|
|
Post by Sara on Sept 20, 2005 8:22:17 GMT -5
From SciFiWire:
Garcia Is Lost By The Numbers
Jorge Garcia, who plays Hurley in ABC's Emmy-winning series Lost, told SCI FI Wire that he's as curious as everyone else about what Hurley's cursed numbers really mean. "I'd gotten some hints about the lottery situation when we added the scene where I'm playing backgammon with Walt, and I tell him he'll get the money that I owe him," Garcia said in an interview. "That kind of [made me suspect], 'OK, I do have money.' But it's the cool, Twilight Zone aspects of my story that really make me anxious and anticipating. ... I want to find out why those numbers are on the hatch."
Last season on Lost, the audience learned that Hurley had accidentally used cursed numbers to win the lottery before he wound up on the fateful flight that crashed on a deserted island. When Hurley saw the numbers on the mysterious hatch, he tried unsuccessfully to stop the others from opening it.
The mystery numbers have become an obsession to viewers interested in the mythology. Executive producer Carlton Cuse said that he didn't anticipate the passion fans would have when it comes to speculating about the numbers. "If you were to ask us back during that story, the numbers were on a fundamental level a plot device for Hurley to go on this journey," Cuse said. "We understood that they were part of the mythology of the show, but we never thought that they would loom larger than the fact that Hurley was a lottery winner, or that people would be so engaged and interested and dissecting the meaning behind the numbers."
Garcia said that he is surprised at the lengths people have gone when it comes to the cursed numbers. "There was a piece of toast on Ebay that had the mystery numbers on it," Garcia said. "I'm anxious to find out how much it sold for. ... There were two more copycat toasts that came after it, one with the numbers backwards. The other one was a kid's piece of toast, like a plastic toy toast. The first toast, if I remember correctly, I went and looked, and it was like $50. When I looked again it was $200. And I swear I saw it over five grand at one point. That's so incredibly insane ... for a piece of toast!"
Like the other actors and anyone who watches the show, Garcia is curious about what's going on. "Particular people have their theories that we're in purgatory," he said. "I always feel like that's too easy. And they're going to have to explain how that creature in the woods does it by being a smoky tendril. How exactly does that tendril grab you and suck you down the hole? I know they know how it works, because I was talking to the guy who created the effect for it. He said, 'They explained to me how it was, and it's really fascinating. But we're not allowed to tell you how it happens."
But Garcia has his own theory. "I think it's based on that cartoon thing when they put the pie on the windowsill, and it would drag the character to the window," he said. "Yeah, the whole thing's going to be a big pie on the windowsill. ... A pie on the windowsill of purgatory." The second season of Lost premieres on Sept. 21 in its new Wednesday 9 p.m. ET/PT timeslot.
|
|
|
|
Post by Sara on Sept 22, 2005 9:01:09 GMT -5
The Laws of the Jungle
By Lorne Manly
LOS ANGELES
On "Lost," one of last season's most successful series, some four dozen plane crash survivors confronted a Pacific island infused with mystery.
A monster devoured a pilot. A polar bear rampaged through the jungle. An enigmatic paraplegic could walk again. The first season ended last May with dual cliffhangers: two characters peered down a hatch they had found, only to be greeted by the spooky darkness of an unending vertical shaft, while another group of characters, attempting an escape by raft, were thwarted by scary strangers who sailed off with a child.
But the biggest puzzle the producers of "Lost" face as they enter their second season this Wednesday may well be how to avoid alienating the audience that has made it one of ABC's first water-cooler hit dramas in more than a decade.
The creators of shows like "Lost" - serialized dramas steeped in their own elaborate mythologies - face a dilemma. Audiences compulsively desire, even demand, answers. But reveal too much, too soon, and they might just bolt, as "Twin Peaks" discovered in the early 1990's.Or dole out only tiny hints about how the pieces fit together, and viewer obsession can curdle into frustration or even disdain, as happened in the latter years of "The X-Files."
"If you get to the point where you're just vamping," said Mark Frost, who created "Twin Peaks" with the filmmaker David Lynch, "just to withhold the trump card about the central mystery, you will start to see the series slipping."
