Comics I Don’t Understand

Lost Unanswered Questions

Cidu Bill on May 26th 2010

Michael posted this in another thread, below, but I thought it needed to be brought up top.

Filed in Bill Bickel, Lost, television | 38 responses so far

38 Responses to “Lost Unanswered Questions”

Cidu Bill May 26th 2010 at 04:44 pm 1

Seriously, I shake my head in wonder at how otherwise-intelligent people are saying “Six years of red herrings doesn’t bother me, because this was all about the characters’ personal journeys.”

My only explanation is that Dharma manufactured its own Kool-Aid.
Chyron HR May 26th 2010 at 05:00 pm 2

What happened with that smoke monster that appeared in Iceland and attacked Europe?

And what about that shapeshifter? Was that his real shape, or had he SHIFTED it?

And who was Daniel?
Catlover May 26th 2010 at 05:43 pm 3

A long time ago, Hurley said to Walt: “Back home I’m known as something of a warrior myself.” [S1E11] That one thing has stuck in my head for years as THE ONE THING I wanted to see resolved. Hurley’s backstory after that gave very little indication that “warrior” had anything to do with his life. He wasn’t a spy, he wasn’t into Dungeons and Dragons that I know of, he did love comic books. Warrior of ping pong? Doesn’t make sense. And did he ever pay Walt the money he lost on the backgammon bet? Who knows.
James Schend May 26th 2010 at 06:45 pm 4

Could be worse. Could be “Heroes.” That show had more plotholes in the first season than Lost did in the first 3. And people loved it!
mkilby May 26th 2010 at 06:59 pm 5

Everything I’ve read here so far just makes me glad that I haven’t watched even a single episode.
Sarah May 26th 2010 at 07:01 pm 6

Me too mkilby.

I was bombarded with people complaining on Facebook about it being a bad ending and not answering all the questions!
Jeff S. May 26th 2010 at 07:39 pm 7

Lost Weekly… excuse me… Entertainment Weekly has already ranked the Lost finale among the top 10 BEST Finales ever. I’m so glad I stopped watching it after the first season was over. I knew then that they were never going to explain anything. They would just continue to throw crap out there to keep confusing the viewers. Those Kool-Aid drinkers would continue to say, “Oh, that’s AWESOME writing! It’s so weird and wonderful!” Wrong. It was pure garbage. Nothing had to make sense while they were watching it because everyone thought it would eventually make sense.

I feel for those who followed the show religiously. I got to watch interesting shows while you got jobbed.
Dr. Shrinker May 26th 2010 at 08:05 pm 8

I’ve been a HUUUGE fan since Season 1, and even when things started to get really wonky this season, I’ve stuck by. The buildup to this finale was typically great, with the increasingly fascinating off-island story line really capturing my imagination and cranking up the excitement. (I was never a big fan of the Heat Miser/Cold Miser thing with Jacob and his brother. Magic superbeings are less interesting to me than regular folks dealing with strange mysteries.) I really didn’t expect or even want them to answer every little question (that’s how you get crap like the Star Wars prequels), but I did want resolution.

To have it end so abruptly, and so many fascinating questions just dismissed like that, was a huge disappointment. It felt like when they got rid of Poochie on the Itchy & Scratchy Show: “Poochie died on the way back to his planet.”
Cidu Bill May 26th 2010 at 08:30 pm 9

My complaint isn’t that they didn’t answer all the questions, but that there clearly weren’t answers: the writers were just essentially bullshitting the audience for six years
David May 26th 2010 at 09:45 pm 10

The first season of NBC’s _Life_ (Damian Lewis & Sara Shahi as LAPD detectives), had various challenges - got shortened by the writers’ strike, was nearly canceled etc. A rough year for a show trying to have a long term mystery running through it. Anyway, on the DVD set, there’s a commentary track on the S1 finale with the creators/writers. They were explaining that they’d set up a lot of questions, and had rearranged things to get some answers for that final episode. They felt very strongly that if you create questions, you have to answer them sometime, because “if you don’t answer them, you get lost”. He didn’t say anything more about it, but I like that it can be interpreted as getting both metaphorically lost, and producing _Lost_. I hope that he meant both.
Kit May 26th 2010 at 11:00 pm 11

Let’s keep in mind the essential purpose of TV - to get you to watch the ads and buy the products. If “Lost” convinced you to watch 6 years of commercials, it was a success.
Winter Wallaby May 27th 2010 at 12:10 am 12

Bill, I’m not trying to rub salt in the wound, but. . . was there something that made you think the writers had a coherent picture for what was going on over the last six years? I stopped watching partway through the second season, because I just couldn’t believe that they had a plan, and nothing I heard about the show over the last six years made me rethink that belief. I figure that good writers who have good ideas would, over six years, give some story lines satisfying resolutions and some mysteries satisfying explanations, as they lead into new story lines and mysteries. It seems unlikely that you would just have six years of increasingly bizarre and confusing mysteries, and then finally reveal something to have it all make sense, in a satisfying way, just at the end.
Cidu Bill May 27th 2010 at 12:16 am 13

Winter, supposedly, a couple of years ago when they set they set the date for the finale, they were going to start tying things together coherently and make it all come together by May 23, 2010. And it seemed as if they were indeed reining in the nonsense and working toward an ending.

