I dunno, I've seen plenty of great Stephen King endings. Shawshank is a perfect example of this. Ending is perfect.

Stand by Me was good. Shining is fantastic. I don't remember anything terrible about The Green Mile.

Writers have a huge advantage though, so we need to give TV writers somewhat of a handicap for the unexpected.

It is true that the show is all about the characters(especially how they set up season 1) - I mean half of the show in the first 3 seasons was flashbacks about characters back story - what made the show great was the mythology/sci-fi elements/plot that fueled, tied into, and propelled the characters arcs. Great characters are almost always > great concept/story.

The story of how it all came together has been out there...in fragments.
Eko was supposed to have a huge arc and have been on for multiple seasons.
Ben was supposed to just be a short term character etc etc
They had no clue where they were going in Season 1 or 2...no real idea what would happen towards the end.

I doubt they had much planned out beyond the overall given season...with just basic major plot points or beats for the overall series charted out.

I don't think any real major lessons can be learned because a show like this is often going to have problems getting greenlit and there is no point in planning it all out given you most likely get canceled Season 1 or 2.

I find it highly unlikely in season 3 they knew what would happen in Season 5 besides maybe "The Losties try and change the past but fail and cause The Incident" etc etc

I would go further and say the last chapter was weak but the final page or two was solid...even if it required some SOD.
but overall yeah i agree with this...probably why SK was such a huge LOST fan.

I don't recall a ton of SK endings...remember the ending of The Stand, It etc being pretty dumb. Didn't read Shawshank short story but obv its totally different compared to the movie I would assume.

An interesting note about the differences between the movie and the novella was actually an improvement IMO.

Tommy (the guy who knew of the real killer, couldn't read, was tutored), gets moved to a lower security prison for keeping his mouth shut. The movie version where he tells the warden he will testify about it, then gets shot, is far more dramatic and interesting and is a great turning point for realizing what a monster the warden is.

The rest is surprisingly similar.

TC, I'm not asking this out of hostility. I promise.


What ending did you have in mind? How would you like the show to have ended? What were your expectations for the end?



Again, I didn't like the ending much either, but I don't think I had nearly the expectations you did. I remember telling my friends in season 2 that the show probably won't end well, but **** it, I knew I'd be down for the journey.

I really wasn't sure what to expect, just something to tie things together as much as possible and give me a WTF moment mostly. It was frustrating because I could not think of how that could happen but was pretty sure it was coming.

I had some ideas on how it might be done, but none were that outstanding. The time travel loop really opened up a lot. Perhaps something about how Mrs. Hawking knew so damn much and required everything to go a certain way. Like they kept going through a loop to try to make small improvements until they finally were able to defeat evil. Almost like Groundhog Day in a sense, but sci-fi. Trying to escape fate, but always being one step behind it. There were a lot of hints into that area that it might go that way. A lot of theme in trying to escape ones fate and free will. Starting it where it began, with some subtle difference would have been pretty mindblowing IMO. Even more mindblowing would have been a reveal that everything we were watching was the combination of several loops (we have seen several iterations). Not sure how they could have pulled that off, though.

One idea might be having the Losties get defeated, darkness takes over the world, and all hope seems lost. But then it's revealed that time split due to events they caused, and they get another chance. Hell, they don't even have to fill in what happens there. A lot of people would be pissed by the open-opened, but I think it would have been pretty sweet.

I really enjoyed the setup for how fLocke set up so much to defeat Jacob, for example. Viewing seasons as individual arcs that are loosely correlated definitely gives a better viewing experience. There were some very good season-wide arcs that set things up and used the story. Just the between season stuff wasn't thought of as well.

also I've had a day from hell at work due to a client deadline so I have probably been more of a prick than normal today.

those are short stories, i'm talking about The Stand, It, Dark Tower. all the 1000+ page books. The books are sooooo good the ending pales in comparison. that's how lost is to me

Agreed. Especially with things like Lost, The Dark Tower, The Sopranos, it's not about the ending, it's about the journey, as Stephen King said about the Dark Tower. And it's so true. The journey of Lost was unforgettable, it'd be near-impossible to put out a perfect ending. It was satisfying enough to not ruin the series, and that's enough for me.

+1

also just re-read my posts from today and I was a major ass lol.
sorry.

The reason the ending sucked imo is that in Lost there were both good and bad payoff surprises, and the final season was full of the bad kind.

A good payoff surprise is something that fits in the storyline that you can piece back together throughout the story arc. An example of this is the reveal that Smokey was inside the body of John Locke. This made you think back to how he had been acting the whole season, the entire arc of John Locke and how that now makes sense, etc...