"An audience will put up with being toyed with for only so long," he added. "But if the audience responds to the characters, the rest will take care of itself."
"Lost" is not your typical network drama, either in its genesis, its large and international cast or its fondness for deliberate ambiguity. The idea for the show was hatched in the summer of 2003 by Lloyd Braun, then the chairman of ABC Entertainment. Sitting at a clambake at his hotel on the Big Island of Hawaii, waiting for his family, he gazed out the beach and began thinking about how to translate "Cast Away," the Tom Hanks movie the network had just shown to good ratings, into a television series.
But a lone man and a mute volleyball on a deserted island do not make for compelling television, so Mr. Braun applied some Hollywood high-concept formula and came up with a hybrid of "Cast Away" and "Survivor."
The first attempt at a script, however, did not satisfy Mr. Braun, and neither did the rewrite. So Mr. Braun turned to J. J. Abrams, the creator of ABC's "Alias." and offered him a writing partner: Damon Lindelof, a longtime fan who worked on NBC's "Crossing Jordan."
"Basically, we had a two-hour meeting where we both came to the same exact solution to how to do the show, which was it had to have a lot of characters, the characters had to be really mysterious and the island itself had to be even more mysterious than they were," Mr. Lindelof said.
They started writing, and by the end of that week handed a 23-page outline to Mr. Braun, who then did something he had never before done - he approved a pilot based on nothing more than a treatment.
The gamble for ABC was immense. Compared to shows like "Law & Order," in which stories usually don't span more than one episode, serialized dramas - like "24" - are harder to re-run or syndicate. "There was nothing I wasn't worried about," said Mr. Braun, from the show's remarkable price tag (more than $10 million for the two-hour pilot) to its dark, moody tone to the ever-growing cast. "And don't forget, it was not like my position at the network was very secure at this time." (Mr. Braun was fired in April of 2004, and is now head of the media group at Yahoo.)
What's more, everyone remembered what had happened to "Twin Peaks": when it made its debut in April of 1990, the country quickly became wrapped up in the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer and the catch phrases of the F.B.I. special agent Dale Cooper ("damn good coffee"). Yet, just over a year later, the show was gone.
"The trick of these series is you've got to keep all of these balls in the air, resolving some stories while revealing others," said Mr. Frost. "Our problem was we really just had one truly compelling story line." Once Laura Palmer's killer was revealed partway through the second season, all that was left was a show that had descended largely into camp, a mere procession of dancing dwarves, inscrutable owls and log ladies. Mr. Frost said if he were to do the show again, he would have the later, more compelling mysteries begin immediately after the unmasking of the killer.
" 'Twin Peaks' looms large to me as cautionary tale," said Carlton Cuse, who joined "Lost" as an executive producer early last season to jointly run the show with Mr. Lindelof. "That was a show where the mythology sort of overwhelmed everything else, principally the construction of believable, plausible characters. It's constantly a presence in my mind about something we can't get sucked into doing on this show."
That fear of getting too wrapped up in the intricacies of the show's mythology keeps Mr. Cuse from trolling the numerous Web sites that fans have constructed to revere, obsess over, debate and criticize the show, like Lost-TV (www.lost-tv.com). "The genre aspects of the show are cool, and we have fun doing it," Mr. Cuse said. "But I am much more engaged by the people on the show, and I think that is fundamentally what we try to do."
Mr. Lindelof added, "It's all about character, character, character." (That's also the mantra Stephen McPherson, president of ABC prime-time entertainment, said he has impressed on the producers.) "Everything," Mr. Lindelof concluded, "has to be in service of the people. That is the secret ingredient of the show."
ON a sunny California day earlier this month, Mr. Lindelof, 32, and Mr. Cuse, 46, dropped in on their fellow writers, in the "Lost" writers' room on the Disney lot in Burbank. Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who also serves as a supervising producer, brought the two men up to speed on the team's progress at an early stab at the conceptual framework for the season's eighth episode. The working theme: forgiveness.
On a white board, below head shots of the cast and pages ripped from The Weekly World News ("Time Portal Found Over South Pole" reads one scoop put up by Mr. Lindelof), the writers had taken a shot at the trademark teaser that opens the show and attempted to map out the other five acts that make up each episode. But they have become tangled up in the various story lines, and are struggling to decide which character will get one of the show's hallmarks, the detailed flashback into his or her pre-island existence.
