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Nobody came to "Get" [i]Lost[/i].

Started by Robert, April 08, 2018, 08:21:25 PM

Robert

I've added more graphics, in the middle of the page, to the "Get" Lost index page.  The explanation will follow in the next entry, whenever that comes.

I'm trying to decide again between Benry's having been a deprogrammer of Widmore's zombies and Benry & Widmore having similar roles.

The Manchurian Candidate speaks more to Benry's being a deprogrammer, but the backgammon metaphor more to Benry & Widmore acting symmetrically.  "One of Our Aircraft Is Empty" leads to different interpret'ns depending on how the roles of Terrell & Finch are viewed relative to each other.  I see them as bad bad guy & not-as-bad guy.

ksm32

Never watched an episode. But after all the negativity on the way it ended, I must admit that I'm intrigued to say the least. But then I'll read a thread like this with all the Lost haters.. and I decide once again to avoid the binge watch once again. And I hate TV so that helps.

I've heard seasons 1 through 3 were great.

Robert

Quote from: ksm32 on May 28, 2018, 07:15:26 PMNever watched an episode. But after all the negativity on the way it ended, I must admit that I'm intrigued to say the least. But then I'll read a thread like this with all the Lost haters.. and I decide once again to avoid the binge watch once again. And I hate TV so that helps.

I've heard seasons 1 through 3 were great.
Those rxns were all from people who expected it to be a normal TV show.  It wasn't.  It was the laying out of a lot of clues that the audience was expected to solve the mystery behind, w/o even being told there was such a mystery.

If you just took it as a normal TV show, in most respects it was shitty.  It was well performed, but the plot didn't make much sense if you just expected it to be laid out w/o need of any inferences.  It was vexingly presented so as to make it seem like it was just sloppy; had it made no sense even if you allowed for sloppiness, then it would've given more viewers the most important clue, i.e. that there was something we needed to figure out that would never be presented overtly.



Robert

Quote from: Jackstar on May 29, 2018, 12:21:12 PMIt had a perfect ending.
Regardless, there was too much focus on the ending, because viewers (including me & Damon's other friends) expected a denouement.  Instead, the ending contained no more clues than the avg. episode.  In fact, the entirety of season 6 was much lower than avg. in clue content.

Jackstar

I don't think many clues were needed by season 6. It was more important to focus on how the characters reacted, rather than what they reacted to.

Quote from: Robert on May 29, 2018, 12:25:02 PM
the entirety of season 6 was much lower than avg. in clue content

Right! Perfect!


I'm gonna close my point with a story you may have heard before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WOrNlVtS8A

Jackstar

And speaking of "too many clues," just how many people from Lost are working on Westworld? It's gotta be dozens.

Robert

Quote from: Jackstar on May 30, 2018, 01:42:59 PMAnd speaking of "too many clues," just how many people from Lost are working on Westworld? It's gotta be dozens.
I don't know.  What I do know is that Michael Emerson, who on Lost played a character based on Howard Finch on Department S, wound up playing a character by that name in Person of Interest.  So these Hollywood people get each other's jokes & carry them on.

His character on Lost was also modeled partly on Hamlet, whom he'd been playing just before being cast on Lost.

Jackstar


Jackstar

Quote from: Robert on May 30, 2018, 10:05:34 PM
His character on Lost was also modeled partly on Hamlet, whom he'd been playing just before being cast on Lost.


I just don't see what this and other facts you've mentioned in this context actually have to do with the show. Sure, the meta-show is legitimately fascinating to me as well, but unless you're positing that The Island has broken the fourth wall and cunningly inspired the creators of the show that The Island is a character on to create itself, I just don't see what's so breathtaking about, "Wow, the guys who wrote a show, watched other shows before that, and included parts of those shows that they liked in the show they were writing!"

That's art, yo. The Craft.

