So what was it? Are they all dead? Aliens? Dream? Government experiment? Bullshit they made up as they went along?

I wish it was just some crazy guys dream, since it is all it seemed to be. Was way too drawn out and seemed just desperate to stay on the air. First 3 seasons were watchable, the rest was like comedy to see how much was just ridiculously thought of.

I never saw a single episode of Lost, but I suggested in the middle of series 2 that the writers were making it up as they went along and the internet hordes obsessing about the ultimate result were way ahead of reality.

Turned out Ashes To Ashes was much the same sort of situation. Maybe Life On Mars is the last proper TV show with quality writing and continuity that didn't have to have some ****ing stupid mystery-centric ending.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Turned out Ashes To Ashes was much the same sort of situation. Maybe Life On Mars is the last proper TV show with quality writing and continuity that didn't have to have some ****ing stupid mystery-centric ending.

I was dissapointed with Ashes to Ashes, it was such an obvious ending right from the start, when that new guy came in I thought to myself "so that's the devil then". I still think Life on Mars should have ended when he jumped off the roof though.

so anyone willing to type up a summary of lost

i saw the first few seasons, then stopped after like half way through 3, i just was too busy, and never went back..wanna know though

Quote from logitekg25 :

so anyone willing to type up a summary of lost

i saw the first few seasons, then stopped after like half way through 3, i just was too busy, and never went back..wanna know though

My collegue told me that basically, the whole series they were dead the whole time.. don't know if he was joking though

i saw like 2 minutes of the last episode when i was drinking a protein shake....jack was looking in an empty casket (cant remember if he was crying yet). then he opened the casket and realised it was empty. his dad came into the room and talked to him, and jack was surprised to see him, and asked how he was there...he said he was dead (the father) and jack then realised he was also dead, and started crying.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Maybe Life On Mars is the last proper TV show with quality writing and continuity that didn't have to have some ****ing stupid mystery-centric ending.

Ever read the summary of the final episode of the US version?

I thought it was a fitting and actually rather poignant ending (sorry! :schwitz. The show really started to lose it around about the 3rd season but to its credit always managed to keep a thread of interest running, right up until the finale. Last night's episode was certainly the best of the season- I can't remember another example where a major series finished up with all of the characters dead. (perhaps there are a bunch of them :tilt PS, you didn't come into this thread before you saw the finale right? In that case.. oops!

The acceleration of individual revelations in this last episode was well paced- yeah the little flash/rememberances were cheesy but still kinda touching, and I thought Jack's cluelessness about his existential condition in the 'sideways world' and finally meeting up with his father to explain things to him was a fine emotional high note to finish the series on.

Having said all that- I still agree with DWB... "Good riddance!".

So they were all dead? That's up there with "it was all just a dream", that's the kind of stuff I was told off for writing in short stories when I was 11 years old. I can picture the pitch they gave now "think Cast Away crossed with Sixth Sense, then drag it out for a few years and put some random shit in there to keep the idiots hooked".

Quote from ATC Quicksilver :

So they were all dead? That's up there with "it was all just a dream", that's the kind of stuff I was told off for writing in short stories when I was 11 years old. I can picture the pitch they gave now "think Cast Away crossed with Sixth Sense, then drag it out for a few years and put some random shit in there to keep the idiots hooked".

Yeah, that's really a spit in the face imo... it rarely works.. The Others beeing a rare example, but that's a movie..

It not really that simple.. hehe

The show ended as a composite of the two timelines- the 'real' world, where Jack is shown dying from a knife wound and a fatal dose of electromagnetic radiation, and the 'sideways' world, which was revealed in the finale to be an 'after death' world. Because of the composite nature of the ending, there are characters who go on to live (escaping the island in the plane while Jack lies dying) but they are also dead in the other world (it's not revealed how they actually died)

Quote from Electrik Kar :

It not really that simple.. hehe

I've seen one or two episodes, and from what I saw the writers just made it up as they went along, nothing really tied together or made much sense. I remember the fat dude going on about lottery numbers, then some black smoke thing was knocking about, then they were in some bunker watching a clock because something bad might happen and I think at some point someone was trapped in a hole that some twonk dug. I remember lesbians, but to be honest I may have that confused with something else I watched. One thing is for sure, I know why they called it Lost.

Best summary so far was made by Bart Simpson, "it was all the dog's dream".

Best movie analogy to the ending is Jacob's Ladder. The movie keeps switching between ever more bizarre scenes, ending where the main character's dead daughter leads him into the light, then the movie returns to reality, where it's revealed that all the scenes in the movie were just the hallucinations of a soldier dying from a combat wound.

I never like ghost story movies like "sixth sense" or "the others", since they are usually full of plot holes and/or keep changing the rules and/or require some incredibly unlikely series of random events.

So I'll bump it up one step from Bart's summary and state that it was all just Jake's hallucinations as he died from the plane crash, then again he could have been dying from something else and the plane crash was part of the hallucination.

I never watched Lost, but seeing that there were only seven or so episodes left, I was hoping that it would end up with good story line. There was another mediocre sci-fi series called DollHouse, essentially a story line that wasn't really going anywhere because there was no end date. Once it was announced that the series was ending, the writers responded by creating a coherent story line that ended up being reasonably well done.

