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I'm wondering if any of you Lost-ies ever watched Carnivà le. According to series creator Dan Knaupf, he had six seasons' worth of mythology planned out from the start. That isn't to say that unexpected things didn't happen along the way - the Dreifuss family was barely in the pilot, but came to dominate much of the first season's screen time, and several minor character were dropped between the only two produced seasons with absolutely no explanation - and it's also true that, with only a third of those prospective six years actually made, things could well have fallen apart had the show continued on.
Still, pretty much every single episode moves the characters forward a bit, nearly all of the major mysteries turned out to have entirely sensible, built-in answers (that were revealed in the overall story's first third, mind), and, taken as a whole, while incomplete, the show coheres wonderfully.
But here's the thing: it always felt like it would. The first episode introduced a lot of mysterious stuff, but it also gave us a hero and a villain, and thus the inevitable assumption that they would some day do battle. No matter how many weird touches or flourishes were painted here and there (and there were plenty, with lots of random little magic with no plausible explanation - this was a show about explicitly about magic), the promise of that battle hung over every hour, and each hour brought that confrontation a bit closer.
I only ever watched the first hour of Lost, on either its first airing or a first-season repeat, but here's what I got from it: a bunch of people just landed on an island, and there might be a dinosaur in the woods. No clear promise, just a potentially ever-unfolding puzzle.
From what I've read of Lost (not a whole lot), I get the impression it plays out like this: mysteries are stacked on top of mysteries, until finally, at the end, there are too many mysteries and players/factions to bring together, so they conjured up a good vs. evil battle, and said that that was an ending, because it was good vs. evil-dramatic.
Carnivà le ended similarly. The difference being, with Carnivà le, nobody felt cheated when it went there, because that's where it was heading from the start. One could argue that, since it didn't start out as a good vs. evil fight-story, Lost was more thematically ambitious. But I find it hard to believe that, all told, Carnivà le's forward planning didn't make it the better overall story.
Still, pretty much every single episode moves the characters forward a bit, nearly all of the major mysteries turned out to have entirely sensible, built-in answers (that were revealed in the overall story's first third, mind), and, taken as a whole, while incomplete, the show coheres wonderfully.
But here's the thing: it always felt like it would. The first episode introduced a lot of mysterious stuff, but it also gave us a hero and a villain, and thus the inevitable assumption that they would some day do battle. No matter how many weird touches or flourishes were painted here and there (and there were plenty, with lots of random little magic with no plausible explanation - this was a show about explicitly about magic), the promise of that battle hung over every hour, and each hour brought that confrontation a bit closer.
I only ever watched the first hour of Lost, on either its first airing or a first-season repeat, but here's what I got from it: a bunch of people just landed on an island, and there might be a dinosaur in the woods. No clear promise, just a potentially ever-unfolding puzzle.
From what I've read of Lost (not a whole lot), I get the impression it plays out like this: mysteries are stacked on top of mysteries, until finally, at the end, there are too many mysteries and players/factions to bring together, so they conjured up a good vs. evil battle, and said that that was an ending, because it was good vs. evil-dramatic.
Carnivà le ended similarly. The difference being, with Carnivà le, nobody felt cheated when it went there, because that's where it was heading from the start. One could argue that, since it didn't start out as a good vs. evil fight-story, Lost was more thematically ambitious. But I find it hard to believe that, all told, Carnivà le's forward planning didn't make it the better overall story.
