Spinoff TV shows I wish they would make, based on some of my favorite characters

[Gendo]

- Jesse Pinkman hanging out in Alaska, making furniture. Learning to live life post-Heisenberg. Maybe having to deal with temptations about using again.

- Dr. House, presumed dead by the world, travels around the country under various pseudonyms, solving medical mysteries for various people he meets; with limited resources.

- Hurley and Ben on The Island. Not sure what they're doing; it doesn't really matter, I'd watch it.

- Dr Cox's son Jack is a pre-med college student, getting ready for med school. Dr. Cox needs to mentor and teach him, trying to balance being a good medical teacher with being a good father to him. (Based on the character's age, this would still be a few years from now.)

[Raxivace]

I'm not sure a Jesse spinoff would necessarily have a whole lot of dramatic potential, but then again I wondered the same thing about a Saul spinoff and it ended up being fantastic and arguably better than Breaking Bad.

The House one could be fun, though I'd miss the supporting cast from the original show.

I don't really think there's much to do with Hurley and Ben, especially since we know from the ending of Lost that their time in the original series was basically the most important to them. I think I'd rather just see an outright reboot of Lost about new characters with new mysteries on a new strange Island.

Didn't they already try a Scrubs spinoff with that kind of premise? I seem to recall hearing bad things.

[Gendo]

The thing with Jesse is that I wouldn't even care if there were any dramatic potential; I just love the character and actor so much that I'd watch him doing any old boring thing.

You're right about Lost; I just really like those characters. At first I was going to talk about a Sawyer spinoff instead; as he's probably the best character. But I can't really think of anything he'd be doing after he gets off the Island. I wonder if he and Kate get together.

Scrubs season 9 was also considered a Scrubs spinoff; it's not clearcut if it's actually a 9th season or a new show. I guess it's somewhat fair to say that it had a similar premise. But the focus really wasn't Cox, it was the med students. But he did have a fatherly relationship with one of them. So yeah, it probably wouldn't be nearly as good as I would hope.It would need to have more of the serious emotion that most of the series had, which season 9 lacked.

[Raxivace]

Even with Sawyer I don't really know what you could do with him. Like presumably he goes to jail for murdering that guy in season 1, and just sits around in a cell moping about Juliet until he dies I guess?

Unfortunately I just don't think a spinoff about any of the original cast really works that well, unless you picked like Lapidus.

[Gendo]

Agreed. The idea really was just about "characters I'd really like to see more of", even if there's no good way to actually do a show which allows that.

[BruceSmith78]

Wait, so Lost really was a bunch of people on an island? I stopped watching after 2 seasons because it was too nonsensical and disjointed for me, but I remember when it ended everybody said that none of it was real and they were all just dead and in pergutory or some shit. It's why everybody got pissed.

[Raxivace]

Wait, so Lost really was a bunch of people on an island? I stopped watching after 2 seasons because it was too nonsensical and disjointed for me, but I remember when it ended everybody said that none of it was real and they were all just dead and in pergutory or some shit. It's why everybody got pissed.

A character in the final episode specifically gives a very blatant and unsubtle speech about how everything that happened on the Island was real and mattered, and television viewers somehow took this to mean "NONE OF IT WAS REAL WAAAAHHH".

[Gendo]

Yeah I'm not actually sure if people who watched Lost actually misunderstood the ending, or if it is one of those things where a correction of a thing becomes way bigger than the thing itself. Like, I've seen huge amounts of things where people explain the ending of the ending of Lost; explaining that they weren't dead the whole time; but I haven't actually seen anyone who has watched the show think that they were dead the whole time.

Bruce, the final season contains several scenes, almost half of the air time, that takes place in what seems to be an alternate timeline or something. Where the plane never crashed and no one is on the island. In the final episode you find out that those scenes took place in the afterlife. But there's no way to actually get confused and think that it was a "they were dead the whole time" thing.

So some people were definitely pissed because that alternate reality turned out to be the afterlife. I think it would have been better if it had ended up being an actual alternate universe created by the bomb.

[Raxivace]

I've seen many people who watched the whole show and thought they were dead the whole time. I think its less common now with correct explanations being easier to Google than goofy ass fan theories but it was absolutely a thing that happened, especially back in like 2010-2011ish.

Part of the misunderstanding may be from people that only watched maybe the first few seasons and though they could jump into the final episode for some reason when it was on TV, then told their friends about it etc. Another thing I've seen people blame is the insert shots of the 815 crash over the credits of the final episode, which some people somehow took to mean "They were dead on the Island too!".

[Gendo]

Another thing I've seen people blame is the insert shots of the 815 crash over the credits of the final episode, which some people somehow took to mean "They were dead on the Island too!".

