Of course, the common thread to both Lost and BSG is that they have defined a set end-point for the series. The pattern makes sense if you think about the series of events:
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Concept drama with serial arc story-telling debuts, nobody knows if it will be successful so they pack a lot of story into the first season.
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Show is giant hit, suits think “omg this thing may run for 10 years, we better start padding it out”, pressure writers to milk it, lots of filler episodes appear, things begin to move incredibly slowly.
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Show slides into suckage.
By defining a fairly reasonable end-point both Lost and BSG seem to have pulled up out of that nosedive.
I’m not sure where Heroes fits into this. I’m starting to think maybe the creative team just got really insanely lucky in the first season (up to but not including the finale) and they just aren’t good enough to continue at the high level they set for themselves.
I think it would be even better if Ben told Locke that Locke was his man on the boat.
XPav
3483
And then a door was opened in the back of Ben’s house that led… ONTO THE BOAT.
Even better would be if instead of a door it was a telephone booth, and George Carlin was inside. That would be most excellent.
Season two was pretty obviously raped by the writer’s strike. Season one left me enthused but cautious (the finale was underwhelming), and while Season two was basically terrible, I’m willing to ignore it when it comes to expectations for season 3.
Season 2 was raped by some of the worst fucking writing in the history of television. The show was horrible before the strike was even on the horizon.
Yeah. They finished their “Second book” before the strike began.
A bunch more scenes of Hiro amongst the cherry blossoms wasn’t going to fix anything.
And they did the Ebola twins on purpose. There wasn’t even a cool twist or anything. Just a boatload of coincidences, a long story Nikki getting vaguely sick, and then the damn virus turns out to be something that was in a vault in Texas since the seventies. You mean that after all that you had never planned on having the Twins somehow be responsible for the your rehash of the first season’s future plot?
Seriously?
I think the bigger issue was that there wasn’t much time to implement feedback. I think they were already filming the eighth or ninth episode of the season by the time a lot of negative feedback hit in early October. Tim Kring was pretty forthright about their shortcomings in interviews, apologizing for the quality of thes how and promising some major changes for the second half of the season but then the strike hit.
Actually, it’s amazing how fast they were able to address the negative feedback. A less than 8 week turnaround between complaints and things to address those complaints? That’s a fucking miracle in TV land.
The bigger problem is their initial ideas sucked massive wang. Period. The rest of the season’s suck was a necessary consequence.
Ergo
3490
How does it feel to be so horribly, horribly wrong? I really can’t even imagine it, so you’ll need to go into some detail.
Jacob puts the “mentalist” in “environmentalist.”
Perhaps a good point. But the voiceover we got on the HD feed said something about finding out who the “last of the Oceanic 6” is - or some other such phrase meaning " you already know 5." (Jack, Kate, Sayid, Aaron, Hurley)
Finer point: How happy do you think they were to get that excellent leaner horseshoe shot? I imagine that’s hard to choreograph.
Magnets! Or they just let the staff play horseshoes for a few hours and filmed it. This is probably why I’m not a professional horseshoe choreographer.
Well, maybe. But if I had six of something and I had already given you four and then I gave you the other two, those would be the last of the six.
DT1
3494
I think CCZ is right. I think it is Sun and Jin. They’ve hinted at it in the narrative quite a bit. Plus, Aaron doesn’t have the acting chops to be a major character going forward.
I can almost imagine it just being one of them, since Sun’s father is in a pretty good position to help fight Widmore or Hanso or whoever the heck is really behind the off-island forces. If just Jin survived, he’d be in a position to seek his help, if Sun survived, her new, more self-assured personality would give her more leverage to demand it.
It has to be just one of them. That’s the whole Jin Sun arc in a nutshell.
Well their episode is next so…
— Alan
I think I just figured out the Ben/Juliette thing:
She’s Ben’s constant.
Although that would mean there’s a past there we haven’t seen yet.
JeffL
3499
My guess: Sun (she’s the woman, right?) goes, the guy stays, in some heroic gesture.
Either way, her dad is directly involved with either Hanso or Widmore.
