Quote Originally Posted by The Man View Post
People stopped watching the show because they stopped being able to follow its convoluted plot threads. Many of them have admitted as much in this very thread. That's fine. <i>Lost</i> is a show that demands lots of attention and it's not a slight on anyone who isn't willing to put in that attention if they can't follow it. I don't think it's really the writers' fault if some viewers get tired of putting the effort in either though. A show like <i>Lost</i> demands a lot of emotional energy and a plot that demanding isn't to everyone's taste, just as science fiction in general isn't to everyone's taste, or as metal and hip-hop aren't to everyone's taste. Long-running mystery shows take a special kind of audience.
Are you bringing this up in response to Miriels last post because if so I'm not seeing the relevance? For the record, I'm exactly the kind of person lost is was targeting in its audience. I watched all but perhaps the last two seasons several times before the show ended, I don't have trouble following convoluted plots, and I tend to remember far more about anything that I watch than most people, and for years longer than most people. And I will gladly state for the record that Lost didn't just become a convoluted mess by the end, but it didn't even have the decency to be an interesting convoluted mess by the end. Sure, most of the characters managed to be interesting enough for most of it's run, but it was pretty clear by about the end of the third season or so that as far as the mythology went, they cared more about leading fans on for several years than telling a tight, well paced, and well structured story. Which is pretty awful really because the structure that season 1 built up was awesome.

That said, most (not all, for sure, but most) of the important plot elements revealed from the very beginning are in fact given explanations, whether it's in the show itself or outside of it. The polar bears are explained. The smoke monster is explained. The plane crash is explained. People may not like those explanations, but that's a whole different problem from not having been explained at all.

Questions like "What is the nature of the island?" were left unanswered, though. I'm not sure why anyone ever expected them to be, really.
Here's the big problem I have with all of that. Most of the stuff they explain doesn't need to be explained, and actually worked against them because it deflated the mystery that the first season builds too much. Meanwhile, answers to the really important questions like why they're on the island got such cop out answers that there really are no words to describe it. At the end of all those seasons, we kind of deserve to know why those people ended up there. What did we get? Because Jacob brought them there. We didn't really get any more than that except that protecting the island is important and he needs a successor. The closest thing we get to why it all even matters is an allusion to the fact that it may a cork holding back hell (metaphorical or otherwise). But they might as well have answered the question of why it was important with "because we say it is" for all that really told us. And it did nothing to explain how the island can do any of the things it can do. Now I'm not saying they had to give us full explanations of everything, but they could have done better than that. Hell, they even could have given us several explanations and never told us which was true and it would have been better than that because at least that would acknowledge that the mystery of the show was half the fun after spoiling most of them with lame explanations that frequently make no sense because the island does whatever they think would be cool that week.

From what I remember, Lindelof and Cuse had been saying pretty much from the time I started paying attention to their interviews (I think starting with the fourth season?) that trying to explain the Force was one of the dumbest things Star Wars ever did, and that there was much more drama and mystery to the saga when you didn't know things like midichlorians existed. Explaining what gave the island its magic would have been taking the mystery out of it.
Except the problem with that analogy is that how the force worked wasn't central to the plot. How the island does what it does and why it's so important that Jacob needed to bring those people to it and so many people are willing to kill for it kind of is. Like I said before, giving an explanation doesn't have to take the mystery out of it. In fact, they were pretty good at giving all kinds of explanations for guys like Smokey early on and never saying which was right.