Like Jazar, I was expecting that MiB would be revealed to be someone we know. Maybe his name is Jack! (Aaron is a more clever guess.) Failing that, his name would reveal him to be a historical or mythical figure with whom we’re acquainted.
That expectation was driven by importance of time travel in the series. Time travel is a cheap device, but it does allow the writer to set up complex and surprising plots. The writers initially explicitly said that they weren’t going to resort to time travel, then introduced time travel as a major part of the plot. Why do that unless you’re going to leverage time travel to explain what’s going on?
Even going into the final episode, I was fully expecting that there would be some sort of pseudo-scientific, almost-unifying explanation, presumably rooted in time travel. Perhaps the glowy light at the center of the island in some ways parallels the anomaly in the finale of TNG, caused thousands of years ago by present day events on the island, and somehow being both the cause and effect of the Losties’ adventures. Future technologies, like a security system which uses sentient black smoke to stop intruders, could explain weird happenings on the island. Something clever exploiting time travel had to conclude the series.
Instead, the mysterious name was just another unresolved mystery, time travel was irrelevant, magic and religion were introduced in addition to time travel as cheap devices which can explain almost anything, and we still didn’t get any satisfying explanations.
While I gave up on the show offering a coherent explanation for any of the goings on about midway through the final season, I’m still let down that they didn’t leverage the time travel motif to do so. I really enjoyed the fifth season, and I think its storyline presented an excellent opportunity to wrap the show up in a way that was satisfying on both a character and plot level. Not only did they go with magic as the cause for everything, it’s about the shallowest example of magic one can imagine. It’s just there, everyone accepts it, and in fact several characters somehow know how it functions.
(Sorry, I realize this post is sort of redundant and mostly just repeating what you said, but the entire last season left a really bad taste in my mouth. In retrospect the whole thing feels like a big waste of time. HumanTon summed up the problem really well back here.)
I personally don’t get the anger over the lack them naming the MiB. For the vast majority of the time you see him on screen, it isn’t even something who looks like the MiB; it’s something that looks like Locke. Only in one episode (“Across the Sea”) do you see the original man whose shape the Smoke Monster takes on, but then only for a couple of episodes, too. The vast majority of the time we see it, the Smoke Monster looks like Locke, and even comes to think of itself as Locke. He even answers when Jack calls him “Locke”. The Smoke Monster was losing the distinction between itself and the man whose form he had taken. It’s name was never dangled or dragged along as being important, in my estimation. The Man With No Name is the perfect analog for him/it; it literally wouldn’t change a thing if anyone knew it.
“_______ raped my childhood!” If only they had given him a name!
The above quoted post about the ending and “magic” comes off to me as sour grapes because they went with an ending that wasn’t science fiction. If they had come up with a terrible ST:TNG ending, you would have been happy. Because they made the story’s central conceit spiritual, it ruined the whole show for you. Hand-waving based on “science” just as much fantasy as the nondescript religious hand-waving would have saved the day. I think that is the rub for many people; the writers got religion in my sciency stuff!
“The glowy cave raped my childhood!” If only it had been a spaceship left by the Gamma Gobulans with a security system from the Delta Quadrant 5,000 years ago!
I think that they could have done the final season straight up without a mystery/sideways world but they kept the framework the series had used throughout. I don’t view the time travel as irrelevant, as it allowed light to be shed on the Dharma folks, how Ben got to be the way he was, how the Hatch got to be there, what the Incident was, etc. It was just another vehicle by which to tell the story, another one of the genre conventions that was utilized along with Mysterious Island, Secretive Corporation, Unknown Monsters, and Weird Energy.
Read Tracy Baker’s last response above again and see if you get it.
The above post about the ending and “magic” comes off to me as sour grapes because they went with an ending that wasn’t science fiction.
You’re really, well, lost on this point. Here is what we were promised when the show started:
While Lost is an amalgam of different genres, including SF, Fury explained that realism is the key in making it all work. “What we are trying to do is make sure everything has a very Scully explanation,” Fury said, referring to the X-Files character. “This is not a show about the supernatural, despite the fact that we have a very huge creature that likes to eat people. Despite the surreal, bizarre aspects of the island, there will be an explanation for it. It may not come for a very long time, but certain information about the island will explain how things are possible. We’ll try to root it in real science or real pseudo-science. There will be no mystical reason or an island of monsters.”’
At the end of the day the half-assed explanation was “a wizard did it.” It’s just terrible writing, particularly given we were explicitly told that the explanation would not be some variant on “a wizard did it.” Read that a few more times: “There will be no mystical reason.” Oh, and on the matter of frustration:
I agree with JJ on that point.
If they had come up with a terrible ST:TNG ending, you would have been happy.
The finale of TNG was not terrible. For starters, it wasn’t “a wizard did it.” I am not irritated because the story drew on supernatural elements—I love lots of stories with supernatural elements—I’m irritated because the story was incredibly badly written.
Puh-leeze. I’ve seen more emotionally-charged screeds in the Bargain Thread. Lots of Lost’s aspects annoyed and disappointed me, but a show about a bunch of yahoos trapped on a mysterious island is never going to get me angry.
David Fury hasn’t been with the show for 5 years. That warranty has obviously been expired for a while. Also, the monster didn’t eat people, either, so TWO LIES.
Given that the Island itself wasn’t purgatory, you guys are in perfect sync. That the characters meet up in the afterlife was far from excluded from the Abrams’ quote.
Again, by a guy who hasn’t been associated with the show since the first season. It really isn’t terrible writing but we will just have to disagree about that.
You think that’s air you’re breathing?
I didn’t mean that the actual TNG ending was terrible; a [terrible] sci-fi ending that could have been in a TNG episode was more of what I meant. While it wasn’t how I would have chosen to end the series, I was very much moved by many of the events in the finale. Both the characters’ journeys and my journey with them (along with this thread, at some point, too)was ending. That spoken lines and moving pictures would affect me so leads me to believe it was not, in fact, terrible writing.
That’s an important distinction I haven’t really made until recently. Lost’s writing was fine overall – it was one of the main reasons I stuck with the show for six seasons, and other than annoyances like characters rarely asking or answering burning questions I enjoyed it. The storytelling, on the other hand, violates nearly every maxim of storytelling ever written.
Up until now I’ve never made any real distinction between writing and storytelling, but after doing so it’s pretty amazing to reexamine everything I’ve read and watched while weighing each of those elements separately.
God. Why after so many posts and responses, do people not get the whole MiB name thing? The writers present us an unnamed man, and actually go far, far out of their way to avoid giving us his name. It may have actually been completely unimportant (it was), but they led us all to believe that it was, indeed, important. The fact that they went through such extraordinary lengths to shield the audience from a name, while at the same time knowing the name meant nothing, simply means that they were just fucking with us. It’s brilliant writing, but in the end, terrible storytelling. Chekhov’s gun is a perfect way to put it. Don’t load it unless you’re ready to fire.
That’s a great piece, and I agree with most of it… But I’m not sure Lost is the most convoluted TV show in history… Maybe second behind The Prisoner… The only explanation for that show was a lot of acid.
Yeah, there’s no way they were going to be able to adequately explain everything. It would have been amazing if they had, but oh well. I still think it was a pretty good ride. I didn’t feel nearly as put off with this show as I did with The X Files, probably because I was less emotionally invested in it.
