Since I know at least a few of the people on the forum watch Lost, I figured I would throw out a few of my opinions of the show.
First off, flashbacks.
They ruin the flow of the show for me completely. It’s a flawed tool to be honest. They don’t offer any insight into anything but the next ‘on the island’ moment, which the writers must be scared can’t stand on it’s own merit.
Secondly, the plot ‘twists’.
M. Night Shymalan must be loving this show. It’s so damn weak when the writers have the option of editing or expanding the past to pretend that any new thing introduced is clever. So what if Claire is Jack’s sister. We’re in the 3rd season and haven’t had any answers for anything important from the first episode yet! And I know when the answers finally do come that they can’t be satisfying. I don’t think there’s any way the writers can excuse themselves for a pillar of black smoke that can show people visions of family members, then slam people into trees.
Thirdly, killing off the cast members.
The ‘twist’ of adding an entire 23 survivors to the plane crash in the first episode, just on the other side of the island is weak as hell, but let’s forgive that and consider what they’ve done with those characters.
Over the course of season 2, all but 2 of those characters were killed off or kidnapped by the others. That’s so lame. It just shows how weak the writers are. They can’t progress with the core characters, so they introduce new people and information, just to kill them off or forget about them in what may as well be the next episode.
And I said all but 2 of the character, because Mr Eko and Bernard did survive into season 3. Of course Mr Eko is dead now, so that just leaves Bernard. In all fairness though, his storyline is a keeper (/sarcasm).
And they’ve done the same damn thing in season 3, introducing 2 new characters, retconning past episodes in an attempt to integrate them into the storyline, and then killing them off. Maybe they aren’t dead, but at this stage I couldn’t care less.
Fourthly, the characters suck.
I’m really struggling to find a character I like in Lost, and maybe that’s deliberate, but it doesn’t make good television.
In season 1 I really liked John Locke, he was an absolute badass. In actual fact I was going to write an article about how great a character he was, but I didn’t, and I’m glad because I would have had to delete it in light of his actions in seasons 2 + 3.
Every character on Lost is less and less interesting the more you learn about them. There isn’t a single good guy in the bunch. They either initially seem like good guys, and the more you see of them the worse they get, or vice versa, and if they’re bad turned good they’re killed off.
Let’s take Sayid as an example of a shitty character. How many Sayid-centric episodes have there been now? 3 or 4 I think. Let’s consider what the issue was in those episodes… the fact he tortured people, and the fact he regrets it. Where is his character going exactly? He could have been a cool character, but we found out about his past in season 1, and since then he hasn’t progressed whatsoever.
Another issue with all the characters is that they have secrets. Secrets are okay if they’re kept between characters, but they’re kept from the viewer, and go hand in hand with the flashbacks and plot twists in dragging out the episodes and seasons to such a point where season 2’s beginning went slower than actual real time. I believe that in the first 4 episodes, the storyline progressed by approximately 20 minutes. That might now be so bad, but nothing much happened in those 20 minutes which hasn’t been shown to be of no consequence now.
The main issue I have is an overlap of all of these points, it’s the deus-ex-machina method of resolving storylines. It’s just not cool. In fact, it’s the weakest plot device ever. They’re slowly taking us along these meandering storylines and then introduce something new, which supposedly sheds an entire new light on it, but all it really does is insult the viewer. How could we have known that Locke’s dad pushed him through a window from what happened in all the episodes prior, and now we do know, we don’t care. We cared back in season 1, when it was first discovered that Locke had been in a wheelchair before he reached the island, before we were all so jaded with this constant ‘this storyline isn’t coming together, but here’s what you didn’t know – ABRACADABRA’ crap we’ve all had to suffer.
Another problem with Lost is that it’s ruined the entire concept of TV shows. So many are now following the pattern of dragging out storylines and seasons to such a point. It actually ruined Invasion because the producers forced the writers to make the season longer, completely destroying the pace, and making viewers lose interest. It’s a sad fact, because when the Invasion storyline got back on track the second half of the season was intense.
Compare the revelations in Lost to those in The Shield to give you an idea of what I mean when I say the storylines in Lost are dragged out. Across an episode of The Shield you could easily have 2 or 3 huge events which would normally only occur 1 or 2 times in an entire season of Lost. Not only that, but The Shield doesn’t resort to editing the past (apart from in Co-pilot, but that doesn’t count
). I’m sure I had more to write, but I just looked up Deus Ex Machina on wikipedia so I could link to it here, and then followed the other links on the page and completely lost my thought process.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina
I'm done.