lost season 5

i didn't like the hurley/miles scene. i hate how the writers always put the audiences words into hurley's mouth as a sort of meta tongue-in-cheek "see, we're aware of how silly all this is!" it's just a lame gag that they overuse. "heh, can't believe you didn't see that coming", "wow, this is so confusing", etc. i know hurley is their gag man, but does it have to be the same gag every time? can't he slip on a fucking banana peel sometimes?

anyway, this episode focused on all the characters i hate: jack, kate, juliette, sawyer. and the parallels were obvious and heavy handed as usual. there is no danger in this show. nobody is ever at risk. ben should have fucking died and they should have just went balls out and upped the drama by creating a dangerous new situation that nobody knows the ramifications of. when you kill someone every 3 episodes and they constantly come back from the dead it means you've fucked yourself when the time comes that you really have to kill a character for good and people are supposed to give a shit. i guess "the boy who cried wolf" isn't required kindergarten reading anymore.

the best scene was at the very end with locke sitting over ben. and it was like, 5 seconds long. next week looks like it might be decent though. at least we'll get to see more of the temples and shit.

- wasnt cassidy gullible before? i mean she caught sawyer out in his scam but he still did her over in the end. now suddenly she can read kate so easily.

- did richard answer hurleys question to the miles? he said "ben won't be the same, he wont remember being shot".

- i forgot about locke. i hate when they ignore the best character for shows in a row.

- cats - charlotte died

- kate came back to find claire. lol. believable sure.

  catsonearth said:

anyway, this episode focused on all the characters i hate: jack, kate, juliette, sawyer. and the parallels were obvious and heavy handed as usual. there is no danger in this show. nobody is ever at risk. ben should have fucking died and they should have just went balls out and upped the drama by creating a dangerous new situation that nobody knows the ramifications of.

yea when the last episode ended i said 'now maybe something interesting can happen', then i came to this thread and saw the alive ben pic

i can't be bothered to watch the new episode

  Benedict Cumberbatch said:

- cats - charlotte died

kinda, but she's still alive as a kid.

and she doesn't really count because nobody ever gave a fuck about her anyway and she was barely even a character. her character bio was basically "redheaded cunt that stands around for a few episodes, looks surprised by everything and then dies".

but like, jin was dead, but then he wasn't somehow, locke was dead, but now he's not, claire is dead, but not really... and i'm not even counting characters like charlie who is dead, but still makes cameos, jack's dad who is dead but can appear to jack back in the real world and on the island as a smoky apparition, etc. i know there's a reason why, but still...there's supposed to be some amount of drama involved in killing a main character and they've already flip-flopped on the death issue so many times that now i automatically think "eh, whatever, they'll be back", which is probably not the response they're going for.

also, why didn't sayid fire a few confirmation shots into ben's little carcass just to make sure the job was done? seems like a rookie mistake (aka convenient plot device) to me. no way someone with that kind of training would just assume he'd killed him with one shot to the body.

mr. eko, boone, boone's sister and countless others have died on the show. calm down.

do i come off as if i'm not calm? i come on here to chat about and pick apart a show that started out promising and ultimately became more and more ridiculous as it went along - not because it shakes me to my fucking core and i need to vent all that frustration, but because it's fun to talk about and hear what other people have to say about it.

and to further my argument, all of those characters you listed died in the first 2 seasons before the show really started getting ridiculous. back then, characters that died stayed dead whereas now they've lost all that and people are coming back left and right and their deaths don't really mean much at all as dramatic story elements.

at least charlie stayed dead

Yeah charlotte never died, and the last 4 minutes were the only minutes worth watching of that emotionally bull shitting episode. They are not revealing anthing but confirming what you have already guessed or think. I need smoke monsters, dinosaurs, temples and dahma stations in this shit.

  tauboo said:

at least charlie stayed dead

except when he pops up to give hurley some cryptic advice every so often.

  catsonearth said:

also, why didn't sayid fire a few confirmation shots into ben's little carcass just to make sure the job was done? seems like a rookie mistake (aka convenient plot device) to me. no way someone with that kind of training would just assume he'd killed him with one shot to the body.

i don't think ben could have died. sayid could have shot him 30 times and decapitated the body.

it was ridiculous to only shoot him once though

  catsonearth said:

i didn't like the hurley/miles scene. i hate how the writers always put the audiences words into hurley's mouth as a sort of meta tongue-in-cheek "see, we're aware of how silly all this is!" it's just a lame gag that they overuse. "heh, can't believe you didn't see that coming", "wow, this is so confusing", etc. i know hurley is their gag man, but does it have to be the same gag every time? can't he slip on a fucking banana peel sometimes?

