Your heightened taste, along with superior intellect and keen insight into human nature must be a terrible burden to bear.
And my apologizes, Tracy Baker, for dragging down the collective well-being of civilization and allowing lesser art to flourish for not being indignantly outraged about a story told on television (OMG MEDIUM EXCUSE FOR POOR CRAFTSMANSHIP I’M SORRY) as well not obsessing about a character not being named.
Please, purge me. I’m ashamed of myself. I should be arrested. I should be purged. I should be flogged. [PLAGIARISM]
Please continue to uphold your refined standards by excoriating all bad writing on television, the movies, and books. And by that I mean everything that doesn’t conform to your every whim and spoon-fed every conceivable piece of trivia relating to any television show that makes you feel jilted. At least you haven’t mentioned the name thing in a day or so.
Now, I honestly don’t care that you are locked in, with your eyes rolled up like a shark in mid-bite to your particular perspective that its “sloppy storytelling”. What keeps bringing me back like a wolf circling a staked piece of meat is your supreme insistence that if you aren’t up in arms like unshackled captives realizing they have been watching shadows on the wall of a cave, you (the great unwashed kool-aid-drinking masses) are shallow creatures of low expectations.
I reject that the plotting must be Lucas prequel-like in its coincidental interconnectivity, that the audience imperfect knowledge, which has been generally reflective of the imperfect knowledge of the protagonists (with exceptions made to heighten the drama) must be made perfect for the end to be complete and “well-written”. I won’t argue that the story is without breaks in its internal consistency (Christian in the ship), that there were strands left particularly dangling. Things such as the baby crises of the first few seasons, although the things that were important in the story tended to be the things that were important to the protagonists at that moment, and thus shifted over time; therefore when Aaron and Sun’s baby were born, these crises were no longer important the 815’ers and thus no longer important to the story. Very few answers were given to the audience on a platter, at times due to somewhat strained (severely so at times) dialog contrivances, although again just because I or someone sitting in their living room with time week to week is going to have more and better questions than characters living in the moment.
[Note: inconsistencies such as these are more forgivable in a television series than it is in a movie because a television series is by nature a collaborative effort that takes place over several years with any number of possible changes in the on-camera and behind the scenes players, as opposed to a movie, a medium which lends itself to more singular control and avoiding these issues.]
I think there were enough clues for the audience to come up with a narrative containing a semi-self-reflecting series of answers (a spaceship/science-fiction source of light at the end vs. a religious/archeological/metaphysical source, dependent upon the viewers’ own epistemological orientation). That those answers were not defined for you by the showrunners doesn’t make it bad storytelling or lessen the artistic value of the work, any more than having an influence on a game such as Mass Effect’s story makes that poor storytelling (this is still QT3, right?). One day there may be an authoritative version of the story written/published/released. Not having one doesn’t make “Lost” a more expensive version of “Charles in Charge”.
In time, I think the show’s run will be fully appreciated by more of those not caught up in the emotional sweep of the finale, positively or negatively.
