Jokes you don't/didn't get

[bloodteller]

i know there’s the thing of “the joke isn’t funny if you explain it” but were there ever gags in Red Dwarf you didn’t get? and if so, what?

i never quite got what Cat’s “stan and ollie” line in White Hole was about, for example. nor did i get what “see you in ten minutes?” (repeat x10) from Pete was all about, and also Rimmer’s “steers and queers, which are you boy?” joke from Meltdown

Topic

[Unrumble]

 People are attacking the Oceanic Six… because. Everything with Charles Widmore gets forgotten… because. There’s some sort of end of the world scenario if they don’t get back to the Island… because. Jack, Kate, Hurley and Sayid randomly teleport to the 1970s… because. Sun, Ben and Frank do not… because. The explanation behind why Eloise Hawking could predict the future was completely ludicrous (they say she has Faraday’s diary, but Faraday could not possibly have known half the things Desmond did). 
Aside from Jack, there is absolutely no way any of them would agree to detonate a nuke and kill themselves and everyone else on the Island in some half-cocked attempt to change history. It’s a completely insane leap and I can’t take the finale seriously because of it. 

I can’t really find much fault with any of this as written, it’s been so long since I last watched it, I think close to 15 years. Maybe I was more forgiving of contrivances in my younger days. 

[Warbodog]

I think early season 3 was the nadir when watching live, but maybe less annoying now you don’t have to wait ages for it, then just get six episodes of not much before another long break, then more episodes of not much before they finally got some momentum going.

[Unrumble]

I think early season 3 was the nadir when watching live, but maybe less annoying now you don’t have to wait ages for it, then just get six episodes of not much before another long break, then more episodes of not much before they finally got some momentum going.

I have to admit that I ignored the show for ages, assuming it was some mainstream overhyped bollocks, and not even aware that it was anything beyond ‘some people stranded on an island’, like a fictional ‘Survivor’.

Then I happened to catch a sole season 5 episode when my girlfriend was watching, where they were skipping through time (a quick check of Wikipedia suggests it was the first or second ep), and was sufficiently intrigued enough to start from the beginning.

So I was able to power through seasons 1-5 without any frustrating delays.

[Warbodog]

Similar for me, but a girlfriend introduced it when season 2 had just finished, so I got to binge those seasons twice over the summer. Season 2 would have annoyed me live too.

[Rushy]

You get like 20 episodes with them though. Can’t really complain. They’re more developed than most main characters in shows today.

[Technopeasant]

It’s still one of the greatest shows of all time, though, and the ending is solid no matter what anyone says. 

I have never seen any Lost past season one.

I have to admit that I ignored the show for ages, assuming it was some mainstream overhyped bollocks, and not even aware that it was anything beyond ‘some people stranded on an island’, like a fictional ‘Survivor’.

Am I the only one who wishes it was a grounded survival drama then?

[Flap Jack]

Am I the only one who wishes it was a grounded survival drama then?

Maybe not, but given how overtly it wasn’t that from episode 1, you might as well wish that Red Dwarf was about a short bearded fantasy creature with a bad sunburn.

[Technopeasant]

Maybe not, but given how overtly it wasn’t that from episode 1, you might as well wish that Red Dwarf was about a short bearded fantasy creature with a bad sunburn.

I am not saying it is a reasonable expectation, just that I would enjoy it more, and it was the bits I saw that leaned into that which I enjoyed the most. If it was not obvious from the other thread, I do not rate J.J. Abrams much. And did not before Star Wars inevitably made everyone else dislike him now (because Star Wars fans are literally never happy, they did not even like Return of the Jedi at the time, even if the sequels were genuinely pretty bad).

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Abram’s wasn’t even that involved in Lost. Not to the point of everyone blaming him for the parts they don’t like. 

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse take most the credit. For good and bad. 

[Warbodog]

Damon Lindelof

Obligatory The Leftovers shout out. Not a favourite show, but the kind you’re glad you watched.

[Unrumble]

Obligatory The Leftovers shout out. Not a favourite show, but the kind you’re glad you watched.

