I don’t think anyone watched the show, (heck, I only caught it in reruns) but The Naked Truth TV sitcom series had one of the absolute best “fuck you” endings ever. The cast literally gets lost over the ocean in a hot air ballon and flies away never to be seen again.
This ending is only topped by the end of Quantum Leap.
No matter how LOST ends, it would have to work hard to get as bad as those.
Some seem to be in purgatory, like Michael. Whom you may not know, since you’ve only watched one episode. He and his fellow Purgatonians whisper.
HRose
6523
Could someone elaborate why X-Files ending was disappointing?
I feel the same way. I’ve felt that way probably since sometime in season 5. I mean, sure, it has its moments, but knowing everything we know now, with all the ridiculousness and the low points, I’d opt out.
I wonder how short the show would have been if the characters would FUCKING TALK to eachother.
Bitch and moan about this show all you want, but even at its low points it’s been head and shoulders better than about 90 percent of what’s been on TV the last 6 years. A show that can make you cry AND doesn’t (usually) treat you like you’re stupid? Sign me up for another six years of that.
And it’s generated 6,500+ posts on a message board that isn’t even ABOUT Lost.
Number of posts isn’t necessarily what I would consider good evidence of high quality. See the Palin thread for an example.
For me:
The show was about Fox Mulder’s search for ‘the truth’. This search was motivated by the abduction of his sister. So in looking for the truth, he was looking for the answer of what happened to his sister.
It’s a no-brainer then that when it is time to end the show it should end with the end of Mulder’s search. My idea was that he should reach a point where he could know the truth and expose the conspiracy to the world but never find out what happened to his sister OR give up all hope and chance of exposing the conspiracy but at least find out definitely what happened to her(alive or dead).
Instead of course they ran the show well after the sister thing was, sort of, resolved(in a lame way I might add).
And to top it off, the ending is basically Fox Mulder saying that he believes there is some higher power on top of things and protecting the faithful. C’mon! I watched years of that show to see Mulder find not his sister but God? A cool show about alien weirdness and other creepy crawlies castrated at the climax, that’s how you snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
HRose
6529
My point is that X-Files at least delivered its promises. The mythology has a point and mysteries were ultimately revealed.
I don’t think there was a part of the mythology that collapsed or failed at some point. The show got worse because they played with the format and decided to go on without Mulder and repeat a pattern without adding anything meaningful to the story. So X-Files failings are more in stretching the plot too wide, than in having it crumbling or a failure in closing it.
Lost failures are in not even trying to tie everything they introduced to a unitarian vision. It fails because it’s an unmotivated castle of cards that doesn’t even explore the nature or the consolidation of myth.
When was Lost mythology successful? The hatch. They discover the door to the hatch, and slowly the mystery builds up, leading to a subterranean installation, that makes them discover the Dharma and its experiments and that on the island is going on a lot more than what they expected. It a slow descent into knowledge. The more it is revealed, the more the mythology consolidated and gained a direction.
The hatch delivered on all fronts. What it was revealed to be was far greater than anyone’s guesses. It was spooky and its resolution didn’t subtract from what happened before.
Where Lost fails? Exactly when Jacob and MiB are revealed. The mythology is quickly shrunk to a core that leaks on all fronts. The Dharma and all experiments become just derails and it all comes down to mysticism whose only interesting parts are rooted in the psychosis of an old woman.
It fails because of subtraction, because everything that was built along the way collapsed into nothingness. It’s like the last section of Half-Life, that forgets what the game is about and hands you a crappy platform.
Whatever. My main point stands.
drewl
6531
Nice summation HRose,what could have been a show about scientific experiments and weirdness gone awry dissolved into a fight between otherwordly entities.
Or every piracy related thread.
It would be amusing if Jacob’s twin name is Dharma.
Right before season 2 of Lost started, I remember reading a New York Times article about how the Lost creators had looked at the downward spiral of the X-Files and learned from their mistakes.
Ah well.
To be fair, they didn’t let the show drag on for 9 years, including a number of season where the stars had left and were replaced by boring characters no one cared about. They also don’t appear to be making a futile attempt to “answer all the questions”, something X-Files tried quite clumsily in the end.
Yeah, the X-Files’ last couple of seasons, and especially the series finale, were horribly disappointing. Chris Carter and the other writers painted themselves into a corner and couldn’t make the overarching mythos cohere by the end. By comparison Lost feels to me like it’s doing a lot better.
The worst part about the X-Files finale is you spend all that time adventuring around the country and the world, fighting monsters and chasing aliens, but how do they choose to end it? Courtroom drama… And it didn’t even give you the prosecution of the conspirators or, like, a whole Senate hearing as would seem appropriate. The proper end to an FBI investigation is supposed to be a successful prosecution, after all. But Mulder was the one on trial! What the hell is that?
X-Files was dead for years before someone put it out of its misery. It contradicted its own mythology or treaded the same ground dozens of times. How many times did we find his sister? How many times did Sculley forget about the overwhelming evidence of aliens/supernatural/sharks with friggin lasers/etc?
Lost is in a class by itself, and unfortunately there won’t be anything around to compare with it for some time I fear.
HRose
6539
The best part of Lost is that the disappointment is making me rewatch:
- Twin Peaks
- Aguirre: the Wrath of God