Robert

Quote from: Jackstar on May 31, 2018, 03:55:09 AMI just don't see what this and other facts you've mentioned in this context actually have to do with the show. Sure, the meta-show is legitimately fascinating to me as well, but unless you're positing that The Island has broken the fourth wall and cunningly inspired the creators of the show that The Island is a character on to create itself, I just don't see what's so breathtaking about, "Wow, the guys who wrote a show, watched other shows before that, and included parts of those shows that they liked in the show they were writing!"

That's art, yo. The Craft.
That's just an observ'n on top of solving the mystery.  It is confirmatory, though.  I mean if in the next TV show he does he's cast as H. Finch, that's add'l evidence that his Benry character was based on the character played by Basil Dignam on "One of Our Aircraft Is Empty", an episode of Department S.

The resemblance of the character to Hamlet is important in that it explains his actions.  Immediately after the sequence of events was presented on Lost, the question arose, why would this character pose as the only person the other characters could verify that he was not?  If he just wanted to steal a random identity & get away w it, he would've picked anybody but the one whose ID was buried where he told them to look.  So right away, discerning members of the audience gathered that he wanted them to find him out, but the question remained, why?

The answer is that he was fishing for rxns by them, the same way Hamlet fished for rxn by his uncle to the play within the play, "The Mouse Trap".  Hamlet had an acc't from an unreliable source accusing his uncle of murder by ear poisoning.  So to see whether that was true, he had re-enacted before his uncle a version of the same story.  His uncle was not good at hiding his rxn!  (Of course then his uncle knew that Hamlet knew, also.)

So the Michael Emerson character put on a version of what he knew had gone on: that some persons had been killed in a transoceanic air wreck, and that some other persons had assumed their identities.  He did not know who among them was a con artist, and who was brainwashed into actually believing it, so he put on his version of "The Mouse Trap", which you'll recall Locke said was his favorite game as a child.  (Locke obviously was hip to what Benry was doing, & made a joke about it.  Hugo did that a lot too.)

The genius of this is that it gives the TV audience a great clue by which to solve the mystery, yet it's plausible that a character would put on such an act.  (It would not be fair for a character to deliberately act a certain way to make Lost; the characters shouldn't know they're making a TV show, but should have independent motiv'n for acting the way they do.)

Lost put on many less elaborate versions of "The Mouse Trap" that would help clue the TV audience in on the theme of usurpation & replacement.  Too many to list here, although if you want I can point to places in the "Get" Lost entries where I''ve compiled those clues.  On top of that, Lost called att'n to self-similarity generally in its plot, most obviously as the entire episode "Expose", in the middle of which they actually used a series of nested matryushka dolls to hide ostensible gems.  So they were telling us that miniature versions of the plot of Lost were embedded within Lost.

Lost also gave a profusion of other clues that the supposed survivors we were seeing were doubles, and that nobody had survived the crash of Oceanic 815.  Most obviously, they showed us the real wreck at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, where it'd been dragged in the hope nobody would find it.  Most blatantly, the promo for season 2 just plain came out & said:
"THEY'RE NOT THE SURVIVORS
"THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE"
But if you didn't get it from those clues, "My name is Henry Gale" should've been enough to figure it out.

Jackstar

Quote from: Robert on May 31, 2018, 07:54:52 AM
"My name is Henry Gale" should've been enough to figure it out.

I don't know that everyone watching considered there to be a singular "it" to the show to figure out. For example, "what about Paolo and Nicki?" No one is ever going to figure that out, because the answer is "writer's room/actor's trailer politics."

Here, let me blow your mind: In reality, there are three Earths. So multiple versions of The Island really isn't that big a deal.

Dr. MD MD

Quote from: Jackstar on May 31, 2018, 05:37:48 PM
I don't know that everyone watching considered there to be a singular "it" to the show to figure out. For example, "what about Paolo and Nicki?" No one is ever going to figure that out, because the answer is "writer's room/actor's trailer politics."