Definitely. Very moving and thought-provoking. 

[Technopeasant]

Abram’s wasn’t even that involved in Lost. Not to the point of everyone blaming him for the parts they don’t like. 
Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse take most the credit. For good and bad. 

Probally fair, but setting up mysteries with no potential satisfying pay off is his M.O. regardless of how others attempted to pick up the pieces.

[International Debris]

I’d be more forgiving of Lost had I not listened to the official podcast alongside it, the one in which Lindelof and Cuse did a really good job of convincing everyone that they actually did have a plan and answers. I remember them asking for people’s theories as to what the smoke monster was and then responding to the answers with “the sounds were chosen for a specific reason” and “some of these are actually pretty close,” only for the big reveal to be that a dead body went into a magic light and out came a smoke monster. Or the whole flash sideways being setup as a massive red herring as an alternate timeline but actually now Desmond can use electromagnetism to travel to the afterlife (?!). I was forgiving of the contrivances in the plot at the time because I thought there would be explanations coming, but watching back, so much of the later series comes down to “that happened because the plot demanded it,” and that’s not a very satisfying watch. People talk about the emotional character stuff being the real ending, but I felt that by the final series the characters had become such boring, one dimensional nonentities that behaved as they did purely to move the plot forward that I honestly didn’t care about anyone other than Desmond and Penny anyway. 

[Warbodog]

Everything’s better when you avoid the marketing. I only endure it for Red Dwarf nowadays.

[Podey]

I honestly think the Lost finale was just ahead of it’s time, people would have no trouble grasping the metaphysical aspect given how much multiverse wank there is these days.

I’ve watched a few YouTuber reactions and they all love the finale when they get to it. 

[Moonlight]

Every time I hear people talk about Lost they make the show sound like what would’ve happened if The X-Files was just the wanky convoluted lore episodes that half the fanbase encourages newcomers to not even bother with.

[Warbodog]

Every time I hear people talk about Lost they make the show sound like what would’ve happened if The X-Files was just the wanky convoluted lore episodes that half the fanbase encourages newcomers to not even bother with.

Ignoring that those are some of the best episodes of the show (unless you meant the bad ones specifically). I see it as a different enough show after the movie that I don’t let its sins tarnish the earlier stuff, as with Red Dwarf.

[International Debris]

I honestly think the Lost finale was just ahead of it’s time, people would have no trouble grasping the metaphysical aspect given how much multiverse wank there is these days. 

Oh I totally understood it, I just thought it was a cop-out. I know there are people who watched it for the character stuff and I’m sure the happily ever after thing worked for them, but I was always more interested in the weirdness than the mostly pretty cliched characters to be honest. The soapiness never gripped me and I wanted to know why a cabin was moving and why the smoke monster was showing people visions of their past and seemingly casting judgment on them and where the island went when it disappeared and what actually happened when the bomb went off and a load of other stuff and absolutely none of it was even given a handwavey answer, it was just completely ignored. Even if you accept the answer to “what is the magic island?” was “it’s a magic island” and “what’s the smoke monster?” was “it’s a smoke monster,” there’s so much that makes no sense even within the show’s own logic. 

[Rushy]

I’m with Podey. It was a magnificent finale that tied the story and characters up beautifully while leaving enough of the world ambiguous to keep you wondering.

I also don’t think it’s Abrams’ MO to leave stories unfinished. He’s never been paid to map out a story, so why is the blame on him? SW was managed by Kennedy, Lost by Lindelof/Cuse. Abrams is largely just a director for hire who does what he says he’s going to do, and leaves when he’s done.

[Technopeasant]

I also don’t think it’s Abrams’ MO to leave stories unfinished.

Not unfinished, empty by design. Because the mystery was always the point in and of itself.

[Moonlight]

Ignoring that those are some of the best episodes of the show (unless you meant the bad ones specifically). I see it as a different enough show after the movie that I don’t let its sins tarnish the earlier stuff, as with Red Dwarf.

