Tag Archives: Television

LOST Goes Out As It Should…With Answers and a Sense of Purpose

Television, , , , , , ,

The finale for LOST was last night, and even though I’m not one to stay up that late these days, it was well worth the staying up. (spoiler warning for anyone reading further….) Right up to the last few minutes, I found myself thinking, wait, we’re about to go out with a nice ending, but I still don’t feel I have any answers. And then they sprung it. Just like that. And I was thinking, wow, that works. Sure, there was a lot of fighting against that thought, but in the end it really worked, and just like LOST, it waited until the last moment to just subtly explain what it’s all been about. That’s so much like LOST.

What I thought was so profound is that one of the obvious clues had been staring us in the face all along. We knew the character’s name from the start, but it was one of those shell games where you just never looked at that person’s name to realize how significant it really was. It took Kate actually just saying it out loud, in almost disbelief, for me to realize how this process of puzzle making was so well done in this show. The bizarre thing is we always knew the person’s name, but no one ever bothered to just say it out loud, all together. That one clue would have really been enough if we realized how significant it was all along. I mean, every character in the show had a significant name (well, most at least), including John Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Jacob, Faraday, and the list goes on.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll ever get another show like LOST ever again. We’ve lost some of the greatest written dramas on television over the last few years, including Battlestar Galactica, which like LOST took a few years to really get its groove.

I’ll admit it. I’m a big fan of good television, but unfortunately, there’s not a lot of good television to find. The big shows right now are a lot of reality TV stuff, like Dancing with the Stars. I can’t watch any of that. The few good dramas are few and very hard to find. Instead, we get really trashy television like Grey’s Anatomy. I really hate that show, even though I love Heigl, even though she’s slowly becoming an enigma on that show. But I hate the stupid premise of that show, and the few times I tried watching it in the beginning completely turned me off of it.

So what do we have left? Surprisingly, one of the more innovative shows became a victim of its own success. Actually, a few did. There was Heroes, which had a GREAT first season and then imploded on itself with the cardinal sin of television (it thought it was more important than it really was). This same cardinal sin is happening to a lot of early shows, like Fringe, FastForward and V. But they didn’t even allow themselves a chance to become important before they turned into jokes of themselves right off the start. Another show that had promise, just for the intriguing writing it was doing in the beginning was one you wouldn’t suspect, and that was Desperate Housewives. And then it turned really stupid, as if it only had to rely on its great first season to make it great by name alone. It’s difficult to watch, so I stopped.

Some of the other promising shows are on the Sci Fi channel, strangely named Syfy these days. Except they’re screwing up those as well. Stargate Universe has taken a great franchise and tried to become Battlestar Galactica, which it is not. Stargate was always light, fun and entertaining. Stargate Universe is boring, tedious and another one of those that sees itself as important without doing anything to become important. I think when they went to the “let’s put our heroes into an inescapable plot in one week and then have them just walk through the stargate unscathed WITHOUT AN EXPLANATION the next week” is what has finally destroyed the show. They keep trying, and every now and then there’s a glimmer of hope, but it’s close to being thrown on the “don’t watch” list.

However, in July a bunch of the good shows from Syfy are coming back, and that might be really interesting. Eureka, a weird, light show, is coming back. Warehouse 13 is also coming back during that time. I’m not sure when Caprica is coming back, but that’s also on the backburner of a lot of people for one of the better shows out there, even though it’s just a spinoff to Battlestar Galactica, told some decades before the events of BG erupt.

One of the other decent shows, especially decent over this last season, is Smallville, and it is going to be producing its 10th and final season, which has a lot of people going through pre-withdrawals. But this means we should finally get to see the Boy of Steel become the Man of Steel, which has always been the end game for this series. Sure, they could make a Superman TV series, but I just don’t think it would be as great as the premise for Smallville always was. The origin story is such a unique animal in fiction, and we already know how it’s supposed to turn out.

Which leaves the rest of us wondering what are we supposed to do now that LOST is gone? There are no other shows that can replace it. Sure, a lot of networks are going to try to duplicate it, but they will continue to fail because they so want people to think they have the next LOST, which is impossible to do when you are trying too hard. That was one of the beauties of LOST. It never came out and said it was great. It just was. It trodded on, telling its story as it wanted to tell it, and they didn’t fall back on stupid shark jumping tricks to keep the fans happy. But the fans were happy, and they kept viewing.

