What We Watched For: The Preemptive LOST Backlash

GAWKER's Richard Lawson posted a really great article about the LOST fan backlash that's occurring even before Sunday night's 2.5 hour finale. An excerpt:

At some point this season or last, things got a little more urgent. And as episode after episode failed to answer this riddle or that mystery, rancor grew and grew. Now you have beleaguered cast and crew trying to hold strong against the backlash—they made the show they wanted to make, and fans will have to deal with it one way or the other. What happened happened. Which, OK, holding firm on artistic principle is all well and good. We can get behind that.

And yet they then announce that the Season Six DVD package will contain answers to additional mysteries. So wait a tic. They had answers to things but didn't put them in the show? Why, did they run out of time? Do they not care about creating the perfect bow-topped present for us? And this here is where the anger comes in.

I know. It's just a tv show. Nothing to get up in arms over.

Except... it's 6 years.

120+ hours.

That is a lot of time to devote to something.

Yes, it's "free". Insofar as no admission ticket needed to be purchased to watch. A lot of people worked very hard to give us this "free" entertainment. But a lot of people worked very hard and got paid very well and regularly.

The showrunners dug their own graves by giving so many interviews and making so many promises. When they negotiated an end-season for the show, several years in advance, it gave them a chance to do what few American tv shows have been able to do: plot out a long-term end-game.

And, initially, this seemed to revitalize the show. For a time, there seemed to be less water-treading episodes. Character development is a lovely luxury in a long-form, serialized narrative, but how many stories do we need to sit through illustrating Kate's commitment issues?

But excessive, water-treading character development was quaint next to the stockpiling of additional mysteries and a flagrant disregard for all the other loose ends dropped along the way. And how about the premise of the show?

1) time-travel
2) island that can teleport (somehow) by turning a donkey-wheel
3) parallel universe
4) god figure and devil figure live on the island

How about picking ONE concept and making it work?

How about the fact that all this time has gone by, 6 seasons of story, and we're not even sure what the premise of the show is. And don't give me any shit about how it's about redemption and free will and fate: those are a bunch of themes thrown into a blender. What's the goal of our heroes? (To get off the island? To "kill" a bad guy with unclear motives of his own?) What happens if they win? What happens if they lose? What's at stake?

This final season should have been explosive from beginning to end with little time wasted. And while I'm sure there will be some fireworks and bombshells reserved for the final 2.5 hours, the season leading up to it has been an exercise in dicking around.


WHAT THEY SAIDAn old interview that JJ Abrams, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse did with ABC Nightline (October 17, 2006):

CUSE: Certainly "Twin Peaks" was a cautionary tale in terms of basically frustrating an audience by never giving any answers and/or by also focusing on one central mystery and putting so much emphasis on that mystery that once that mystery is solved -- in that case "Who killed Laura Palmer?" -- then everyone's interest in the show goes away.

We looked at "Twin Peaks" as a model of what not to do in terms of stringing the audience along...

Here, a discussion of what went wrong with THE X-FILES:

LINDELOF: ...the pragmatic reality of the network television business is we don't own the show. We don't get to decide when the show ends. If we lived in a world where Chris Carter could say to his masters at Fox, "I want to end the show after five seasons," then you could point the finger and say, "Shame on you."

Again, this interview was done back in 2006, before they did negotiate an end-date to the series. Ergo, Carlton/Cuse said to their masters @ Disney, "We want to end the show after six seasons," which—by their own account—allows us to point the finger and say, "Shame on you".

On whether or not they have an end in mind (again, interview from 2006):

NIGHTLINE: Do you have in your minds an endgame, where the show ends, what happens? Is it all sketched out that broadly?

LINDELOF: Absolutely. I mean when we first started talking about the show in that -- in that very first meeting we talked about, you know, OK, everyone was saying what would Season 2 look like, what would Season 3 look like, what would Season 4 look like?

And we started having those conversations and obviously that conversation ended with "and here's where the show ends." This would be theoretically what the last episode of the show would be. But the reality is you're sorting running a race, a marathon, where no one has told you where the finish line is. So your plan at how how you're going to feel and how you're going to finish when you cross mile 26 changes because when you're passing the nine mile marker someone tells you the marathon has been extended to 40 miles.

So what our original ending is hopefully is going to still be in play. But the reality is the characters who were involved in that ending and what happens on the island might change as a result of external factors. God forbid, Josh Holloway decided to leave the show after six seasons, which is what he's contracted for. If that were to happen, we as writers would have to change our minds about certain story directions that we're taking. But the kind of conceptual idea of the ending is in place.

Acknowledging that they know all the answers to the mysteries they present:

CUSE: They've been incredibly supportive of what we've done here. We went in to Steve McPherson, the head of ABC, and we said, "OK, when we go inside the hatch there's going to be this guy down there and he's pushing a button every 108 minutes because he thinks he's saving the world." And he said, "That sounds cool." I mean what more could you ask for out of a network executive than that? But then they also say, "So what happens if he stops pushing the button?" And primarily our dialogue with the network is they want to know where we're going with things. And in that way they do serve as a great litmus test because you can't throw arbitrary things up against the wall.

When we do we have to go in and explain to them how it's going to pay off. Our rule has always been when we introduce a mystery on the show we have to know what the answer to that mystery is. So if a polar bear comes running out of the jungle in the pilot we had to have a conversation of OK, where did this polar bear potentially come from? Is it a figment of Walt's mind, did he manifest it from the comic book? Then we have to know that. Or is it a remnant of a Dharma Initiative experiment? We have to know that in order to know what role the polar bear is going to conform to.

And... an ominous end note:

LINDELOF: Yes, our goal is if we can't end spectacularly at least we'll fail spectacularly. Nobody wants to go out with a fizzle.