Put three film and television critics into a room and what happens? Check out this meeting of the minds of Chicago Tribune’s Maureen Ryan, Time’s James Poniewozik, and Newark Star-Ledger’s Alan Sepinwall where they discuss ABC’s show “Lost” and its long term influence and their hopes for how the series concludes. This conversation took place in late October.
Ryan: What do you guys think “Lost‘s” legacy will be? Is it a one-off or is it going to have some kind of lasting influence? I really go back and forth on that.
Poniewozik: I actually was just thinking about this, because I had not been thinking about “Lost” in the off season, but I started watching the remake of “The Prisoner,” [which aired Nov. 15-17 on AMC] and you can’t watch any iteration of “The Prisoner” without thinking about how much “Lost” goes to that.
I don’t think “Lost” is a one-off, but I also don’t think that we’ll see a lot of mini-“Losts” every year after that. I think it [ties into] the theory of the eternal return. There will just be one of them that comes like a comet every 10 years You get your “Prisoner” and you get your “Twin Peaks” and you get “Lost.” There will always be some obsessive who watched “Lost” when he was a kid, or watched the “Prisoner” when she was a kid or whatever. And so that’s going to continue to be remade in some way or another.
Sepinwall: But I think the interesting thing that differentiates “Lost,” even from “The Prisoner,” is that “Lost,” at least for a while, was insanely popular. It was a cult show with a huge mass audience. And most of that audience has kind of run straight into the time travel and the polar bear cages and all that. But this idea that you can do a show this complicated and this weird and have this much sci-fi content in it and yet get that kind of audience — I don’t know that that’s ever going to happen again.
Poniewozik: Well, you won’t have that kind of audience again, yeah. [Future shows might not] necessarily need that kind of audience. Yeah, as a mass phenomenon, you may be right.
Sepinwall: And the other thing is – you’ll see lots of shows like this and we’ve seen a lot of shows be made like it in the few years that “Lost” has been on, but you’ll very rarely see shows this good.
Ryan: Yes.
Sepinwall: “Invasion,” “Threshold,” “Flash Forward” — it’s like, they are all trying so hard.
Ryan: Right. And I think they’re getting part of the equation wrong. I had this really illuminating conversation with [former “Lost” writer and current “Fringe” executive producer] Jeff Pinkner about this. Earlier this year, I wrote a story predicated on the whole “serialized versus non-serialized TV” thing — the broadcast networks certainly seem to be backing away from serialization. Pinkner was sort of saying “Lost” was a stealth show in some ways. It had these genre elements, but it was a character show. The brilliance that allowed “Lost” to get over was that the individual episodes worked as an hour of TV. Early on, it was a procedural of sorts, and the procedure was figuring out, “What happened to that guy? Why is he in a wheelchair?”
So my guess is that maybe the next “Lost” also won’t be in your face about time-travel and so forth. Maybe the next one won’t front-load the concept and will sort sneak the weirdness in the back door. I don’t know.
Poniewozik: I think that’s really true. I don’t even know that “Lost” was a stealth show in that sense. When it started out, it wasn’t the Damon Lindelof show, it was a J.J. Abrams show. J.J. Abrams was generally was concerned first and foremost with the people and the emotions and the stories. And then throw some freaky [stuff] in there and it throws people off balance.
What “FlashForward” doesn’t get about “Lost” is that, when “Lost” started out, most of the things that we think of distinctively “Lost” — mythology, the Dharma Initiative — none of that was in there. There was a polar bear, there was a mysterious broadcast out of the plane that crashed and there was a monster. “FlashForward” — it’s like they don’t understand why “Lost” was good. It’s good because it’s funny and because the characters surprise you and all the mystery evolved out of it and grew out of the characters.
Ryan: Right. Whereas on “FlashForward,” it seems like the characters, such as they are, are there to serve a concept, whereas “Lost” was like, “Here’s a bunch of characters running around, what the hell’s going on?” And we don’t know what the concept is necessarily.