Here, let me blow your mind: In reality, there are three Earths. So multiple versions of The Island really isn't that big a deal.

Where are the other two? ???

Robert

Quote from: Jackstar on May 31, 2018, 05:37:48 PMI don't know that everyone watching considered there to be a singular "it" to the show to figure out.
Oh, there were plenty of other things to figure out!  Lost made a habit of making things appear the opposite of what they were.  (Damon did this because I told him I liked it so much on Smallville.)  So, for instance, Aaron really was born to Kate, not Claire; the appearance of having Claire give birth to him was sleight of hand.  So they made it appear as if Kate was pretending to be Aaron's mother, when in fact she was actually his mother!  Similarly, Sawyer was the one who swindled the Ford family, and took the name James Ford, rather than vice versa.

Or just see reply #10 upthread.
QuoteFor example, "what about Paolo and Nicki?"
You'll have to form the question more specifically than that.  What about them?

I can tell you why Nicki had that name: She's supposed to be an echo of Kate.  Evangeline Nicole Lillie, who played Kate, was known to her family as "Nicky".

Jackstar

I feel like asking the audience, "which of these characters is meant to be a foil of which other?" is a totally valid question, for a lecture hall, but not really one to expect the network television viewing audience en masse to bring themselves up to.

Robert

Quote from: Jackstar on May 31, 2018, 09:53:23 PMI feel like asking the audience, "which of these characters is meant to be a foil of which other?" is a totally valid question, for a lecture hall, but not really one to expect the network television viewing audience en masse to bring themselves up to.
And yet, audiences don't seem to mind that sort of thing if the series is explicitly a detective show.  For example, in Monk there was the series-long mystery of who killed his wife.  I think Andy Breckman wanted us to guess it was Monk himself, but that would've been too obvious, and it wasn't.  It turned out not to be solvable by the audience, because it wasn't a character we'd been seeing.  But there've been other mystery or cloak-&-dagger series in which it was eventually revealed that a certain regular character was a plant or spy as a foil for one or more other characters, or where the audience was led to suspect that was the case.

Jackstar

Quote from: Robert on June 01, 2018, 08:23:00 AM
And yet, audiences don't seem to mind that sort of thing if

But wait. Audiences loved Lost. What they didn't love, was being too ignorant to have the experience of "figuring it out," even after it was explained to them.


Quote from: Jackstar on May 29, 2018, 10:06:08 PM
Perfect!

Robert

Quote from: Jackstar on June 01, 2018, 08:36:06 AMBut wait. Audiences loved Lost. What they didn't love, was being too ignorant to have the experience of "figuring it out," even after it was explained to them.
They expected the concluding episode to be fully explicit, like showing things unmistakably so there'd be no interpret'n needed.  Even I & at least one other mutual friend of Damon expected it.  When it concluded w/o such a denouement, we thought they'd chickened out or some such.  It was almost 2 years before I got back on the trail, and then only because I'd fortuitously read "The Lost Special".

Some people in the audience loved Lost regardless of its mysteries or main plot.  That was mostly chicks.  They were interested in the suspense of who was going to wind up paired off w whom.  That's kind of like people who watch Shyamalan's The Village and then still care much whether the injured character was going to recover & get married.  Or, the other way around, people who looked at the other Village (in The Prisoner) & tried to figure out where it was, or why he resigned!

I still suspect there's footage in the can from Lost that constitutes a denouement.  Maybe it's being saved for a feature film.  But it might not exist.  Even if it doesn't, it wouldn't be too hard to get a cast member or two & shoot the kind of denouement Alfred Hitchcock Presents would've had.  (Like where we're shown that one character was making a tape recording all along to catch the corrupt authorities.)  The genius of it is that you could even use actors who'd never been cast for Lost but who have enough resemblance to cast members that they could be presented as characters who were to become doubles after plastic surgery.  (That's why Ilana/Elana was shown w her head covered in bandages.)

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