Eva Yojimbo wrote:Finished Season 5. TBH, I got a bit lost with all the time-traveling stuff, which is not unusual given that time travel, even in the best of cases, is completely absurd. Still, the more the season wound on the more I liked how it was using the time travel element to play with notions of fate VS free-will. Of course, being a materialistic determinist I'm firmly in the camp that if we were to rewind time and reset all the particles in the universe exactly how they were then things would play out the same; but there's a twist when you're able to go back in time with some kind of knowledge of what happened in the future.
Yeah the time travel stuff is a bit confusing. I'm not sure whether "whatever happened, happened" as a rule exists to clarify or confuse the plot, especially if you try and think out something like the Locke/Richard compass scene and how that damn compass basically has no point of origin (Shouldn't it also eventually decay into nothingness going through the infinite loop? What happens then?).
Another time travel question that bothers me is how how "Christian Shepherd" was able to meet Locke down in the well, which opens a lot of can of worms. Like I can't even say for certain whether this is part of the loophole that Man in Black (What internet people call "Jacob's rival") mentioned or not.
Other than this, perhaps the thing that struck me most about this season is how it incorporated that element into the series' seeming overall strategy of keeping the audience in suspense about what the truth was. In previous seasons it was typically withheld information about characters and situations to do this, so in S3 it's the nature of The Others and Ben's trustworthiness (or lack thereof); in S4 it was the nature of those on the boat (and still more Ben, I guess); but S5 was basically all about not knowing whether or not what's happening is what was destined to happen, or whether the cast can take some actions to change things.
Its something that continues into S6 too, about whether the bomb worked or not and what exactly detonating it did. People still debate this!
I also started S6 (just a couple eps. in), and the first thing I thought of with the introduction of Jacob and his rival was the Book of Job, as if the "rules" are some kind of "bet" made between good and evil to test certain people.
I think the "rules" and the "bet" are separate things based on some later season 6 information, though whether the rules between Jacob/MiB are the same "rules" as between Ben and Widmore is something that has driven me crazy for years. I think Jacob's and Ben's are ultimately separate, but its a bit annoying that the same key word is used.
Anyway, I think despite the time travel silliness and the fact that the cast and plot get a bit scattershot I preferred S5 to S4. S4 was all suspense that seemed to drop a lot of thematic/metaphoric substance, while S5 kept the suspense but brought back just enough of those elements to make it interesting beyond that. I also rather liked the skipping record metaphor for the time element, especially given how putting on records had kinda been a motif throughout the series already.
When I first watched the show I preferred s5 to s4, but going back I just find a lot of S5 to continue that "video game sidequest" feel I mentioned. The mission to get back to the island just kind of takes forever, the DHARMA stuff itself drags for a while (The episode about Sayid in particular was a low point. What S5 and S6 do to Sayid's character is just sad), DHARMA just being another set of characters in a long of line of them in Lost that don't actually know anything was disappointing etc.
The high point, other than finale, was probably the time skipping though in the first half of the season. The way they introduce the metaphor in the first episode with the Willie Nelson song was good (Reminded me a lot of season 2 with MAKE YOUR OWN KIND OF MUSIC).
Speaking of that first S5 episode, I'm not sure I like how they introduce Dan during the DHARMA times in the cold open.
This series does love its twists, but I guess I didn't mind the Jin one too much since it doesn't seem like a device it's overusing. We haven't crossed into Shyamalan territory yet, as these twists just seem to be ways to keep things surprising/interesting on a more milder level (IE, it's not like the entire series is riding on these twists).
Uh.
Hmmm.
You might want to come back to me on this one when you're done.
Yeah, I'm not entirely sure what them leaving substantially added to the series other than as a means to stretch things out. Maybe you could say that them leaving is a metaphor for trying to escape one's destiny or whatever you're supposed to do, and that while you can leave/run away for a while you inevitably end up miserable if you ignore that purpose.
Its just weird because we get like several different explanations about why they even needed to go back on a plot level. There's the idea about them being "lost" without the island still, but then there's what Locke supposedly says, which the show is inconsistent about.
It comes down to what Jack says "Jeremy Bentham" told him and what actually got being different things- namely, in the S4 finale Jack says that Bentham told him that very bad things happened to the people still on the Island because Jack left (Which doesn't seem to track with the actual events of S4/early s5 to begin with. Presumably we're meant to think Locke is referring to the time skipping, but Jack had little to do with that), but in the S5 episode where we actually get to that conversation Locke says nothing of the sort.
