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What is the last Television series you watched?


Jay

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There's no need for that, I got Lost ending. It wasn't the strongest episode ever or anything, but it mostly made sense to me and there's nothing convoluted about it. And there's nothing earth-shattering about BB ending either, it's solid and that's it. not any better than other finales for different shows. In fact, both finales are kind of similar in feel. Move on.

Karol

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Lol I'm sorry Karol but BB is in another universe of quality to Lost.

True, but I happen to discuss it in context of this article and what their respective finales try to accomplish.

I saw plenty of Lost to know.

How much exactly?

It's a gimmick show.

It kind of ended up being a character piece with the "gimmick" elements playing more of a McGuffin part in the end. The resolution is quite simple and very nostalgic. Same with BB, which you just praised. Which is exactly what infuriated so many people back in 2010.

Behave yourself, you sound like a buffoon.

Why?

Karol

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Actually, he did not. I thought so too, but then read the previous script written by the other guy and it's almost identical. But I can see your point, his name is on the thing and his face everywhere in the interviews. His responsibility. I myself was looking forward to it because I thought Lost was clever, witty and quirky piece of network television, having more in common with The Twilight Zone and stuff like (genre-bending, wacky stuff) that rather than anything else. It entertained me for 6 years. Amazing how many people didn't have a brain capacity to get it. They moan the show didn't give you any answers, and the truth is it answered most of them and gave you enough data to do the math connects the dots in other areas. It's all there, right in front of you.

Karol

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Your guy Lindelof, the Lost showrunner, he wrote Prometheus.

He's fucking useless in my eyes. He can't come back from that. He's the MTV version of Koepp.

Riiiigggght. The guy rewrites a bad script and is banished to the underworld for eternity? lololol

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None of that stops me joining the dots between Lost, Lindelof and Prometheshite.

That article today where he says Breaking Bad "freed" him from Lost; what a friggin' massive cheek - to dream that Vince Gilligan is somehow within reaching distance of him. I remember when Prometheus was out in the cinema - how he shirked responsibility for that as well. It was all our fault for not "getting it". He's a career writer, a hack.

Your guy Lindelof, the Lost showrunner, he wrote Prometheus.

He's fucking useless in my eyes. He can't come back from that. He's the MTV version of Koepp.

Riiiigggght. The guy rewrites a bad script and is banished to the underworld for eternity? lololol

The way I watch stuff nowadays, yes he is. Completely. He fucked up and I'm not interested in a part 2 from him or his replacement.

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I'm aware of Gilligan's X Files beginnings. It was a decent show from the odd one I bothered to watch. Word is he wrote a couple of the better ones.

I like how humble Gilligan is about it. He's openly grateful for the opportunity.

Lindelof doesn't strike me as a humble person, nor writer. He seems far too self conscious and susceptible to pop opinion to be free enough to write anything other than what he's being paid for.

Look, at the end of the day it's just me and my Lindelof vendetta (for his Prometheus travesty). Sort of how Joey (who?) hates Fincher by default.

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None of that stops me joining the dots between Lost, Lindelof and Prometheshite.

That article today where he says Breaking Bad "freed" him from Lost; what a friggin' massive cheek - to dream that Vince Gilligan is somehow within reaching distance of him. I remember when Prometheus was out in the cinema - how he shirked responsibility for that as well. It was all our fault for not "getting it". He's a career writer, a hack.

Your guy Lindelof, the Lost showrunner, he wrote Prometheus.

He's fucking useless in my eyes. He can't come back from that. He's the MTV version of Koepp.

Riiiigggght. The guy rewrites a bad script and is banished to the underworld for eternity? lololol

The way I watch stuff nowadays, yes he is. Completely. He fucked up and I'm not interested in a part 2 from him or his replacement.

I'm not talking about Promtheus 2, I'm talking about him as a writer. He didn't even dodge responsibility. Look at his Twitter feed, he took all the fanboy raging shit for it.

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I see him as a very candid and honest person, with a very self-deprecating sense of humour. There is one great 2 and a half hour interview in which he's talking about his career as a whole. That was before Prometheus. If that won't convince, nothing will:

Karol

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What can I do? I don't like Lost and don't like Promo. Linda was the fall guy. What am I supposed to do, pity the guy?

To be perfectly honest I think he's in the same league as JJ Abrams.

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Talking about Lost, yesterday I held the Blu-ray of Spielberg's Fallen Skies in my hands, wondering if I should buy it, but it felt (my famous sixth sense) too Lost-ish for me (or worse, The Walking Dead), so I decided not to do it.

Falling-Skies_13_Noah-Wyle_PHKen-Woroner

Alex

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There's no need for that, I got Lost ending. It wasn't the strongest episode ever or anything, but it mostly made sense to me and there's nothing convoluted about it.

It wasn't actually a bad ending, leaving aside whatever one thinks of the flashsideways plot. The problem with Lost wasn't its ending.

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What can I do? I don't like Lost and don't like Promo. Linda was the fall guy. What am I supposed to do, pity the guy?

