Dear LOST,I try to avoid any media or news connected to LOST outside of the viewing or dicussion with friends of the episodes themselves, but this little nugget is too much in my geeky pop cultural wheelhouse to ignore. A copy/paste of the GeeksOfDoom report follows...
You rock!
Especially when that guy was in the hatch!
P.S. Do you know FLASHFORWARD?
In the letter, Lucas speaks about how he didn’t exactly know where he was heading with Star Wars and how impressive it is to create such a complex show yet still keep track of everything they had done since day one. He even shares the secret to this success as it worked on Lost and Star Wars, explaining that you just really need some “father issues” and homages to previous stories.Congratulations on pulling off an amazing show.And what did producer Damon Lindelof have to say about the kind words from Lucas? What any one of us would say if such a man complimented us so emphatically: “I just want to apologize to Mr. George Lucas for everything I said about the prequels.”
Don’t tell anyone … but when ‘Star Wars’ first came out, I didn’t know where it was going either. The trick is to pretend you’ve planned the whole thing out in advance. Throw in some father issues and references to other stories — let’s call them homages — and you’ve got a series.
In six seasons, you’ve managed to span both time and space, and I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I never saw what was around the corner. Now that it’s all coming to an end, it’s impressive to see how much was planned out in advance and how neatly you’ve wrapped up everything. You’ve created something really special. I’m sad that the series is ending, but I look forward to seeing what you two are going to do next.
"Let's call them homages..." (So that my smoke monster legal team won't rip out your throats. =) I wonder who in the creative team is a STAR WARS fanboy. Or maybe no one is and they just did good writers' research? In any case, I really do think there have been some scenes in the show, particularly in finales, that are directly lifted from the original trilogy, too. Sometimes it'll be like deja vu, other times it's more about the flow or pace of an episode. Frack. I can't pick a specific scene out now, but I seem to remember the deja vu hitting me several times in the season 5 finale.
Heh. All of those Sawyer references to STAR WARS. "Some Like It Hoth." And "Who the hell's Anakin?" Too frickin funny. =)
Keep on keepin on~
1 comment:
Of course, this is by nature what a good storyteller always does by the firelight... they improvise and weave around the old themes and mix in some of the new. (i.e. a great DM does this too.)
But much of Lucas' knack for improvising left when Joseph Campbell died. This is why the first trilogy is memorable, while the second is merely "homages".
An example of a show that is almost completely based on "homage" and obscure reference is The Simpsons, and while it has been enormously successful in its own right, it's not quite what I got from Lost.
Lost has what the second trilogy of Star Wars almost completely lacks: character development.
Lost's creators said this was a show about the characters, about their relationships -- in some ways this puts Lost further along the axis towards soap operas, but the inclusion of "the epic" background (time, space, topics, the world) pull it back from becoming *just* a social drama.
I was a little disappointed at the ending, I kind of feel like the show's creators didn't really have much of a "reveal" at the end... in some sense what they did was "the easy way out". Fortunately, the strength of the show is based on it's characters, and ideas, not as much on it's sci-fi.
Personally, I would have loved it if they carried Faraday's character or insights further -- how does the mystical island, time travel and everything match up with physics or the world of the rational. Faraday's mom sits squarely in between the worlds of the rational and the mystical as both a physicist (with the computers and pendulum predictions) and a mystic (knowledge across time). Maybe she would have been able to expand on these themes. But I guess this was a dead-end for the writers, because (like us) they simply don't know how it links up.
So instead they returned to the easier mysticism of animism (the living island) and human sacrifice (light of the world) and heartstrings (i.e. What Things May Come). It's not bad, it's just intellectually easy. I mean, I understand the risk of blowing a mega series ending is huge, so almost anything you do may be "unsafe", but I felt they could have put more *meat* on the ending.
Still, it's ultimately about the characters. And seeing that we're essentially saying goodbye to them, the ending the writers went with was especially fitting -- (of course my nitpick is that the ending would have been fitting no matter what else had happened). It's kind of like a stylized "stage bow" at the end of the show.
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