Lost: The Sixth and Final Season-"The End" (Part 4)

Is this boxset worth getting?
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Complet...0036EH3WK/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

 

Not at that price.

 

I want it.

 

I want it just for the extra episodes. Only on this boxset, correct?

 

Extra bonus material only on this edition I think. Not extra episodes. . . .

 

Don't believe there's a extra episode. I'd be buying it for the bells whistles map.

 

Bit late than never.
Just ordered The Lost Chronicles (book/dvd).

 

I'm surprised that "CHRONOLOGICALLY LOST", that someone made on the internet, never wound-up being available for purchase!

 

The LOST Encyclopedia is expensive now.

 

Lost was awesome. My favorite show by far. The only show I rated a 10 out of 10. I wasn't as crazy about seasons 4-6 and where they took the show in those years, but it was so deep and involving that the journey really was all that mattered. What a ride.

I remember reading a site a few years ago that contained what I thought was the most logical explanation for the island. I think it was this one:

ABC’s LOST: the ultimate theory and explanation | Eric Knows It All

I'm sure there are many unanswered questions...this is a work of fiction after all - not like there is an objective truth that people can discover. You can't fly to this island and actually study it so it is best not to take things too seriously, but one can still invent theories and see if they hold up given what happened in the show.

One day I'll have to read up on the show again and then re-watch it. Should be a fun exercise.

 

Thx for the link.
LOST & Breaking Bad are my two favourites.

 

I'd love a new LOST series with a whole new cast, but taking place during the reign of "new Jacob" Hurley, and his newly-faithful "#2" Ben.

 

It's bull****. One of the low-echelon producers that I worked with for four years on Lost (2004-2008) told me the staff writers had no idea what they were doing, and they were just throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck, and that there was never a master plan to explain anything. The concept that the golden light was "time" is just a silly-ass fan theory.

There are bigger questions, like where the undersea cable came from and where it went, how so many buildings were constructed on the island (including underground corridors and lots of machinery), and why the island was so difficult for many to find and yet the Dharma people seemed to be able to take ships and planes their frequently. Even going back to the Statue of Tawret (the 3-toed Egyptian god made of stone), there's very little real info, which tells me the writers just threw in cool ideas without any sense of logic or a semblance of dramatic construction. The frustrating thing is that the show is very well-done, the acting is terrific, all the technical credits were good, and it was often a very entertaining series. (In particular, John Bartley's cinematography was the highlight of the show for me.)

I particularly hated the Flash-Sideways scenes in season 6, which really didn't affect the existing story or the conclusion at all. To me, it was just a way to take up about 20 episodes with an alternate reality that took up time, generally at least 20 minutes of every show. A total waste to me, merely showing "here's where the characters could have gone with their lives." WTF cares?

Even basic questions like "What was the Man in Black's Name" could have been very easily answered. I think there was a lot of mucking about by people bending over backwards to seem cool and profound without really saying anything. The Lost Encyclopedia (which is an interesting read) does provide a lot of clues, but a lot of it simply verifies for me that "there is no there there."

 

I really liked the flash - sideways scenes season six, could have had some spin off series with that idea.

 

Fine, but don't waste the time of the people trying to get into the main story with the real characters in the world established within the show.

 

It was a little confusing, but showed potential.

 

The Season 6 "sideways" stories were also widely misinterpreted by some who cared more about "mysteries" being solved than character development. They weren't an alternate reality or "what could have been" -- the Sideways was supposed to reflect how the characters had been changed by their time on the island. As they lived in this post-death "limbo" we see how they saw themselves, with each character's "life" being a kind of self-created world where they got to be the best version of who they had become in real life. If you look at the Sideways through this lens, you can infer a lot about the post-Island lives of those who escaped. Sawyer, for example, was clearly transformed by being a "good guy" for three years in the DHARMA Initiative; he was a cop, a protector in the Sideways -- troubled by his search for Cooper, but not consumed by it. Kate, who was the living embodiment of moral ambiguity in life, still saw herself as essentially "good" -- particularly because of how she helped Claire. Jack, who died on the Island, didn't get to resolve his many issues, so he is haunted in the Sideways by a failed marriage and a strained relationship with his son. But perhaps the best example of how the Sideways reflected real stuff and wasn't just pretend / alternate / meaningless was Hurley. Here's a guy who spent his life feeling cursed, the unluckiest guy in the world -- but what is his life like in the Sideways? He's successful, happy, magnanimous -- he's the LUCKIEST guy in the world. Why would his Sideways life be so radically different from his earthly life? Because before he died, he had spent years (decades? centuries?) as the guardian of the Island, Jacob's successor -- doing good, helping people, running things HIS way. By the time he died, he felt blessed, not cursed.

I had my own problems with Season Six, but they weren't with the Sideways -- they were with all the wasted time at the Temple, with new characters we didn't need and didn't care about. Heck, even the writers didn't care enough about one of them to give him a proper name -- they just named him after a celebrity he vaguely resembled!