To me at least, at first it seems like this is what causes Jack to feel guilty for escaping because of bad things happening to survivors still on the Island (Which would fit with Jack as hero, as leader, even as doctor etc.) and is what drives him to drink, but the S5 version of the conversation makes it seem more vague mysticism/spiritual stuff from Locke that drives Jack over the edge for a while, with Locke's death being what finally drives him to actually get everyone to return to the Island.
Of course once Jack actually returns, he flashes in time to the 70's (Why this happens still isn't clear to me, other than non-answer of "whatever happened happened"), where he goes with the flow and doesn't do anything (Doesn't even seem to care about the redshirts that died. Like I don't expect him to be torn up over Charlotte Staples Lewis (She's C.S. Lewis, get it?) since Jack barely knew her, but you'd think he'd have thoughts on other characters perhaps) until deciding to detonate Jughead.
Moving on to thematic reasons...
Not sure I really buy that, though, because it's not like in a "normal" situation a freak crash landing on an island would be how one would find their destiny/purpose. Maybe the idea is that they're supposed to sense the "magic of the island" and use that to find what they're looking for; or, maybe to take it further, the island is a source for self-reflection and them leaving is just trying to run away from whatever it is they needed to confront there. I don't know if any of this makes sense or is really even supported within the series, but I'm just throwing out possible justifications beyond them needing to stretch out the story to get to make it to 6 seasons.
I thought the thing about self-reflection was the intent too, but then its weird how Jack goes from chill go-with-the-flow Jack to "I'm detonating a damn hydrogen bomb" which is like the ultimate form of Jack's worst tendencies in the show to control, to do a vaguely science-y thing, to run away from his problems by resetting time etc.
And that's just with Jack. Sayid goes from assassin to attempted child murderer. Kate doesn't get to find Claire yet for returning, Sun, seemingly arbitrarily, ISN'T flashed to the 70's where Jin is etc.
Again, everything about the return journey is just odd, especially when its setup so far in advance in the S3 finale. It really does seem like it was all just to setup Jughead detonating in S5, to setup the flashsideways in S6.
As for the freighter characters, I really liked Daniel, probably because that nerdy/nervous/scientific personality was one type that was really missing from the island. I also liked how they tied him in with the time travel/physics element. Though I don't think his backstory was developed too well beyond that... like, I think there's something there with the girl he "paralyzed," but it was never really specific about it.
Yeah he's the one guy you hope might actually be able to figure out just what the hell the Island is. And then he dies.
Also, I often forget that he's Widmore's son, and therefore Penny's brother. A bunch of weird connections to add onto his character, in addition to weird mad science backstory stuff you mentioned.
Miles seemed mostly like a... less substantial Sawyer/James, and I really don't think the Sixth Sense stuff added much to the series.
Yeah. He's such a weird character too because like, Hurley already sort of had a version of his power. Its weird to have two different variations of "talking to dead people" as characters on what is essentially the good guy team.
Also he's Pierre Chang's son I guess. It was a popular fan theory before season 5 came out that he would be Chang's son, and tbh I thought the theory was kind of racist at the time because the evidence seemed to amount to "Both characters are Asian". Welp, I ended up being wrong about that.
Charlotte was just... there. Why is it that the females seem to constantly get the short straw in terms of characterizations? Too often they seem to only be there to be love interests so we sympathize for their male partners when they die. Kate and Juliette are the most developed and even they seem less 3-dimensional than the male stars...
Yeah I've wondered the same thing (Which makes that Kate was supposed to be lead all the more bizarre in retrospect).
If I were to hazard a guess, and this is me getting into psychoanalytical bullshit about the author who is still alive a bit, I think its because Damon Lindelof has very large unresolved daddy issues (
If the open letter he released before Watchmen came out is any indication). The dude is very concerned with sons and fathers, the legacy of fathers etc. and its all over Lost and comes up again and again in Leftovers and Watchmen (Well at least in Watchmen the female characters get to have daddy issues).
Because he's so focused in on sons/fathers, I think that's why the female characters get kind of shafted as a result. Jack has his dad issues, Locke has his dad issues, even Locke's dad is a negative father figure in Sawyer's life, Desmond has a father in law in Widmore, Ben has his dad issues etc. Jacob even becomes the ultimate dad of the show.
I think this is also why, and this is where I admittedly start to lose people if I haven't already, that Lost season 6 starts getting very authoritarian themes about the need to both have and submit to an ultimate father figure, because Jacob becomes the ultimate dad and anyone who threatens dad is clearly a monster that needs to be stopped.