I was more meaning that early on it seems like it’s building up all the pieces of this grand mystery that will all come together when the truth is finally revealed and it’ll blow your mind, but then you slowly realize the further you get into the show that they’ve just been tossing random cool ideas at the wall with no plan.

But that’s also me speaking as someone who first watched the show when I was a teenager and hadn’t much experience with serialized drama or mystery box shows before. I took this show start to finish dead seriously when I first watched through it, but now I appreciate the intrinsic cheesiness it can have alongside the genuinely good stuff.

[Warbodog]

I was more meaning that early on it seems like it’s building up all the pieces of this grand mystery that will all come together when the truth is finally revealed and it’ll blow your mind, but then you slowly realize the further you get into the show that they’ve just been tossing random cool ideas at the wall with no plan.

When I watched Just the Mythology Shows once (choosing season 8’s happy ending), I was surprised that it felt like the truth was all out there at the end of season 3. But then they got a movie and more seasons, so they’re also doing something with bees and the oil does completely different things all the time and rebel aliens (I liked that bit) and ancient aliens (which was like one cool cliffhanger then forgotten about?) and Super Soldiers (I zone out there) and whatever the Samantha stuff ended up as that I probably skipped.

[Moonlight]

The rebel aliens and Scully’s kid two parters from season 5 are some of the best myth arc stuff, I decided upon rewatching the show in the last couple years.

[Podey]

Another thing I don’t get about the Lost hate (and I’m not referencing anything said by any particular person in this thread, just in general) is the idea that there’s anything wrong with making it up as you go along, regardless of whether those storylines resolve in a satisfying way or not (and there were certainly some strands that were just outright abandoned). 

I don’t think it’s any less valid to tell a story organically that reveals itself along the writing process rather than meticulously planning it all out from the start. Case in point, here’s Zack Cregger talking about his writing process for the well-received recent movie ‘Weapons’: “When I’m writing, I have a rule for myself—I don’t want to know what’s going to happen at all. I always just start. So, I sat down to write what would become this movie, and the first thing I type is this little girl telling a story and these kids who go running out of the house. And I’m thinking as I’m writing, “This is cool. I hope I figure this out.” And I didn’t really figure it out until it was time in the script to answer that question. Basically, I’m writing on a tightrope, hoping that it is revealed to me. Luckily, in this case, it was.”

I’m a fan of either approach to writing.

[Podey]

(and also, Lost clearly wasn’t only written in that way – there was a broad outline of where the show was going with flexibility to discover new plot points along the way, which I would imagine is how most things are written)

[Dave]

Another thing I don’t get about the Lost hate (and I’m not referencing anything said by any particular person in this thread, just in general) is the idea that there’s anything wrong with making it up as you go along, regardless of whether those storylines resolve in a satisfying way or not (and there were certainly some strands that were just outright abandoned). 

I don’t think it’s any less valid to tell a story organically that reveals itself along the writing process rather than meticulously planning it all out from the start. Case in point, here’s Zack Cregger talking about his writing process for the well-received recent movie ‘Weapons’: “When I’m writing, I have a rule for myself—I don’t want to know what’s going to happen at all. I always just start. So, I sat down to write what would become this movie, and the first thing I type is this little girl telling a story and these kids who go running out of the house. And I’m thinking as I’m writing, “This is cool. I hope I figure this out.” And I didn’t really figure it out until it was time in the script to answer that question. Basically, I’m writing on a tightrope, hoping that it is revealed to me. Luckily, in this case, it was.”

I’m a fan of either approach to writing.

I remember Grant Morrison talking about this in comics and likening it to Jazz – he liked to have a basic structure within which he could still improvise and be spontaneous to allow for an organic approach to writing rather than a rigid adherence to a set plan.