To be perfectly honest I think he's in the same league as JJ Abrams.

Damon can't seem to write a good, solid script (Prometheus almost made me want to harm myself) and JJ can't recognize when a script is good or bad.

Both are too Hollywood. Their stories work on a Hollywood movie level, where characters, and events are dictated by strict rules about what studio's think the target audience of 14 to 21 wants, and lazy plot contrivances to move the story along (I still can't believe the scene in Prometheus where the captain and Charlise Theron "decide" to have sex, because for plot reasons the captains station needed to be unmanned.....)

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I'm not going to argue that Prometheus, Cowboys & Aliens and even Star Trek Into Darkness are far from good storytelling. The first two are borderline terrible.

But you have to understand there is difference between 200 million dollar productions (with thousands more important things going on that storytelling choices). Television writing was on average always better in terms of quality. Writers on television get more freedom to express and explore some of the elements that wouldn't be allowed in film, especially of this magnitude. I would be very careful when comparing the two.

Is Lindelof a brilliant writer? No.

But that doesn't mean he's not done work of any quality. Lost, regrettably, seems to be... lost... on many people, but I'd argue of the network television shows it will always be one of the winners. Again, there is a difference between network show writing and something like HBO/AMC, where different rules apply - the aim is more for an adult viewer and awards. I never felt cheated by Lost and it was a solid storytelling. And always putting character arcs in front of genre/plot gimmicks.

Karol

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I have no interest in Lost. I am only judging Lindelof on his film work.

The only thing I've seen of him so far which was decent was World War Z, of which he reportedly rewrote the third act, which is quite effective (even though the scale and tone is very different from the rest of the film.)

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He's not done any writing of his own on films, so far. It's all rewrites. The only credit that he gets for being an author and main player is Lost. And neither you, nor Lee, actually watched the whole thing.

That's what me and Koray are getting at.

You don't need to watch it, of course. And both your opinions are appreciated (heck, I agree with them). But there needs to be some perspective which I'm trying to provide here.

Karol

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But it's not relevant. I don't need to see Lost to have an opinion on the films he is credited for that I did see.

A lot of people who criticize Lost never watched the whole thing, which is a key. It has become a synonym for a television failure for whatever reason. It's like everyone knows Dracula and nobody has actually read Dracula novel. Which is very different in feel to any screen version.

I agree with you on his film writing credits so far. It was for me an even bigger disappointments than to you two, because I knew his work before. If you flick through the Prometheus thread, you'll see I've bashed the film big time. In fact it almost got troll-like (maybe it did).

Judging on film credits alone, he's shit.

He is quite a big name, why isnt he writing his own stuff?

He's a big television name, not film name. I guess it's the same with great television actors always playing second fiddle on big screen.

Karol

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I wouldn't know. He's getting a major co-writing credit with Brad Bird on the upcoming Tomorrowland, a projects that is not based on any property and apparently Lindelof is the actual author (from what I know). We'll see what that's like.

Until then.

Karol

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I wouldn't know. He's getting a major co-writing credit with Brad Bird on the upcoming Tomorrowland, a projects that is not based on any property and apparently Lindelof is the actual author (from what I know). We'll see what that's like.

Unless another writer is hired to rewrite Lindelof's script...

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I watched the first season of Lost. I also didn't watch every episode of Under the Dome. Am I not allowed to criticise that either? Would that be awfully unfair of me? Aww, life's so hard.

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Lost started out great, it's first few episodes. It had the potential to be the ultimate Twilight Show episode ever made. But it's patterns and hooks became clear almost immediately. It was engineered to be a series of red herrings and contrived cliffhangers EVERY SINGLE WEEK without fail. I dunno, I just haven't the patience for that sort of gimmicky plotting - ESPECIALLY when it's clear the committee are writing blind.

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If you two go back to the beginning of our exchange we were talking about TV shows in the context of the ending. There is a looooooong way to go from where you finished watching (in fact it's about 1/5). Season 1 is not even the whole first act of the story and the "survivor" angle doesn't carry over into the subsequent episodes. It's more about the different meanings of the title where each season turns into a slightly different genre and theme. It was, as you say, The Twilight Zone and didn't treat itself too seriously. Heck, even characters started to comment on how absurd certain plot points were.

Of course, you can criticize whatever you want and whenever you want, but understand that I won't take it as seriously. "I've not seen it and I won't, but I didn't like it" just isn't interesting enough. It's not an episodic show that gives you a good understanding of what it is in one episode. Lost (again, the title being a key) changes all the time and that's what made me watch it - sheer fun factor.

Karol

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My mate, Jay, was a big Lost fan. I saw the odd random episode of later seasons while at his house. I saw the button press guy - the mysterious dude who they discovered on the island, and the time he was followed going off on one of his secret trips out. I saw the hottie from Machete and pretty much her entire subplot unfold, including her demise. I saw a decent amount of stuff from later episodes. It was entertaining in places actually.

