Six seasons ago Lost debuted on ABC. I skipped it. It looked dumb. There was a plane crash on an island and the people who didn't die tried to survive against all odds... Yawn. Hell, I'd just seen Tom Hanks' Cast Away, I didn't need an entire television series about the same topic again. And Christ, didn't TV already give us the great Gilligan's Island? Why did we need more weekly hijinks surrounding more stranded castaways on an exotic desert isle with no phone, no lights, and no motor cars?
Well, a year went by and all my friends started getting boneriffically excited over the upcoming 2nd season premiere of Lost. I was primarily amazed that it lasted more than one season on such a floppy premise, but I was also intrigued at how rabidly my amigos defended the series.
"Dude," they said, "this show is awesome! The title 'Lost' really isn't about the fact that the people on this plane crash who now live on this island are actually lost lost, but that they are lost as people. It's deep as fuck man... And there's like this monster on the island that may be some kind of dinosaur or maybe something made by a wizard. It's deep, man." A dinosaur on an island with maybe a wizard? Fuck me, I'm only human. I had to give it a try.
So I went out and bought the first season on DVD and watched it all in 3 nights. Then I too pissed my pants in anticipation for season two. Then when the amazing season two was done, three. Three then made me super giddy for four, but four made me wary of five. Five picked things up a bit, but the entire world then really began to worry about the final sixth season and how it would actually finish everything up. Yeah, it was fun to hang out with Sayid, Hurley, Juliet, Ben, Sun and Jin, Locke, Mr. Eko, and even Desmond... but the rest of the whole gang (and there were a shitload more) were pretty lame and boring... And unfortunately the most boring of them all (Jack, Kate, and James) became the focus of the rest of the series, and the writers soon forgot about the whole reason people kept tuning in week after week and instead focused mainly on these three fups. The main reason most of America continued watching was of course because of the mysterious island that the castaways found themselves on — seeing if we'd ever find out what the "Others" were about, why there were polar bears on a tropical island, what the smoke monster was, why the child Walt (WAAAAAAAALLLLLLLT!) was so important, why people couldn't get pregnant on the island without dying, why Richard never aged, where the food drops kept coming from, what the Dharma Initiative was using all those stations for, why normal people couldn't find the island, and what the fuck that frozen donkey wheel was, and how Ben knew how to use it and what it'd do despite the fact that he never ever talked to Jacob.
If none of that last paragraph made any sense to you then consider yourself lucky. You didn't waste an hour a week for six years on this Twilight Zone wannabe that had neither a point nor a plot to sort out all the weirdness when everything came to a close with the grand finale.
Yes, I enjoyed the ride for the most part, but as I've stated time and time again, if the ending to something is terrible, no matter how good it was up till then, the terrible last part is what sticks in my brain well after the final credits roll.
For all you noobs out there, here's a quick and dirty rundown of the whole show so you don't have to waste your time on it in syndication or renting it on Blu-ray: Oceanic Flight 815 from Australia to LA falls apart in midair over the Pacific, and the front and backs of the ripped-in-half plane land on opposite sides of a mysterious island. The survivors (and there are a TON of them despite the horrendous accident) band together and start making a life for themselves on the island when it becomes clear that nobody will ever rescue them.
A boy (Walt) seems to have strange, telekinetic powers, a cripple named Locke can suddenly walk again, all the survivors seem to have pasts that kind of intertwine, they find a civilization of strange fucks who already live on the island who like to dress up as redneck retards for no reason, and soon they find a "hatch" buried in the ground.
The hatch is the entrance to a research lab built in the 70s by a group called the Dharma Initiative (but despite the fact that the first five seasons focus on Dharma, they're not important in the least when all's said and done, and we never find out how they came to the island, or what exactly all of their many research stations are intended for... fuck you, writers), wherein there lies a computer that's hooked up to the island upon which somebody has to type in a string of numbers (4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42) every 108 minutes or "bad things will happen," and these numbers are the cause of all of the fat guy's, Hurley's, terrible misfortunes in life... But the writers forgot to explain them any more than that, so just forget about them.
Soon the 815 survivors meet Ben Linus, the leader of the Others, and even though he looks bat-shit crazy he makes deals with people left and right and proves to be a brilliant tactician... Until season 6 when the writers turn him into a namby-pamby wuss who shits himself out of fear and his own loserdom every 5 minutes.
