Some things I hate about LOST
This probably won't be an especially popular post, but I need to get it out of my system after seeing so much Lost stuff on reddit.
I know I'm way behind the times, but I've finally started watching Lost on Netflix based on a ton of recommendations (not least of them on reddit). I'm about halfway through season 2. Note that this is not an "I HATE LOST" post. I don't hate it. A lot of it is outstanding, especially the acting, casting, and production-value. There has been enough good to keep me watching, so far.
But this is a post about some things that I really don't like, and that really disappoint me about the recommendations from smart people. So if I dwell on the bad and not on the good, well, that's the point. Here goes:
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The fundamental plot seems to be one MacGuffin after another. 30 episodes in, there is extraordinarily little "there" there. New plot devices are introduced constantly, which is cool, but instead of getting resolved or escalated, they just get replaced.
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There is a shit-ton of pure filler. This seems to have been not so much written by a team, as by a bunch of writers who meet once a week to fit their various stories together. There is a lot of irrelevant, tedious, and annoying stuff that breaks the tension and suspension of disbelief.
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A lot of the flashback/back-story sucks. It's often like watching 8 different shows on 8 different channels where someone else is controlling the remote. It's not that they are all bad, it's that I'm constantly switching between a supernatural mystery, a cultural drama, a soap opera, a medical drama, a gritty crime story, a conspiracy thriller, an indie film, etc. They are not all of equal quality, and it's not an ideal way to watch any of them.
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Annoying filmmaker artifacts. This kind of stuff is rampant in Lost: spend 5 minutes on slow, drawn-out, irrelevant personal interaction, followed by 10 seconds of confusing, indistinct plot-advancement. Or detailed, in-depth exploration of atmospherics followed by a "you're not allowed to see that yet" actual event. Also juvenile, go-nowhere, "sexytime" situational stuff.
In short, I'm starting to get the impression that I am watching an extremely well-made shaggy-dog story.
One of the notorious difficulties in sci-fi/horror/supernatural writing is that it is far easier to come up with scary/mysterious/cool premises than it is to actually resolve them. Probably 99% of all such stories start much better than they end.
I'm getting the impression that Lost's "solution" to this problem is to just never end, to just keep introducing cool/mysterious conceits or "setups" that simply replace each other, like 100 unfinished novels spliced together. It seems more designed to be addictive than good. It feels like it's cheating.
I'm not too worried about spoilers at this point, because I'm increasingly getting the impression that there is not much to "spoil". It seems like the Maltese Falcon turns out to be an artifact covered in jewels that is really a government tracking device that is really psychological experiment that is actually not the real Maltese Falcon, which is in fact a computer disk that has been hidden in the luggage all along that contains a secret code to corporate conspiracy which is intended to hide the financing of a weapons project that is intended to de-stabilize a foreign government who is threatening to reveal a bribery-scandal that has manipulating UN votes in order to protect experiments on human beings that are (so on and so on... you want hear what the secret experiments are about right? well, keep watching...)
I'm getting the impression that we're just going to keep pulling on loose threads until there is no sweater left.
Posted Jul 25, 2011, 3:17 AM UTC · edited
I hear what you are saying. It's personal preference. Some people, myself included, really love the five minute long drawn out personal interaction. I feel like the best scenes in LOST are often when two people are just sitting there talking and the dialog is so intense.
I think the problem is that, to the writers the characters are the main thing, and to some fans, the mysteries are the main thing. Both wish the other would keep the main thing the main thing, but they are talking about different stuff.
But thanks for your opinion and don't give up on it. If you go into it not expecting every single answer I think you will enjoy it. Cheers!
Agreed 100%. I love the long dialogues between characters. That stuff was so rich and entertaining, and honestly thought provoking.
I think the biggest problem with mystery vs character is that the writers just couldn't know what it's like to be us. To them the characters are their creations and are the most important things, but to many people watching the mysteries were what they were interested in. The reason the writers didn't understand this is because, simply put, the mystery is not a mystery to them.
We looked at the show and said "What is that thing making noise in the woods?! This is so cool!" and when they looked at the show they said "Yeah that noise is just [SPOILER], but what's REALLY interesting is Jack over here. What's his deal? Why does he have these issues? Isn't that interesting?"
Fair points.
I have no objection to personal interaction, or intense dialog. I loved "My Dinner with Andre", for example. And I think "Dexter" is a great example of a show with a great high-concept MacGuffin (psychopathic serial-killer protagonist) whose strength lies mostly in the psychological human interaction, where the murder-business is mostly just a compelling setup. Shakespeare, who I think is the best writer of all time, by a wide margin, thrived on that sort of thing.
It's a blurry and fuzzy but not especially fine distinction that separates drama (or even melodrama) from soap-opera. There is no precise diving line, but there is a gradual progression into essential plotlessness, where the dramatic tension, instead of constantly escalating towards an intense resolution, instead just keeps changing direction. It's obviously hard to achieve Aristotlean catharsis in episodic serial fiction, but the best TV shows and, say, comic books manage to clever resolutions with essentially static characters.
Based on this comment, I think you might be using the term "MacGuffin" differently than most. In the original, Hitchcockian sense, a MacGuffin is a physical item of great importance that the characters all are motivated to attain/control, but an item which, in and of itself, holds little material interest to the viewer. The diamonds valued by Niki and Paulo are textbook MacGuffins. I don't see how Dexter has a "high-concept MacGuffin". Do you mean premise? Wikipedia does indeed define a MacGuffin as "a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction," but goes on to clearly state that it is a tangible thing within the work of fiction, not merely the conceptual trappings or form of storytelling. The interesting achronological storytelling of many Tarantino films quite clearly catch the viewers' attention, but could not really said to be a MacGuffin.
Also, I like Lost, but I understand where you're coming from. It's funny, however, in that I felt the same way you feel about Lost that I feel about Dexter: there was that whole third season with the British chick that just really didn't resolve anything. I feel like you can find these kind of flaws with almost any show that's not rigorously plotted in advance and where every element is nailed down before-hand: that's the difference between TV and film. A film is a stand-alone, complete story, which necessitates a beginning, middle, and end, all within a preset timeframe. TV series, however, are just that: serial, and therefore are subject to the very real idea that "we know what we want to do generally, but how long do we take to get there" is a viable mindset in a writer/director/producer's mind.
That being said, how shows differentiate themselves is either by having everything really strongly plotted beforehand, which is tough especially when you just start with a Pilot and you have no idea if it's going to last one season or ten, or by demonstrating writing skill not through preformed plot but through plot recovery. Recovering from poor plot pacing and false trails is a fair metric for the quality of show writing, and I think Lost does this remarkably well despite its myriad mythos. Sure, there are elements that are brought up and not addressed directly again, but that doesn't mean they leave the Lost world: these are still living pieces of the Lost puzzle, and the writers did a great job of keeping things consistent despite four seasons of shifting ideas. I say four because, as I've heard it, and believe from the tone of the show itself, Carlton and Cuse sat down and indeed did iron everything they wanted to do with the show at the end of season 4, and said it would only last 2 more seasons despite protestations from higher-ups.
So yeah.
That's not what "MacGuffin" means