My theory of “Lost” has always been — part of the reason “Lost” worked is because it was a crazy, out-of-left field idea. And that’s what I always wish networks would do. “Hey, take a chance.” Then CBS did take a chance for, like, three minutes when they did “Viva Laughlin.” But they didn’t really commit to what that was, which was a shame.
So, I’m not saying broadcast networks never take chances, but the bottom line was that “Lost” was just a risky idea executed well. It’s not that we need a weird mythology, we just need a good idea.
Sepinwall: I remember my first reaction to the pilot was, “I don’t know that that monster needs to be there.” I almost would have liked the pilot better if it was just them on the island and there was some weird stuff going on but you don’t know what. And when the monster came in, it was kind of overtly sci-fi and I felt at the time that they didn’t need that. In the end, I came around and I love Smokey as much as the next guy.
Ryan: Although I think if we’re talking J.J. Abrams, I loved “Cloverfield” until they revealed the monster, and then the movie became the story of how they escaped the monster. And it’s not that the second half was bad, it was just less interesting once we saw the monster.
And that was just something that I wanted to ask you guys. I’m a die-hard “Battlestar Galactica” fan obviously, but I was pretty taken aback at how passionately people reacted, not just to the finale of “Battlestar”, but to that last set of 10 episodes. People were incredibly invested in what their idea of what the final chapters should be. People were very, very adamant about what the show “had to do” or “was supposed to do” before it ended — like, they had this mental checklist. And you know, everybody has their little mental checklist for a final season, probably even moreso for “Lost.”
So do you think there’s a way that this can end well for “Lost,” in terms of the reaction? I mean, will there be rioting in cyberspace no matter what?
Sepinwall: Yeah, people are going to be pissed off. But you can’t satisfy everyone and everyone who’s has built up in their head their own ideas. I mean, Lindelof has said this, Cuse has said this — everyone has their idea of what the monster is, what the island is, etc. And either the ending is not going to go along with that and people will be upset, or people are going to be like [mildly disappointed voice], “Oh, yeah, that’s what I thought it was. OK.”
It happened a couple of times in some of the earlier seasons where when they give you an answer and it’s the answer you thought of. Suddenly it feels a little less impressive.
Poniewozik: Unfortunately, there’s this [problem] that’s inherent to sci-fi shows that “Battlestar Galactica” ran into.
In a regular, character-based drama, maybe people have high expectations for the finale, maybe they expect that closure from it, or [maybe they expect it to] wrap up in a certain way for the characters. Even when it’s a finale that people really don’t like — the “Seinfeld” finale, the “Sopranos” finale for a lot of people — I don’t know that many people who said, “I hate this ‘Seinfeld’ finale so much that it ruined the show for me.”
But there’s a thing about sci-fi that they expect the finale is not just supposed to be a narrative ending. It’s supposed to be an Answer, which to me is kind of ridiculous. The finale is supposed to say what it all meant, what everything was about. And you know, I’m not saying that it’s unimportant. I watch these shows for the same reason, but if the show is really good, that’s secondary.
Ryan: Well, I really felt like there was a left-brain, right-brain split in a way, when it came to the reaction to “Battlestar.” I’m obviously being overly reductive, but it seemed like there were two sort of realms of fan responses or reactions. There were the people that wanted the whole mythology to add up correctly and make sense, and there were the people who wanted the character stuff to kind of wrap up. I was mostly in the latter camp. And so for me, I felt like there were a couple of wobbly things in the finale, but I was willing to live with them because the “Battlestar” finale really delivered, for me, on a character level.
Whereas, in the post-finale comments I was seeing, people wanted the math to add up. You know, like, the show is a math equation and the show needed to get the right answer. And in my mind, it was never going to do that — I necessarily didn’t expect that or think it was going to be possible for it all to add up neatly. I felt like, this is a show that has taken many risks. A few of them have not paid off, but I’d rather watch a show that does something crazy that has an 89 percent chance of working out down the road, story-wise, than a show that plots things out in a way that is purely logical and kind of clinical.
So I just think certain segments of the various “Lost” fandoms are, if anything, more obsessed with various bits of arcane mythology and they will want everything to add up a certain way. I think there’s a chance the “Lost” guys are going to have to go to France and hide.
