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Lost (without the ‘sideways’ bits)

One Lost fan has become so incensed by the Finale episode that he has re-edited the entire 6th season and omitted all the "sideways" scenes.

One Lost fan has become so incensed by the Finale episode that he has re-edited the entire 6th season and omitted all the “sideways” scenes.

Season 6 depicted an alternate world of what happened to the passengers had they seemingly not crashed on the island. The concluding episode revealed the characters were all dead, and meeting up in an afterlife.

While some fans were rapturous about the Finale, others were dissatisfied with the conclusion they were fed after 6 seasons.

“A lot of people invested a lot of time and energy in following Lost over the years. I was one of those people. A lot of people were satisfied with the way the series ended. I was not one of those people,” he writes at Lost Revised.

“The entire conceit of the sideways world was to bring all of our heroes together again in the afterlife – one of the most cliched storytelling devices there is. Sure, there was a spin on it, but the whole idea that “there is no now” in the afterlife came across more as a cheat than a genuinely interesting twist.

“For one thing, it enabled the creators to conveniently bring all the characters together again at the end of the show, even though not all of them had died by the end of the series. Of course, if they had only featured the already-dead castaways in the sideways world, people would have figured out what it was straight off the bat.”

Source: Lost Revised

16 Responses

  1. “So he’s re-edited the season to omit the “sideways” sections. Thereby completely missing the entire point of the show from episode 1 to the finish.
    I said years ago that Lost was never a sci-fi mystery or a thriller with a quest for “answers”. It was abundantly clear right from the outset that the show was about its characters, their interactions and their connections. The finale honoured that completely (dodgy religious overtones….” This statement is completely and utterly wrong in every way.

    The biggest fans of Lost were on all the lost forums. The real hard cores. Go there and see if you viewpoint links up with 99% of the fans. I’ll give you a hint, the word starts with the letter N and ends in the letter O. Lindelof basically said in season 2 he saw it as primarily “a quest based, mystery based show”, doesn’t sound like a statement that would mesh with you view does it. When people actually watched Lost it was for the monster, the hatch, the others etc etc. That’s what people remember, no whether Sun and Jinn kissed. When people didnt get answers they bailed, cause they didnt give a toss about the characters.

    Nice try but way, way wrong. Good justification for why the finale was such a lame copout though.

  2. “The ending was the best ending around… showed the love they all had for each other. I will remember it until I go into the light”

    Lol, the exact target audience for the finale. Says it all really.

  3. Lost final was a complete waste of time and effort. the entire side timeline was pointless and did not relate to the “story” of Lost in any way. They could have set it 1000 years after the end of time on earth. It was like a dumb epilogue, had no connection to the previous 5 seasons.

    The writers let everyone down that was actually interested in the story line of lost and not some abstract waste of time about where they went when they died.

    Was a spit in the face to all the Lost fans with an ounce of intelligence that are not swayed by sad emotional manipulation.

  4. The first five seasons of lost at had interesting plots and character stories that grew and got more interesting and entwined. The 6th season basically bitched all of this and set off in a story that basically dropped all of these stories. As the season progressed the characters journeys went more and more into the flash sideways. There were moments in the real world but the plot was handled the worst and dullest of any season of lost. They could make good episodes but they really only approached it all superficially.
    The only saving grace was the flash sideways. It was interesting it was about the characters. To then have that unrelated and not pay off was bad. It wasn’t good. It meant there was no redemption for the bad handling of the real world story and despite what people say it didn’t end the character journeys. It highlighted the big flaws with the season not addressing the dropped plots and it then had no real world completion for the characters.

    The teaser for bext weeks Castle has it looking like castle might stop working with the police. If that is the case then it cuts to castle and beckett reuniting in heaven after they are both dead. That’s not character story arc conclusion.

    Lost wrapped up a story based on themes of the show but started in the final season, dropped all the previous plotlines for this. Then just showed us what the characters were up to in the afterlife instead of addressing real world storys for them.

    Its lazy and a cheat and not a pay off.

