Making up for my neglectful behavior
If this is going to turn into a TV blog, then I have to give some time and love to this season's awesomest new show: Heroes!
It's awesome. Last night's Fall Finale was really good, although the Hero that dies wasn't that big of a deal. It was shocking and sad, but not as much as they tried to build up. Sorry if I semi-spoiled anything for you. Plenty of questions left up in the air for January, and to stretch over the season, and that's fine. The nature of Claire's father and his job, and who's giving the "marching orders" is my biggest question.
So all of that said, I'd like to segue into a discussion of Lost. There's a lot of hating on that show lately, hating which began last season. The show's too slow. They don't give enough answers. Things get brought up for no reason and go nowhere (Hey, look, there are some Tailies! Now they're all dead!). I'm not inclined to buy all of these criticisms, but I'm not a fanboy that will blindly defend the show, either. I was forced to reflect on my feelings for the show when I stumbled upon this interesting article today: IGN's Top 50 Loose Ends on Lost. It's a good, thorough article (although they've overlooked one point about the two islands and the polar bears: if the cages where Sawyer and Kate are being held are for the polar bears and are on a different island, how'd the bears get to the main island? That's may be a continuity problem the writers can't resolve without a ridiculous, after-thought explanation). Anyway, the article is not overly critical, but it does provoke thought.
What I got out of the article is: Holy crap, there legitimately ARE at least 50 things introduced on the show that need further explanation! I'm a pretty devoted Lost fan. I watch the episodes closely. I followed along with The Lost Experience over the summer pretty regularly (although I didn't participate to the level of some nutso wack-jobs out there. Get a LIFE, people!) I feel I know what's going on and have my desires for discovering what's going to happen. But the show is so intricate, there are several things I've missed or forgotten about. And reading over that list of 50 loose ends, it's obvious the show will not have time to resolve all of them. Either the producers will have to let them drop to introduce new story lines, or they'll get bogged down trying to explain them all and get cancelled.
Frankly, it seems that the Lost team are trying to do too much. Maybe they don't care about the explanations for things like the Black Rock ship, or the cable leading from the ocean to the inner island, and feel that they just add spooky atmosphere. But real fans of the show do care, and will want to know the story behind such strange things. Even if those things are throw-away items, the plotlines that do matter are still complex without the extra stuff, and mysteries abound on several fronts. So you've got two sources of frustration: from the ardent fans when not enough explication of details in the background/ mythology of the island is given, and from the more casual fan when no storyline is satisfyingly resolved to allow for characters to move on.
The creators of Lost are asking for a lot of patience and attention from its audience, and it's starting to seem that the wonderful world they created didn't have enough boundaries at the outset. Like our Administration and its adventure in Iraq, they needed to have a clear understanding of the scope of how the story would play out before starting, and have an exit plan for when it would end. And that ending has to be on their own terms, not on someone else's. They should have it scripted already. And maybe they do, but so far it seems that the way they are getting there is a bit masturbatory. Anyone who ever read any of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series of fantasy novels knows what I'm talking about. Sadly, I am one of those people, and I hope to begin reading Volume 11 this winter. *sigh*
Having laid out my own criticisms of the show, I still love it and have faith that it will intrigue and entertain. But counting on the endurance and optimism/naivety of devotee's like me who have nothing better to do with their lives is a dangerous thing to do in the network TV world. You won't last long on that fanbase.
P.S. - I just proofread this post and man, is it rambling! Sorry, but I don't have time to rewrite it.
P.P.S. - If you're looking for talk of last week's Office episode: I didn't like it. "Prison Mike", and just about everything else except Ed Helms, fell flat. Pretty disappointing.
It's awesome. Last night's Fall Finale was really good, although the Hero that dies wasn't that big of a deal. It was shocking and sad, but not as much as they tried to build up. Sorry if I semi-spoiled anything for you. Plenty of questions left up in the air for January, and to stretch over the season, and that's fine. The nature of Claire's father and his job, and who's giving the "marching orders" is my biggest question.
So all of that said, I'd like to segue into a discussion of Lost. There's a lot of hating on that show lately, hating which began last season. The show's too slow. They don't give enough answers. Things get brought up for no reason and go nowhere (Hey, look, there are some Tailies! Now they're all dead!). I'm not inclined to buy all of these criticisms, but I'm not a fanboy that will blindly defend the show, either. I was forced to reflect on my feelings for the show when I stumbled upon this interesting article today: IGN's Top 50 Loose Ends on Lost. It's a good, thorough article (although they've overlooked one point about the two islands and the polar bears: if the cages where Sawyer and Kate are being held are for the polar bears and are on a different island, how'd the bears get to the main island? That's may be a continuity problem the writers can't resolve without a ridiculous, after-thought explanation). Anyway, the article is not overly critical, but it does provoke thought.
What I got out of the article is: Holy crap, there legitimately ARE at least 50 things introduced on the show that need further explanation! I'm a pretty devoted Lost fan. I watch the episodes closely. I followed along with The Lost Experience over the summer pretty regularly (although I didn't participate to the level of some nutso wack-jobs out there. Get a LIFE, people!) I feel I know what's going on and have my desires for discovering what's going to happen. But the show is so intricate, there are several things I've missed or forgotten about. And reading over that list of 50 loose ends, it's obvious the show will not have time to resolve all of them. Either the producers will have to let them drop to introduce new story lines, or they'll get bogged down trying to explain them all and get cancelled.
Frankly, it seems that the Lost team are trying to do too much. Maybe they don't care about the explanations for things like the Black Rock ship, or the cable leading from the ocean to the inner island, and feel that they just add spooky atmosphere. But real fans of the show do care, and will want to know the story behind such strange things. Even if those things are throw-away items, the plotlines that do matter are still complex without the extra stuff, and mysteries abound on several fronts. So you've got two sources of frustration: from the ardent fans when not enough explication of details in the background/ mythology of the island is given, and from the more casual fan when no storyline is satisfyingly resolved to allow for characters to move on.
The creators of Lost are asking for a lot of patience and attention from its audience, and it's starting to seem that the wonderful world they created didn't have enough boundaries at the outset. Like our Administration and its adventure in Iraq, they needed to have a clear understanding of the scope of how the story would play out before starting, and have an exit plan for when it would end. And that ending has to be on their own terms, not on someone else's. They should have it scripted already. And maybe they do, but so far it seems that the way they are getting there is a bit masturbatory. Anyone who ever read any of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series of fantasy novels knows what I'm talking about. Sadly, I am one of those people, and I hope to begin reading Volume 11 this winter. *sigh*
Having laid out my own criticisms of the show, I still love it and have faith that it will intrigue and entertain. But counting on the endurance and optimism/naivety of devotee's like me who have nothing better to do with their lives is a dangerous thing to do in the network TV world. You won't last long on that fanbase.
P.S. - I just proofread this post and man, is it rambling! Sorry, but I don't have time to rewrite it.
P.P.S. - If you're looking for talk of last week's Office episode: I didn't like it. "Prison Mike", and just about everything else except Ed Helms, fell flat. Pretty disappointing.
posted by at 11:07 AM
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