Batutta
Major Contributor
They ended up doing it half-assed in my opinion. If it was supposed to be purgatory they should have just stuck with that, as the show would have at least made consistent sense. As is it's neither here nor there.
Lost - The Final Season Thread
- Thread starter Batutta
- Start date
They ended up doing it half-assed in my opinion. If it was supposed to be purgatory they should have just stuck with that, as the show would have at least made consistent sense. As is it's neither here nor there.
To be honest, fear of exactly this kind of disappointment has kept me from bothering with Fringe. I'm done with big mystery, slow-reveal shows.
It had one of the most infuriating endings of any show. This guy put down in words everything I thought afterwards. It's lengthy.
http://ideas.4brad.com/battlestar/battlestars-daybreak-worst-ending-history-screen-science-fiction
Apparently there was never an alternate timeline at all, and The Incident did nothing other than launch them on another, final time-trip.
The "alternate timeline" could have been shown at any point in the series, considering what it was. Which, of course, raises the question of why they made a point of depicting the island under water.
But with Fringe, the "Big Mystery" has all ready been mostly revealed. At this point it is more about how it is resolved.
And at least Fringe works somewhat on an episode by episode basis. There are a lot of episodes that are purely about the big mystery, but there are a lot of interesting mystery of the week episodes as well.
In the case of the Lost, it was purely about the Big Mystery, because the premise of the show never really supported standalone episodes.
It's not like it was Gilligan's Island or whatever, where the entire point of the show was funny interactions between the characters on the island.
Lost was purely about the Big Mystery. To bad they clearly they couldn't decide what the Big Mystery was supposed to be, so they decided to pull a giant smoke-screen instead.
Then maybe Fringe is different. I wouldn't know because as soon as what's-his-name who was Matthew Abbadon on Lost came out and made mention of a secret organization, I said "no thanks." All the advertising and conversation I'd seen about the show led me to believe it was "big mystery."
Multiple-season, giant-mystery formats simply don't work, as has been borne out by numerous attempts to do them. If it has a prayer of working, you need to have every detail worked out well ahead of time and the discipline to make good on your implied promise to explain it. Most shows fail on the first point, but those which don't fail on the second.
Multiple-season, giant-mystery formats simply don't work, as has been borne out by numerous attempts to do them. If it has a prayer of working, you need to have every detail worked out well ahead of time and the discipline to make good on your implied promise to explain it. Most shows fail on the first point, but those which don't fail on the second.
Brandon Rice
Distributed Producer
I guess I liked that "god" was the ultimate answer...
Batutta
Major Contributor
Shh...you know he doesn't like to be called that...BSG at the very least answered the fundamental question that drove the show, "Will they find Earth?". They did. We are no closer to figuring out what the hell that island was all about, other than in some mystical, metaphorical, hocus pocus kind of way.
It made the entire struggle completely pointless. There's a reason Deus ex Machina is a dramatic failing, and in that case, it was literally so.
Not to mention that it turned the show into something it was never supposed to be.
I don't think that was the fundamental question at all, because it was never in doubt.
Batutta
Major Contributor
The inspiration for Lost--
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| I AGREE |
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Brandon Rice
Distributed Producer
Well... we're going to start this at season 1... I originally started watching, but lost (no pun intended) interest at season 3...
Batutta
Major Contributor
That was the engine that drove the plot and all the major characters.
It was the MacGuffin. As I said, that they would reach Earth was never in question.
Brandon Rice
Distributed Producer
When they got to Earth 1 (destroyed earth) it was in question, in my head anyway.
Batutta
Major Contributor
But they resolved it, totally. Not saying the end was satisfying to me but it's not as unresolved as Lost's ending. The MacGuffin of Lost was "What the hell is this strange place?". Nobody knows definitively, just a bunch of theories. All that's clear is that the flash-sideways in this last season was some kind of purgatory.
It meant they actually reached it. That it wasn't what they expected doesn't matter.
A MacGuffin is something that the story is ostensibly about, but isn't really about, and simply serves as a platform for launching the actual story.
The mystery of the island was what the story was actually supposed to be about.
And in fact, in BSG, they found the specific "Earth" they were looking for, but the story continued after that. THat Earth played no further part in the story and had little if anything to do with the resolution.
Fringe is a Big Mystery show, but with the end of Season 2, almost all of the questions have been answered. There aren't many lingering questions other than how it will be resolved.
Batutta
Major Contributor
Yeah, but that was all in the winding down section of the saga. Again, not saying it was totally satisfying to me either but like you said, the mystery of the island was what Lost was about and to not get solid answers to that was more unsatisfying to me than BSG was.