Shows just don’t do that these days. And that’s what we’ll probably miss the most.

The Complexities of Government in the 21st Century

Politics, Television, , , ,

I know this is going to sound a bit strange, but I got the idea for this post from watching a really low quality science fiction tv series imported from the BBC. The show is called Survivors (not Survivor as in the really stupid reality TV show about tribes on an island). The premise is that some kind of virus has killed most of the people in the world, and a very few people are now amongst the survivors. The story is told from the main perspective of two women (one formely very wealthy and the other somewhat dirt poor). The two women hook up somewhere around the third episode, and slowly they are traversing the outskirts of London looking for some way to survive.

The wealthy woman seems to have come to a conclusion about what needs to be done for the future, and this came from some old geezer guy who was maintaining a vigil at the school where her son was last seen (her son becomes the motivation for her to seek out any attempts to find him). The old man, realizing he’s too old to really do any “surviving” tells the rich woman, Abby that long term survival isn’t going to come from hoarding the stuff that’s left but in the ability of the survivors to reinvent the old days of basic manufacturing. An example the guy uses is that in order to build a table you not only need wood that was cut down from a tree, but you need to be able to make the ax you used to cut it down because eventually the supply of axes and tools will break and run down, meaning that we have to be able to make this stuff again. The victors will be the ones who relearn how to do such things so that we’re not just scavengers but producers as well, so that the future of humanity is not just gathering but creating as well. Well, Abby takes up this idea and pretty much tells everyone she comes across that this is needed for the future, and she becomes very convincing as a future leader for whatever institutions they create.

This doesn’t really resonate until they hit about the third episode when she comes across a former parliamentarian who has taken it upon himself to rebuild “society” by claiming control over certain sections of the local area. If you want to scavenge supplies from abandoned stores, you need to go through him and his goons, and quickly you start to realize that in all of the talk that they have about saving civilization, they are really just another version of lazy government officials who have taken it upon themselves to take control because they got there first, and everyone else is pretty much at their beck and call. Abby fights against this and decides to go it alone with her little ragtag group of people, and suddenly you start to see the beginnings of class and political struggle that results, and the reality the story shows is that no matter how much you try to avoid it, you’re forced into that paradigm one way or another.

Which caused me to start thinking about the moral that this story has to be telling to those of us who are living in civilized society where a virus hasn’t wiped out government yet. As I talk about from time to time, somewhere down the line we surrendered power to people who have had their hands on the reigns ever since. Sure, we can believe that we can “vote” them out, but in reality we have little ability to change anything because the vast numbers necessary to make a difference are practically insurmountable and incapable of being obtained. As Mancur Olson points out, we can get a lot of people to rally together for a cause, but once we get them together, there’s little way to keep them motivated on the end game, and even worse, as is pointed out by me, once you have those numbers of people gathered together, there’s no telling what they’re going to do on a whim. Look at the protests that took place during the first Gulf War that happened in San Francisco. At one point, there were thousands of people gathered in the streets; the next, people were climbing the railings of the Bay Bridge, disrupting traffic and getting arrested while doing absolutely nothing for the movement but everything for their critics. Look at the protests that took place in Berlin in the 1990s. People wanted to get together to protest the harsh conditions and the rumors that were circulating about future freedoms. The result: They tore down the wall and ended communism in East Germany overnight. All it took were random people throwing rocks and bricks before things went completely out of control. In Berlin, that was great for freedom. In Czechoslovakia decades earlier, it was disastrous as the government responded by opening fire on the crowds and arresting anyone who dared to protest such treatment.

Yet, there’s a problem that has emerged in the latter part of the 20th century and into the 21st century that no one is addressing, and that’s that people are no longer quiet peasants who are uneducated and willing to do whatever the forces of power tell them to do. We’re seeing all sorts of random violence taking place all across the world at government summits and economic meetings where people are angry and no longer willing to just sit on the sidelines waiting for crumbs of information from those in the know and those in power. There are powder kegs all over the world that are waiting to explode, and some already have, yet we see these as isolated incidents and pay little attention to them. Partly because we aren’t concerned, and partly because I think a lot of people want to hope that such events do not lead to horrific futures that they refuse to imagine.

