacted down into a fairly tight half-hour show.
                            Alas, the writers have tripped up over their own red herrings whilst using the OTT drama as a caveat to provide it a veil of meaning to keep people hooked.

                            Comment


                              #15
                              "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

                              This series needs to be filed into the "nice idea originally but became woefully overblown and, in the end, utterly, utterly, unwatchable, because actually the writers themselves quite literally lost the plot" drawer.

                              Alongside The X-Files and Twin Peaks. And, gathering dust at the back, The Prisoner.

                              Comment


                                #16
                                "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

                                I think that, unless the need and desire by an audience is so strong for a programme that it has to prolong its life by another series, a ceiling on episodes needs to be put into place so that it doesn't either do a bit of shark jumping or fade away into blahland, dashing the hopes and enthusiasms of people who really enjoyed it and now have to twiddle their thumbs and watch it die a slow death.

                                Keep it to one or two series, finish while you're ahead and at the top. Ending with a whimper after a long and arduous visual slog is pushing it a bit.

                                Comment


                                  #17
                                  "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

                                  That's probably a decent rule of thumb but it's belied somewhat by the success of shows such as The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, The Shield and other cable shows, some of which have continued for five or six seasons, often growing stronger as they did so.

                                  I think it comes down to how the show is planned. If it's been sold on the basis of a simple treatment and the producers haven't given much thought to what happens beyond that then they're liable to be faced with juggling too many hastily conceived balls (ie: characters, plot devices etc.) at once, like Lost. If it's organised coherently from the beginning this is less likely to happen. For example, Mad Men has a writer assigned to each of its main characters, as the story evolves their writing is essentially a response by that person to events as they unfold. Similarly they have people doing deep research into actual events and places within the series's narrow time frame. A lot of that detail may not actually appear on the screen but, as viewer, you sense it's presence and it forges a stronger connection than desperate devices like nuclear explosions, sinking islands, time traveling characters, and people coming back to life ever could.

                                  Comment


                                    #18
                                    "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

                                    I'd agree with that and then some, but it's pertinent to look at such shows and see that they come from the HBO stable (cable, as you pointed out), where a certain exceptional quality control - allowing writers, directors and producers to thrive creatively and with a great amount of adult and intelligent sensibility - is imposed. But Fox, on the other hand, seem to want to squeeze blood from the greatest amount of stones they can get get their hands on. By rights, most of their big sitters, like The Simpsons or Lost have been allowed to disappear up their own fundaments, the last drops of their appeal having been wrung out long ago.

                                    HBO know when to get out when the going's good, maintaining quality at the best moment before calling it a day. Fox just let the zombie roam until it crumbles.

                                    Comment


                                      #19
                                      "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

                                      Lost isn't on Fox. It's on ABC.

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                                        #20
                                        "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

                                        Yes but the point still stands. Networks are primarily interested in selling audiences to advertisers and they've pared down the variables to such a extent that it makes any program that strays outside them vulnerable by definition. First there's the range of dramatic subject, essentially there are two: police/legal and medical (forensic shows are a combination of both.) Second the structure of each episode of a successful network series is as constrained as haiku. Whether it's 24, House or the CSI and Law and Order franchises the dramatic arc is similar in each one, every time. Shows such as Lost and Heroes are destined to fail, either artistically or commercially, because they try to do something different within a form that allows no flexibility.

                                        (I wish Horse was still around for these discussions.)

                                        Comment


                                          #21
                                          "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

                                          Shows such as Lost and Heroes are destined to fail, either artistically or commercially, because they try to do something different within a form that allows no flexibility.

                                          Whereas I was more concerned about their longetivity rather than their ability to accommodate themselves artistically within a stringently commercial framework. The main complaint is that audiences soon drop away or refuse to maintain any level of interest if a series travels on its merry way through series after series, outstaying its welcome and becoming either more convoluted or simply boring. Commerciality and sales prolong the making of the shows and their shelf life, possibly straining the producers' and writers' efforts to provide material interesting enough to justify such lengths. It's not really a matter of imagination straining to fit into an allotted structure or format, it's just trying to keep an audience on your side.

                                          So when that bald bloke on Lost turns up on a trailer saying 'all will be revealed', chances are the response from some will be 'tough shit, slaphead, I'm watching Corrie'.

                                          Sorry, Amor, Horse isn't around so you've only got bumpkins like me around to muddy the waters. Apologies.

                                          Comment


                                            #22
                                            "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

                                            The main complaint is that audiences soon drop away or refuse to maintain any level of interest if a series travels on its merry way through series after series, outstaying its welcome and becoming either more convoluted or simply boring.

                                            But that doesn't happen. If audiences decline networks drop shows almost immediately. Even if an audience is stable but doesn't grow sufficiently it might be axed. For example Ugly Betty — not a show I watched but one with a loyal and enthusiastic audience — will not be renewed after this season. It, like Lost, and every other series that tries to do something a tiny bit different, has had a gun to its head from day one. The pressure to emulate the success of a show's first season by repeating it dramatically is intense, anything else invites cancellation. In fact a generous reading of Lost might be that its explicitly done that as an ironic critique of the form.

                                            BTW I hope you didn't think my yearnings for The Horse were an implicit criticism of yourself? Far from it. It's only that he had an insider's take on this stuff which was informative.

                                            Comment


                                              #23
                                              "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

                                              You make good points, but it's a pity that you don't get decisions other than commercial ones that can dictate what kind of shelf-life a programme should have. The most well-known example, I guess, is Fawlty Towers, where both John Cleese and Connie Booth brought matters to a close after two series. The appeal of the series is still quite strong even though the seams are showing - but that's come about due to the strengths of its writing and the decision to leave them wanting more. These days the viewers get more than they wanted to the extent that they become sated and a little pissed off - the feeling of watching a new show that impresses and surprises you enough to pencil in a regular time to get settled on that sofa is a lovely one. The worst is watching it go on longer than it should and the effect is a bit like watching a favourite relative stroll around with growing dementia and dribbling all over the place - where's that sharp character we used to know?

                                              The Prisoner's another, stopping at 12 episodes and acquiring a reputation going beyond that of cult. But those examples belong to another age where even video sales, never mind DVD ones, didn't exist, purely the quality of programme and the need to bring in a good prime-time audience. Today, it's the money - ratings, sales that DVD box set that's the normal destination for any series that passed its sell-by date some time ago. C'est la vie.

                                              And don't be concerned about my remark about Horse - tongue-in-cheek was the tone - and, yes, I agree, his knowledge would straighten things out much more decisively.

                                              Comment


                                                #24
                                                "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

                                                it's a pity that you don't get decisions other than commercial ones that can dictate what kind of shelf-life a programme should have.

                                                It is. The lack of commercial constraint provides cable shows with their creative flexibility and once did the same for the BBC (quite why it doesn't anymore is beyond me.)

                                                Comment


                                                  #25
                                                  "Are they STILL Lost on that bloody island?"

                                                  ANYWAY....Heliotrope did nail the problem with the list of others on the island.

                                                  just seen episode 4, best episode for a long time and focuses on two of the best characters

                                                  even got a few answers

                                                  I can probably post spoilers here as nobody else seems to watch it

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