Anyway, lots of people die (like the cool Mr. Eko, the incestuous Boone and his bangable sister, Shannon), the 815 crew and their insane Frenchie friend Rousseau (who landed on the island years before) declare war on the Others, and then a freighter filled with crazy mercs lands on the island and tries to blow it all up because fuck if I remember. Oh, and all during this time we flashback to the lives of all the main castaways before they came to the island in order to see just how pathetic and annoying they were even before all this shit went South.
With the help of some of the rebellious freighter people a few of the Losties make it off the island and back to civilization, and just as they leave, Ben turns his Others over to the once wheelchair-bound Locke and goes deep into the island's core to turn an old donkey wheel and make the island vanish to another time and space while sending Ben to the Sahara Desert. This is never explained (any of it), so don't ask "why?" or "how?" or "what the goddamn fuck?"
Oh yeah, and there's an enormous foot of what must have been a gigantic statue at one time with only four toes on it on one of the island's beaches. It was once a statue of an Egyptian god, but it's never explained and the writers think that by presenting us with a shitload of questions, but no answers or resolutions, that they're clever. They are not clever, they are retarded assholes who know nothing of a term called "audience fulfillment." Fuck 'em.
So once Ben made the island disappear the whole tropical paradise started skipping through time, causing nosebleeds and eventually death in the poor schmucks caught up in it. Locke then sacrifices himself to the donkey wheel in order to stop the flux capacitoring of things, and he then thinks that it's his destiny to get the poor schmucks who actually got OFF the island back TOO the island. They hate him for it, but eventually Ben kills Locke and this makes everybody sympathetic to his cause and they all go back because they're dumb.
Back on the island, Locke stopped it from time skipping in the 1970s, when the Dharma Initiative was at its peak, setting up research stations all around the place, and studying absolutely nothing in particular despite this being the entire PLOT of the show up until this point. A bunch of the Flight 815ers join the once fabled and spooky initiative, and find out that because they're now part of history that they can't change it at all (meaning whatever they do, it is what was done the first time through, so they can't fight fate). Sayid tries to assassinate a young Ben, but it just turns out to be the thing that turns young Ben into a heartless psychopath later in life. Oh, but then the Losties who got off the island miraculously make it back (and somehow back to the 1970s... never explained how, so shut it), and they try to change time themselves by blowing up a hydrogen bomb on the island to destroy it, making it impossible for them to crash land on the island in 2004. They get all of Dharma to evacuate the island (unlike the original timeline, somehow), and then Juliet sets off the bomb.... And the Losties find themselves back in the 2000s, but in two places.
My head hurts.
Oh, and we find out that EVERYTHING that was important up until this point (the end of the 5th season) is not important at all. Get over it. Forget it. Move on. Instead, it turns out that the show is really about some blonde, immortal, and unshaven douchebag named Jacob who's trying to keep his dressed-in-black brother stuck on the island because his adoptive mother told him to never let him leave over 2,000 years ago. I am not shitting you. The whole point of this show is that some ancient dickweed won't let his wander-lusting brother get a glimpse of the outside world. And we're supposed to root for the blonde asshole.
In the end (I mean the literal end, like in the last 3 episodes of EVERYTHING) we find out that the island is a "cork meant to hold back evil," even though we're never told what this "evil" is (the brother in black isn't evil — Jacob, the eternal blonde is actually the evil one), and there's a glowing cave on the island that we've never seen before, and in this cave there's a rock in a pool of water that must never be removed. So Scottish Desmond removes the rock, earthquakes happen, Jack the boring doctor puts the rock back, and everything becomes normal again. Oh, and Hurley (the fat guy who got even fatter on a desert isle) becomes the new Jacob and has to keep the island safe... from no threat that we're ever told of because the brother in black is dead and the Dharma Initiative no longer exists despite them still dropping food crates on the island.
Oh, and the point of the season-long flashes to an alternative group of Losties who actually landed safely in LA in 2004 (that took up HALF the entire storyline of the final season) are completely pointless to the plot. It turns out that it's just the afterlife and everybody there meets up again to find the loves of their lives (except for Sayid who ended up with Shannon [who he fucked for only 2 weeks], and not Nadia, the woman he loved for half his adult life), and then move on to Heaven. Oh, and Jack has a kid in this purgatory despite never having one in the real world because he has terrible daddy issues.