People often see the Obama victory for the wrong reasons. So many people want to see it as a refutiation of the Bush Administration, as if the country wised up and “threw out the bums”. Yet, these same people seem shocked when the masses are going through the motions of throwing out government officials from Obama’s side. To them, none of this makes sense and appears to point to a public that is unsure of what it wants. But a logical mind can look at these incidents and realize that something very simple is taking place: The masses are reacting against pretty much all authority and showing its dissatisfaction with anyone who is in power.

Unfortunately, this is just a placebo that will work only long enough for people to realize that throwing some people out of office will only strengthen the ones that manage to stay in, and even worse, create a new group of cronies who will quickly grow into the types of people the masses don’t want in power. The masses can only get angry for so long before one of two things happens: Things REALLY change, or they take their anger out in other ways. The first alternative is the best course, but it hasn’t ever happened that way, and it isn’t happening that way. Lobbyists still control government in the shadows, and as long as they continue to do so, and the rich continue to use government to enrich themselves as the expense of the public, then the first alternative will never happen. Oh, we can hope for it and pretend it’s working, but convincing ourselves is not the same as convincing the angry masses who aren’t easily appeased with government cheese handouts and pretending that a loss of jobs is really an uptick in jobs because we turned the statistics chart upside down and said all is well. The second alternative is the dangerous one, and if things go that way, there is no going back to the first alternative because once things start moving down that road, they don’t stop. And there is no controlling events either because once things start to go into anarchy, only the gods of anarchy can be appeased, and they are appeased by chaos and uncertainty.

Could make for an interesting future.

TV Critics Still Don’t “Get” LOST

Television, Writing, ,

There was another article today on LOST on CNN.com, right here. Basically, the reviewer has a decent review of the ending of LOST, and then has to go full retard and start talking about how other “thinking” shows aren’t wanted by audiences, noting the failures of “familiar” shows like Heroes and FlashForward. No, the problem with those shows were not that people were already satiated with LOST, but that Heroes and FlashForward completely miss the reason that LOST is popular in the first place. While Heroes and FlashForward have “science fiction” elements and try to act like there’s a huge “mystery” to them, they fail because like most normal network television, they hit the audience members over the head, screaming, “I’m innovative and I’m a mystery!!!!” Audience members who bought into LOST got a show that was innovative and a mystery, but not once has the show had the need to hit the audience over the head with its premise. It just trodded along, doing its thing, and the audience jumped on board because the writers and producers actually gave them the benefit of the the doubt that they’re not total dolts and capable of following along with a complex story.

That’s been the beauty of LOST all along. It knows its audience is intelligent, and it realizes it has to be that much more intelligent to keep a few steps ahead of them. It did this by a lot of nuance, kind of like it was stating: “Hi, I’m a simple little adventure story above an island where people are trying to survive and…holy crap! Is that a polar bear on a tropical island?….oh sorry, back to the island story about looking for survival food and…what the hell was that plume of smoke that’s chasing Hurley across the grass, trying to kill him…oh sorry, I mean, and then we see a mysterious boat that seems to have been left by mysterious island people…HOLY CRAP! The island just jumped thirty years into the past, half the characters went 20 years into the past and the future, and Evangeline Lilly lost a bit more clothing…oh, did I get off track there?” Yeah, that’s the kind of thing that really keeps this story going. From one moment, we’re talking about trying to survive without food, and the next we’re dealing with an ultimate battle between good and evil but forgot to mention who might be good and who might be evil.

Television shows today just don’t do that. That’s what makes LOST so rare and unique. They do it so well. And it may be decades before we come across another show that does it as well again.

Heroes? Bad writing, stupid premise, and a self-importance level that doesn’t match its delivery. FastForward? Tries too hard to be LOST without any of the uniqueness, drama or intrigue. Just because you scream “Mystery” doesn’t make anyone interested in following it. It’s like Fringe, another show I detest. It doesn’t know whether it wants to be the X-Files, Twin Peaks, or CSI. Tried watching it and then decided it was more exciting watching paint dry.