As they brainstormed, the pop-culture riffs came fast and furious. In an effort to guide the team's storytelling path and technique, Mr. Lindelof tosses out references to movies as varied as "Pulp Fiction," "Death and the Maiden," "Dog Day Afternoon" and "Red October."
Mr. Cuse suggests they keep in mind the Biblical notion of forgiveness, adding, "That will have a lot of resonance."
He and Mr. Lindelof prod their writers to simplify. Figure out what's happening on the island, and the focus of the flashback will become clear, they add. "The story needs to play on a character level, so forgiveness is more than an arbitrary decision," Mr. Cuse said.
The two men have an easy rapport. Mr. Cuse gave Mr. Lindelof, who refers to him as C. C., one of his first staff writing jobs, on "Nash Bridges," the Don Johnson vehicle. And when J. J. Abrams found himself too tied up with "Alias" and preparations for the movie "Mission Impossible 3," Mr. Lindelof returned the favor, and asked Mr. Cuse to help oversee the staff of about 400 on "Lost."
They both believe in the necessity of a long-range plan for the show, but they both also like to venture off the beaten track. "It's sort of like a road trip from California to New York, and these milestones are cities on the way," said Mr. Cuse. "But on a day-to-day basis, when we get up in the morning we have to make a decision: Are we taking the Interstate, or are we taking the rural byways?"
The writers had planned, for example, to ratchet up the animosity between two characters, Michael Dawson (Harold Perrineau) and Jin-Soo Kwon (Daniel Dae Kim), while developing a romance between Michael and Jin's wife, Sun (Yunjin Kim). But they became invested in the married couple's relationship as they developed their back story in Korea. Meanwhile, as Mr. Perrineau and Mr. Kim became good friends on the Hawaiian set of "Lost," the creative team sought to exploit the chemistry between them, even though their characters did not speak the same language. "When we see stuff we like, we write to it," Mr. Cuse said. "We're viewers with control."
One way they exercise that control is by hewing to the science-fact - as opposed to science-fiction - model they see in the novels of Michael Crichton. "There can be things that are happening that are quote, phenomenal, but there's always a scientific answer to it," said Mr. Lindelof. So when Jack Shephard, the surgeon and supposed voice of reason played by Matthew Fox, has visions of his dead father, care is taken to let the audience know he has gone without sleep for three days. Of course, the ghost does lead him to desperately needed water, so maybe he's not a hallucination after all.
The two men also share an admiration for the storytelling prowess of Stephen King. " 'The Stand' was a book that really informed the idea of 'Lost,' " Mr. Lindelof said. "Thematically they're about the same thing, which is this fundamental 'Live together, die alone' philosophy."
And they both delight in playing mind games with their viewers. Last season, when they introduced the character of Arzt, the annoying, know-it-all high school teacher based on a physics teacher Mr. Lindelof detested, they intentionally had him survive a run-in with the monster. "We let him play for three episodes so we could really convince the audience he was going to make it and not die," Mr. Cuse said. "And then we blew him up."
But some attempts to confound viewers' expectations can boomerang. Convinced that viewers would expect them to avoid a conventional cliffhanger, they went ahead with one, the sight of Jack and John Locke, the paraplegic character (played by Terry O'Quinn) mysteriously cured - if indeed he ever truly was handicapped -staring down into the hatch. Fans felt they were being toyed with and responded with virulent criticism. So at the beginning of this season, the writers have taken pains to be fairly explicit about what's found in the hatch and its implications for the people on the island, particularly on the ongoing and unpredictable battle between faith and reason exemplified by the characters of Locke and Jack.
DESPITE the efforts of Mr. Lindelof, Mr. Cuse and the rest of the creative team to keep the show from "jumping the shark," ultimately their biggest challenge may come from their very success. Unlike J. K. Rowling, who can take comfort in knowing the Harry Potter series will wrap up after seven books, the "Lost" producers do not have such a luxury; as long as the ratings are good, it will run.