Fuck.
This whole show was just one big clusterfuck. What gets me the most though is how the show's creators claimed from the start that they had EVERYTHING planned out from the beginning. We fans knew this was a lie when stories of how Ben Linus was originally meant to only be in it for 2 episodes, but the producers liked the character and so they kept him, came into the light.... BEN is the entire focus of half the final story! And yet he was originally only meant to be in it for only 2 episodes? Bullshit.
The plot meanders so much, it's almost as if the writers came up with one reason for everything happening one week, only to get drunk and forget about them (and never check their notes or older episodes) before rewriting the reason a season or two down the line.
"Hmmmm, I think that there's this rich man named Charles Whidmore who has a daughter who's dating Desmond, whom Whidmore doesn't like, and HE'S the mysterious reason for everybody getting together and finding this crazy island!"
"Um, but sir, didn't we say last week that it was all about the Dharma Initiative and their electromagnetic tests that led to the plane crashing and that smoke monster thing flying around?"
"Oh shit... I forgot about that smoke thing. Can we say it's really just a polar bear in disguise?"
".......Maybe, but we'll have to explain why it sounds like chains clinking all the time."
"Hmmmm, we'll say the mysterious voices everybody hears are the cause of it all."
(YEARS PASS)
"What did we say those mysterious voices were about? An audio indication that the Others were close by because they're so freaky and mystical? Fuck it, the Others are just normal people now, so we'll say the voices are just dead people talking about the living."
"Brilliant, sir!"
This shit went on for six years. Reasons for many, many secrets and enigmas changed, went unanswered, or were blown off with a quick one sentence reply stated as matter of fact even when they altered the entire point of the series (like WHY were all those children important, and why did the Others want Walt so damn bad?!), and then in the final season a brand new plot is brought forth that's supposed to be the answer to everything, despite the fact that all it did was ask even more questions. Fuck the Jack, Kate, and James love triangle that the creators focused so much precious time on... Nobody watched Lost for that, despite the writers and die-hard fans claiming otherwise. Normal people watched it for the crazy island. Claiming that the soap opera elements were the main reason for the series' popularity (when you simply ran out of time to tell the REAL story and thought you could placate the masses through back peddling) is like when David Hasselholf claimed that people didn't watch Knight Rider for the car, they watched it for him.
Fuck.
Okay, I originally got into the whole Lost phenomena when it first came on TV back in 2003 or '04, but then it got real shitty real fast. I kept watching though because the mysteries that the writers continuously threw in our faces... well, I just HAD to know the answers to them. Yeah, yeah, I really didn't care too much about the characters (except for Sun), but the oodles and oodles of mysteries that they kept heaping on top of us, and the promise at the end of the third season that they had an end date in mind and would therefore be able to plan ahead and ANSWER EVERYTHING they asked, well, that made me hang on the whole bitter way.
And you know what happened in the end? Go on, guess. Guess. That's right, champ, they didn't answer 3/4ths of all the questions they asked. Or if they answered a question it was with another question, like the smoke monster. What is the smoke monster? Millions of people have been asking that very same question since the first season. You know what our answer was? The smoke monster is the man in black. Oh, well, who's the man in black, and how did he become the smoke monster? Well the man in black is a poor schmuck who was born two thousand years ago on the island whose only wish was to leave the island, so his awful mother and brother killed his will then his body. Then his brother tossed him into a glowing cave and he became the smoke monster... Despite the fact that the exact same shit happened to Jack in the last episode and he didn't become a smoke monster.
Anyway, instead of writing about how much I hate this show now, here's a list of all the questions (that we were led to believe were important from the beginning) that they never answered:
I actually have more questions to ask, but that's enough I think. You get the idea anyway. The writers chose to simply ask a whole lot of zany questions, and then refused to answer any of them, thinking it made them look clever. Not knowing the answers to your own questions is never "clever." It's the very definition of "being retarded."
Hory shit... What the fuck? Kuni is... Head to explode. Smoke monster is scariness!... Kuni scared.