Anyway, I’m waiting for Sunday’s episode, and then I will be sad because LOST will never be new again.

The “end” of LOST

Television,

What’s interesting is that for the first time in a very long time, we’re closing in on the end of what has to be one of the most monumental shows in television history, and a lot of people don’t even realize it. This show has been going on for six seasons now, and it’s one of those that people either love or hate, and there really doesn’t seem to a lot of in-between there. The show ends at the end of this month on Sunday after a 2 1/2 hour conclusion.

I remember watching this show when it first came out, and I was apprehensive about it because all I kept thinking was that this was essentially a remake of Gilligan’s Island without the laugh track. But at the time, I knew nothing about the show; I was just making a spot assessment based on what I was hearing in the popular media. But to be honest, no one in the media had a clue what was going to happen on this show, so everyone was just acting like they knew more than everyone else, and the show aired as some kind of weird drama.

The first episode really should have told everyone what they needed to know: This show was going to be so different than you’d probably never see anything like it again. In the very first episde, we have people crash landing on an island from Oceanic 815, trying to figure out where they were, getting attacked by polar beers (in the jungle!), then attacked by a mysterious “smoke” monster, and then running into ghosts and mysterious people. No, this definitely wasn’t going to be a serious version of Gilligan’s Island.

What is interesting about this show is that everyone is a critic and convinced they know more about what was good and what was bad, when in reality some of the “bad” episodes were actually mega important when it came to the crafting of the overall theme. The third and fourth season is often seen as the low period for the show, when a bunch of bizarre characters get introduced to the island, but what was really happening was that a HUGE story arc was being created that was so necessary to bring the drama to where it is today. Without those really bizarre asides, the story we have now could never have come into being.

And that’s the problem with a show like this one because very rarely is a network going to be giving the show enough time to develop this kind of an arc, cancelling the show before it even has a chance. Had LOST been aired on NBC, there’s a good chance that it would have been taken off the air after the fourth season. Fortunately, it aired on ABC, which has a bit more of a backbone than NBC ever had.

LOST had to survive some pretty interesting times, as it was pretty much coming into its groove when the Writer’s Strike took place, an event that destroyed so many potential shows during its occurrence. It also had to survive Hollywood’s incest-like behavior whenever a ground-breaking show appears, and that’s the tendency that networks have to copy a show and try to capture audience share by trying to reproduce what an innovative show has already done. For every LOST you have, you end up with dozens of Flashforwards that try so hard to pretend that they are as innovative as the original but just pale in any comparison. One thing LOST does well is that it sets up a mystery and lets the audience experience the growth of that mystery through its eventual revelation once its solved. A show like Flashfoward screams “I’m a MYSTERY!” because it so wants to gain the audience that a show like LOST has. So instead of a lot of nuance and intrigue, it jumps right into the mystery, patting itself on the back as it recognizes itself for what it thinks it is, and then prods on as if it is the first to ever do so. You can even see it in the ad spots that they run for the show; they want so much to seem mysterious, but instead they come off as pretentious and stupid. Having watched Flashforward, that’s been my observation of the show as well.

Unfortunately, for a show like LOST to work, it has to eventually end, and it is doing just that. The mystery is being unfolded now, and we’re starting to find out more and more. Not only that but characters that have been with us since the beginning (and others that hopped on board in the process) are slowly being shown to be real and touchable, meaning that they can die at any moment now. We lost a few hugely important characters just last Tuesday, and it was done in a way that those watching still shake their heads and cannot believe those characters could possibly be gone. But that’s the beauty of a show like LOST, especially as it comes to an end. Anything can happen, and when someone watches a show with that thought in mind, it makes it that much more real. And in a show with such a fantastic premise, “real” is such a wonderful thing to achieve.

What is sad about LOST is that its end means that we will probably not have a show like it again. Oh, they’ll attempt to recapture this kind of show in many different variations in the near future, but it will take many years before we have anything that comes as close to being as impacting as this show was on the viewing public. You can probably list on the fingers of one hand how many shows have ever been that powerful that so many people are anxiously awaiting the outcome. Fortunately, those of us who watched LOST from the beginning can now say that we were there all the way through, and May 23rd, that journey finally comes to an end.