The implications for storytelling are enormous. "If we knew this series was 88 episodes, we could plot out exactly where all the pieces of mythology were going to land, and we could build very constructively to an endgame," said Mr. Cuse. "But we don't know and we can't know. For ABC, this is a very financially successful enterprise, and rightfully their goal is to have to it go along as long as they can have it go along."
Mr. Lindelof quickly interjected: "It's the equivalent of, if you get the ratings for Episode 4 of 'Roots' and you call up Alex Haley and go: 'Look, this is doing huge. Does Kunta Kinte need to be free? Can he be freed in Season 3, or even 4 or 5?' "
Frank Spotnitz, who worked on "The X-Files" for eight of its nine years as a writer and eventually as a executive producer, said that series' creator, Chris Carter, did not think the series would go past five years and planned accordingly. When ratings and financial success demanded otherwise, the producers had to improvise. Originally, the plan was to reveal the fate of the sister of Agent Mulder, the F.B.I. agent played by David Duchovny, in the fifth season. Instead, the explanation was held back until Season 7.
"The longer you tease people along, the more hooked they become on the mythology of the show and the more disappointed they'll be by however it's resolved," Mr. Spotnitz said. The emotional resolutions among the characters are more important than fitting the past piece into an ornate jigsaw puzzle, and Mr. Spotnitz is plotting his new ABC show, "Night Stalker," accordingly.
Both Mr. Lindelof and Mr. Cuse embrace Mr. Spotnitz's theory that the show is about the journey, not the ending, and sound resigned to mixed reviews no matter how they resolve the various mysteries. One thing is certain: they won't go the route of the "Matrix" trilogy, in the second installment of which one character took a seemingly interminable amount of time to tell Keanu Reeves's character just what the Matrix was, his role in it and what was going to happen to him in the final movie.
"It's unsatisfying on every level to me as a storyteller, and to most people who saw it," Mr. Lindelof said. "The fact there is someone there to definitively tell me that I was wrong, that my imagination was wrong, is uncool."
But the creators do know how the series ends. The survivors will not learn they are part of some dastardly experiment, or discover they are in purgatory, or wake up from a bad dream. "These guys get off the island," said Mr. Cuse.
Then, nearly in unison, both men add, "If it's an island."
|
|
|
|
Post by Karen on Oct 13, 2005 13:43:02 GMT -5
thelostnumbers.blogspot.com/From the site:
Welcome to The LOST Numbers. The site dedicated to finding the number references 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, & 42 used in episodes of ABC's critically acclaimed and Emmy award-winning drama series LOST.
|
|
|
|
Post by fish1941 on Jan 24, 2006 13:58:25 GMT -5
Shedding Light on a 'Lost' Villain
Tuesday, November 29, 2005By MELANIE McFARLAND
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER TELEVISION CRITICPlenty of television viewers are discussing Michelle Rodriguez these days. That's no accident; her character on ABC's "Lost," the brooding, broken ex-cop Ana Lucia Cortez, became one of the most intensely hated characters on television this fall in a few short episodes. Achieving villain status among "Lost" fans wasn't difficult. All she had to do was be a demanding, increasingly hostile leader and bully Michael (Harold Perrineau), Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) and Sawyer (Josh Holloway), the survivors we already knew and loved. Michelle Rodriguez as Ana Lucia So, when Ana Lucia shot Shannon (Maggie Grace) through the gut at the end of the series' first November sweeps episode, that was, to many, the last straw. Never mind that Shannon was the least deserving of sympathy of all the previously known survivors, that the shooting was a terrible accident, and that the regret on Ana's face was immediately, torturously palpable. Ana Lucia haters merely detested her even more. And that makes the creation of her character, and Rodriguez's hire, strokes of brilliant writing and casting on the part of "Lost" producers J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof. For even if the season has been slow -- and until this month, it has been snail-paced -- Ana Lucia has given us a poignant new reason to watch. She's a hero stewed in pathos, who can't help behaving badly. Still, it makes me wonder what is it about Ana Lucia that has made her so uniquely unappealing to such a