I Can See The Future (In The Hollywood Reporter)
No Lost spoilers, unless you check the link:
I didn't want to find out, but I couldn't help but see that some Lost characters are coming back for the final season. Okay, but on Lost this could simply mean appearing in a flashback.
The producers are promising the final season will be something different. I'd expect nothing less. Every season has changed and expanded the meaning of the show. Season one (and this'll be spoilers if you haven't seen the show yet) was all about the Castaways on this weird island. Season two added the Tailies and the Hatch. Season three had the Others. Season four added the Freighter Folk. Season five had the Oceanic Six and the old days of the Dharma Initiative.
What will season six be about? Well, that's supposed to be a surprise, but I'd guess it means, if nothing else, we'll finally get the war everyone's been talking about, where Jacob and Blackie will have it out. And I assume selected Castaways--especially those who've been "touched" plus Locke--will be at the center of the action.
Does it mean we'll get a reboot, too? Who knows?
I didn't want to find out, but I couldn't help but see that some Lost characters are coming back for the final season. Okay, but on Lost this could simply mean appearing in a flashback.
The producers are promising the final season will be something different. I'd expect nothing less. Every season has changed and expanded the meaning of the show. Season one (and this'll be spoilers if you haven't seen the show yet) was all about the Castaways on this weird island. Season two added the Tailies and the Hatch. Season three had the Others. Season four added the Freighter Folk. Season five had the Oceanic Six and the old days of the Dharma Initiative.
What will season six be about? Well, that's supposed to be a surprise, but I'd guess it means, if nothing else, we'll finally get the war everyone's been talking about, where Jacob and Blackie will have it out. And I assume selected Castaways--especially those who've been "touched" plus Locke--will be at the center of the action.
Does it mean we'll get a reboot, too? Who knows?
posted by LAGuy @ 12:16 AM
4 Comments:
Several folks here have said that if S6 is as good as the previous seasons, and also answers the key questions, Lost will be the best show ever.
If Lost manages to do that, it will be an incredible show that I would recommend to anyone, anytime. But to be truly stupendous it needs one more thing: it needs to have some sort of unifying theme or thread uniting all six seasons.
When I rewatch Lost today, I enjoy the whole thing, but some aspects -- e.g, Shannon -- seem "irrelevant" now. In fact, Sayid's love for her almost seems an odd parenthesis in the middle of his undying love for Nadia (which is key to his backstory and his Oceanic 6 story).
Yet the more we learn about the answers, the more things we may discover to be simply irrelevant: minor riddles that masked bigger riddles. The blast door map, for example, might be just that. If the writers were to be so sloppy as to render too many things irrelevant to the big story, rewatching all six seasons after its all done would leave the impression that big chunks of the series could have been cut out. That would prevent it from being truly great.
The following has spoilers for past seasons:
They know the main path, and the destination, but there are undoubtedly cul de sacs. I'm sure they didn't know if Charlie or Michael or Walt or Shannon or Boone or others would be important by the end, or fade along the way. (Though I'm guessing they always had big plans for Jack, Locke and Kate.)
Sayid and Shannon was probably not planned at the start, but was a convenient and intriguing love affair that I'm guessing they created partly because they knew how they could end it in tragedy.
Also, the Tailies didn't amount to much. I believe that they did plan to kill of Ana Lucia, though who knows if they'd have kept her alive if she turned out to be popular. And then when the audience wanted her dead, they threw in Libby just to make it sting--though at that point they may have figured there wasn't that much more to tell about Libby. As for Eko, there's no question they had bigger plans for him--either he'd be Locke's rival as the island's spiritual leader, or may have been the time-traveler that Desmond became. But either because 1) the actor wanted to leave early or 2) everyone hated him, his stay on the Island was shorter than planned.
For all we know, they had bigger plans for Nikki and Paulo.
I also bet they didn't know how big Ben or Juliet would be. They hired Michael Emerson for a few episodes and I think saw it as a tryout--he'd always be an Other, but would he be THE Other. And would Juliet be a true competitor for Jack (they didn't even think of her as Sawyer's girl till later, I'm sure) or quickly fall by the wayside?
I think the final episode will answer most of the questions and pull together a lot of strings that have been there all along, but there's no way if you watch all six seasons you won't see some seams showing. (On the other hand, seam-wise, it won't be close to Babylon 5.)
That's an interesting question -- to be truly great does a dramatic TV series have to have the same type of clean narrative arc as a great novel or feature-length film? I.e. do we hold them to a different standard because of the nature of the medium? I'm with LAGuy that there will necessarily be compromises that can be overlooked -- e.g. I don't particularly care what happened to the Russian mobster lost in the snowy Pine Barrens.
QG wrote: That's an interesting question -- to be truly great does a dramatic TV series have to have the same type of clean narrative arc as a great novel or feature-length film? I.e. do we hold them to a different standard because of the nature of the medium?
I think it depends on the genre. A show such as Law & Order is utterly episodic, and I think their occasional attempts to link multiple episodes (e.g., a detective's daughter is in trouble) make the show weaker.
On the other hand, Lost, Heroes, and Battlestar Galactica (following in the footsteps of Babylon 5) are attempting to tell a long story. These shows even use foreshadowing in the early episodes to hint at the final ending of the series. So it is reasonable to demand that the story hold up if you rewatch the entire series after it's done.
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