To me, it can't be taken as a drama, and it's not funny or surreal enough to work in any other way. I stopped with that Mexican druglord -- he was just too much the cliche. Weeds had a similar character, but gave him more of a personality. All of my friends love the show, though, so that probably makes me right.

My final post on Lost.

My wife and I are midway through season 5 of Weeds, and it gets a big thumbs-up. It's a little offputting that they kind of take the premise and pitch it out the window at the end of season 3, but it stays entertaining, so whatever.

(That being said, it does take a while to get going again in season 4. But yeah, once said Mexican druglord shows up, that's where it gets good again.)

Charles: call it a doubt-ridden, guilt-saturated fantasy story, if it’ll make you feel better. I don't see the show's uncategorizability as a problem, the way you do. On the contrary it's part of the appeal.

And Tuco was loads of fun!

K

Man, I gave Weeds a chance earlier tonight; different strokes, I guess. It's so cheeky and forced and self-congratulatingly topical. I don't get the appeal. The "clever" dialogue was driving me nuts. Wasn't funny at all.

K

It ain't great, for sure, but I guess I must like it, since I keep watching.

Since the thread's opened a bit to non-Lost shows,a reminder that 'Rescue Me' returns 10:00 on FX tonite. Very little promo,it really sneaked up on me this time.

So a year after the fact I finally got around to watching through this show, courtesy of Netflix. First couple seasons were cheesy but pretty compulsive viewing nonetheless, and I was more or less entertained -- and unquestionably addicted, despite myself -- through probably Season 3-ish. Beyond that, boy does that show get fucking tiresome. But with all the episodes right there to click on and 3 seasons invested into the increasingly arbitrary-seeming story, I plugged on through the rest.

Charles' commentary was pretty interesting; and I never, ever would've pegged Jacob as the hitman from Mulholland Dr. Good catch! I did of course spot the Denny's dream-guy from Mulholland Dr., as "Le Fleur's" assistant in Dharmaville. Also never caught your Blood Meridian quote since I hadn't read your LOST posts before now. While I haven't put the level of thought and knowledge into the show you obviously have, I had trouble giving the show's avoidance of the expected thematic "easy outs" in the final three seasons as much credit as you did, although I did notice them. I liked them, for example, leaving it open that John Locke was, perhaps, just an unfortunate sucker, in the grand scheme of things, and the extent to which they played with that idea. But most of the convolutions of narrative in whatever form beyond Season 2 or so just struck me as a series of increasingly cheap ploys to keep that lost sense of mystery artificially going, rather than a deliberative philosophical virtue. Typical TV show bullshit. Unlike in the earliest seasons, it took on the feel of something they were making up as they went, and they were more concerned with creating a new "oh my Gosh!" twist/cliffhanger for every episode than with driving anything towards coherence -- narrative, philosophical, or otherwise. It just became a soggy soup of nonsense that assumed the audience wouldn't know the difference between constructing a forward-moving mystery and the writers just throwing out whatever arbitrary nonsense they could dream up for that week that would keep pushing the "Mystery! Suspense! Expect the Unexpected!" button. You draw some comparisons to Lynch's work, Twin Peaks especially, but I can't really see why one would put the LOST scribblers in anything approaching the same category creatively. They just ain't at that level.

I'm glad to be done. If you could create a visual map of this show's lost plot threads, unintentional red herrings, general tonal missteps, arbitrary shifts in characterization, needless redundancies, etc. -- that'd be something to see. It seemed to me the creators/writers of LOST were big Stephen King fans -- King's work is referenced many times -- and that seems about right to me. LOST feels like the TV equivalent of an 'eh' King novel. Great at hooking you in and setting up interesting questions, but sort of lost when it comes to knowing quite where to take any of it.

As to sexist women -- and yeah, though I'm not always a huge stickler on these issues, it did frequently aggravate me how nobody on the island ever degenerates to anything less than nearly supermodel-esque, save for the cheesy-ass "I'm crazy jungle woman!" get-ups of Rousseau (who still had perfect teeth) and the late Claire -- I probably go for Shannon on pure superficial hots, Sun on general beauty; Juliet had a weird sort of sex appeal to me, but Kate on the other hand -- despite being undeniably physically beautiful -- never really rang my bell. I was digging on the young Dharmaville version of Eloise a bit though, and Rousseau's daughter was gorgeous. They leave her off the list because she was 15 at the time? She looked about 30 to me for some reason. She has a weird look.

Sexiest men -- as incredibly gay as it is for me to opine here, I give my definitive vote to Sawyer, cheesy half-beard, blonde highlights and all. He's cornballish, but that's a good looking man. Boone would be right behind him, and Richard stuck out as being noticeably handsome, despite that weird-ass black eyeliner he always seemed to have on. None of the others really registered enough for the gay part of my brain to kick into much of an evaluation. I was surprised to see Desmond top that list?

K

Well, it's been awhile (and, man, did I write a lot about that show!), but I think that, contrary to the sort of reverse-engineering/ad hoc possible explanation for how the show progressed from one season to the next, there was enough structure in place that the final season could've wrapped it all up in a narratively coherent package. Maybe it didn't matter, but Vaughan left before the 6th season, and he wrote some of the best episodes (I forget which now, but he did). I suspect that a lot of the direction of that season was in the heavy hands of the showrunners, who weren't as responsible for all the structural elements that had been set in place. It would be interesting to hear all the writers' views on how the show wound up. Anyway, Lindelof and Cruse were so committed to having everything unpredictable that they fucked over attentive viewers by making it impossible for them to guess anything about the outcome. A good mystery contains elements that lead to the conclusion, which the audience may or may not pick up on as they're going along. Those elements were almost completely dumped to keep us guessing up to the end. That's just bad storytelling.

I do still stand behind my view that Jack's story is one of the finest (if not the finest) character arcs ever on TV. I just don't know if I'll ever be able to rewatch the series again the way I revisit Twin Peaks or Deadwood, because the resolution sucks so much.

As for the Twin Peaks comparison, I definitely wouldn't put Lost in that category of greatness, but I do think it raises just as many philosophically interesting questions (and its characters are more fully realized or realistically grounded).

Hmm. I don't see it. I mean, I thought Jack a solid enough character generally speaking, but post-leaving-the-island Jack didn't really ring true to me anymore. Like with the show in general, I felt like his characterization became sort of increasingly arbitrary after the first half. I was never really clear on the rhyme or reason of the transitions from one Jack to the next, post-leaving-the-island. Why'd he so badly need to go back again, according to the logic of the show? Nor could I make any particular sense of his decisions, motivations, or actions after returning, in the final season. And really, I suppose by that point I didn't feel there was much sense worth making of them...

K

I thought season 2 the weakest, apart from maybe the last. In hindsight, it's obvious that all that tail end second group stuff was a filler option, as pretty much none of it was ever really tied into the overall narrative. The thing is, even upon first watch, I felt that that was the case - it just reeked of filler. I almost gave up on watching it at that stage, but it managed to draw me back in by the end of season three.



I mentioned that somewhere here (maybe earlier this thread). He wrote one in season five with a lot of unLock talking with Ben that was really good. And some of the best from earlier seasons too. It isn't the only TV show where some of the more capable writers on the staff weren't ultimately in charge of the overall direction. (For example, the X-Files best episodes were usually written by people other than Carter or his main showrunners.)