wide swath of "Lost" viewers. Interesting character studies of her abound, but the simplest theory is this: She's not cute. Sexy, sure. Beautiful even. But not cute. Think about it. Kate, played by Evangeline Lilly, is adorable. She, Sun (Yunjin Kim) and Claire (Emilie de Ravin) have such sylphlike features, you might believe they came to the island from Rivendell. Kate is also a criminal who robbed a bank, and it has been insinuated that she committed an even worse crime, which is finally going to be revealed tomorrow night at 9 when "Lost" airs on KOMO/4. If she murdered someone who abused her or her mother, which is the main theory circulating out there, one could argue that puts her on the same level as Ana Lucia, who killed the guy who shot her, taking the life of her unborn child and leading her lover to abandon her. That also makes Kate cut from the same cloth as Thelma and Louise, whereas Ana Lucia's a more kindred spirit with Ripley from "Aliens." Ripley was crazy in her own right, but that was acceptable because she was shooting hungry space roaches. In a situation like that, crazy is called for. Ana, on the other hand, was forced to kill other human beings -- three who had it coming, one who didn't. In truth, many passed sentence on Ana Lucia long before she killed Shannon. They despise her perpetual scowl, her take-charge nature, her inability to be reasoned away from her dictatorial decisions in leading her fellow survivors from the back end of Oceanic Airlines flight 815. A few episodes into the second season, the Ana Lucia hate postings littering the Internet are numerous. Some of the interesting ones are available at www.losttv-forum.com and www.thefuselage.com, home of The Official Ana Lucia Hate Club, and of course, www.televisionwithoutpity.com. Such threads are not particularly unique; hundreds of sites run on malevolent feelings towards TV characters. The campaign against Ana feels a bit different in that it is, at its core, impatient and a tad hypocritical. Like everyone else on the island, her past has shaped the way she's reacting to the cruel circumstances of the present. She was a trained law enforcer who, when the plane and chaos exploded around her, fell back on her training to take charge, just like Jack (Matthew Fox) did for the primary group. She saved lives and helped organize her fellow survivors. But, unlike the other group, the Tailie group was smaller and less cohesive -- prime prey for the Others, the island's disturbing residents. So here we have a protector, who lost a child and, in the accident, gained a chance to fill the void that left by protecting a couple of kids on the plane, only to have them literally ripped away from her by psychotic strangers. Most people would have gone as feral as she under the circumstances. But let's put things in perspective. "Lost" fans adore Sawyer, a con man, Charlie (Dominic Monaghan), a heroin addict who leeched off of people in his other life, and Kate, a wanted fugitive. Even the soulful Sayid (Naveen Andrews) used to torture his fellow Iraqis. An ocean's worth of distance from their pasts have made them softer. Sayid himself understands Ana's regret, even if she killed the woman he loved -- who, it bears reminding viewers, falsely reported Sayid to airport authorities before she knew him, just for kicks. Somehow Ana Lucia is less worthy of redemption because she's the most thoroughly unredeemable of women: a tomboy, and a bitch. Then again, that's how we know her now. "Lost" is, above all, a show about revealing layers. Until now, we've had a lot of people who are pretty or enigmatic on the outside revealing the secrets within, some of them vicious and ugly. Ana Lucia flipped this around, making the challenge to Rodriguez to make us dig for some solid point of empathy. Should we watch to see whether that happens -- and we probably will -- the girl's obviously doing something right. P-I TV critic Melanie McFarland can be reached at 206-448-8015 or tvgal@seattlepi.com. seattlepi.nwsource.com/tv/250...tml?source=rss
|
|
|
|
Post by Karen on May 27, 2006 14:37:16 GMT -5
|
|
|
|
Post by Spaced Out Looney on Nov 14, 2006 20:05:00 GMT -5
|
|
|
|
Post by fish1941 on Nov 16, 2006 12:54:37 GMT -5
I have some questions of my own:
1. Why didn't Ana-Lucia or Sayid question Charlie about how he managed to get possession of a gun in "The Whole Truth", following Sawyer's little con job? And why didn't Jack ask the same question, when Ana-Lucia gave him the gun in "S.O.S."?
2. Why did the Others (aka The Dharma Initiative) kidnap Jack, Kate and Sawyer, when they had the chance in "The Hunting Party"?
