Lies, Damn Lies

Lost Season 5 (will obviously contain spoilers)

I will start with the positive. Since towards the end of the third season, Lost really notched up a gear. By creating a strong plot, and a time limit to tell it in, this forced the writers to stop being quite so self indulgent, and made Lost action packed television. Yes, there is still crazy nonsense, but it is mostly internally consistent nonsense now. There will never be a real reason why the numbers are important, but the fact that they ARE important is enough.

So, now to the issues. Season 5 started with a central conflict which was resolved relatively quickly. Several of the cast were zipping about in time, seeing the island in its past, until finally getting stuck in the 1970s. This device was used brilliantly, with Daniel Faraday explaining the kind of time travel we were existing in (its impossible to change things), and gave us some lovely snapshots of the island in the past. Sadly, the final conflict.. sucked.

While Locke(?)'s quest to kill Jacob was generally excellent and a lot of fun (seeing Ben confused was wonderful), the other plot line just didn't work. Faraday had come back, with a plan to change the future, so the plane never crashed. This would wipe out all the bad (and good) stuff that had happened over the last few seasons.

Heres why this plan sucked:
It obviously won't work. The notion that the writers are going to spend their final season with the previous 5 erased is just absurd. If they do, I'll just be very angry. So in other words, the viewer certainly wants it to fail. We have no emotional attachment to the characters goals, because we're almost certainly opposed to them.
Worse yet, the characters clearly wouldn't want to do it. While Jack, and indeed Daniel, wanting to do it made perfect sense, the other characters very reasonably did not, which meant the writers had to somehow bludgeon in a reason for all the characters to come together.
This led to Juliette acting like a lunatic, with her motivation changing every 5 seconds. She came out as pathetically weak- shes been with Sawyer, happily, for three years, but when Kate come backs, because Sawyer looks at her for a minute, Juliette decides their love isn't meant to be. Sigh writers, just sigh.

So yeah. Now I haven't seen 6 yet, and I don't want to be spoiled, but if they've erased everything that happened I'll be both astonished and really, really fucked off.

Labels: rant, review, television

posted by Mr K @ 1:28 pm