JJ did a TED Talk back in 2007, and he mentioned Lost a bit, and he touched on his love for mystery. First impression: JJ talks FAST! The important part of the talk, that stuck with me and is related to this post, is how holding back information, intentionally, adds mystery and brings fear to the audience: "You love it because you don't hear it." That's what he did with the smoke monster. It wasn't shown too often, and no one could guess what it was. It was pure mystery.
My problem with the show might be because I wasn't expecting it. My suspension of disbelief couldn't quite get there and move along with the later seasons of the show. I was expecting the mysteries to be answered with realistic explanations. Actually, if they had sufficient explanations, I would have been somewhat satisfied.
I think I just need to take a break and stay away from this show, and then watch it again more slowly and paying more attention to details, because I know I missed a whole lot of stuff sprinting through the episodes. Especially the last two seasons -- in which they probably had most of the explanations -- that I just hurried through because by that time I was tired of the show and there ware no characters I cared about. JJ touched upon this, too, that the audience must care about a character (or multiple characters) to keep them watching the show -- although I'm not sure if it was on his TED Talk or one of the many interviews/events of his I watched recently.
Back to the mystery that is Lost; not denying that it's a great show -- at least the first half of it was -- I was just... dissatisfied. My biggest unanswered question is: What do the numbers mean? They pop up everywhere, all the time, and they seem to be what's tying everything together. But, they were never explained. Is someone (the island?) somehow controlling these numbers or are the numbers the ones doing the controlling?
I honestly thought that this was all masterminded by one person -- a very powerful, insane person. I thought it was Richard Alpert, because he had always been there. And then my suspicion turned to Charles Widmore once he became more pertinent in the show. Seemed like he was a powerful enough person to do this. So was it just the island then? I'm still unclear on this.
Who/what the hell is the Dharma Initiative? If I recall correctly, they were said to have stopped for a while now, right? Ben Linus killed the lasts of them. Then how come there were still food drops? Just for Desmond? He was still needed there. Somehow, his decision to not press the button caused the plane crash that kicked off the show. Is the island really that powerful that it controls people's actions too? If that's the case, why the need for all the puzzles? Why not just get the people it needed and made them do whatever they're needed for? Or does the island need the people to believe, too?
Another thing I'm unclear of: Who are "the others" to the castaways? Are they Ben Linus's people? And yet they have "hostiles" too? Why did they take the children? There was a scene where it shows "the others" walking barefoot in rags, and I believe it was one of the kidnapped children with them. It was revealed later on that the look was just a disguise; so was the kid acting with them just for show? I'm assuming they knew the castaways were there because they were dressed that way, putting on a show for someone. Later on, a girl asked for Ana Lucia, already part of the group ("the others?"). Did they know that they were being used?
One last issue that stuck with me: Isn't the Daniel-Desmond connection something of a paradox? Daniel tells dream-Desmond (?) to tell past-Daniel the correct configuration for past-Daniel's experiment, which in turn returned dream-Desmond to current-Desmond, and made past-Daniel believe dream-Desmond... Okay, I've confused myself. I guess my point was, who came up with the configuration?
It's not that I don't get the explanations, I think I just don't like them, therefore I'm refusing them as real answers. Yes, it's selfish, I know; but I think that's human nature.
---
Like I said, I'm gonna need to take a step back from the show before re-watching it. I'm currently rewatching Buffy and Angel (of course) because I'm crushing on Alexis Denisof again after watching him on Much Ado About Nothing. This is gonna take a while, and I'll watch another show or two afterward, before returning to Lost. Hopefully, next time, I wouldn't be as confused as I am now.
No comments:
Post a Comment