A bad payoff surprise is most of what we saw at the ending. It's stuff that comes mostly out of left field, has very few things that you can think back on and piece together. When Christian reveals to Jack in the church that they are all dead, I feel like myself and most other fans were just kinda like "Oh... well... that's kinda dumb".

why was it dumb? it makes sense, they all died at different times, the flash sideways' were their limbo/purgatory, and when they found each other they remembered what happened and why they were so important to one another

i mean, i understand not liking it, i understand thinking the flash sideways were pointless/had nothing to do with the 1st 5 seasons where they had already created all these questions that they should have been answering, but it did make sense...

Or he was making fluffy statements to market the show.


TC the list you gave was true, they are character driven shows and good ones, but they were episodic, not one plot driving many seasons. Sitcoms have to be somewhat character driven anyway right? The classic answer is "likeable characters."

Ever see Silent Hill the movie? Great original Lost-like set up; resolved with "and now for the 106th time in cinema history..."

it was completely unrelated to anything that happened all series long. also, they made it seem like the limbo was something other than limbo. they made it seem like the bomb caused the alt timeline.

also, the writers said 'It's not purgatory'

but it ended up being p anyway

TV shows that thrive off of the questions/mysteries they pose depend heavily on the ultimate payoff of the show. The payoff in Lost ****ing sucked.

While this wasn't directed at me, I have similar feelings as TC and I hadn't thought about Lost for several weeks (maybe even months) until this thread was bumped.

iirc, they said the island wasn't purgatory. I can see how many can claim that it was though. It was Jacks place, the only place he ever was not only happy, but felt a real sense of accomplishment, he thrived on constant conflict.

Back to the show overall though. Is it rewatchable, yes. For the cinematography and the score, a resounding yes. ff through either the crap, or arcs you don't like/agree with.

you'd have to skip the entire 2nd season and half of the third.

Your 2nd paragraph is exactly what I hated about it. Instead of closing the story arcs that they had opened in a satisfying way, they chose to open a new mystery inside the final season, and answer that mystery instead. If you're going to do that, it had better be a damn good mystery. The ending made sense, but I feel like they wasted a half a season of TV just to set up a schmoltzy ending.

Not only was the ending cheesy, it was just inconsistent. The idea that everyone met up with some true love or whatever from the island. Then Sayid, who had this multi-season relationship with Nadia, somehow gets paired up with Shannon just to bring her back into the show, is hilariously dumb. It seemed like just a cheap way to get a lot of old minor characters back in the show (Artz, Boone, the freighter jackass, Charlie (not that he was minor), Shannon).

I would disagree that character driven shows have to have likable. Ben was an awesome character when he was at his evilest. Villains are fantastic for character driven shows.

Obviously Lost wasn't going to be a sitcom or episodic (although it had some elements of it, which were perfectly fine - I greatly enjoyed the Paolo and Nikki episode, although a lot of others hated it, and it was the perfect example of episodic). But you can't have a serial drama show without having it be highly dependent on plot.

Zimmer pretty much is right on with what I am thinking. They did a LOT of good stuff, which is why I thought there was still hope even as late as mid season 6. The sideways world was really starting to fit together and really hint at something epic. All of the early reviews were highly positive. There was enough of a hint it was just being winged, but there was enough good stuff to make us think maybe not.

Part of the problem with having a mindblowing ending is that most people can predict it in advance. Tons of people were predicting purgatory for the island, and in a sense it was. They were able to rid themselves of their demons there, it was between the real world, hell, and heaven.

I liked the idea of coming up with non-sucky Lost endings. Anyone have any other alternative endings that would have been sweet?

Kate falling off the cliff, breaking every bone in her body and slowly bleeding to death.

I would have liked that more midway during season 1 though, but I guess better late than never

I would have been very happy if they cut out the entire alternate reality/everybody being dead stuff. Instead, have the story follow basically the same arc that it did, fill in some of the missing gaps. End in a very similar way to how they did, with Jack finally being able to help everybody in getting off the island, have a touching ending with Jack and his father. Reveal that Christian's purpose was to help Jack find what he wanted. Because Jack wanted to help his friends leave, his purpose is fulfilled and Christian and Jack can move on together to their next life, or whatever you want to interpret it to be.

Every season had a flash. The last season would have stuck out like a sore thumb.

one thing they didn't really clear up is whether the place they were at post island time was a religious like form of purgatory - a so called afterlife etc...or more just scientifically based in terms time/energy/dimensions/social constructs/etc.

I know that in Season 1 when Fury was writing a episode with Sayid and Rousseu he originally had Rousseu say that the research team was specifically there to research/study time, but DL made him cut that out. So its seems like they may have had some sense that time travel etc was going to become involved later on.

Season 6 seemed to ditch the attempt at having some sort of an attempt to base what was going on in theoretical science/physics etc that had been present in prior seasons

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIl0r...eature=channel

i don't know if this has been posted but i think it is hilarious.