Though to be honest, I always thought the show was overrated, and stuck with it because my wife liked it. I figured I’d better go along with what she wanted after that Franny incident.
Harold May 27th 2010 at 01:02 am 14

Incoherent story lines that go nowhere? So “Lost” is the “Funky Winkerbean” of TV.
Cidu Bill May 27th 2010 at 01:12 am 15

Well, except that we didn’t have to watch an entire season of Rose dying of cancer.
Jeff S. May 27th 2010 at 01:59 am 16

I heard there was a Montoni’s franchise on the Island.
mkilby May 27th 2010 at 04:18 am 17

… when they set they set the date for the finale, they were going to start tying things together coherently and make it all come together by May 23, 2010. And it seemed …

Why that date, I wonder… I would have thought that they would have jumped on the mystical bandwagon by selecting 21 Dec 2012 (the purported ending date of the Mayan long count calendar). Perhaps the scriptwriters doubted their ability to generate another two and a half years of mystical drivel.
Rebecca May 27th 2010 at 07:07 am 18

http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2010/05/26/absolutely-the-last-thing-i-will-write-about-lost/
Nicole May 27th 2010 at 08:07 am 19

Winter Wallaby @12 … You and I stopped watching about the same time. I stopped becuase as Bill so eloquently put it, it seemed the writers were just throwing crap against the wall to see what would stick.

What I find itneresting is that most of the comments here seem to voice the same opinion … That LOST was overrated and underwritten. Almost everyone else I know LOVES LOVES LOVES LOST. So we have another LOST mystery — why is it that so many CIDU commentors were unimpressed with LOST ? Does this tie in somehow with the high percentage of atheist/non believers somehow ?
Carolyn May 27th 2010 at 09:31 am 20

Kit #11 - Don’t you think most people are fast forwarding ads? I haven’t actively watched ads since 2003 when I bought my first Replay TV DVR. It had a “commercial advance” feature that worked almost flawlessly. No fast forwarding through commercials or using a one minute jump like current DVRs. I still don’t watch commercials but have to work harder to avoid them.

Count me as a Lost fan who is sad the show is over that would have liked more questions answered.
amo May 27th 2010 at 11:52 am 21

@nicole i’m definitely not an atheist and i never watched more than five minutes of lost for most of the above reasons. sometimes you can just tell from commercials that a show is ridiculous. also it’s because i have little respect for shows that throw in bits of whatever religion they can think of to try to attract everyone (again that’s from hearsay, never watched the show myself)
Keera May 27th 2010 at 12:45 pm 22

Well, my 2 cents: I was absolutely fascinated by the great cinematography of the first episode. The first five or six minutes of it - one continuous sequence showing the plane wreck and people stumbling out of it and around it. That was so amazingly done, I decided to watch the show, expecting a spectacular study of survival, getting to know the characters. The first couple of episodes held my interest, by the third I realized the flashbacks were going to be standard, dumping the series into ordinariness. By the fifth, I realized the show was just another soap and I don’t watch soaps, even if there is some nifty sci-fi stuff going on. (Same reason I dropped “4400″. They kept going off point. “Heroes” I liked, though. The weirdness and that awfully cute Indian dude held my attention. For one season.)

Nicole @19, a data point for your theory: I’m not an atheist.
Nicole May 27th 2010 at 01:02 pm 23

Amo @21 and Keera @22 … I was not suggesting that everyone here is an athiest or that everyone here disliked LOST. I am sure there are atheists who loved LOST and theists who hated it.

