and the bolded is BAD WRITING at its finest. Its not that hard to sit down and come up with a general storyline before your show starts. In fact, I would argue that its REQUIRED to do so when you're writing a mystery show that provides a ton of hints along the way.

It had nothing to do with the writing... It was the concept. I don't know why it is necessary to attribute your appreciation of it to good writing.

Ben thought he was special and had a special communion with the island. A group of outsiders crashing on HIS island was seen a threat to his perfect little world that he sought to control. He heard Locke had been paralyzed and was now walking around, just as he had developed a tumor on his spine. Uh oh, he might not be so special after all! This worried him, he probably thought this new group of people might be important to the island or to Jacob and this would threaten his reign as leader. He did not want to give that up willingly so he met the LOSTies with resistance. However he still wanted Jack to fix him, so he kidnapped him and tried to manipulate him into doing it.

Assani,
Given the nature of TV that often isn't possible. They are in the middle of writing/film a whole season and are more concerned with not getting cancelled. I cannot think of a single show where they had it that mapped out; possibly The Wire and maybe some Milch shows, but you also need to consider the fact that Milch is ****ing insane.

+1


Plus I don't even really buy the whole "red herring" thing anyway. I mean, in the Usual Suspects its a red herring that Keaton = Kaiser Soze....its a believeable red herring, and it makes a lot of sense. But here, they just devote a ton of time to Aaron being special and needing to be raised by Claire, and then they just say "nope, that all doesn't matter at all"....thats not a red herring, thats the writers writing a storyline and not being able to come up with a satisfactory conclusion.

The number of arguments developing over a story this vague is pretty funny. There were no answers at all about the series. All we know is they all went through this adventure and then died at some point to reunite in the afterlife, which was only explained by Desmond as being a place where we can be with our loved ones and 'none of this matters'.

There are links and questions that haven't been answered but that's the point, the story hasn't been fully told yet. We only have a small fraction of evidence so the mysteries can have any number of conclusions. Anyone complaining about not getting answers...why don't you try coming up with your own?

They had to adapt to situations changing. They would have a vague idea of what was going on given they left plenty of hints that there was a Jacob and an MiB who was the Smoke and could change into horses and dead parents and ****.

I think a lot of this anger is some of you expect the show to be more than a TV show. It isnt. They are CONSTANTLY battling against writer differences, actors leaving or getting in legal trouble, a network that has its own input and the ultimate "problem" that if you make something for 6 years you will probably come up with something new after year 3 that you didnt think of in year 1.

Aaron probably was special at first, but they decided to stop that before it got going and its known that Eko was meant to be a huge part of the show till it turned out he was a dick to work with (the only reason he wasnt in the finale is he wanted 5 times what everyone else was getting paid). Plus Walt growing a foot in 6 months or whatever it was just made it awkward to continue what might have had some significance but not so much they want to write around it.

As for the skeletons they probably wrote it as 50 years because they didnt expect the show to be such a huge hit. When it is you need to expand your scope and that is what they did so 50 years became 2000 years. They knew who the skeletons were, just they adapted how they got there to fit with the expanding show.

TV is not a novel and a show always needs adaptability. Tbh given the scope of the show i think Lost adapted really well and whilst they have holes here and there you cant just whinge about them and dismiss the fact that TV has problems because that is the reality of the world.

When you don't know if the show is only going to last 12 episodes or 12 seasons???? How the hell did they know what the reaction to the show would be?

So just after the idea for the show is pitched and the Pilot is written and filmed, you expect them to sit down and write a 125-episode arc that will tie in all the loose ends and make sense of every little mystery along the way. And if they don't do this, it's simply BAD WRITING.

Wow.

I don't really understand how "its not possible." During the early seasons, I spent a ton of time on message boards where I went into great detail about what I thought the entire end game would be. If I could do that, then why couldn't the writers? Its not like it takes months to come up with a basic outline of a plot....you can literally sit down for a few hours and work something out.

I think they chose not to...
I don't know why they chose not to. But I assume "because it is too hard" would be very low on the list. I mean for this type of show (fantasy), you can make **** up a bit easier than a show like the wire or sopranos.

I know i am defending lost a lot. But... as a casual viewer I do not feel like I was cheated as a result of missing answers. Most of my biggest questions were answered, and the ones that were not I am able to ponder w/ my friends and family.

Did you miss the reason Kate went back to the island? It wasn't for Jack, it was to get Clair. The scene at the plane, Kate pleading with Clair to come. The bond they had, holding hands on the plane. How much more conclusion to the Aaron story do your need, a picket fence with a play fort in the back yard?

And gl to you writing 100 hours of the ACTUAL story. Any idiot can write a cool general outline for a story. And remember, every scene you write, it can't leave out any answers to any mystery you've introduced beforehand or contradict itself in any way.

The point is they DID come up with a basic online of the plot, after s1 when it was evident the show was going to be picked up and become a success. You want them to just scrap their entire story because "OOPS, we had Jack say the clothing was 50 yrs old, can't do that, back to the drawing board."

Not at all.

Miles was presented from the off as a guy with the ability to talk to the dead. For a very short period of time, less than an episode, it looked like possibly bull**** but there was definitely no mystery about it. Sure, we didn't know how he could do that, but that's not important.

