You Can’t Always Get What You Want
This is the real killer: Lost‘s ending is going to disappoint fans. It almost doesn’t matter how good it is – although the backlash has already started, pre-emptively, born of the disappointment from last week’s “Across The Sea” and the infodump contained therein – because whatever the finale is, whatever the final answers given (or not given) are, they’ll have to compete with each fan’s imaginary perfect ending that they’ve been cooking up in their heads for the last six years. You can see the flop sweat permeating recent interviews with Cuse and Lindelof, as they (defensively, perhaps) explain that they’ve ended the story in the best way they could, and that all the questions won’t be answered, and and and; Lost‘s finale looks set to be a re-run of last year’s Battlestar Galactica finale, which managed to disappoint hardcore fans to such an extent – even though, I maintain, it really wasn’t that bad an episode, Dean Stockwell’s accidentally-comedic exit aside (Yes, spoilers) – that the entire series somehow became devalued in retrospect.
This isn’t really anyone’s fault, aside from perhaps the fans’ – After all, it’s some kind of weird tribute to the show’s creators for coming up with something that’s inspired such passion and imagination, surely – but, nonetheless, it’s there, and it’s the biggest danger to Lost‘s reputation. Can anything really live up to the finale that everyone currently holds in their head?
(What television producers should be worried is going to happen is that, if Lost‘s finale doesn’t blow everyone’s minds with some unexpected stroke of genius that lives up to the hopes and dreams of at least the majority of people, if it doesn’t earn all the hype and supersizing of the finale (Two-and-a-half hours had really better not mean we have several hundred endings, a la the last Lord of The Rings, is all I’m saying), then fans will think “Well, Lost sucked. Just like Battlestar Galactica ended up sucking. That’s the last time I’m giving up years of my life for a show, because even the best ones end up disappointing.” Of course, then they’ll watch Fringe when it returns and get sucked in again, most likely, so maybe there’s nothing to worry about after all – at least until Fringe reaches its endgame.)
This, ultimately, is the problem with shows like Lost (or Battlestar Galactica, or, hell, even The Fugitive or anything that last a long time, has a faithful following and hinges on answering a question or questions for its entire run): That, even if a show finds enough of an audience to survive, has smart and well-crafted writing that engages and challenges that audience, and through whatever twist of fate manages to make it all the way to an intended end somewhere close to its own terms, it will still become a victim of its own success, and unable to live up the hype that has grown up around it. The biggest danger to making a show like Lost might end up being not coming up with the right story or finding the right actors and directors and timeslot or whatever, but simply that, when it comes down to the ending, it ends up feeling like too much trouble to deal with all the expectations that you end up with by accident or intent, especially when it’s so much easier and potentially more lucrative to make a sitcom starring Charlie Sheen. Maybe we should all expect less from our television, in order to make it easier to get more.
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