  5. The ending was such a cop out by the writers that i think that I am done with lost and wont even bother to buy the box set. It just seems that maybe the writers were Lost and that they had no idea where it was going to end so they just made it up without reference to anything that happened in the last 5 years. For example why did Ben Linus in season 2 pretend to be Henry Gale – a balloonist who landed on the Island. What was the deal with the Dharma Initiative and Alvo Hanso and the De Groots and all the training videos with missing minutes? Why did the hell the Desmond spend three years pushing a button every 108 minutes. Theres just so many questions left unanswered. In the end none answered and just a cop out story of Jacob versus MIB and purgatory and moving on to the afterlife. And what happened to poor Kimberley Joseph, the flight attendant on Flight 815 who seemingly joins the others and what about the two kids who were kidnapped with her. Please? Theres no way that anyone who has been faithfully following this show for the past 6 seasons could be satisfied with the lack of explanation. Its like a whole lot of sub-plots were created by the writers for 6 seasons with no end plan as to how to resolve them so they just ignored them with their lame finale.

  6. @Paull: That’s one of two Q’s to which I would like an answer. The other one is how was Jacob able to leave the island but not Smokey? Everything else I can live with not knowing for sure.

    It will be good to trawl thru the entire series in a couple of years and place events in context as they occur, now that I know the whole story. There were highs and some lows (Medusa spider anyone?) but, overall, this was one of the best series I’ve seen.

  7. @David S: I will have to respectfully disagree with you where you say “rational, “many worlds” interpretation”. There is nothing rational about the belief in more than one world/ universe, and if the writers had gone with that, it would have required just as much faith as the ‘afterlife/ purgatory’ approach that the writers ended up with.

    The good thing about them choosing that path is, it showed what was important in life, the relationships and friendship shared by that group of survivors.

    My only trouble with the final season was, they did seem to forget that the dedicated viewers cared as much about the events of the island, and events in the losties’ lives, and just focused on the aspect most prevalent in the first season.

    @Craig: ABC America added in those credits at the end, that wasn’t something the Lost writers intended. So technically 7’s version of the credits (a pacific preview) were just as accurate to the story as ABC America’s. Although I do agree that 7’s choice did ruin the emotional ending and would have prefered something more fitting such as ABC america’s credits.

  8. People make the mistake of assuming that those of us that didn’t like the finale wanted all the answers. I couldn’t care less how many “mysteries” were solved and I tuned in for the character stories as well. But at the very least they could have made an attempt to tie some of the plot elements together that were painstakingly developed over the years.
    The writers very uncharacteristically took the easiest way out. I expected much more from them and I’m sad for having assumed they were up to the task.

  9. I liked how they ended things on the island but was a little disappointed in what the sideways turned out to be. The sideways world was a good plot device but I think the whole of season 6 could have been done without it as it ended up being something that was totally unrelated to the events of the previous 5 years.

  10. Well I was a bit annoyed, because it meant all the events and ‘lives’ of the losties in the sideways actually weren’t realy and didn’t matter, thus jacks son ceased to exist. However, I was more dissappointed by the fact that a lot of seasons 2-5 was not properly addresss in the final season, and therefore we were left with the impression that those events (walt being special, the dharma’s experiments, the widmore-Linus feud, widmore’s boat people, and time travel to name a few) were really secondary in nature to feud between jacob and his brother. The whole reason the plane crashed was so Jacob could find other people to fix his mistake.

    Seeing as the ending was written back in season 1, it makes sense why season 6 serves as a better ending to season 1 rather than to the whole show.

    Just to be clear though, I still thoroughly enjoyed lost and regard it as one of my favourite shows.

    One more thing, can anyone give a satisfactoy answer as to how the a smoke monster left the island in season 4 and appeared to Jack, in one of his flash forwards, as his father and also set off the smoke detector.

  11. So he’s re-edited the season to omit the “sideways” sections. Thereby completely missing the entire point of the show from episode 1 to the finish.

    I said years ago that Lost was never a sci-fi mystery or a thriller with a quest for “answers”. It was abundantly clear right from the outset that the show was about its characters, their interactions and their connections. The finale honoured that completely (dodgy religious overtones aside).

  12. The trouble is that a lot of the sideways world and it’s events were quite interesting, it was really only the final reveal of that universe’s nature and how all the character’s stories tied up in it that was terrible, lazy storytelling.

    The Lost writers had the opportunity to avoid a lot of the fantasy/magic, “hand of God” nonsense and actually show a rational, “many worlds” interpretation with two separate world lines for the characters, but instead they went with the pseudo-religious “afterlife reunion” BS approach that cheated the audience using cheap emotional manipulation. No amount of post-letdown editing can fix that.

  13. I’m sticking with the makers version of Lost They kept me guessing all the way to the end of the series and thats why I liked the show. I don’t want to be spoon fed all the answers. I will buy the box set in a year or two and start again just to see what I missed.

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