Quote from ATC Quicksilver :

I've seen one or two episodes, and from what I saw the writers just made it up as they went along, nothing really tied together or made much sense.

That's probably partly true, but I'm sure that for the ending to come together in the way it did last night, the writers surely must have had a very coherent plan about where they were going, probably right from the outset. Sure, there were tons of red herrings and unresolved side plots, sometimes gratuitously placed simply to get people to tune into the next weeks episode- but people demanding that everything to finally make sense and to have every little thing explained would be like demanding all of the suspects in an Agatha Christie novel to turn out to be actual murderes. It's just not the way literature works. Sometimes a red herring is just a red herring.

Quote :

Best movie analogy to the ending is Jacob's Ladder. The movie keeps switching between ever more bizarre scenes, ending where the main character's dead daughter leads him into the light, then the movie returns to reality, where it's revealed that all the scenes in the movie were just the hallucinations of a soldier dying from a combat wound.

I recently watched Shutter Island, which had a similar type of outcome. I thought it was really lame. But I didn't feel the same way about Lost last night. I thought it was a pretty satisfying resolution to a show which was becoming increasingly tedious and mediocre the longer it went on. As mentioned above- 'good riddance!' But that doesn't mean that I thought the ending wasn't any good. It was a good ending.

The plane did crash, the island is real, they never answered ANY questions.

I liked the stained glass window at the end, nice attempt at religous harmony Abrams.

Quote from Electrik Kar :

I thought it was a pretty satisfying resolution

the best summary ive read so far was somthing along the lines of emotionally very satisfying but intellectually not one bit
the emptional impact of it was almost enough to cloud the fact that they didnt answer any good damn questions and that the answer to the most important question of all was a friggin stone on top of what appeared to be a lava pit/cheaply done cgi effect when the stone is in place... almost

Quote from Shotglass :

the best summary ive read so far was somthing along the lines of emotionally very satisfying but intellectually not one bit
the emptional impact of it was almost enough to cloud the fact that they didnt answer any good damn questions and that the answer to the most important question of all was a friggin stone on top of what appeared to be a lava pit/cheaply done cgi effect when the stone is in place... almost

Imo, Lost was always being way over intellectualised. There were always a million theories running about what was happening at any one time. There was a cheeky scene last night which made for a great summing up of all the nonsense, when Jack says 'Locke was right about everything' and the other guy simply says 'Locke was right about nothing', and neither of them actually had any real clue about what was immediately going to happen next!

I was pretty satisfied with the ending. It explained enough to conclude the story of the characters we cared about, but leaves us space to think about what happened to the others. Because of the branching and overlapping timelines it means there are other stories in there that haven't been told.

But you know what I'm most upset about?

We STILL don't know* why Hugo gets called Hurley!

*I'm guessing vomit is involved somewhere but it was never confirmed!

Quote from DeadWolfBones :

Ever read the summary of the final episode of the US version?

Yes!

IMO given the nature of the series, it would have been a complete sell out to answer every question. One of the great joys of Lost was trying to figure out WTH was going on. The ending should be no different.

I watched almost every episode. At times, I thought it was wandering (Lost in the woods, as it were), but that's part of the fun. I think the thing that kept me watching the show was knowing that it had a firm ending date. Had it been endless plot twists with no end in sight I'm sure I would have given up.

Someone from Bad Robot's take on the Finale

Quote :

"But, from a more "behind the scenes" note: the reason Ben's not in the church, and the reason no one is in the church but for Season 1 people is because they wrote the ending to the show after writing the pilot. And never changed it. The writers always said (and many didn't believe them) that they knew their ending from the very first episode. I applaud them for that. It's pretty fantastic. Originally Ben was supposed to have a 3 episode arc and be done. But he became a big part of the show. They could have easily changed their ending and put him in the church -- but instead they problem solved it. Gave him a BRILLIANT moment with Locke outside the church ... and then that was it. I loved that. For those that wonder -- the original ending started the moment Jack walked into the church and touches the casket to Jack closing his eyes as the other plane flies away. That was always JJ's ending. And they kept it."

Quote from Electrik Kar :

Imo, Lost was always being way over intellectualised. There were always a million theories running about what was happening at any one time.

at any rate the conclusion that nothing other than what jacob (who as we now know would look dumb next to some of the guys penny dated on big bang theory) did really meant anything is rather unsatisfactory

As a friend summarized it:

Quote :

So, the stuff that happened in the alternate reality was meaningless because they were already dead; the stuff that happened in the previous two seasons was meaningless because the time travel bomb didn't work; the stuff that happened before that was meaningless because that was an entirely different show; the stuff that happened in the finale was meaningless because it was about characters and plot devices that hadn't been introduced until the last two episodes; and the whole show was meaningless because they explicitly explained the mystical/faith themes that don't need explanation, and didn't explain the sci-fi themes that do.

LOST in 3 minutes <<< The series in a nutshell.

(I Didn't watch Lost apart from a few episodes in the first season)