I summarized the plot of Lost for a coworker today. So here you go:

A bunch of people planecrashed on an island.
There was a group of OTHERS.
The OTHERS turned out to be more survivors from the plane. Most of these people promptly die.
But then there are OTHER OTHERS. Who WHISPER IN THE WOODS SOMETIMES.
Also, sometimes a Black Smoke Monster comes out of the woods and eats people. But sometimes it doesn't eat them.
Then they discover that the Others are really a bunch of researchers from a science expedition.
Then you find out that they really killed all the researchers on the science expedition and they're still OTHERS.
But they also still do research.
Then you find out that there's another group of OTHERS who live in a temple.
And they fear the Black Smoke Monster.
Some of the original survivors leave the island. But the Island wants them to come back.
So they do.
Then they're mad that they came back.
Then they set off a nuke inside of A HATCH.
Then the island starts time traveling.

Seriously.

Then it gets complicated.
Then in Timeline A everyone leaves the island.
In Timeline B no plane ever crashed.
This timeline is boring.
In timeline A, some people stay with The Others (but not the Temple Others).
But then the Black Smoke Monster infects some of them.
And then there's an invisible guy named Jacob.
He gives orders to people who can see him (most of whom are crazy).
Then a character dies.
But he also gets infected by the Black Smoke Monster.
Who is Jacob.
Who is sometimes invisible.
Who apparently is a body snatcher.
You know, probably from outer space.

There you go. I'm still an episode or two behind, but that's the plot thusfar.

I'm way to hungover to read all of that but I just wanted to express my love for "Lost". I've loved every single episode & am sad that it's coming to an end. "You are everybody!"

Killing off Charlie was the turning point for me. </3

This season has a severe lack of Desmond.

YES! Desmond has been my fav character since he's been introduced. "The Constant" in Season 4 is an incredibly moving episode and of course he's primarily featured!


Happydud, the picture below probably does a pretty good job summarizing your summary!

http://www.timelooptheory.com/the_timeline.html <-- That actually does a pretty good job explaining the show. Its been around for a while, and he's been pretty spot on about his predictions thusfar.



But you gotta somewhat take it at face value if thats the story they are gonna tell. Last season was pretty weak, and in my opinion season 3 sucked major donkey balls. But I've watched from the beginning, and frankly, I have to keep going. I gotta see how they somehow can wrap this up.

Next weeks episode about Richard I hope is going to be mind blowing considering no one as even hinted about whats up with him.

Lost is totally awesome **** yo

Is it more or less confusing than

http://blog.katharsys.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/galactica-timeline.jpg

(holy side-scrolling, Batman!)

People still watch Lost?
People like it????
People are trying to explain a storyline that isnt basically "they ran out of ideas at season 1 and so now they just make everything up on the fly and make feeble attempts to explain but leave giant holes everywhere" ?

Yes.
Yes.
I just finished my 2nd playthrough up to the end of season 5. The plot connects more than you'd think. But that's not the point anyway, its fun to watch, and that's all that really matters.

If you watch the entire series it all makes a bit more sense & you begin to realize that while it may be coming to an abrupt ending, everything happened for a reason & it all makes a bit of sense. I never felt like they ever lost control of the script. Then again I'm the same guys that enjoyed all of "The Wheel of Time" series & never cared that it kept going & going like the Energizer Bunny. I don't personally like me entertainment to come to an end. That's what's so great about Star Trek.

I'm willing to bet big money on them making it up as they go along and they're going back and desperately trying to fix things.
I stopped around season 3 and it was clear already that a lot of stuff was just slapped on to explain previous stuff.

I mourn for season 1, that was when there was good scripting,the characters were interesting, the story (such as it was, hadn't gotten very far yet) was told in a good way, they spent a nice amount of time showing the characters had, well, character.
They quickly gave up on that though, the rest of the show is nothing like season 1, mores the pity.

Did you miss the whole point of them switching to a fixed end date and only doing 16 episode seasons? It was because they were trying to regain control of the narrative, and they have done. Season 3 was weak, but it's been MUCH better since.

Yeah, I'm lost...

I really don't like these types of concepts. They're OK in small doses, but to base an entire series around it, no thank you. Tell me a story from point A to point B. Don't try to out think me, I already know how it's probably going to end (or close to it).

I pretty much started on season five. I Netflix'ed one through four, so maybe the pain of season three wasn't that obvious...?

At least it's better than Heroes. *shrug*

Almost every criticism of Lost can be summed up as "But I want all the answers NOW!"

**** you, I started reading that.
I just finished season 2, I'm not going to have it ruined by that.

I stopped watching when I realized they were making everything up as they went along and had no grand plan in mind. This was somewhere in or just after season 1. I have no desire to watch it again, even if it did improve.

Except for the criticisms that are "they're just making it up as they go along and any answer they can come up with at this point will just be silly anyway" which covers mot of the criticisms I hear.

We don't want answers, we want the show to go away =p

Except that isn't a criticism. It's just an assumption that is patently incorrect. And it's an assumption that stems from a lack of patience for a gradually revealed mystery. In other words, "I want all the answers NOW!"

Hahaha, well you can make whatever assumptions you want regarding my patently correct criticism, but if anything this thread has only added to the "making it up" case.
And it's not a gradually revealed mystery, they keep chucking in random things and making it more and more stupid.
Again, I don't want the answers now, I really don't, the show has gone too long and gotten far too ridiculous, it should've been put out of it's misery a long time ago.



You know what? I just realized I'm arguing with a die-hard fan about his show, I'm gonna stop now, but I had a good laugh nonetheless
(sorry flirb)

your argument is balls

Lost is a fictional (!) tv show about crazy ass **** going down on an island.

Making it up, is not really surprising, or bad, or unusual.

OH **** THEY MADE UP STARWARS AS THEY WENT ALONG MAN THATS AWFUL HOW COULD THEY DO THAT

There is a difference between making something up and making something up as you go along.

Not really.

Why should they have every detail of the show mapped out 6 seasons ahead of time?

Heroes makes **** up as they go along way worse than Lost. Heroes is still fun to watch.

I'm pretty sure you guys are making too big of a deal out of a TV show. Don't like it? Quit *****ing, do something else.

Hey, whoa, whoa, you're flipping out because we said we didn't like it. I don't like it, so I don't watch it.

You're right, though, you don't have to have every moment of 6 seasons' worth of shows mapped out in advance...but when you're just making up crazy stuff and then explaining it later with other crazy made up stuff, it's about as interesting to me personally as a jackson pollock painting. Like throwing a bunch of rocks on the ground and connecting the dots on them. Sure, you might be able to make a picture, but personally it's not one I care about. Especially when the show is a big mystery search for answers at its core.

Those answers DID NOT EXIST at the start of the show, and therefore I was uncompelled, not because I wanted the answers NOW, but because I wanted the answers to EXIST now, whether I knew them or not.

If you start watching it now, the answers exist.

Maybe the reason I like it is because I started watching after 5 seasons were already released.

Also, I'm not flipping out. I'm just confused as to why people find it so important to say that Lost should cease to exist. Some of us like it. Apparently enough that ABC hasn't canceled it.

Maybe if I had started watching it after they tried to figure out some answers, I'd enjoy it, but as it is I can't bring myself to care knowing that it's built on a throne of lieeeeesss.

.....Whut?

So you are saying at the end of Season 1, you stopped watching because you somehow knew that they would not answer anything from Season 1? That's like me walking into a mystery movie and leaving in 15 minutes because "I don't think they are going to tell me who the murderer is". You may be right, or you may be wrong, but it's definitely premature and an impatient move at the very least. If you told me that you stopped watching LOST because you didn't want to invest the time into it, that I can understand. So perhaps I am understanding you wrong. But automatically shutting out because at the time you predicted through 5 seasons that they wouldn't answer anything seems kind of a quick judgement (and in this case, wrong)

If that's the case of why you stopped watching LOST, then you are wrong, as I can already point to numerous "answers" they have given regarding a multitude of Season 1 occurrences (aka smoke monster, who all the others are, next week going to answer about Richard, etc)

This is all coming from someone who acknowledges the absurdity of LOST. I was the first one in Season 4 to go "uuuuuhh......this isn't that great of a show right now". But at least I've watched it enough to know that it wasn't because of "lack of answers that didn't exist in season 1". I really recommend reading that Time Loop Theory explanation. That was written a LONG time ago, and the guy was pretty much dead on, so obviously he was able to craft a perfectly acceptable theory from the early seasons (and has been proven right)

It's not that I didn't think they WOULD answer the questions, it's that I got the distinct (and apparently correct) impression that they did not create the questions with the answers in mind. Rather, they just threw a bunch of weird stuff out to make people interested and stuck a post-it on it that said "figure out a good explanation for this later".

It's like walking into a mystery movie and leaving after 25 hours because I think the writers haven't even decided who the murderer is yet, and they're just blowing black smoke up your ass, mostly. Just a personal thing, really.

What a horrible show. This season has been nothing but a generic expository cock tease, and wrap up for complex ideas that once drove the show. They've turned a show about nothing into a show about good and evil. It is so caught up in its own metaphors and literary throwbacks that it doesn't say anything itself. Characters that were once recognizable and believable have become caricatures and blank slates to which the too-many-writers use differently every episode.

If you're writing a mystery story, and you have no idea how its going to end, it isn't a mystery story it's a first draft and you're a bad writer. Furthermore, when your mysteries could be solved by characters wanting to know what the **** is going on a little more, they're not all that mysterious, it's just withheld until the last episode.

Oh, and I wonder if they have the awesome lack of creativity to add even more new characters or landmarks in before the end of the season. Maybe even a whole new group of Others on another island, eh? I wouldn't be surprised at all.

The only thing I have liked about this show is when they contrast their normal time line with the island, showing how an individual could be so different given the right circumstances. I wish that this story telling technique didn't rely on the absurd time-traveling shtick. Even if there were a pool that showed people what their lives "could be" it'd be a little less corny. Hell, they could be dreams that people have while sleeping.

Otherwise I wish I had never started watching it, it isn't good by any measure at all, since the camera work isn't even half decent anymore.

Edit: Those of you who think they had any of this planned are being way too nice. I could objectively prove it by drawing plot lines on a horizontal graph. The number of ideas started but not stopped, immediately stopped with another plotline crossing, or subtly changed over time are beyond our very own Never Ending Story. There are few ideas that follow their logical consistency to the end, and most of those were in the first and second seasons. Unlike Deadman I have seen every episode, and he's right on the nose. This isn't really a matter of opinion, if you've ever written anything you can recognize their laziness.

Having dud explain this in person was far more entertaining!

Have any of you ever tried creating a gradually revealed mystery story yourself? Simply by the nature of the thought process of constructing such a plot, a writer will plan ahead and construct the details of the mystery. To write a mystery story that doesn't have any coherent, hidden explanation is significantly more difficult than you think. It's a challenge in itself, because the writer will constantly be compelled to meaningfully connect all the details together.



Disregarding the fact that the article you linked doesn't support your assertion by any means, I fully expected and hoped from the beginning that not everything would be resolved by the end of the series. I have in the past compared Lost to the novel "House of Leaves", one which contains a gradually revealed mystery not unlike Lost (and even features a sort of smoke monster). The mystery is left very much unresolved at the end of the novel, and it's better that way.




Did you ever watch Twin Peaks?

Flirb, glad to hear you like House of Leaves! That book is awesome!

This stopped being true like 3 years ago. But I still watch it anyway.

House of Leaves changed my life.

It is not even comparable to Lost. Lost is a mess of a TV show. HoL is barely even a book.