3. Why didn't the Others simply approach Jack and the other Losties after their plane crash, if Ben needed an operation?
4. Why didn't Jack and the Others set out to search for Walt, following Shannon's burial in either "What Kate Saw?" or "The 23rd Psalms"?
5. Why did Jack and the Losties set out to get Michael back in "The Hunting Party", but didn't bother to search for Walt, earlier?
6. When will Sun and Jin learn that Charlie was the one who had attacked Sun?
7. Why hasn't the disease that killed Danielle's husband and colleagues, has not touched the survivors of Flight 815?
|
|
|
|
Post by Sara on May 23, 2007 8:42:53 GMT -5
I could not possibly agree with this salon.com article more...
Tease me
Others may gripe about "Lost's" many mysteries. Me, I embrace the delayed gratification of TV's first tantric narrative.
By Daniel Zalewski
May 23, 2007 | Am I the only "Lost" fan who is still content to be lost? Wednesday night, I fully expect the third season's final episode to end with a narrative swerve that will compound, rather than resolve, the show's shamelessly proliferating mysteries. After watching some 60 hours of television, I will likely remain unable to answer the most basic of questions: What strange properties does the island possess? Was the crash of Oceania Flight 815 really an accident? Why do all the survivors have such melodramatic pasts? Yet I won't be irritated in the least. To become impatient with "Lost" is to misunderstand it. The series may be television's first tantric narrative. Every week, the show withholds gratification by adding even more contortions to its already tangled plot; yet it continues to promise that a gobsmacking climax will eventually arrive. I believe that this moment will indeed come -- sometime in the spring of 2010, when the show is scheduled to end. And I'm content to wait. Why should everything be illuminated? Sometimes it's more fun to be in the dark.
Like everyone who watches the program, I'm baffled by many elements of "Lost": the shipwrecked slave ship that's inexplicably rotting away in the middle of the jungle; the eerily comprehensive dossiers that the Others have compiled on the castaways; that crazy black-smoke monster. But I'm even more baffled by viewers who demand, with increasing crankiness, "answers" to the show's biggest secrets. "Lost" is not a crossword puzzle, people! Moreover, there's a point to our collective bewilderment. Viewers of "Lost" are placed in the same dreadful, thrilling position as the castaways, who, thrust into a fiercely bizarre world, feel compelled to explore it frond by frond, even as they sense that something ominous lurks just outside their field of understanding. The castaways aren't professional detectives; they're ordinary people muddling their way toward enlightenment. It makes sense that this journey takes time. (This may explain why one of my favorite characters is Jin, the Korean gangster, who originally spoke no English, and after three seasons speaks no better than a toddler. No matter how confusing things get on "Lost," Jin will always be even more flummoxed than we are.) The show's odd pacing, I think, is connected to the fact that it more closely resembles a video game such as "Myst" -- in which players wander through an alternate universe, sometimes amassing clues and sometimes just idling -- than a conventional television serial.
To those who feel that the show's occult scenario should, by now, be fully explicated, I cite the sad example of "Twin Peaks," which initially maintained a seductive aura of infinite strangeness. Remember how unexciting it was to learn, in the show's second season, that Laura Palmer was murdered by her father? (He was tormented by having perpetrated incest.) Suddenly, "Twin Peaks" seemed not much different than "All My Children," and the show imploded. The pleasure of a mystery plot, it turns out, lies almost entirely in anticipatory speculation. If "Lost" were to give away the island's secrets too soon, it would devolve into a lushly landscaped action movie.
I am equally unsympathetic to the complaint that the show's plot -- proudly loopy since the first episode -- has become too byzantine. This is like complaining that "Bleak House" is too long, or "Scarface" too violent. The creators of "Lost" are consciously, and comically, taking the conspiracy genre to an absurd extreme. ("The X-Files," once pummeled for its burdensome "mythology," seems quaint by comparison.) Intricacy is one of "Lost's" deepest pleasures. Indeed, the baroque, flashback-laden structure of the show probably wouldn't have been viable before the advent of the Web, TiVo and high-definition screens. Many moments of the show are now clearly designed with TiVo (or the Internet screen capture) in mind -- for example, the split-second confirmation, two weeks ago, that "Jacob" is not entirely a figment of Ben's imagination. Such stunts annoy more casual viewers, but devoted fans love that "Lost" rewards such fetishistic attention. No cultural creation since "Gravity's Rainbow" has occasioned this much feverish annotation; the Web site Lostpedia.com contains more than 3,000 pages.
