The Beginning of the End?

Requiem4adream

Let me just preface this by saying i'm a massive LOST fan, always have and will be. Most people on this forum would know that. I love Season 4 and cant wait for the Finale and the final 2 seasons.

However there's no point in sugar coating it, if/when Lost continues it's descent towards pure sci-fi (time travel, teleportation etc), there is going to be a massive body of opinion similar to what Loon/Sherifu articulated in another thread; a lot of people are going to feel very cheated to have invested so much time in a show that turns out to be nothing like they expected. Duped even.

Of course the rational follow-up question is - what did they expect from a show featuring polar bears and smoke monsters on a mysterious tropical island? Well even from that angle there are legitimate reasons to have expected a different course of events. For example, the whole Dharma Initiative, Widmore conspiracy angle could have been explored without resorting to time travel/teleportation, and could have resulted in a strong pay-off after 6 seasons. The significance of the Island, it's history etc could also have been explored without resorting to it.

Fans, in general, would have a much easier time accepting mythical impossibilities if there is no presence of Time Travel etc, because time travel always feels like a Get Out of Jail Free card to explain the unexplainable and always leads to gaping plot holes. The Islands power to heal people, a very spiritual idea, would be accepted a lot easier than it's ability to teleport people or sling them through time. Both are impossible/improbable, but the spiritual is easier to accept and doesnt feel like a cod.

I just think there is going to be a significant exodus of fans after the end of the season, and it's not without a huge dose of irony that i say this because Season 4 has been, imo, the best yet. The writing, acting, storyline progression, pace of the show have all been top notch.

As for the writers lying - can you imagine them going to pitch their idea to ABC for the pilot and saying:

Writers

---

Execs
"well there's this plane crash..." - Listening

"half of them survive on a mysterious island..." - CONTINUE!!

"on the island there's mysterious people, animals,
noises in the jungle..." -

"so it's basically gonna be what is this island,
where are they, the struggle to get off it...." - CHA CHING $$$

"via teleporting to the Sahara after travelling through time" - GET OUT.


The problem a lot of people will have with it is simple. Most of us have been in a situation when we are little when there's something on your dinner plate you really hate. Like say cabbage. I always hated cabbage so no way i'm eating it. Sometimes my mom would dupe me by mashing in some cabbage to the mash and disguising it with some ketchup. I'd eat it! I might even like it! But if i retrospectively discover there was cabbage in there, i most definitely wont eat it in the future. LOST basically took the cabbage and wanted it on the plate, so they mashed it in and dressed it up, but now the cat is out of the bag and a lot of people will just say "**** it, pizza hut anyone?!" A lot of people simply wont care that the show is actually still quality.

It wont happen but i'd say it'll get very close to a situation where viewing figures are dangerously close to ABC offloading it to someone else.

Sherifu

I'm a sci-fi fan so I don't mind. I see it finishing out to its 6th season quite easily. It has been a hit for abc so it's all good.

loon

i don't mind sci-fi, as long as it makes sense... but unfortunately, lost doesn't.

the time theory makes no sense...

they have one way of saving the show, but i doubt that they will do it... even if they do they'll probably cock it up.

cooker3

I don't really care if I am the only person left watching it. The show has got it's end point which is great so can't be "axed" and season 4 is probably my favourite yet. As long as it's entertaining and interesting then I am happy.

Sad Professor

The exodus of viewers already happened. I think we're about down to the core audience. Everyone who made it this far can make it the rest of the way. Frankly anyone who sat through the sky going purple at the end of season 2 and still didn't think there was a major sci-fi angle was just in denial. I guess a lot of them are coming out of it now.

ABC seem pretty happy with the show. It's winning it's current time slot, is always in the top ten downloaded shows on itunes, dvr figures and dvd sales are strong. Comparing the current ratings to season 1 is unfair. It was on a whole 2 hours earlier then and scripted shows are down across the board right now.

Now that The Wire is over, Lost is certainly the most serialised and demanding show on air. It's just too much work for most people. The only problem with time travel and teleportation is that they messed up some people's theories.

The writers lying? It's getting repeated around here a lot lately. I'd love to see some quotes. Just because they didn't call it a sci-fi show back in 2004 doesn't mean they lied or changed the premise. The mystery element always hung on not quite know what kind of explanation there would be: sci-fi, supernatural, science-fact, everything was up for grabs in the beginning. The writers encouraged this.

David Fury, who wrote Walkabout and Solitary in season 1, said this in April 2005:

Theory: The two skeletons in the cave are Jack and Kate.
DF:Who knows what's possible on the island? There was something that was cut from the episode I did in which Sayid was captured by the French woman Rousseau, and tortured. She said she was with a science team, that she had come from a research vessel. There was a line that was cut from an earlier draft where he said, " What were you studying?" and she said "Time." If you think about that, suddenly you say that's Jack and Kate in the cave.

Solitary was the 9th episode of season 1. We first saw "Adam and Eve" in episode 6. And from a recent interview with Damon and Carlton:

UGO: When was the decision to use time travel in the story made?

DAMON: It's been in the DNA of the show since the very beginning. Obviously, one thing the flash backs and the flash forwards provide you with is the idea of time travel. You're bouncing around in time and events from the past are seemingly influencing the present, but it's not a traditional time travel story until we started talking about what the hatch was there for, and what this electromagnetic energy that the hatch is trying to contain is and what would be the effect of that hatch going away, otherwise known as the purple sky event. And it was sort of those conversations which obviously happened way back in season one when Locke and Boone found the hatch that were the early precursors of time travel. I will say, though, that the first significant event in the show where we were thinking in the back of our minds that this is going to require a story telling element that isn't traditional narrative, is the discovery of Adam and Eve in the caves.

loon wrote:

i don't mind sci-fi, as long as it makes sense... but unfortunately, lost doesn't.

the time theory makes no sense...

loon, based on your post in the "Whine" thread I don't think you understand how time on the island works (or is currently theorised at least). The island is not 12 hours in the future. The time fluctuation happens when travelling to or from the island on the wrong compass bearing. The effect so far seems to be random.

SP