Saturday 28 May 2011

Reflections on Lost

I'm currently re-watching my favourite TV series - Lost! It's really interesting how the 'black vs white' theme, which represented Jacob and the Man In Black, was actually clearly there right from the beginning. It's now been a year since the series ended. The trouble is, the more I watch the older episodes that more annoyed I get about the final series.


I obsessed about the series from the moment I started to watch it. I loved the way that mysteries were built and gradually explained. The whole thing was perfect... for five seasons. Then Season Six arrived. 


I felt cheated by the final season. Unconvincing answers were given to some questions, other questions were avoided altogether. The ridiculous sideways flashes were introduced. The final episode was brilliant and it was not the finale which annoyed me - really it was the whole of the final season.


Here are some of main annoyances:

  • What was the significance of Aaron? The baby seemed to be such a crucial part of the story of Claire and Kate yet he didn't even appear in the final series.
  • Why wasn't there a Claire flashback in the final series to tell us more about what made her crazy?
  • Why were viewers cheated about the season one finale? We were never told what The Others wanted with Walt and why they took him.
  • Why did Sayid spend all of his life in love with Nadia and then end up with Shannon in his after life?
  • Charles' Widmore's character was one of the most mysterious - yet he ended up being insignificant. In the grand scheme of things his freighter arriving actually had no bearing on what happened in the final series. That means we can write off the entire fourth season!
  • I get annoyed that one of my favourite characters, Ben, became a bit-part character in the final series. 
  • I loved learning about the Dharma Initiative in Season Five but the were never mentioned in the final series.
  • In Season Three they were building a runway for Ajira flight 316 - how did they know to do this?!
  • Why were all of the Dharma stations built?
  • How did nobody see the lighthouse? And why smash it up without ever telling us anything about it?
  • Where did the rest of the statue go to after it was knocked over?
  • I wish Eko's character had been explained more.
  • Danielle was on the island for 16 years and yet learned nothing about it. She didn't seem to know where anything was. Why?! It was such a shame that she was killed in Season Four.
If I could have written Season Six I would have had sideways flashes, but in my sideways flashes it would show what would happen if the plane never crashed. But somehow the characters would still have ended up on the island - meaning that it was always going to be their destiny.

I could go on as I have hundreds of these. I must stress that I still love the series, but I wish the writers had come up with something better than the purgatory idea in Season Six, and given a better role to Ben and Widmore.

Has anyone else got any thoughts about this?

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