I find it peculiarly satisfying that the same electronic hive mind that catalogs every plot turn and philosophical allusion on "Lost" has not been able to unravel the island's secret history. On the Internet, viewers have proposed all manner of possible solutions: There's the "shared hallucination" theory, the "last humans" theory. All these explanations, however, seem insufficient or askew. Remarkably, the writers of "Lost" have created something so singularly odd that it can't be disassembled and decoded by the Wikipedia generation.
So do the writers really have a stunning revelation planned for "Lost"? Or, as some suspect, are they just vamping until the last customer leaves the bar? Some insight was offered, perhaps, by the recent episode "Exposé," which struck me as the creators' sly comment on audience expectations. In Season 2, two new castaways, Paolo and Nikki, were introduced in a manner that struck many frustrated fans as suspiciously haphazard. The addition of these two attractive cast members, critics complained, supplied some fresh eye candy, but the characters' scenes didn't seem to advance the plot; Paolo and Nikki became Exhibit A in the argument that "Lost" had become a rudderless soap opera. But "Exposé" -- which dispatched with Paolo and Nikki in a devilish tale worthy of Poe -- made clear that their destinies had been planned out with tremendous care. The writers of "Lost" weren't just entertaining us; they were sending a message: Trust us. Everything will come together in a delirious rush. All you have to do is wait.
|
|
|
|
Post by Anne, Old S'cubie Cat on Mar 24, 2008 17:08:59 GMT -5
I finally found the quote; or, why I am very, very annoyed with Mr Lindelof. And thereby hangs a tale... There was an article in the LA Times, back in February 2008 when the writers' strike was being settled, that included a section about Lost. Well, I read it, and then when I went looking for it again, I couldn't find it. I've been googling the interwebs off and on ever since, and I was beginning to think it was some kind of Dharma hallucination, but suddenly this afternoon, there it was. Mr. Lindelof, for whom I no longer have any respect, was asked, basically, what next? His response, in part (emphases mine): If all goes as planned, the producers will begin talking about stories with the writers on Wednesday, Lindelof said. The difficulties, he added, might lie in remembering all of the characters, mysteries and island secrets.
Like the Dharma Initiative? (If you don't know what this is, it will take the length of another strike to explain.)
"Everything I've forgotten about the Dharma Initiative is best left forgotten," Lindelof said. "The good news about time away from the show is that you remember the good stuff. If you've forgotten about it, it's probably best not to be reminded.So, if he doesn't remember something, it wasn't important.  Excuse me? We the viewers have been trying to keep track of all these freakin' little details for three freakin' seasons and it's "best left forgotten"? Razzlefratzin' frazzlratzin son of a four-toed...   *Deep breath* *Deep breath* *Puts down Mr Bolty, carefully* And that, dear S'cubies, is why I have no respect for the creator of Lost anymore. |
|
|
|
Post by Sara on Mar 24, 2008 20:26:29 GMT -5
I finally found the quote; or, why I am very, very annoyed with Mr Lindelof. And thereby hangs a tale... There was an article in the LA Times, back in February 2008 when the writers' strike was being settled, that included a section about Lost. Well, I read it, and then when I went looking for it again, I couldn't find it. I've been googling the interwebs off and on ever since, and I was beginning to think it was some kind of Dharma hallucination, but suddenly this afternoon, there it was. Mr. Lindelof, for whom I no longer have any respect, was asked, basically, what next? His response, in part (emphases mine): If all goes as planned, the producers will begin talking about stories with the writers on Wednesday, Lindelof said. The difficulties, he added, might lie in remembering all of the characters, mysteries and island secrets.
Like the Dharma Initiative? (If you don't know what this is, it will take the length of another strike to explain.)