 

anyway, this episode focused on all the characters i hate: jack, kate, juliette, sawyer. and the parallels were obvious and heavy handed as usual. there is no danger in this show. nobody is ever at risk. ben should have fucking died and they should have just went balls out and upped the drama by creating a dangerous new situation that nobody knows the ramifications of. when you kill someone every 3 episodes and they constantly come back from the dead it means you've fucked yourself when the time comes that you really have to kill a character for good and people are supposed to give a shit. i guess "the boy who cried wolf" isn't required kindergarten reading anymore.

 

the best scene was at the very end with locke sitting over ben. and it was like, 5 seconds long. next week looks like it might be decent though. at least we'll get to see more of the temples and shit.

next hurley scene:

hurley: dude, like, can we die and stuff?

miles: why is it always you that asks this things?

the scene was good because it was funny, and it was funny because hurley was being very stupid it wasn't reflecting any meta-whatever on how things didn't make sense, because hurley didn't make a single valid point until the very end.

I can imagine your 10 page rant if ben had actually died: "didn't they say things couldn't be changed blablablablaimsojealusididntmakethisshowblablablathisisnthow

theytaughtmetowritescriptsblablabla" it was fucking obvious he wasn't going to die. the thing one should focus here is not on death and life but the choices they make, sayid decided to kill ben, jack decided to not help him, but juliette sawyer and kate chose to help him.

so you think the best scene was the one that involved one (and the only actually) character that came back from the dead? why because of the surprise in ben's face? I think you need to get your opinions straight.

i like how jack is still a complete prick but for completely opposite reasons

Damn - for a minute there I thought I had the whole thing figured out. I thought that Ben would die from the gunwound and Aaron would turn out to be the real Ben that we know. Apparently that's not the case.

Btw Aaron is a cute kid.

  GORDO said:

so you think the best scene was the one that involved one (and the only actually) character that came back from the dead? why because of the surprise in ben's face? I think you need to get your opinions straight.

my opinions are my opinions and they can be as crooked as i want them to be. what i'm saying about the dead people is that when you do that too many times it loses the dramatic effect. i'm assuming they want the audience to go "oh shit, i can't believe that just happened!", but when you use that same trick 3 or 4 times it loses it's impact.

the scene was the best in the ep because it was the first bit of honest emotion shown by the actors. the rest just game me the feeling like "this is what this character is supposed to be feeling", but it came off like they were just going through the motions instead of really getting into their character. the look on ben's face said a lot without saying anything, but i also liked the look on locke's face and the fact that he was just sitting there for god knows how long waiting for the sweet sweet payoff of having ben wake up to his mug. and it hints that maybe locke's character is going to become interesting again after a few seasons of just kinda being blah.

  GORDO said:

the scene was good because it was funny, and it was funny because hurley was being very stupid it wasn't reflecting any meta-whatever on how things didn't make sense, because hurley didn't make a single valid point until the very end.

i mean it was meta in the sense that the writers know that people are confused by what's going on and a lot of people are not really getting the time travel aspects, so they acknowledge that they're aware of it by putting the audiences words into hurley's mouth like "haha, we know it's confusing too, let's all laugh about it. LOL!" i know it's supposed to be funny, but like the dead character thing, you can only use a trick so many times before it loses it's edge and they've done this trick so many times already that it isn't really funny anymore. at least not to me. hurley used to be a cool character, but now he's just "the guy who says what the audience is thinking".

  GORDO said:

I can imagine your 10 page rant if ben had actually died: "didn't they say things couldn't be changed blablablablaimsojealusididntmakethisshowblablablathisisnthow

theytaughtmetowritescriptsblablabla"

actually, i would have preferred if he just died because it seems like where they're going with all of this is that everybody wants to figure out how to change a future that seems to be set in stone. that's what the dharma initiative was trying to figure out and my guess is that this is the reason the island disappeared at the end of last season (because they changed the timeline and blew up the island with that atomic bomb...but that's just my own theory of where it's going, i'm not buying the traditional understanding that the island is "moving"). if indeed that is the direction they want to go in (with the timeline splintering and being altered finally) then that would have been a good place to start. i don't think they'd be emphasizing the fact that "you can't change time" if they weren't eventually going to go ahead and change time. it's the oldest dramatic trick in the book - you set up an impossible scenario for your characters and then watch them struggle to make it possible.

and for the record, i've never taken any script writing classes or read any manuals on how to do it. i learn by analyzing other work and that's part of why i watch this show even though i'm kinda over it. i'm not an academic and i don't think there's any one right way to do this, i just know what i think works and doesn't work.

im lost.

