What's Alan Watching?: Lost, "Jughead": How to dismantle a hydrogen bomb
Sean L said... I also watched the first four seasons over winter and I have to say I'm feeling pretty entertained. Which after all is the primary purpose of the show. Yes, clearly there's evidence of directions the writers headed in that lead nowhere (Eko's church - the actor left; Libby - they decided to kill her to heighten the impact of Michael's betrayal and now it seems the actress doesn't want to come back). On other points it seems the audience has to accept that that the Others take some 'creative' (read wacko) approaches to problem solving - but I don't particularly mind that.
And yes, clearly also there's some retconning going on. The polar bears are an explicit example of that - the first bear appeared in the pilot, and the writers admit that they didn't plan out the arc and mythology until after that. But what great retconning that was! They were being trained to turn a frozen donkey wheel that unseats the island in spacetime and banishes them to the Tunisian desert. I certainly wouldn't have included that on a list of possible explanations in season 1.
But I still maintain my belief that the overall story arc, and where we'll end up at the end of season 6, is a result of planning that took place in 2004. And to be honest, unless they do something really stupid to make it obvious that isn't the case, I'm happy to give them some wriggle room on that whilst I'm being entertained as highly as I am.
And if you're more irritated than entertained by the show, well sucks to be you.

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-Undercover Asian Man said... I'm all for creative wiggle room in a TV series, but not for introducing things just for shock value that make no sense inside or outside the story. Like making someone enter numbers into a computer every 108 minutes instead of automating it (with the very computer it is attached to) when the people who created the system of discharging (the people who designed it so that the computer and number sequence would cause a safe discharge) would have had to known what it was for and how it works. So their conclusion for the best solution then is to have a fallible, sleepy, REM-sleep-needing human do it? When waking up every 108 minutes would drive him insane? Or the people who gained control of the Island after the Purge - Ben and his gang - would keep a crazy Desmond in charge of that computer instead of killing him and taking control themselves? Or that after Desmond turns the key and triggers the fail-safe, there doesn't seem to be any effect of NOT having the discharge anymore (so why didn't they turn the key much earlier, since the discharge didn't mean anything to the Island's existence?). This isn't 'creative maneuvering', this is just dumb plotting. Just like "THE NUMBERS". People really have short term memories. There was someone in the comments a few weeks back that said he just watched the first 4 seasons over winter in time for the start of season 5. I wonder how he feels about the time he spent wondering about Echo's church, Karl's brainwashing, why Russo was given such prominence if she dies without ever explaining her being allowed to live, all the stuff with Claire and Sun needing to be kidnapped (when Others could leave the Island and recruit/enslave people easily, like Juliet), why the Others thought it would be a good idea to have their leader let himself be captured and tortured on purpose yeah that & their hillbilly ruse & I dunno what-all do have to be taken as just the Others doing wack thingswhen they had the complete upper hand versus the Losties (full knowledge and the element of surprise), why Polar Bears were needed to turn the Donkey Wheel when a more docile Donkey could be trained to do it (Ben alone was strong enough to turn it and survive the cold long enough too), why if the hatches were built with true functions, they had a system where a pneumatic tube would just dump into a field allowing thousands of them to pile up unattended, why they made up a virus and corresponding shots etc, etc, etc.