I think it’s an approach that can work and create a story that feels more alive and unpredictable, but I do think that when a story is based on a central mystery or secret then it it helpful to have a fairly clear idea of what the endpoint is from the start, rather than just trusting that you’ll come up with a good payoff down the line. Because sometimes that doesn’t happen.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

When a show is running multiple seasons with 20ish episodes each, of course of lot of it will have to be made up as you go.  Damon and Carlton have also spoken about how not knowing how long they had on air meant they had to just keep throwing out mysteries until a point they agreed an end date with the network.  At one point they were being pushed to make 10 series (why deliberately stop something so successful?) they fought back and agreed on 6. Meaning that from about season 4 onwards they could start planning towards the end.

Sure there’s a lot of mysteries left hanging, to me thats a lot of the fun, but I do think broadly the show answered everything it needed to. 

[Podey]

That’s it exactly, it answered everything it needed to.

Walt was the only important element that felt to me unfinished (and they addressed this in the epilogue), but that was partly due to the actor ageing. 

Side note, all the complaints about how old the Stranger Things cast are in season 5 took me right back to the “how can a hologram age?!” arseholery.

[International Debris]

Again, I think I’d have been less bothered with it if Lindelof and Cuse hadn’t kept promising that everything had a purpose that had been planned out and it would all be explained and make sense. They were explicitly lying to their audience about the kind of show it was in order to keep them watching, which leaves a very bad taste in the mouth. Especially when Lindelof then goes on to say things about how he hates shows that explain everything and people shouldn’t expect that. He also said they’d never do time travel because it’s where writers go when they’ve run out of ideas, and he hated scenes where people just sit down and do exposition to tie everything up – and almost all the answers in Lost were given in a scene where Jacob sits them down by a fire and does a long bit of exposition – so it’s clear that they were always winging it, but eh. He learned his lesson for The Leftovers, a show which never attempted to explain itself and was all the better for it.

In terms of making it up as you go along, I suppose people get burned by stories that fall apart because they were written by people who were better at setting up stories than resolving them. The X Files is a great example: the mythology of that falls apart completely because it wasn’t originally intended to be such a big part of the show. The Prisoner is another: a show built around surprisingly mundane questions (“why did you retire?” is the literal purpose of the show) and yet ended with an insane fuck you to the audience that proved so unpopular that Patrick McGoohan couldn’t get work in the UK for years after (fwiw I love how batshit that ending is). So there’s a suspicion and a worry that it’s going to go that way again and it won’t be worth putting in the time if the ending is going to be shit. I don’t know how much of Lost was genuinely planned, and how much of that made it through to the end – I’m fairly sure they changed some bits because the audience got too close with their guesses, which always feels a bit irritating – but clearly huge chunks of it changed. Desmond was never intended to be a main character yet he was absolutely key to the resolution, which is one example. But I think people expecting the whole thing to be mapped out in advance is mostly just naivety from viewers. Shows like Babylon 5 are very few and far between. 

Lost was mostly a victim of its format, it tried to be a mainstream syndication show dictated by the network and also a niche nerdy show you have to make notes on and listen to the official podcast of, and they weren’t able to balance it at all. If I’d known in advance that they would push the vagueness and characters at the end, I wouldn’t have carried on, because I always thought the characters were trite stereotypes and was only interested in the intricate mystery box that the writers were telling me would be mind blowing in how it all fit together. 

[Podey]

I vehemently disagree with a lot of what you wrote, there, but I will say the time travel season was utter smeg. Easily my least favourite.

[Jimboid]

Battlestar Galactica (’03) had a much-criticised but perfect ending. 

Also – Game of Thrones.  The writing went to shit in the final season but I didn’t have an issue with the plot choices.

.

[Ben Saunders]

Breaking Bad was written by the seat of their pants and managed to knock it out of the park, they famously had no idea what they were going to do with that machine gun at the start of Season 5 until very late in the game, and it ended up having a very satisfying payoff. Also many, many examples of a character only supposed to appear a couple of times being kept until the end of the show because they simply liked the actor. Jesse was supposed to die at the end of season one or two. Mike Ehrmentraut was invented because Bob Odenkirk (Saul) wasn’t available for filming one day.