It has been noted before that there seems to be a high percentage of non-believers here, and it certainly seems that a high percentage of the comments are anti-LOST. I was just wondering if there was a corelation.
Cidu Bill May 27th 2010 at 01:16 pm 24

And even after six full seasons, the agnostics still aren’t sure whether they like the show.
Nicole May 27th 2010 at 01:32 pm 25

No one has mentioned the rather erratic way some of the seasons were broadcast .. One or two episodes were shown followed by a two month hiatus — another reason they LOST me
Elyrest May 27th 2010 at 03:30 pm 26

Aww, dumping on the agnostics again! I can’t decide if that is a good thing or a bad thing.
Irene May 27th 2010 at 04:04 pm 27

You know, after reading through these comments and the other thread, I don’t feel I missed a blessed thing by never seeing a single episode of Lost!!!
paperboy May 27th 2010 at 05:34 pm 28

I wanted to find the answers, like all the other complainers, but I did keep watching also because of the actors and actresses, so it wasn’t a COMPLETE waste. I’ll watch for them in other productions. And look for the writers of Lost in other productions to avoid them.
Todd May 29th 2010 at 04:59 pm 29

James, what were the plot holes in Heroes first season? I stopped watching after the first episode of the third season because I thought Skylar should disappear for a couple of years.

Far as I’m concerned, anyone who thinks the Star Wars prequels were crap is actually saying George didn’t tell the story like they would have done. Although, I don’t feel that Anakin had turned evil enough to slaughter the Jedi children. And he should have blamed Palpatine for Padme’s death.
Chad May 29th 2010 at 06:40 pm 30

Carlton Cuse, one of the LOST gurus, was also responsible for The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. So he is forgiven.
Nicole May 30th 2010 at 01:05 am 31

Here is one more unanswered question — definitely NSW

Why Isn’t there More F**king on this Island? (A song for LOST)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIl0rYbW_hU&feature=digest
Nicole May 30th 2010 at 01:06 am 32

That was supposed to be NSFW … yeesh
Keera May 30th 2010 at 03:44 am 33

Nicole @31, although I thought that question, too, I concluded it would be a good idea not to have a bunch of pregnant women running around.

And now I’m going to confess to why I really gave up watching “Lost”: They never answered my questions about what happens when both the contraceptives and the feminine hygiene products run out. If this had happened to real people, they would have built a woman’s lodge and the women of fertile years would all get synchronized and hang out together for one week every month, and during that same week the guys could play poker and test the product of the still they’d built.
mitch4 May 30th 2010 at 08:25 am 34

It’s probably apropos to New South Wales!
Nicole May 30th 2010 at 04:43 pm 35

Keera @33

The other big unanswered question is why didn’t Hurley lose any weight ?
CIDU Bill May 30th 2010 at 05:41 pm 36

That was addressed in-show, Nicole: The first couple of seasons took place over a month or so in their time: after that, they found food stores in the hole in the ground, and they had contact with the Others, the Other Others and the Other Other Others, and they were back in Los Angeles for a while. We did see Hurley hitting the Ho Hos pretty hard at times.

And keep in mind that a number of characters mysteriously disappeared…
Numbat May 31st 2010 at 10:36 am 37

@ CIDU Bill

Wasn’t it a case of -

Two men enter, one fat man leaves ?
chuckers Jun 4th 2010 at 08:38 am 38

All right. After bingeing on 4 episodes a day since Monday, I burned through all of the final LOST season and can now read this thread with impunity. Of course, I about a bout 4 days too late to join the conversation. Oh well.

Basically, it wasn’t great, I suppose. It wasn’t really hideous, either. It could have been so much more. A lot of things were working against it, I suppose. The Writer’s strike was probably the biggest problem and that effectively killed a lot of shows early in their “prime” as it were (e.g. Prison Break, Heroes.) LOST basically got lost in the middle of its 3rd season and then got smacked with the strike which could very easily have offed it there and then with NO resolution which would have been a whole lot worse than what we ended up with. So, they had to make due and promise to wind it up with fewer episodes per season and cut out certain stories they wanted to tell (some of which may not have even needed telling.) Even in the Finale episode, it felt like there were scenes cut out and dropped from it, scenes that could have explained a few more things a long the way.

It also felt, watching them in such a brief period, that they had a lot of ways that they could take towards a final conclusion but couldn’t make up their minds as to which one to take so relied on a dart board to chose the plot points they wanted to settle on. Watching the above link brings forth a lot of things that I had forgotten were actual plot points at one time because there was so much time between watching each season. Again, the strike and the writer’s not really having anything coherent like the promised from the outset, even if they claimed they new where they were going and how they were going to get there.

It had so much potential early on and failed to live up to it. But overall, still reasonably worthwhile. Especially when compared to Prison Break, which became a chore to watch in the end and even then it was obvious the wanted to continue it, or Heroes, which was also beginning to drag and lose focus. Heroes not only suffered from the strike but also from trying to tie things into webisodes and online comics that were a chore to keep up with (which I didn’t) leaving you confused as to what was actually going on.

Now that I am caught up on all of my shows, there is little left to carry me through the summer. Guess I will have to read a book or something.