"Everything I've forgotten about the Dharma Initiative is best left forgotten," Lindelof said. "The good news about time away from the show is that you remember the good stuff. If you've forgotten about it, it's probably best not to be reminded.So, if he doesn't remember something, it wasn't important. Excuse me? We the viewers have been trying to keep track of all these freakin' little details for three freakin' seasons and it's "best left forgotten"? Razzlefratzin' frazzlratzin son of a four-toed... *Deep breath* *Deep breath* *Puts down Mr Bolty, carefully* And that, dear S'cubies, is why I have no respect for the creator of Lost anymore. Copying from the main board... My reaction to the article Anne pointed us to was a bit different than Anne's. To me (and it takes reading hte whole answer by Lindelof) he is saying that he isn't gonna worry about trying to tie everything up this season. Not that a lot of the clues are meaningless, jsut that at least some are not going to be fleshed out. He goes on to say that they are going to concentrate on the mysteries of the Season: about who the Oceanic 6 are, who is in charge of the freighter, the mysteries maybe about the staged plane crash. They still have two more Seasons (hopefully not ones interrupted by strikes) to give us the "whole" story. I think maybe he was even suggesting that they weren't going to be going overboard in new clues, but instead trying to bring some things to closure. I haven't lost faith in LOST... not yet. (Tho' I did go through a dark spell starting in Season 2 that lasted 'til the back half of Season 3) Vlad I have read the article several times, in full, because I couldn't believe he'd actually said that. It was in my local newspaper in the first place. My problem is with Lindelof's "if I can't remember it, it isn't important" attitude. I don't expect to have every single loose end tied up. I do, however, expect them to keep track of their own world, and to respect the viewers who have been encouraged to keep track of all those little details. Anne, if the creator doesn't care about his own little details, why should we? Couple of observations I'm just going to throw out there: 1. If you've ever seen an interview with Lindelof or Cuse (or, better yet, the two of them together) you know that they tend to joke around. A lot. Sometimes their humor can be very tongue-in-cheek, and like Joss it's often all about the delivery: if you don't hear them say it, it can be hard to know whether they were being facetious or not. And I think Lindelof sometimes tries too hard to be funny, resulting in a clunker or two—this could easily be one of those times. 2. In a more recent interview, Lindelof had this to say (the question was about how the producers can truthfully respond when answering specific questions about the story): The reality is, anything that Carlton and I say, or anyone involved with the show says, that is all part of the politicking that sort of surrounds the show. We like the idea of being answerable to the show, that is to say if we do something the fans don't like we can come forward and apologize for it and explain what the thought process was for executing that story line. Or, vice versa, if we do something people really like we get to sort of pull that forward and explain, for instance, that we weren't able to do the flash forward part of the story until they promised us an end to the show, and this is how we were able to end the show, and this is why we are doing three more seasons, and so on. The fans are owed those explanations. But, in a lot of ways it is like J.K. Rowling revealing that Dumbledore was gay. She's saying this, and it is part of her talking about the books, but all that matters at the end of the day is the books. So, watching the show Lost, you watch it and the data is there for you to form whatever theories you have, and you can't factor in anything that even the creators or actors are saying about the show outside of the show, because at the end of the day the show will be processed in six DVD box sets. It will be completely irrelevant as to whether we confirmed or denied or speculated. The one thing that Carlton and I are steadfast on saying over and over again, and that we're not lying about is that the show is not all a dream. It's happening in the real world, there are real stakes, you're not going to get to the end and cut to black and suddenly realize that this was all sort of a fantasy. That's the only thing that we sort of need to get out there in the world, because it does diffuse a lot of wacky theories.To me that sounds like a guy who takes his obligation to the fans seriously pretty seriously, not one who'd blow off a huge part of the show's past. He also said in another interview when asked about the DHARMA Initiative: "You haven't seen your last station. But the larger mythos, like ''The Purge'' — that's more season 5." So there could also be some truth to what Vlad said about his comments relating to this season specifically, not the show in general. 3. Lindelof isn't the only one in charge: he does have a co-executive producer, Carlton Cuse. So just 'cause he says something about where the story will and won't go it doesn't mean it's written in stone.  |
|
|
|
Post by Sara on Oct 27, 2009 11:03:37 GMT -5
|
|