[International Debris]

Yeah, Breaking Bad is a great example of a making it up as they go along show that actually works really well. It’s certainly possible. When it comes to the Lost approach, I eventually watched Dark which was basically the show I wanted Lost to be: an enormous mystery box sci-fi which was properly planned ahead. I absolutely love shows that keep upping the stakes by pulling out and showing that what you thought of as the main plot is only a tiny part of it, and Dark did that really well without resorting to “who knows, it’s all magic,” type stuff. 

Game of Thrones obviously fell apart because they had to go from tightly plotted books to a very vague outline, although I thought every change they made from the books was terrible right from the first season, so I wasn’t surprised. 

[sleepey]

The soapiness never gripped me and I wanted to know why a cabin was moving and why the smoke monster was showing people visions of their past and seemingly casting judgment on them and where the island went when it disappeared and what actually happened when the bomb went off and a load of other stuff and absolutely none of it was even given a handwavey answer, it was just completely ignored.

The smoke monster was poking around everyone’s memories looking for someone he could manipulate into killing Jacob. He’s also just generally kind of a dickhead, which can account for a lot. The island moved to one of the other places around the world that’s connected to the life/magnetic/whatever-it-is energy (on Eloise Hawking’s big pendulum map). The bomb cancelled out the meltdown at the dig site, or something like that (it’s vague but the gist of it is they saved the island by causing The Incident we heard about at the Swan, & ultimately caused their own crash). Idk why the cabin moved.

[International Debris]

Actually, while I think the current approach of shorter seasons does sometimes cut down a lot of important character work, it has pretty much stopped the ‘episodic but we’ve got to work an arc in there to keep people coming back’ format which is probably a good thing. Although this worked sometimes – Farscape, Fringe – all too often it just ended up with a really forced, mediocre arc which never made sense or resolved satisfactorily. 

[International Debris]

The smoke monster was poking around everyone’s memories looking for someone he could manipulate into killing Jacob. He’s also just generally kind of a dickhead, which can account for a lot. The island moved to one of the other places around the world that’s connected to the life/magnetic/whatever-it-is energy (on Eloise Hawking’s big pendulum map). The bomb cancelled out the meltdown at the dig site, or something like that (it’s vague but the gist of it is they saved the island by causing The Incident we heard about at the Swan, & ultimately caused their own crash). Idk why the cabin moved.

I dunno, the smoke monster seemed to react specifically to individual characters’ memories. And he also almost killed Locke at first. Coupled with the fact that for the first few series  he was referred to as Cerberus and the island’s security system and things, as well as Ben revealing he can summon it, it feels like the generic villain he turned into later was totally different. I honestly believe the original idea was for there to be another big bad and the smoke monster would have played a more ambiguous role, but that changed somewhere down the line. As for dickhead, well Jacob is directly responsible for more deaths than the smoke monster over the course of the series, so…

Island moving… I can buy, although I don’t think it’s ever stated on screen, is it?

Yeah, that seems to be what happened with the bomb, I suppose it’s slightly obfuscated by the ridiculous red herring of the flash-sideways being designed to look like an alternate timeline. But how the hell do the time travelling lot end up back in the present again afterwards? 

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

It’s been a few years since I last watched it, but Ben “moving” the island is what causes it to skip through time, and the bomb going off is what stops it jumping around and resets it to the present, I think. 

[sleepey]

Oh yeah I don’t believe for a second that they knew what the monster was until at least season 3 (first mention of Jacob iirc), but making it turn out to be just some guy means it all hangs together well enough, because any inconsistencies you can say he changed his mind, he got angry & lashed out, he was being arch & mysterious, etc.

I seem to remember the island moving being very explicit but I don’t think there’s a Lost Smegadrive to search up a quote.

No idea how they got back though. Island magic.

[Podey]

It is definitely stated explicitly on screen that Ben moved the island, he was instructed to do so in order to escape Widmore’s boat by “Christian”.

[Podey]

This is my understanding RE: the timey-wimey stuff, though I haven’t watched that series in years.

