Lost Season 3 finale and assessment
Well, I needed a few days to think things through- not just about that epic final double-bill, but the way the whole season now stands in the light of its events. And of course, the real challenge will be in doing this without any spoilers. Hummm.
Season 3 was incredibly disjointed, in some ways. It really was. The six-episode mini season thing at the beginning only sort of worked, let’s be honest. The truly memorably stand-out from those was of course The Cost of Living, which simply rang every bell that the best of Season 1 had, though staying with the somewhat unsatisfactory season 2 pattern of saying absolutely nothing of any interest for four episodes and then stuffing half a season’s worth of revelation into 45 minutes.
I was absolutely terrified for the show’s future at that point, I can remember. The emphasis seemed to have shifted to the power-plays between various groups on the island rather than the central mysteries. Moreover, they were using silly ways of addressing big stuff left hanging from the Season 2 finale. Again, the word has to feel disjointed. Disjointed, disjointed.
The writing was, with a few notable exceptions, failing to reach the Season 1 highs. The trend had been set in Season 2- instead of showing, Lost was telling. The elegance and the naturalism of the writing and the dialogue was somewhere being lost, the subtlety sacrificed to exposition of the clunkiest kind. The writers clearly wished to be able to appeal to a new audience, since the viewing figures were descending and ABC was messing with screening times.
But I can’t say how reassuring, how impactful and intriguing and exciting the last four or five (or even six or seven) episodes have been. It’s high time for all you folks who lost the faith to suck it and see again. The particular, structural alteration revealed at the very end of the Season 3 finale I think is a masterstroke; I can only hope that the mechanism is used with similar skill in future. Those of you who have seen it know exactly what I’m talking about. Also, the return of a perennial mysterious character as double-act with Locke is exceedingly welcome.
The fact is, the show had to change. Deep down, we all knew it did. Season 1 was where the fun was easy and the gains immediate: introduction, surprise, random and strange things, self-contained episodes, big themes, boys-own adventures. But it couldn’t last forever. Thematically, the show had to progress the very second a few answers- or the keys to answers- were given away. Season 2 saw many of those growing pains. And the second half of the third season is where the payoff began.
I suggest that everyone catches up immediately.
There. No spoilers. It can be done.
I bet it didn’t compare to the Cowboy Bebop finale.
You mean the whole, “Im going to shoot you, you green headed bastard” thing from faye? Oh yeah. Teen angst all OVER that bitch. I cant watch the show anymore. It was good when it first came on, and I was years younger. BTW, ed ftw.
I loves me a bit of angst with my jazz and kung-fu.
Nice recent updates, asshole.
Dazzling. Dazzling. That’s the word for this show. Take it from a guy who didn’t even bat an eye lash when all the vulgar hype started. I saw the first episode just about one month ago and i’ve been glued to the screen like a, well, a guy who’s out of his mind and watches 3 episodes per day.
I was just that devoted, even during the hard times when my heart sank; when the story-web became too tangled (psychological experiments, four-toed statues with flip-flops, various overt displays of hokus-pokus, jesus-sticks, doomsday devices, polar bears) and the connections between these too scarce and scattered to incurr continued faith in the overall integrity of the story; when the attitude of season 1, which promised delicious brutality to come, sort of abated as if character-attachments on someone’s whim became all holy and important; when the flash-backs stopped adding depth and started looking like uninspired rehearsals designed for milking sympathies; when every other episode felt like space-filling cooked by the book per recomendation of some soulless viewer reaction analysis department… and all the other bad stuff.
But it pays off. Like a tripple-BAR with your last penny.
So, us spoiler-immune converts aside, what do you think the flash-forward thing was. A glimpse at the very end or a glimpse at a not so distant episode?
And, uh, Cowboy… bebop, Quigs?
Okay all, looks like we are going to be getting into some serious SEASON 3 FINALE SPOILERS here. So here is your one and only warning.
I thought that the way they handled the end of season 3 was absolutely inspired. The structure of the show, I feel, has always reflected the essential weirdness of the Island itself. I think that there is a meta-level of construction going on here, with the flashbacks, this universal preoccupation with the past, being a function of the Island itself. The big teller was the S3 episode where Desmond literally traveled back, and tangled with all kinds of deterministic issues.
So the big question is whether the flash-forward was a one-off… or whether every episode will have something similar from now on. That kind of intelligent, leading retrospection would be incredible difficult to script effectively… but I would love to see them try.
What the fudge is a “meta-level” of construction.
The episode where Desmund becomes lucid (and is “visited” and “counseled”) in a flash-back moment was actually the first episode i ever saw, so i’ve been considering his erratic oracle-ability and the introduction of a time-manipulation theme pretty naturally since the very start. With serious woe. If someone in the show starts ordbajsing phrases like parallel timelines/wormholes/time travel my brain is gonna seppuku before the Langoliers jump out of the shrubbery. Hopefully we’re not going to see Jack in an absurd “course-correcting” island-return where he attempts to alter mistakes, while planting convenient “aha-moment” explanations for the strange events, or something similar amongst the inane, countless and ultimately paradoxical possibilities that cascade once the time-travel floodgate is open.
Try http://www.lost-theories.com (if you haven’t already) and would like to see people go out of their way to apply different bizarre and intriguing logic to the weirdess of the series. The ideas are almost always inconsistent and plain dumb, but there are A LOT of people contributing, and a lot of poeple mean a lot of observations (in the comments), and some just seem damned sharp in their own right, even if they extrapolate these to mad degrees in the speculations.
Heh heh!
http://www.lost-theories.com/theories/2007/jul/04/what-jacob-might-have-said-not/
oh god..