But the gimmicks were still very much in place, the tiresome back story flashbacks (filler) playing out for every single uninteresting character and his dog, the tedious cliffhangers were still being wheeled out to keep you watching a week later (except Jay binged, naturally). It was the same Lost I lost interest in after the first season.

Just knock off the condescending "you don't get it so I won't listen" routine. You sound like a baby.

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Just knock off the condescending "you don't get it so I won't listen" routine. You sound like a baby.

The bottom line is I've watched it, you have not. This conversation started when you attacked me (too strong of a word, perhaps) for comparing the two finales. And the truth is I felt they are actually very similar - in tone, approach, content and quality (that last thing I understand as compared to the average episode of their respective shows, not against each other).

Karol

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My mate, Jay, was a big Lost fan. I saw the odd random episode of later seasons while at his house. I saw the button press guy - the mysterious dude who they discovered on the island, and the time he was followed going off on one of his secret trips out. I saw the hottie from Machete and pretty much her entire subplot unfold, including her demise. I saw a decent amount of stuff from later episodes. It was entertaining in places actually.

But the gimmicks were still very much in place, the tiresome back story flashbacks (filler) playing out for every single uninteresting character and his dog, the tedious cliffhangers were still being wheeled out to keep you watching a week later (except Jay binged, naturally). It was the same Lost I lost interest in after the first season.

Just knock off the condescending "you don't get it so I won't listen" routine. You sound like a baby.

The flashbacks are filler? Ha! Jeez you're insufferably ignorant. What you call gimmick the rest of the universe calls formula. Every show has one.

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Many were. Many weren't.

But Lost did have noticeable filler at times. Plus the abandoned plot lines which feel like filler too.

Now. Filler can be good. Watchmen was written with loads of filler in mind. But in Lost it was quite dull.

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A lot of this filler comes from the fact that up until the second part of season 3 there was no ending (network-wise) and that's why there were so many flashbacks up until that point. Not so in seasons 4-6. In fact from that moment the show switched from leisurely walk into a sprint mode.

Karol

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It all depends on what you're watching the show for. If, like most, all you cared about were the mysteries on the island, you weren't watching the same show the creators were writing. There was plenty of filler, in that the main plot on the island was not progressed in an episode, but that never made the episode meaningless. Even something as mundane as learning about Jack's tatoo provided insight to the overall character arc, and that was when the show hit its lowest point.

The flashbacks, and subsequently flashforwards and flashsideways, are where the meat of the character development is. Karol likes this show, but not nearly as much as me. I find LOST to be brilliant, not without its share of faults, but those misteps are what makes its near-perfect in my eyes. The quality of writing throughout is top notch, it's my favorite show of all time.

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The flashbacks are filler? Ha! Jeez you're insufferably ignorant. What you call gimmick the rest of the universe calls formula. Every show has one.

Nah, felt like padding to me. But I'm glad you were riveted. I was almost always bored by the flashbacks. I'd have probably stuck with it if they'd stayed with the sci-fi weirdness of the Island itself, but I guess that was a pricey enterprise (hence the cheaper, real-world filler).

Re: the cliffhangers.

I can remember a meta game which could be played each episode. If in the last five minutes nothing particularly exciting was going on it was more difficult to predict how they were gonna make sure you came back the following week, so in the last thirty seconds or so they'd just quickly INVENT something and whack it in there. There'd just be this little subdued back-and-fourth between a couple of characters and then there'd be this sudden change of location which craftily revealed some big Ooo what does that all mean! What could that be! BS, and dickheads would talk about it all week afterwards! Hook line and sinker.

The biggest joke of course that the even the writers themselves didn't know what any of it meant.

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It all depends on what you're watching the show for. If, like most, all you cared about were the mysteries on the island, you weren't watching the same show the creators were writing.

Indeed, most of them weren't actually mysteries, they were hooks. Genuine mysteries don't work like that.

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The flashbacks are filler? Ha! Jeez you're insufferably ignorant. What you call gimmick the rest of the universe calls formula. Every show has one.

Nah, felt like padding to me. But I'm glad you were riveted. I was almost always bored by the flashbacks. I'd have probably stuck with it if they'd stayed with the sci-fi weirdness of the Island itself, but I guess that was a pricey enterprise (hence the cheaper, real-world filler).

You should have stuck around. Smoke monsters, donkey wheels, Egyptian temples, submarines exploding... ;)

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A lot of this filler comes from the fact that up until the second part of season 3 there was no ending (network-wise) and that's why there were so many flashbacks up until that point. Not so in seasons 4-6. In fact from that moment the show switched from leisurely walk into a sprint mode.

Karol

This paragraph sums up perfectly why I didn't stick with it. I. Don't. Like. Filler.

Continuing the Breaking Bad comparisons: there was literally one moment of filler in its entire five season run - the much loved Fly episode. I didn't like it. The only part I didn't.

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Yes, Quint. It is all true. But Lost is a B movie (or B series, rather). It's not as artful and subtle in its storytelling as Breaking Bad or other shows like that. As I said, it's network television. But, as such, probably one of the better ones out there.

Karol

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