I took Hurley's scenes mostly as recapping shit for new viewers, explaining what's going on, getting their unique view of time-travel straight.

And I found it incredibly annoying that they have to do that, but I suppose it makes sense from a ratings perspective.

  catsonearth said:

do i come off as if i'm not calm? i come on here to chat about and pick apart a show that started out promising and ultimately became more and more ridiculous as it went along - not because it shakes me to my fucking core and i need to vent all that frustration, but because it's fun to talk about and hear what other people have to say about it.

 

and to further my argument, all of those characters you listed died in the first 2 seasons before the show really started getting ridiculous. back then, characters that died stayed dead whereas now they've lost all that and people are coming back left and right and their deaths don't really mean much at all as dramatic story elements.

dude, the only person to come back from the dead is locke, i have no fucking clue what you're talking about ... and people are getting the impression that you're not calm because your posts aren't calm at all, in this thread

  catsonearth said:

i didn't like the hurley/miles scene. i hate how the writers always put the audiences words into hurley's mouth as a sort of meta tongue-in-cheek "see, we're aware of how silly all this is!" it's just a lame gag that they overuse. "heh, can't believe you didn't see that coming", "wow, this is so confusing", etc.

this.

  playbynumbers said:

dude, the only person to come back from the dead is locke, i have no fucking clue what you're talking about ... and people are getting the impression that you're not calm because your posts aren't calm at all, in this thread

he's the only one that's "come back from the dead", but he's far from the only character that's appeared to die and then turn out not to be dead or has died, but continued to be a reappearing character after their death. that's what i'm talking about. jin was on the deck of a tanker that blew up and wasn't featured in many episodes until finally he was shown floating in the water - we were supposed to believe he died in the tanker explosion. charlie is dead, but he appears a few times every season to hurley. jack's dad is dead and appears to him (and others) off the island and on it. claire is dead, but she's hanging out with jack's dad in jacob's cabin. locke was "killed" once before by ben and left in a ditch. i'm sure there is more, but that's just off the top of my head. if you have one character that dies and comes back or dies and it's a fake out, that's fine, 2 characters, eh that's pushing it a little, but when you're treading on 3, 4, 5 or 6 characters then it gets to the point where death doesn't have much of a dramatic impact anymore because you've made it trivial and taken all the danger out of it.

it's like antibiotics - use them once or twice and they're effective, but after awhile diseases build up a resistance to them and they no longer work the way they used to. lost does this with a lot of their dramatic tricks. the slow reveal trick, the hurley says what the audience is thinking trick, the death turns out to be a fake out trick, the time travel to narrowly escape danger trick, the heavy-handed flashback/forward story that parallels the main story trick, the witty/ironic one-liner and horn swell right before the opening credits trick, etc. they're fine if you just use them once or twice, but if you do it too many times it becomes formulaic and it loses the impact, which is the whole point of using them in the first place - to have dramatic impact.

  Benedict Cumberbatch said:

what they are basically saying is that kate is retarded and pretty much made ben what he is.

What? No richard alpert made ben what he is. He even says "he won't remember anything after this" or something along those lines.

  catsonearth said:

i didn't like anything about this show and I still continue to watch it.

 

anyway, this episode focused on all the characters i hate: everybody

  catsonearth said:

but like, jin was dead, but then he wasn't somehow, locke was dead, but now he's not, claire is dead, but not really... and i'm not even counting characters like charlie who is dead, but still makes cameos, jack's dad who is dead but can appear to jack back in the real world and on the island as a smoky apparition, etc.

We never saw jin dead, all we saw was a grave (as Sun assumed he was dead). Claire isn't dead, she disappeared. Charlie shows up as conscience, that's a pretty standard technique. I don't think Christian has ever appeared off island after his death.

  chenGOD said:

I don't think Christian has ever appeared off island after his death.

he appeared to michael off island and to jack in the hallways of a hospital.

He appeared to Michael on the freighter, which was still within the sphere of influence of the island.

And he didn't really appear to Jack in the hospital, Jack thought he saw him while he was drugged up and sleep-deprived.

next week! This week's ep was a bridge to the ep coming out on me birfday! Can't wait....

  chenGOD said:

  Benedict Cumberbatch said:

what they are basically saying is that kate is retarded and pretty much made ben what he is.

What? No richard alpert made ben what he is. He even says "he won't remember anything after this" or something along those lines.

 

 

wtf are you retarded?

not a quote but from lostpedia"

  Quote

Richard explains if he takes Ben, he will not remember any of this, will lose his innocence

my point was that kate took him t richard