24 Problems (but a Smoke-Monster Ain't One)

I've talked a lot of shit about how "24" has been an exercise in sucking... but the adventures of Jack Bauer ended on Monday night and it's no spoiler to say that the finale managed to close out the series in a manner that didn't totally betray the expectations of long-time viewers.

That wasn't so difficult, now was it...?

I'm gonna try to stop ranting about LOST because I've wasted enough time on it and there are other people expressing similar frustrations.

Here's a round-up of critical appraisals.

One last thing before I quit...

J.J. Abrams had another show before LOST, called ALIAS.

ALIAS never found a LOST-sized audience but still managed to make it through 5 seasons.

ALIAS was another show that was brimming with mysteries and mythology. It had its creative ups and downs, but it was always ambitious. The characters were very well-realized. Unlike LOST, the producers did NOT have the luxury of knowing their end-season several years in advance, yet they still managed to resolve a grand swath of mysteries and loose ends on the journey to their finale.

Abrams oversaw LOST less and less as the years wore on and he got busier with other projects, but I wonder how different it would've been if he'd been instrumental in plotting the endgame. (Meanwhile, Abrams's FRINGE is doing a far better job with paying off mysteries.)

I can be a sucker for romantic treacle, but I believe that it has to be earned. The LOST finale was a shitload of romantic treacle with a bunch of smoke and mirrors thrown in to try to distract you from the fact that they hadn't bothered to set up any grounded logic. Yes, it's emotional to witness a series of happy endings for these characters—you WANT to see them all get what they want in the end. I think that many people got so emotionally invested in these happy reunions, once the underlying premise of the "sideways narrative" was revealed (it was all just some fantasy land they collectively created after dying) they just went along with it.

But if they were all dead in the sideways narrative, then there was never anything really at stake. Since the start of the show, people have been speculating on the idea of "what if they all died in that plane crash and the island is purgatory"—and the showrunners continually shot that down. Because it would've meant that there was nothing at stake on the island. The sideways narrative they came up with for the final season was an even WEAKER premise because the characters didn't even share a common cause of death (plane crash)—according to their premise, they all died at different times, under different circumstance. And they all ended up in this purgatory world where they met up again.

Okay. Let's talk this through. Boone died when he was young, on the island (season 1). Kate got off the island *twice* and let's say she lived to a ripe old age. So... was Boone just spinning his wheels for decades in this purgatory world? Never aging, never questioning it, never aware of time while he had to wait for everyone else to die? Also, it seems that everyone's waiting for Jack to come into the fold but he's not the last island alumnus to die. A bunch of people outlive him. You could make up some bullshit about how anything can happen in The Afterlife, but that's as much of a cheat as "it was all a dream".

That's the underlying mess of the entire 6th season "flash sideways" narrative. What happens "for real" in the main island narrative is a clumsy mess of nonsense logic, dressed up with heaps of spiritual hokum to try to mask the nonsense. The Cavern of Glowing Light felt like some sub-par Indiana Jones device, except an Indiana Jones movie would at least come up with some clearer explanation for HOW THINGS WORK.

Let's talk this through. The cavern of light has some sort of fountain of light with a stone cork in it. We've been given a lot of non-answers for what the light *represents*. (If I were a character in this world, I would not accept a metaphor as an answer to the question of "What is that thing?" Tell me what it is or tell me what it can do.) Desmond gets lowered into the cavern and he doesn't even know what he's supposed to do there! Then he sees this fountain with a cork and he just decides, "I guess I'll pull that cork out." (It's like videogame logic: there's nothing else I can interact with in this room so let me just click on this and see what happens. Maybe save my game before I do it.)

How does he know that he has to pull a cork out of a glowing fountain?

How does Jack know that he has to put the cork back in afterwards? Why is that cork even there?

Let's go back to the character of Jacob. He's able to live forever, warp on and off the island whenever and wherever he pleases. He manages to control the fates of all these different "candidates" so that they all end up on this plane that crashes on the island. Jacob is a clearly a god on earth. The Man in Black is the devil incarnate. Why are god and the devil living on an island on earth? Assuming that Jacob is god (and if he isn't, how does he have all these powers?), it seems odd that he's so easily "killed" in such a pedestrian manner by Ben. He's dead but he's not dead because he can appear at will to the remaining candidates.

Oh my fucking lord. I really didn't want to go on a rant but there's so much sloppy plotting duct-taped together with rules upon rules and pseudo-spiritual jibber-jabber, you could go around in circles for days pointing it all out.

Fuck it.

I am letting it go now.