The island has the whole electromagnetic phenomenon thing going on, and Ben turning the wheel unleashed it and dislodged the island and it’s inhabitants from time, I seem to recall a metaphor about it being like a record on a record player skipping.

We learn at some later point that “whatever happened, happened”, meaning their actions in the past are predestined and they can’t go “off-rails”. So the timeline of the island – past and future – is complete and it’s just going along it at random points.

The ”Losties” returning on the plane arrived into the magnetic field that is radiating out through time and those that are meant to be in the past, because of their actions in detonating the bomb and causing “the incident”, find themselves in that period whilst the others remain in the present day. This stops the island skipping, but the Losties are in the past because it’s where their next actions are.

They then cause “the incident” which releases the electromagnetic energy, causing the timeline to right itself and returning the ”Pasties” to the next point in their timeline where they had actions to complete, which was the present day.

… Hell, if that’s gotta make sense, I don’t wanna BE sober!

In seriousness though, this whole setup is partly why I love season 6 so much because that event (“the incident” and the potential of splitting timelines) just sets up the “flash sideways” perfectly and is the kind of twist that only this show could have done, to have these two parallel timelines seemingly happening at the same time. It was delightfully bonkers.

[Rudolph]

Battlestar Galactica (’03) had a much-criticised but perfect ending.

Another example of the writers making it up on the fly. The opening titles teasing the Cylons having some grand plan was something thrown in by one of the producers as a dramatic hook, with no idea where it was leading. Same with the plotline with Helo and Boomer on Caprica. The intent in the miniseries is that Helo would have died after giving up his seat to Baltar, but a positive audience response to the character saw him return.

[Rudolph]

I dunno, the smoke monster seemed to react specifically to individual characters’ memories. And he also almost killed Locke at first. Coupled with the fact that for the first few series  he was referred to as Cerberus and the island’s security system and things, as well as Ben revealing he can summon it, it feels like the generic villain he turned into later was totally different. I honestly believe the original idea was for there to be another big bad and the smoke monster would have played a more ambiguous role, but that changed somewhere down the line.

To be fair, the idea of the monster being a security system comes from Danielle Rousseau in Exodus, who isn’t playing with a full deck of cards, and has only her observations of the monster’s behaviour to base things on.

Ben does say later on in What They Died For that he believed now that the monster responding to his summons in The Shape of Things to Come was another manipulation tactic by the monster to trick him. Part of Ben’s character arc is that he wants to believe he is something special, when really he’s nothing of the sort. The monster feeds his ego by acting as his attack dog, meaning he’s susceptible to his command later on in Dead Is Dead to follow Locke’s orders, as penance for getting his daughter Alex killed.

What Ben doesn’t know at this point is that Locke and the monster are one and the same now, as he’s still under the impression Locke returned from the dead in Whatever Happened, Happened thanks to another miracle performed by the Island.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Battlestar Galactica (’03) had a much-criticised but perfect ending.

Another example of the writers making it up on the fly. The opening titles teasing the Cylons having some grand plan was something thrown in by one of the producers as a dramatic hook, with no idea where it was leading. Same with the plotline with Helo and Boomer on Caprica. The intent in the miniseries is that Helo would have died after giving up his seat to Baltar, but a positive audience response to the character saw him return.

If anyone is at all interested in BSG, Ronald D Moore did commentary on every episode (orig ally as a podcast but it’s on the blu ray boxset I have) and it is such an incredible insight into how they just pulled all this shit together on the fly. 

It’s really quite impressive just how much the manage to mostly tie up despite not knowing one episode to the next what was going to happen.

It makes you realise just how much successful TV is basically luck. Good writers and producers manager to make a show spanning several years feel deliberate (mostly) when they’re not at all. 

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

I dunno, the smoke monster seemed to react specifically to individual characters’ memories. And he also almost killed Locke at first. Coupled with the fact that for the first few series  he was referred to as Cerberus and the island’s security system and things, as well as Ben revealing he can summon it, it feels like the generic villain he turned into later was totally different. I honestly believe the original idea was for there to be another big bad and the smoke monster would have played a more ambiguous role, but that changed somewhere down the line.

