asshat
Slasher
Erin Go Bragh, y'all.
Posts: 1,388
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Lost
May 24, 2010 10:39:57 GMT -5
Post by asshat on May 24, 2010 10:39:57 GMT -5
Not purgatory. Two concepts in play here that are very difficult for people to digest: pure subjectivity and non-linearity. The thing I'm seeing in a lot of the discussions is the "oh, they all died on the plane and the island was purgatory" slant. Not possible for at least one critical reason: if they all died in the crash, not knowing one another, how did they become important enough to each other without the shared experience of the island to be critical to Jack's transition to the afterlife when his death is shown to occur on the island? That says to me that the island was a real, if unexplained or inexplicable, location where the bulk of the series' events took place, the biggest McGuffin in television history. They literally explained nothing whatsoever about the island's "special-ness" - all the questions I had about the polar bear, the smoke monster, the giant statue of Taweret (hippo goddess), what the Dharma Initiative hoped to achieve, and so on and so forth remain unanswered. Probably because they're intentionally mysterious and irreconcilable. It's the kind of thing where you're either OK with unanswered questions and ambiguity or you aren't. Most people aren't. Subjective interpretation is a necessary component of art, and I think Lost is about as close to art as network television has gotten...
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Lost
May 24, 2010 10:59:07 GMT -5
Post by Almeda J. Becker on May 24, 2010 10:59:07 GMT -5
Subjective interpretation is a necessary component of art... Word. While I don't agree that Lost qualifies as art (any more than any other TV program), I do agree that subjective interpretation is vastly more important than personal expression when it comes to art. Fuck personal expression. I've long believed that art, whatever form it takes, should act as a sort of Rorschach test. To me, Lost looks like two ducks kissing. Pardon me for butting in...
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asshat
Slasher
Erin Go Bragh, y'all.
Posts: 1,388
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Lost
May 24, 2010 16:08:54 GMT -5
Post by asshat on May 24, 2010 16:08:54 GMT -5
Subjective interpretation is a necessary component of art... Word. While I don't agree that Lost qualifies as art (any more than any other TV program), I do agree that subjective interpretation is vastly more important than personal expression when it comes to art. Fuck personal expression. I've long believed that art, whatever form it takes, should act as a sort of Rorschach test. To me, Lost looks like two ducks kissing. Pardon me for butting in... Most TV isn't art, to be sure. But the best of television is most definitely art (The Simpsons, Six Feet Under, Sopranos, etc.). Of course, the best of television is more like film, and most can't be shown unedited on network TV. Maybe I should have said that Lost was as close to a purely artistic endeavor as is possible on commercial network broadcast TV given its limitations and requisite shillery. Yeah, I made up a word. Dig it.
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Joe
Victim
I don't wanna work, I just wanna bang on the drum all day.
Posts: 540
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Lost
May 24, 2010 17:58:51 GMT -5
Post by Joe on May 24, 2010 17:58:51 GMT -5
This is the second worst live chat ever. OK, I'll bite. What was the worst?
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Lost
May 26, 2010 8:53:26 GMT -5
Post by Akasha on May 26, 2010 8:53:26 GMT -5
what it comes down to is that the writers took an easy way out and decided not to explain anything. They are dead is their out. Not acceptable. They answered no questions like they promised to do years ago in an interview. If the island wasn't purgatory then what was it? We will never know because the writers answer was "they are dead." Poppycock!
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asshat
Slasher
Erin Go Bragh, y'all.
Posts: 1,388
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Lost
May 26, 2010 15:21:29 GMT -5
Post by asshat on May 26, 2010 15:21:29 GMT -5
what it comes down to is that the writers took an easy way out and decided not to explain anything. They are dead is their out. Not acceptable. They answered no questions like they promised to do years ago in an interview. If the island wasn't purgatory then what was it? We will never know because the writers answer was "they are dead." Poppycock! My point is that the island couldn't be purgatory because they weren't dead there. Jack dying there while watching the Ajira plane escape spells that out pretty clearly. It would have taken another entire season to wrap up all the island's mysteries, so I don't necessarily agree that it was the easy way out. Quicker, yes. Planned from the get-go? Doubtful. IT must have been a difficult decision to leave a big segment of their fan base hanging. I think they had a basic arc that they filled in with randomness along the way with no plan to tie the weirdness into a cohesive whole. They wanted a polarized reaction similar to what happened over the Sopranos ending. One thing they definitely did was overestimate the willingness of the viewers to simply accept the island as a mysterious and inexplicable place...
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Lost
May 26, 2010 15:58:38 GMT -5
Post by Akasha on May 26, 2010 15:58:38 GMT -5
what it comes down to is that the writers took an easy way out and decided not to explain anything. They are dead is their out. Not acceptable. They answered no questions like they promised to do years ago in an interview. If the island wasn't purgatory then what was it? We will never know because the writers answer was "they are dead." Poppycock! My point is that the island couldn't be purgatory because they weren't dead there. Jack dying there while watching the Ajira plane escape spells that out pretty clearly. It would have taken another entire season to wrap up all the island's mysteries, so I don't necessarily agree that it was the easy way out. Quicker, yes. Planned from the get-go? Doubtful. IT must have been a difficult decision to leave a big segment of their fan base hanging. I think they had a basic arc that they filled in with randomness along the way with no plan to tie the weirdness into a cohesive whole. They wanted a polarized reaction similar to what happened over the Sopranos ending. One thing they definitely did was overestimate the willingness of the viewers to simply accept the island as a mysterious and inexplicable place... The whole show was about that island and what was going on with it. Then this season they blow up the hatch and next thing we see is this parallel story line which is them if the plane had never crashed. That is a copout if you ask me. We don't know what to do so they are dead. Not something like, the island is the Garden of Eden (thanks Rich) and a few people found it and are running experiments on the island to figure it out. Or purgatory, or the lifeforce of the earth, or the exit point of energy for the earth. There are multiple choices.
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asshat
Slasher
Erin Go Bragh, y'all.
Posts: 1,388
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Lost
May 26, 2010 17:00:12 GMT -5
Post by asshat on May 26, 2010 17:00:12 GMT -5
My point is that the island couldn't be purgatory because they weren't dead there. Jack dying there while watching the Ajira plane escape spells that out pretty clearly. It would have taken another entire season to wrap up all the island's mysteries, so I don't necessarily agree that it was the easy way out. Quicker, yes. Planned from the get-go? Doubtful. IT must have been a difficult decision to leave a big segment of their fan base hanging. I think they had a basic arc that they filled in with randomness along the way with no plan to tie the weirdness into a cohesive whole. They wanted a polarized reaction similar to what happened over the Sopranos ending. One thing they definitely did was overestimate the willingness of the viewers to simply accept the island as a mysterious and inexplicable place... The whole show was about that island and what was going on with it. Then this season they blow up the hatch and next thing we see is this parallel story line which is them if the plane had never crashed. That is a copout if you ask me. We don't know what to do so they are dead. Not something like, the island is the Garden of Eden (thanks Rich) and a few people found it and are running experiments on the island to figure it out. Or purgatory, or the lifeforce of the earth, or the exit point of energy for the earth. There are multiple choices. Again, I think a lot of the negative reaction is coming from people being inherently opposed to something as undefined as the island turned out to be. They wanted answers and didn't get 'em. I got a little concerned with the idea of adding time travel to the story line, because it's such a sci fi staple/cliche, but I think it was used decently. It was handled in at least a pseudoscientific manner. Lotsa holes re: the physics, but whatever...
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