Comments on: Theories About Lost: First in a Series

By: Kyle

Kyle — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 21:19:36 +0000

I know I’m posting a month after you originally posted this, but I have to strongly disagree. I admit that this past season’s (Season 4) dialogue existed only to move the characters into place for the execution of the plot, and contained less of the character flourishes that I loved the early seasons for. And yes, the characters do avoid asking the right questions.

But you can’t fault the show for not having characters talk like real people. No show does that (or shouldn’t, anyway). If they talked like real people, they never would’ve discovered the hatch, saved Walt from the Others, or even gotten off the Island. Fictional dialogue should be a twisted mirror of the real world: similar to our own thought processes and patterns, but different enough to keep our interest.

Then the next question becomes whether this fictional dialogue is any good. But I can’t really fight you on this point, other than telling you that I think the writing is sharp, because you haven’t shown any examples. Other than those two lines up top, which I think are good ones, you haven’t specifically mentioned any instances on the show where you “cringed” at the lines.

Yes, Lost does have loose ends, but isn’t that inevitable with a show this big? And the actors with DUIs getting killed…that’s pure speculation, and two of them are set to return on the show.

Lost has a lot more layers than you think, and I for one cannot be happier it is nothing like how real people talk.

By: A Writing critique on Lost « Not Confused Just Lost

A Writing critique on Lost « Not Confused Just Lost — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:16:00 +0000

[...] Theories About Lost: First in a Series [...]

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 01:18:58 +0000

Honestly, I don’t know what you mean by bad writing. You seem to be complaining about a few cheesy one-liners. I’m a pretty big Lost apologist, I’ll admit that, but aside from the occasional clunker line and the They Don’t Ask The Right Questions complaint, I’ve always thought the dialogue was pretty sharp. (And by the way, dialogue is part of writing, but writing doesn’t only consist of the lines. Plotting requires a heck of a lot of writing too.)

You say they don’t talk like real people. Listen closely to the dialogue in…anything, including BSG, which has its share of clunkers as well. Dialogue is a slightly disguised method of moving the plot forward and making you care about the characters – it never, ever sounds like real life. Write down a real conversation you have with someone sometime to notice the difference.

By: biggestmirror

biggestmirror — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:43:22 +0000

Thanks, izikavazo. I’ll have to check out your blog some more and brush up on my theorizing. If it makes you feel better, I too loved Alias, and often cringed at that one as well. After season three it became too much and I just had to stop watching. Little did I know that JJ Abrams would still be stringing me along five years later.

I have to agree that Lost does love one-liners. Some of them are genuinely funny, like “Do you know those crackers are fifteen years old?” But more often, they’re just totally incongruous within the context of the scene, or weird little mystery-placeholders. Obviously, we, the Internet fandom, are going to be spending a lot more time debating a line like “He changed the rules” than “OH CHRIST HE KILLED MY KID” or even “Widmore violated our agreement.” The mystery is still preserved, the writing is still sloppy, and everyone wins…kind of.

By: izikavazo

izikavazo — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:14:25 +0000

Good stuff, I still worship the show, but you bring up some mighty relevant points.
I think the biggest reason why they have such terrible lines is that the crazy one-liners are easy to sell. You can have a commercial full of split second, unrelated scenes, then end with one of their crazy one-liners like “Guys, Where are we?’, or “We have to move the island”, or “he changed the rules”. The one-liners on this show are coming at a comic book level, every scene seems to end with one.
BTW if you thought Lost writing was awful you should have watched Alias, that was painful. And yet I liked that show too, apparently I’m not too critical about scripts.
I’m going to link here from my blog.

By: annemarie

annemarie — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 06:03:43 +0000

YOU ARE SO GOOD AT THIS. I never realized before why Lost bugs me so much. It’s because it fucks with my plotdar! I hate that.