Sepinwall: And the problem is that everyone has their own favorite bit of mythology. Some people are really into the numbers or the four-toed foot or whatever.
Ryan: I didn’t realize until I read this interview that Whitney Matheson recently did with Damon – people are really into this conversation that happened at one point between Kate and Ben on the beach. “What were they talking about?” And Damon’s like, “Nothing. It’s not a big deal.”
It’s like the mention of Daniel, the Cylon that didn’t work out, in “Battlestar’s” final season — they had no idea that people would seize on that so obsessively. Ron Moore tried 50 different times to say “That does not matter” and people were not hearing it. I definitely thought there was some meaning with the Daniel thing myself.
Poniewozik: It’s a double-edged sword because the fact that you can get involved with the show on that granular a level, that’s what makes it sticky and what makes people follow it so closely.
Ryan: What do you guys personally want out of the last season?
Poniewozik: Honestly, I don’t know if there’s anything that I particularly want. I want to be entertained and impressed. And I want to have some sense of why the island is important and why it was necessary that they all be there, if it was necessary that they all be there.
I don’t necessarily need all the parts of that to add up. It’s not like there’s an outcome that I’m rooting for. I’d love to be surprised.
Sepinwall: There’s one outcome I am rooting for, and that is Desmond, Penny and baby Charlie have to be OK. If they [expletive] with them, I’m not going to be happy and that’s the only area. But beyond that…
Ryan: Yeah, I think I’m with you there. I think they probably know they cannot break our hearts with that. If they do, they will be dead.
Sepinwall: And I would like to know what Smokey is. They’ve teased that out so much that if they don’t answer that — that I think would be disappointing.
Poniewozik: It’s funny that the thing that you guys come to is Desmond and Penny and little Charlie. And not Kate and Jack and Sawyer, for instance. [But] some people have this idea that, for a show like this to be any good, should know exactly what it’s going to do from the beginning. You know — have a map and follow the map militarily to the end.
And the fact is, it’s like a novel, it’s like writing and developing anything else, it’s like making a movie — if it doesn’t happen organically, if it doesn’t come out of the characters, who are human beings and will surprise you and take you places that you didn’t expect to when it started out, it’s going to be [crap]. And therefore, [the show] has to allow for the possibility that things that the creators thought were going to happen in Season 1 just end up not happening at all. And some character who is down a hole at the beginning of the second season ends up having the relationship that is cared about most at the end.
Ryan: That does makes me a little bit crazy, that comment that people make — “The were just making it up as they went!” Well, obviously! They’re not making a documentary about people on an island with polar bears. And they’re also not going to plan every turn of every episode in advance of shooting the show.
Of course I do understand the frustration on one level, in that sometimes storytellers can falter. I’m not saying, “Gosh, you know what? ‘Lost’ has been a perfect from the beginning.”
Sepinwall: Come on, the polar bear cages were awesome, admit it. Admit it.
Ryan: If you’re asking me, did I like to see Sawyer as Shirtless Cage Guy? I’m not going to lie to you; I was OK with that. Everyone got so mad about those six episodes and I just didn’t get it. I was like,”Wait, Sawyer’s in a cage with his shirt off? Why would I have a problem with that?”
No, but I mean, I understand, it’s not always perfect. But if they weren’t making it up, they wouldn’t have baby Charlie and Desmond and Penny. A lot of the stuff that people love the most wouldn’t even exist had it not been for “making it up as we go.”
Poniewozik: And if you have a plan that you stick with and come hell or high water, that’s exactly when you get into a situation where the characters [don’t seem real].
Ryan: I have to admit, I got a little bit emotional when I was filing out of that last Comic-Con panel for “Lost.” Partly because they were playing that version of “Over the Rainbow”/”What a Wonderful World” by that Hawaiian singer, Israel Kamakawiwoʻole, which was really amazing. But part of it was — to have that level of emotional engagement with a show is not the norm, but it is really nice to have. I mean, I get very engaged by “Mad Men” too. But to have the emotional engagement and the sci-fi element at the same time — to have my heart and my nerd brain activated at the same time — that’s rare.
[Source] ChicagoTribune