Oh yeah, I just read the other day that the footage wasn't actually filmed as part of the episode at all; it was just something ABC decided to show as a transition between Lost and the show that came after it.

Also to be fair, the show did drop a bunch of hints throughout to try and lead you into thinking that they were actually dead (completely separate from the season 6 stuff). Richard tells Sun that he remembers her friends being in the Dharma Initiative because he "watched them die". Presumably he just thought that because he saw the Dharma Folk as a whole getting killed off. And several other times characters come to the conclusion that they must actually be dead and in hell.

[Raxivace]

I've heard that explanation about that shot too but I'm not entirely sure where exactly the source on that is from anymore.

I recall reading somewhere once that originally that in the S5 finale Richard was supposed to see Jughead's explosion from a distance and that was supposed to explain the "watched them all die" line, but again I can't exactly recall what the source on that is. In the final show I think its just another example of Lost characters making weird assumptions from incomplete information- something that kind of continues throughout the whole series.

[Gendo]

Yeah, seems like he could have meant the purge or the bomb. But on that subject... I've been trying to figure out what the deal with the bomb was. We know what they wanted the bomb to accomplish, and we know that it didn't accomplish it (at least not in any literal sense). So what actually happened at the last moment of season 5? I can think of a few options:

1) The bomb went off, but because of the surrounding electromagnetic energy, it caused the back-in-time characters to be transported back to their own time.

2) A split second before the bomb went off, their was another time flash and the characters ended up back in their own time. This explains how they weren't hurt by the bomb blast; because they weren't actually there when it went off.

3) The bomb never went off. Instead there was just another time flash and the characters ended up back in their own time. "The incident" refers to the time that they drilled too far and released all the EM energy.

It feels like the show wanted you to assume #1, and that "the incident" was actually the detonation of the bomb. But my problem with #1 is that there's not a good reason to think that the bomb wouldn't kill them. Especially Juliet. And this wasn't just a little C4 or something, this was the core of a hydrogen bomb. I don't know much about hydrogen bomb cores, but it seems like it would have had huge destructive force; when Jack first started on that mission the others were worried he was going to kill everyone on The Island if he blew up the bomb. So if the bomb really did go off (#1 or #2), then how did it not kill everyone anywhere near there?

This leaves #3; which seems reasonable to me, maybe when they disconnected the core they just broke the whole thing. If dropping it down a long shaft didn't detonate it then hitting it with a rock a few times likely wouldn't either. The only question would be why did they time travel again, after Locke had fixed the wheel? An answer could be because The Incident released the EM, energy which caused them to get sent back to their own time.

[Raxivace]

Sayid compares the Swan Hatch to Chernobyl in Season 2, which would seem to imply the Bomb went off...I think. It doesn't explain how characters like Radzinsky survived though, yeah.

There's a fourth option that I sometimes see thrown about, that the bomb's explosion combined with the "Light" to create the Flash Sideways (Hence Christian's line about how "You all made this place together" in this interpretation.) I don't know that I buy it, but I can't think of anything in the show denies it off of the top of my head either. And there's at least some circumstantial evidence- like Juliet spouting off lines from her FSW-self as she dies.

If the Bomb didn't go off though, it could be that Jacob just zapped them into the future. He tells MiB that "They're coming", and he could just know this because he's bringing them to the present himself, though it would contradict the non-interference policy he had throughout most of the story.

Do you remember what Dan's line about the bomb was in the FSW? That's the last clear reference to Jughead in the show that I can remember, but I don't remember exactly what he says about it there.

This is one of the points of the story that once you get past the "lol the Bomb made the split timeline" misdirect in Season 6 just genuinely doesn't seem to have an answer that points one way or another that I can tell. Some of it is just minutia I could just ignore if I understood what the intent was, but its weirdly ambiguous for reasons I don't quite see a purpose for.

The other big one like this to me is Jacob's Cabin, which I think makes even less sense when you break it down.

[Raxivace]

Found the source for the Alpert thing. I'm not really sure what its worth at the end of the day, though we at least know that the Bomb exploding was considered in the writing of Season 5, at the very least, though its hardly the final say on the matter.

[Gendo]

Pretty sure Dan said “I don't want to set off a bomb. I think I already did." I can't quite remember though how bomb was brought up in the first place though. He was talking to Desmond about the contents of his notebook, talking about how it was very advanced math that he wrote but doesn't understand.

Of course, on Island Dan died before the bomb plan even quite started, so he didn't set it off. Though it was his idea, and he's the one who convinced Jack to do it. So it that indirect way, he did set it off.

[Raxivace]

Huh, well I guess it shouldn't be surprising that Lost's last word on the Bomb doesn't actually explain very much lol.