To be fair, the idea of the monster being a security system comes from Danielle Rousseau in Exodus, who isn’t playing with a full deck of cards, and has only her observations of the monster’s behaviour to base things on.
Ben does say later on in What They Died For that he believed now that the monster responding to his summons in The Shape of Things to Come was another manipulation tactic by the monster to trick him. Part of Ben’s character arc is that he wants to believe he is something special, when really he’s nothing of the sort. The monster feeds his ego by acting as his attack dog, meaning he’s susceptible to his command later on in Dead Is Dead to follow Locke’s orders, as penance for getting his daughter Alex killed.
What Ben doesn’t know at this point is that Locke and the monster are one and the same now, as he’s still under the impression Locke returned from the dead in Whatever Happened, Happened thanks to another miracle performed by the Island.

Speaking of Ben. He too was meant to be a one of character in a couple of episodes. He played so well they brought him back, became integral to the overall story and had one of the best characters arcs of the whole show. 

I absolutely love watching him fall and finding out he is basically just another “lost” soul, so to speak, trying to find meaning in the island. 

[Podey]

There are characters you miss watching when a TV show ends and Benjamin Linus is definitely one of them.

[International Debris]

Oh yeah I don’t believe for a second that they knew what the monster was until at least season 3

And yet they talked about how the sounds it makes were chosen for a very specific reason. Again, it’s the outright lies from the showrunners that made some people expect it to head in a different way to what it did, so when Lindelof got defensive about people expecting every answer later on he only had himself to blame.

To be fair, the idea of the monster being a security system comes from Danielle Rousseau in Exodus, who isn’t playing with a full deck of cards, and has only her observations of the monster’s behaviour to base things on. 

While that’s fair, her comments do feel in line with the broader idea of the monster at the time. It had strange and almost metaphysical behaviour, and whatever they had in mind at the time, I refuse to believe it was ‘several hundred year old man who just wants to get off the island’.

Fully agree on the Ben love, though. I feel like the 815 passengers were mostly really bad cliches created by committee, but the one offs who ended up staying on the show became really strong. Ben and Desmond were by far my favourite characters. 

[Warbodog]

Laughing at the cliched characters was part of the fun from the start though, it felt like you were invited to, rather than it being a flaw. It just got less fun when the flashbacks started getting too repetitive and desperate and felt like a waste of time. They had to either go or change, which they did brilliantly.

[International Debris]

Problem with having such overtly cliched characters is it’s then hard to enjoy an ending which asks you to be emotionally invested in them. I honestly couldn’t care less if this bunch of one dimensional ciphers meet up to get to heaven or not. 

[Moonlight]

Another thing I don’t get about the Lost hate (and I’m not referencing anything said by any particular person in this thread, just in general) is the idea that there’s anything wrong with making it up as you go along, regardless of whether those storylines resolve in a satisfying way or not (and there were certainly some strands that were just outright abandoned). 

Since I brought this up, I want to clarify that I was more referring to something that feels like the writer is just making it up without any idea where it’s going, as opposed to the literal way it was written. Because I don’t think stuff that’s more discovered in the actual process of writing than meticulously planned ahead is going to inherently feel like that kind of narrative bullshitting. I’ve seen this style of writer described as a “pantser” (as in, “writing by the seat of your pants”, an expression I can only assume does not translate for any of you), and I would very much say I fit that mold myself.

I think the X-Files is very good at pantsing its lore in the early seasons. I never saw Lost but if I watched it in the early 2010s on Netflix or something like I did The X-Files I probably would have become a diehard fan.

[Podey]

The funny thing about Lost is it wasn’t just about the show, I think I got an equal amount of enjoyment from the talk between episodes, listening to podcasts about them and discussing theories with people. It really felt as far away from watching a TV show in your own home alone as it’s possible to feel whilst watching a TV show in your own home alone. That’s not really a thing anymore, to the same extent at least.

Anyway, anyone got any jokes from Red Dwarf that they don’t/didn’t get?

[Author]

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