With Walt it was completely different. Tons of weird **** was going on and he seemed to have some strange power, but we didn't actually know what it was. There was a lot of speculation on what made him special, completely different from Miles where we knew he could get the thoughts of dead people. What is more important though, he was at the center of the main conflict at the time. The others were attacking and it seemed primarily in an effort to capture him (and Aaron, same really goes for him although they didn't show us any actual weirdness).

This applies for all of the plot-based mysteries. I personally don't mind the numbers not being revealed. To me that's like all the characters bumping into each other - Locke working for Nadia etc. It was an interesting side story, but the plot of the show was driven by a series of conflicts. The conflicts weren't particularly great by themselves. I don't think the action scenes were bad, but the show was carried by the mystery surrounding the motivations of one or both sides. The only exception really is Jack and Locke where it was about different life and management philosophies, with a bit of ego thrown in as with all of them I guess. With all of these conflicts in the first five seasons, we either didn't learn about the motivations whatsoever (Widmore) or possibly the explanation is something like what you gave which was simply that the people in charge were corrupt, power-hungry and somewhat incompetent.

Knowing that the reasons for these conflicts weren't interesting takes a lot out of them and the show as a whole.

I think this is the crux of a lot of disagreement, what you call different interpretations others call unanswered questions.

I personally was not particularly happy with the way the series came together as a whole, but I did really like the finale given where we were going into it. To me its not so much that they didn't bother to explain every last detail, its that they went so far out of their way to bring them up in the first place. I mean, its not a big deal that they didn't explain the hieroglyphics in the hatch, but why even have them there at all?

Its ok that you are satisfied with a little ambiguity and others aren't though. Can't we all just agree to disagree without getting too personal about it?

I'm pretty sure this is the reason I could never watch the whole series again...all the cool little mysteries would just feel so uninteresting and meaningless.

J Michael Straczynski writing Babylon 5 is another good example.

To do this he planned to make 5 seasons from day one and had a handshake agreement to do so (impossible nowadays, esp on the budget Lost had). He wrote 92 of the 110 episodes, the pilot movie and another 6 films plus the two spin off shows he wrote virtually all of. He plotted each season how it fit into the overall story which was already planned out and planned every single character including a realistic "trap door" so if an actor left at any point he had a realistic out for them (he had to use one of them and then write around another actor leaving before the last season which wasnt so hard given the plotting at that point).

He researched like a madman, he designed a lot of the sci fi concepts and the general look of the ships, he backstoried every part of the show including the basic history of all the alien races and this was all before he even started casting (Lost's pilot was rewritten several times including after casting people).

The workload to do this as you imagine is so intense that its just not possible. You have to be a ****ing madman to do this. And at the end of it all he almost got screwed over by the network going bust before securing another network to pick up his last season (so the show has a few rewrites here and there and it suffered a little for it).

Basically the recipe for making a perfect TV show is to start with one person with full control and make him an absolute nutter who will work constantly on it and a network that wont suddenly pull the plug or just screw you over so you dont get enough viewers to be kept (see Firefly). Something that is both rare and largely impossible to do in modern TV.

I read several message board theories that would've tied together the loose ends a lot better than they did in real life.


So if randoms on message boards can do this, then how come professional writers can't?

Here how about this.....


Ok, I know its a pretty dumb story....thats not the point. The point is that it took me maybe 10 minutes to write that. So why couldn't PROFESSIONAL WRITERS come up with something from the beginning? Its not that hard to come up with a general idea!

This post contains a lot of bad writing, so you should know.

Rock on, go write a TV show and if its good ill watch.

LOL that The Usual Suspects makes any sense at all. It doesn't hold up to any scrutiny. In fact, the whole movie is just supposed to be a tall tale told by Kevin Spacey in the police station. Horrible movie.

That's a good point I totally forgot about that... that's some BS for sure.

Important to remember. Their job is much harder than people give credit for. It's still the best show on any network except AMC, HBO or Showtime, and that's saying a lot.

Every part of Verbal's story was true except "Keaton = Kasier Soze" or that "I don't know who Kaiser Soze is". This was supposed to be obvious when Kobaishi showed up in the car to pick him up at the end. I've watched the movie at least 30 times, and if you follow that assumption then the story actually holds up 100% on subsequent viewings.

Um, because they came up with something much better than that? It just happened to be after the first season that they got a lot more of the better ideas for their story. You don't think you'd run into continuity errors doing the story above? It has to play out for what, 50+ episodes? I guess 10 episodes could be Faraday working on the Delorean and the flux capacitor.

I simply just don't care if "its tough to write for TV". I want to be entertained with a consistent storyline that holds up upon repeated viewings....in other genres this is a minor issue, but in the mystery/suspense genre it is paramount. As I said in my first post, maybe i did expect too much out of a TV show. However, I'm not going to simply say "Well the show's answers sucked but because its tough to write for a TV show I don't care."

The biggest WTF on this to me is visiting the Kwon's when they were getting married. At that point in time they didn't really have any problems so the only way his excuse works is if he time traveled to visit them or saw the future.