Every time I see griping about LOST, though, I still come back to all the great stuff about the show that people take for granted. They cranked out three seasons of a wild, expensive, multi-national, genre-busting show on a punishing network 24-episode schedule. The showrunners seized control of their show, negotiated an end date (unprecedented at the time), and changed network television forever -- helping to usher in the auteur-driven golden era of "Too Much TV" we're all currently enjoying. Every time a network show can tell their story in tight, 13-episode seasons instead of having to insert several wheel-spinning filler episodes, you can thank LOST. Whenever a show features a dense, literary sci-fi premise -- especially one with multi-layered narratives, flashbacks and time travel -- you can thank LOST. Whenever any show negotiates its own death, so that the story can be told properly and not just strung out indefinitely until inevitable cancellation, you can thank LOST.

No, it wasn't perfect -- but how could it be? Their kid actor grew too fast and had to be written out of the show. Various other actors came and went, and not always because of the demands of the plot -- some weren't available when the show needed them, one got stir-crazy and begged off the show after one season, and another caught fire with the audience and the whole arc of the show was affected by it. The writers strike wreaked havoc on one season. Producing 24 mini-movies on a TV budget was brutally challenging -- but when they got the shortened seasons they wanted at the end, the storytelling got more choppy and the show lost some of its charm. When you're revolutionizing your medium, it's not always going to go smoothly. Mistakes will be made. For LOST to be as great as it was is practically a miracle.

And that's the end of my annual rant defending LOST. Not looking for a prolonged debate -- it's all been said before, much of it in this very thread over the last seven years. I don't expect to change any hearts or minds -- opinions are calcified at this point -- but I have to get this off my chest every so often.

 

Great insightful post.
Appreciated.

 

I think what happened is that once Lost became a time travel mystery, which is exactly what it became during its last couple of seasons, fans expected and even demanded a fairly conventional solution to the time travel issues that had been raised. That was one of the big reasons why The Constant from season four was such a fan favorite episode. It gave a satisfying solution to the time travel issues while still honoring the characters as we knew them.

It's also why fans started throwing fits when the producers were unable or unwilling to give us legitimate answers in season six. I can understand why the producers felt they were in an impossible spot. If they had introduced something like aliens or given us a concrete religious answer akin to magic, you would pretty much lose half the audience with any decision. Afraid of alienating the audience, they gave us half-baked solutions that ended up satisfying even fewer people.

 

I agree with this 100%. My major problem with the series in general and season six in particular was with the Temple. The producers introduced a major new setting and a number of (seemingly) important characters late in the game, then just as quickly disposed of them. What was the point? Up to the start of the final season, I'd been pretty confident that Lindelof and Cuse knew exactly what they were doing. After the Temple fiasco, I started to wonder.

 

Great post!

 

Love this post! I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiments.

To piggyback on your point about the sideways flashes and character development, the sideways flashes are similar to the flashbacks in that they provide character development. The flashbacks tell us who these characters were before arriving on the island. The sideways flashes tell us who these characters have become after approximately 3 in-story years on the island. Character development matters, and as such, the sideways flashes are important.

 

I think it's a worthwhile set if you can get it for a reasonable price (under $100 for the Blu-Ray, $50 for the DVD). It is difficult to fit on a shelf, but the discs are in a separate binder and can be put on a shelf while the box itself it stored in a closet (or maybe in your own personal version of purgatory). The blu-ray does seem to be harder to find so that be the one to snap up.

I'm not sure if they ever released a more compact complete set of Lost.

 

I think they did, but in other regions. I'd prefer a version without all the extra "stuff" as well.

 

The undersea cable came from the Looking Glass station (the one that Charlie swam down to) and went to… I don't remember but it was their communications line going into the island proper.

The sideways world, to me, was not so much a dreamworld purgatory where the characters lived different lives, but instead was a parody of television. So Sawyer was stuck in a stupid police procedural, someone else was stuck in a stupid mobster show, etc. It was the absolute bottom of the creative barrel.

The decision to introduce two new characters in the last moments of season 5 - the man in black and man in white - was a decision made of desperation. My impression from afar is that they had no choice - the writers from the early seasons who had a sense of what the clues could build to were gone. Like a company that fires its oldest employees and winds up with no institutional knowledge, they were not equipped to follow through.

The couldn't match the tone or even follow the clues that had come before. They tried to come up with something, and it was embarrassing. The last season was a retcon that diminished what had come before. (The middle seasons had done just fine, coasting forward with what the first couple seasons had established.)

But - and I know this is not popular opinion - the very last episode was interesting. The last episode mostly worked. Not the giant cork, but the church scenes. If that had been the ending to season 5, Lost could have been remembered as a successful series, rather than as one that started out well and then stumbled at the finish line.