On Tue, 01 Apr 2008 03:31:06 -0500, weberm@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Ubiquitous)
wrote:
>Anyway, now we've got Michael on the "rescue" boat, told by Ben to kill
>some but not all of its passengers (Please wait for further
>instructions!), and we've got a boat full of thugs straight out of a bad
>Vin Diesel movie...
Yes.
And I think that this, plus some other points you make later in your
post point to a flaw I've seen. There's something pretty generic
about the action going on here.
>firing their automatic machine guns in the air, thugs
>who are presumably charged with storming the island and killing everyone
>there...
>
>Kill, kill, kill. In the old days, when in doubt, the writers solved
>plot problems with mysterious clouds, polar bears, Dharma initiative
>clues, and the appearance of some im****tant figure in a person's past in
>the middle of the jungle. These days, plot problems are solved by
>killing or threatening to kill characters.
Yes! I noticed it -- especially when it seemed that people like Ben
could always get their hands on a gun to take yet another shot at
someone.
>We find out Charlie is going
>to die somehow, and then he does.
Well, that was fine.
>Locke kills Naomi.
Yep!
>Sayid becomes a paid assassin once he leaves the island.
Borderline TV movie. Not very "Lost-like."
>Juliet's lover Goodwin ends up killed, thanks to Ben.
Yes.
>Jin is going to end up dead. Michael is trying to
>kill himself because he killed two people, but he can't...
Well, I'd skip those two. At least they're not one guy with a handgun
shooting some other guy in a scene that just doesn't *feel* like it
has that surreal Lost reality, but rather something out of a '70s cop
show.
>so now he has
>to kill a whole boatload of people before they kill the people on the
>island. And how did the episode end? With Alex's lover, Karl, and
>mother, Rousseau, being killed by sniper fire.
Yes, and yes -- although at least the sniper fire was more interesting
than all these other guys pointing handguns at each other. The lamest
bits, IMO, have been Ben getting a gun that he can use to shoot CS
Lewis and Jack trying to kill Locke, but oops, no bullets.
Both felt like very generic TV show stuff.
>Maybe they should change
>the name from "Lost" to "Killed."
>
>Although they may have the toughest job in television, the show's
>writers aren't making imaginative choices, given the possibilities. Each
>new plot development feels like it does the quick and dirty work of
>solving two problems: 1) prolonging the suspense and 2) pulling in some
>old thread along the way to make it feel more authentic (Juliet's lover
>is Goodwin, who we already knew was killed by Ana-Lucia; the spy on the
>boat is Michael, whose fate we've never known). But the plot of each
>episode accomplishes little beyond those two immediate goals.
That's how it feels, all right. Although, in the writers' defense,
they are only human, and they're writing episodes that we'll compare
to past episodes of Lost -- and not only to past episodes, but to our
own overly idealized memories of how good those past episodes were.
>The flashbacks used to reveal a character's personality and the
>formative experiences that shaped his or her worldview. Sometime last
>season, though, they became empty, plot-based threads that felt more
>like bad episodes of "The Outer Limits." (Remember Jack's affair with
>the creepy tattoo woman who said, "I mark people!" but who otherwise
>served no purpose?)
Yes, I think that the writers / producers themselves discovered that a
pointless flashback was actually worse than no flashback at all, but
felt they had to do it anyway because that was the show's formula.
>And now even the flash forwards feel flat. Having
>Jin run around town, looking for what we thought was a present for Sun
>was a nice misdirection, since we thought he was finding a gift for her
>while she was in the hospital having their baby, and revealing his grave
>at the end was surprising, but what else did we learn about Jin or Sun
>in that episode?
Yes, once you realize the twist, you realize that you actually wasted
your time watching the panda half of that episode, and perhaps the
whole thing.
>Plenty of loyal viewers will say, "If you don't like 'Lost' don't watch
>it."
Yeah, anyone who says that probably shouldn't go to a forum where the
purpose is to have all sorts of conversations about the show --
presumably both positive and negative.
>But the creators and writers of this show have made it clear that
>they can do much, much better when they bring the question of character
>and intention into the picture. When they honor the richness of these
>characters, that takes a lot of the pressure off the plot: We're happy
>to hang out on the boat or get trapped on the island indefinitely as
>long as there's a substantive conflict that reveals each character's
>motivations and flaws.
Well, I don't know about that. I'm a lot happier hanging out loose on
the island of Hawaii, with my characters free to at least walk around
and do things, than I am when we're stuck in a bear cage or a ****p's
cargo hold.
>Do we even know the difference between Miles,
>Locke and Ben at this point? They all seem one dimensional, and we're
>left to speculate which is the most deluded or evil.
I'm guessing, based on how I feel about Miles right now, that the show
will bring him around, and he'll end up with an arc somewhere between
Sawyer's and Jin's -- both characters that started up initially
dislikable. I could be wrong, but he seems to be positioned that way.
As for Locke and Ben, yeah, they both get on my nerves. I feel like,
from the very beginning, the show's intention has been to show how our
"heroes" can change into "others," but I feel like it has cheated a
bit to get them there.
A big problem I have, on which a lot of this season rests, is the ease
with which a LOT of our Losties became convinced that the freightees
are there to kill them. They may turn out to be right, but their
entire evidence seems to be a guy writing "Not Penny's boat" on his
hand, and the threatening words of weasely villain, Ben.
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