1. "Lost is a show about the characters and their stories. The mysteries are just secondary."


This seems to be a popular line among the Lost-defenders out there. Whats funny to me is that for 5 seasons whenever people complained about not getting answers, the response was always "Just wait...its still early in the story." And now that we haven't gotten those answers, the response is to tell us that the story was purely character driven and that the answers aren't all that important. I think thats BS.

I think that if the Lost-defenders were honest with themselves, they'd admit that the show's main appeal has always been the mystery aspect. Its the mysteries that have caused us to spend hours and hours on online message boards debating different things. Its the mysteries that caused us to go back and rewatch old episodes for clues. Think back to some of the best scenes in the history of the show such as Michael shooting Ana Lucia and Libby, Eithan not being on the plane's manifest, finding out that it was a flash forward and not a flashback at the end of season 3, first seeing Jacob and MiB at the beginning of the season 5 finale, etc. What do they all have in common? They're all great scenes because they're either great reveals or great cliffhangers. I think that anyone who doesn't admit that this is the major reason Lost is so popular is simply lying to themselves to justify how poorly the writers have handled the conclusion of so many mysteries.

Even if I were accept that "its a character driven show", then I don't think the characters are collectively strong enough to make it anything more than an average show. Don't get me wrong....Ben and Locke were phenomenal characters. Sayid, Desmond, Richard, and a few others were very solid as well. However, there were definitely a ton of weak characters such as Kate, Shannon, Boone, Claire, Sun(early on she was ok, but her character was horrendous after her and Jin got separated), Michael, etc. As a whole, the characters' stories just aren't compelling enough to make Lost anything more than a slightly above average TV show.

Listing the best characters only proves that its a mystery show imo. Ben and Locke were quite clearly the two best characters imo, and not surprisingly.....they had huge mysteries concerning their character's intentions and beliefs throughout the show!


Lost clearly marketed itself as a mystery show all along. Every promo was about mysteries and answers to those mysteries. The cliffhangers, the music to build suspense as a cliffhanger/reveal was happening, the character's vague communication, etc. was all in line with a mystery show. And that is what made it so great! So I'm simply not buying this nonsense about it being a character driven show all along.



2. The journey was indeed quite fun and very well done in certain parts.


I'm sure that because of the overall tone of my post, most people will think I hate the show. Thats not true at all. Through 5 seasons it was my favorite show of all time, and I argued for it as the best show ever quite a few times. The scenery was great, Emerson and O Quinn were brilliant in their roles, Sawyer/Hurley provided decent comic relief, the music fit the show perfectly, and so on. Theres definitely a lot to like about the show, and I do admit that I enjoyed it a lot.


3. My expectations were clearly too high, but I still think they could've done a lot better.

As I've mentioned before in these threads, I love movies with big twist endings that make you want to go back and rewatch the movie from the beginning. Movies such as The Usual Suspects, Fight Club, Sixth Sense all do a great job of this. And I was hopeful that whenever the "big reveal" happened in Lost that I'd want to go back and rewatch it from the very beginning.

I guess that with a TV show it just isn't possible to have a totally cohesive story and tie all the loose ends together. But I dunno....I'm not a writer by any means, yet even I can think of some pretty cool ideas that would've easily been better than what they did. A few things I thought would've been cool:

-The Losties traveled back in time to the 1970s(and earlier) and we find out that every problem they encountered in 2004 was actually caused by them in the past. Ben wasn't lying at all when he said "We're the good guys" as they were simply trying to fix the Losties mistakes. I thought that the "we're the good guys" line was actually one of the most interesting things about the early/mid seasons because the Others seemed so obviously bad on the surface. I thought it would've been really mind blowingly awesome if upon rewatching the show, we would've seen that the Others were actually 100% good all along and only appearing bad because of the situation that the Losties put them in when they time traveled. The show kinda hinted at this a bit with Richard only thinking Locke was important because Locke telling him in the 1950s and with Ben only betraying his people because of Sayid, but they had a great chance to tie everything up that way and they just didn't do it.

-Locke was actually Flocke for quite a long time. Locke was a really strange character with a lot of mysterious beliefs and a quickness to have "faith in the island". I though it would've been really cool to see that after one of his meetings with smokey or when he "saw into the heart of the island" that something really did change(i.e. it was no longer Locke) and that would give a great explanation to his character's actions throughout the series.

-There was a lot more to the "Desmond skipping through time" storyline, and they could've ran with that idea a lot more. Perhaps some of the other main characters such as Widamore and Ben were also skipping through time(when they mentioned that they couldn't kill each other in Widamore's hotel room, my theory was that they were each other's constant).

-Have Aaron be extremely important and the entire "don't let him be raised by another" be 100% true. I speculated a few weeks ago that maybe Alt-timeline Aaron would be raised by Claire and that he would grow up to be good(Jacob?) and the one not raised by Claire would grow up to be bad(MiB?)...it might not be the best story in the world, but at least it would've tied together a lot of loose ends and made the early season happenings actually mean something.


There were quite a few ways for them to go about answering all of these questions, but they decided to make the Jacob/MiB storyline the major one. And I just never really liked their storyline at all. I've already mentioned how bad I think Across the Sea was, and that probably is the main reason I don't like their characters....their motivations and actions simply don't make all that much sense. It definitely doesn't have me itching to go back to rewatch the show from the beginning.....if anything, I bet I'll just get more pissed off doing that because of the inconsistencies I'll find.


I think there were at least 10 theories I read on online message boards that I would've liked a lot more than the Jacob/MiB "story" we got. I put "story" quotes because I still don't feel as if we even got their story, which is my main complaint.



4. Looking back now, character's actions/motivations make even less sense.

-So why exactly did Ben go through all that trouble just to get Jack to operate on him? Jack loved saving people! There was absolutely no reason to not just go up, introduce yourself, and ask for Jack's help.

-Why were the Others so confrontational? Now that we know that the Others were just a random group of largely irrelevant people, it doesn't really make sense that they'd be so rude about "This is our island, don't cross this line ever again" type of stuff.

-WTF was Widamore's motivation? He hired Abbadon and a ton of other people, he set in place a ton of events(Abbadon telling Locke to first go to the island, telling Locke to go back to the island, etc.), him and Eloise supposedly were ok with murdering their child because of some greater good, him and Ben had some huge feud which was never really explained or even important, etc.

-There is a statue to Tawaret, they bring a fertility doctor to the island, Walt and Aaron are seemingly incredibly important....all of which leads us to believe that kids/pregnancy has some huge importance.

-Dharma....they were so interesting early on. Its so disappointing that their entire storyline is pretty much "A bunch of scientists found that the island had a ton of weird properties, they did experiments, their experiments never were successful enough to accomplish much."




5. Its just bad writing


Making certain things/characters seem really important, building suspense about them, and then revealing that they aren't important is simply bad writing. And Lost did this time and time again. Even if you buy into the "it was merely a character driven show" then you still have to acknowledge that Lost did this a ton of times and that its simply horrible writing. I won't even bother listing all of the examples here because theres too many. Some people will say that its just the nature of a TV show as its hard to plan so far ahead, but I would then point to things like the temple...it was only introduced in season 6 and it ended up being completely meaningless.




Cliff notes: Lost was a mystery-driven show. The writers built a ton of mysteries but had no real ideas on how to conclude them. So instead of concluding them, they gave a ton of unsatisfactory answers. Now several Lost fans are claiming that "it was a character driven show all along."