I can't resist calling attention to this from Adam Roberts, which has to be (I haven't seen the series) a masterpiece of compression...
I liked this quote, which makes me want to find the time to go back and do the whole thing:
But perhaps there is a danger in attempting to respond to a series like Lost after the end. The main motor of the show, the hook upon which were painfully suspended so many millions of fans, myself included, was "What's it all about?" (alloyed with a little "What's going to happen next?"). The last few episodes of season 6 provided the definitive answer to the first of these questions, and that answer will now inevitably colour memories of the show. More: that answer will tend to diminish the show—as we all knew it would, even before we had an inkling of what it was—not only in the sense that it closes down the other avenues of possible interpretation, but because it involves a kind of optical illusion of coherence. We need to hold in mind just how wonderfully streaked, freaked, spattered, and dribbled this show used to be. How superbly it resisted the stare-eyed hermeneutic obsessions of its fanbase (myself included), not with mere opacity but by a sort of glorious promiscuity of more "meaning" than even we could stomach.
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His view of the finale is fundamentally wrong. The correct response is that what's left, after the dross has ben "filtered away," is the only stuff that ever really mattered.
As for watching the show NOW, after having read this -- can't imagine it. Picking through all the possibilities to get to that point was the show; that was the experience.
Both possible ways of watching the series would be wonderfully satisfying: both fundamentally correct.
Recently read "Book of the New Sun" which is extremely suggestive of broader and hidden meanings, making every character, incident, and description fraught with possible importance.
The folding of possible meanings into one -- however large -- shouldn't negate the experience of the even larger and messier process.
OK, you're on. And correct, if "Lost" as a work proves to have lasting value. Which wouldn't suprise me at all.
We expect frequent reports as your viewing progresses.
Not happening until I read "The Golden Bowl", and that's not happening until I get a LOT smarter.
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