Yeah, I can see both of these complaints. Still, I'm not sure if the moment's hurt too bad just because Keemy is a superficial villain. He's one of those characters whose primary purpose just seems to be the response he elicits from the other characters, and none more so than Ben. Widmore seems much the same. Both of them seem to be character versions of MacGuffins.
Keemy totally is that, its just a bit disappointing to see such a cartoonish guy when every other villain character has some kind of characteristic to at least complicate them. Like even Mr. Friendly had a little more going on.
Keemy makes good eggs I guess? I can't help but notice you ignored my question about Eggtown, which was the most important part of this whole post!!!!!
With Widmore, it bothers me more because it always seems like there's supposed to be more to him that just never seems to quite come. Like you may have noticed by this point he never actually shares a scene with his own daughter Penny in the entire series, which is just weird (Though because this is Lost, he gets on with Dan of course).
Good points that I agree with. Though I might sugges that the characters "wallowing around" kinda fits with the "lost" theme in general, I do like that Desmond is a counterpoint to that, another kind of "lost" if you will.
Yeah. I don't say "wallowing around" as a complaint necessarily (Well it is at times when it just feels like stalling both plot and character development/exploration), but that the Desmond character is just fundamentally different from the others.
That's generally the problem with allegory when you move out of the realm of fantasy and sci-fi. In fantasy and sci-fi you can invent your own fictional universe where abstract concepts/ideas map on to fictional elements within those worlds that, in themselves, don't have real-world analogs (or, if they do, they're very different; like "the ring" in Nibelungen). Lost is, well, a bit lost in some kind of middle ground between realism and fantasy. Like, there's definitely some obvious fantasy elements--the smoke monster, time travel--but other stuff, like island healing, can easily be taken more literally than metaphoric. I guess I'm just in the camp that if the literal reading doesn't make sense or seems pretty absurd/stupid, go with the metaphoric one, even if it doesn't make perfect sense.
For me, I'm just too far down the rabbit hole in knowing about Lindelof's view of the world from interviews, his other shows/movies etc. that I'm just way less likely to give his work the benefit of the doubt on these shakier elements. Like if you ever get around to watching Watchmen, I'll have things to say on his very bizarre takeaways about what he thinks Alan Moore was doing with the original comic.
Look, the last decade has been very, very long.
Yeah, I would agree that the problem with The Others isn't just the civilization, but maybe it's more that, as they've become civilized, they've also cut themselves off from the rest of the island/nature. I actually wondered at one point if those giant sonic gates weren't symbolic of that; that they needed protection from nature, or even from the "immigrants" who were learning how to live in/with nature. There also might be the notion that, just like the Dharma Initiative before them, The Others essentially became the people who were just using the island to benefit themselves and only themselves. More abstractly, there's the general idea that as civilization increases and we cut ourselves off from nature and only look at nature as something to be manipulated for our benefit, we start seeing ourselves as essentially gods and not a part of nature anymore. It makes sense historically as well, given how religion evolved from imagining nature as gods (the sun, eg), to imagining human-like beings controlling nature as gods, to imagining abstract human ideals (omnipotence, omniscience, perfectly good, etc.) as being god. It's also why something like Darwin hit so many so hard, because trying to re-imagine ourselves as part of nature was a shock to our collective egos.
Since you're early S6 now, the problem with this reading is the Temple Others, who do seem to be more in tune with nature, less reliant on modern technology (Though I guess they have their weird test for evil, though I'm still not sure if that's supposed to be mysticism bullshit or science bullshit), and those guys freakin' suck too. They even have their own version of the sonic gates with the ash (Which has come up through the series a few times in past seasons actually).
They're also kind of weird because IIRC, they're not actually a separate faction from Ben's Others even though it would probably make more sense that way, and would point more to what you're saying about the lure of civilization corrupting Ben's people.
Well that's a shame because I know I've always felt that way about nature, even if it was something as simple as sitting out on my back porch.
I mean, I can enjoy sitting on a porch too, that's just not the kind of feeling it gets out of me.
FWIW, Mysterious Object is nothing like his other films. I'd start with either Tropical Malady or Uncle Boonmee, both of which I think represent what he does well.
Yeah I will get to more at some point. I might start with Uncle Boonmee since now that I'm done with the Oscar Best Picture Winners, I do want to move on to the Palme d'Or winners too as the next long term watching project.
