L O S T - one audience member

Facebookers - this is probably cut off. Importing doesn't work right anymore.  You can read it, should you care, at http://ciceroinpants.blogspot.com

I didn't expect Lost to do what it was supposed to do.  This allowed me to enjoy the finale in spite of what it was. So I'm not enraged at Lost per se, and some of what it did I quite liked - like the resolution of the sideways timeline. That said, to hell with 'em anyway. What do you mean "it was about the characters?"

"It's about the characters" is a basic bait and switch. It's burned me before with Battlestar Galactica.

Lost wasn't Melrose Place or Guiding Light. It wasn't a soap opera. The story was not really driven by the interplay between the characters. It was driven by the interplay between the characters and the mysteries of the island. The question isn't "what was the show about". The question is "what was attracting viewers to watch the show"? 

To be sure, viewers liked the charismatic characters - if you don't like a drama's characters you don't care about their fate - but what the show sold was mystery. Even more so than with BSG, because in BSG character interplay really was on an equal footing, or even more important, than the mysteries.In Lost, character motivation would change like the wind to support the needs of this week's plot. The plot itself was actually in service of the cliffhanger hooks - whether for commercial break, episode or season. The hooks were supposed to keep you watching (the ads) and everything worked backwards from there. That's bait in a very literal sense.

When a TV program offers mysteries like this, it intimates that it has answers which, if you tune in next week, will be revealed. The Lost writers did more than intimate though, once people started threatening to stop watching if they didn't know where they were going. They changed their tune in interviews to reassure their viewers that answers would come. (As the series neared its end they started to dial back on this and said the big mysteries would be resolved or the mysteries that were important to the characters. Screw the audience's expectations.)

What is sad is that in both the case of BSG and Lost, there is a subset of the fan base that will now convince themselves that they didn't care about the mysteries and don't care about being defrauded. That thinks its ok to make promises and not deliver on them, or weasel out with an "I never promised ha ha ha" when they knew the audience's expectations full well.

 Whatever. I've learned my lesson. I've grown up. I'm less naive. I now know how television writing works. Get the cliffhanger image, work backward from there, don't worry about the resolution. Resolution doesn't sell ads. Once Lost is over there's no more ads to sell.

So I'm done investing in shows that promise arc mysteries. Fringe can sod off. See those ads for "The Event", ABC's Lost replacement? Forget it. I already refused to even look at Caprica.

People are being defrauded and thanking the fraudster. There's now an ethos that says it's perfectly acceptable, even artistically preferable, not to fulfill dramatic promises made.

I'm not on board. Have fun with it, Charlie Brown. When Lucy pulls the football away next time, don't say I didn't warn you.