I guess I either didn't catch the timeline and/or had (half-)forgotten much of that.
Lost just throws so much at you that its easy to forget details when you're just binging it.
When the show was airing we had months and months between seasons. There was something like an eight month wait between seasons 5 and 6 for example. That gives you a long time to stew on details. A lot of us noticed contradictions and unexplained elements back in the day, and we foolishly thought season 6 would clear these some of these up lmao.
TBH, I'm not even surprised this is the case given how many characters, stories, and themes the series is trying to juggle. Unless someone had worked all of this out beforehand as like a novel and had had months to go over and edit it, I'm not sure there's any way to write a show like that week to week and avoid those gaps and holes. Perhaps depending on how big they are there's an argument to made that they probably should've had some of the more major stuff down beforehand, but it's worth keeping in mind that even Anno said he didn't know where he was going with NGE until about mid-way through. I wonder how long it took the Lost creators to figure out where they wanted to go?
I think the core plan with Lost honestly changed between seasons. Like the Jacob stuff is not at all consistent between seasons 3, 4, 5, and 6- the Cabin plotline alone is enough evidence for that, just try and make sense of it sometime.
But yeah my main criticism is this bigger picture stuff (Mainly Jacob and MiB, everything about them) that doesn't make sense and should have been thought out more- especially once they got that end date so many years in advance. They had time to get big picture stuff right at least. Minor characters like Libby being whatever are one thing, the characters the entire final season revolves around is a different thing entirely.
Like even in NGE there's a level of plot and thematic consistently that I just don't think exists in Lost, Anno at least is building on core ideas that are still present in early episodes like hedgehog's dilemma and the like. Breaking Bad is another show written on the fly that just holds together way better.
I guess it frustrates me too because I do feel, for some reason, Lindelof could actually make something that good as NGE on a writing level, but just hasn't seemed to pull it off.
I can definitely see that. Kubrick, especially, seemed extremely cognizant about what elements he left ambiguous and why he was doing it (comparing Clarke's 2001 with Kubrick's makes it crystal clear what elements Kubrick left out, and the reasons why are, IMO, fairly obvious). Lynch seems fond, especially after Lost Highway, of creating these psychological narrative puzzles, so I tend to think he has it worked out what his films "mean," for the most part, even if there are red herrings here and there. NGE is probably the closest to lost, because we know Anno didn't know himself where the series was going to go until about midway through, and there are huge chunks of its fictional universe that are just never explained. But NGE was also obviously always meant as an allegory, so those mythological elements are less crucial to understanding the series than the themes its exploring (and the way it's exploring them through various story/character elements).
Yeah.
NGE might also benefit from have a clear basic plot even if deeper details are mysterious. Angels appear, EVA's must defeat them to prevent the apocalypse.
In Lost, they never even give a real explanation as to why Man in Black can't leave the Island, you're supposed to take Jacob's warning that it would just be bad, maaaaan, on faith which I think reveals a lot about how Lindelof views the world. You're supposed to believe in the patriarch, whereas Anno makes mysterious patriarchs the villains.
If Lost ends up being more like NGE I'd probably say that it's a shame they forced it into 6 seasons because the downside of stretching out the story that long is precisely that you inevitably put most of the focus on that story--and the characters, and the world--rather than whatever themes are being explored through it. NGE is short enough and its themes integrated into its story elements well enough that it never really had this problem, while there are long stretches of Lost where I don't feel like any themes are really being explored/developed and the entire focus is just on the action/suspense/drama generated by the situation and characters.
Yeah despite years of bitching and whining from me about Lost, at least some of its problems are because it was forced into 6 seasons in addition to general network TV limitations. While they have their own problems, Leftovers and Watchmen's plots don't quite have the same kind of problems that Lost does in terms of just basic coherence, and do allow more focus on thematic concerns (Too bad the themes in Watchmen are dumb. Things get kind of shaky in Leftovers after season 1 too, though I'll still stand by season 1 as Lindelof's best work).
The problem with authors like Dante is that it's nearly impossible to render both the story and the poetry. Divine Comedy was written in terza rima, which sounds fantastic in Italian, but is nearly impossible to render in English while retaining the meaning and without sounding archaic/stilted. Reading Dante in English is probably like listening to a remake of a song compared to the original.
In that case the remake is pretty fucking good in its own right, so I can only imagine how great the original must be.
I should mention I did try Purgatorio back in the day, though I couldn't get through it. Its true what they say about all of the cool people being in Hell!
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris