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Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Got the LOST Complete Collection Blu-ray set today!

Am enjoying it right now. This is by far the most intimidating behemoth of a box set that I have ever added to my personal library. I mean, you not only get a whole heapin' bunch of Blu-ray discs (or DVD discs if that is still your flavor) but also a touchy-feely relief map of the Island, a Senet board with black and white playing pieces, a cryptic note, and an even more mysterious DHARMA Initiative pen-sized dark light that can be used to illuminate the box (and finding hidden... stuff, with it).

Watching Season 6 at the moment. Am pleased to report that picture and sound quality is amazing. But the absolutely first thing that I had to watch was "The New Man in Charge": the 12 minutes-long "mini episode" that follows up on the events of the series finale. And in twelve minutes we get to see darn nearly and maybe all of the still-lingering questions get answered! Wondering about the food drops, the "Hurley-bird", Room 23 and Walt? Well those and many more matters get addressed to satisfaction.

If you're thinking about getting this set soon, you might wanna drop by your nearest friendly neighborhood big box store and get it this afternoon or evening: they were going fast at the nearest Best Buy (in fact mine was the last copy they had and the nice lady at the register said people had lined up outside the store this morning to buy the Complete Collection and the regular Season 6 set that also came out today). If you're anything at all a nut for Lost, this is definitely a must-have :-)

(And I learned yesterday that the Lost Season 6 soundtrack CD will be out next month! Followed in October by the 400-some pages Lost Encyclopedia.)

EDIT 7:35 p.m. EST: I just found the hidden disc. Yup, there is another disc in this set and you have to look for it: it's not anywhere that you can readily spot. And this is a huge box set. I'm beginning to wonder if it might be booby-trapped...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Really? Really?!?!
"Darn nearly and maybe all of the still-lingering questions get answered.."
Are you kidding me? Maybe that is why you refused to post my negative comments to your posts back when the finale aired.
Allow me to remind you of the mysteries still at hand.
-What happened to the original timeline Libby in the mental hospital? Matter of fact I can even show you direct quote from Damon that they WOULD explain that, then a quote after they didn't saying they were "done with that"
-How did Locke and Eko escape the hatch explosion?
-How did Ben see his dead mother? Or MIB his for that matter?
-What’s the deal with the frozen wheel? I mean a good explanation not a cursory one.
-When the losties were unstuck in time, who was that shooting at them from the outrigger?
-How did Jack, Hurley and Kate get from that Ajira flight to the 1970s, and why didn’t Sun?
-What was that light/"source" on the island after all? And how did that cork get there?
-What exactly would happen if MIB got off the island?
-Who broke the circle of ash around Jacob’s cabin?
-What is the “infection”?
-What happened to the flight attendant Cindy and the kids?
-How in the crap did Christan Shepard appear to Jack in LA when MIB can't leave the island?!!!!! Plot hole anyone?
-Why did the psychic say that Claire had to fly on Oceanic 815, and why did he insist that her son had to be raised by Claire? What was the deal with Aaron??
-And a ton more!!!

Why does all this matter? This was, as the writers have forcefully stated "always a character show."
Well so is every other story in human history. But what made this one so intriguing was its use of mythology and mystery. And if it was always a character story why did the show [and the writers] constantly promise that one day all would be revealed? Because they never really had any intention of answering most of the mystery and to a certain degree where the plot was going, yet mystery and mythology kept viewers coming in.
Let me first say that I LOVED and ADORED this show. It was like a loved one to me. It was one of the only shows to really truly draw me in. When I watched the finale I felt betrayed like my best friend had killed a family member. Wretched betrayal is the most fitting term. I feel "better" about it now, but my opinion remains the same. I will not, ever, watch this show again as the wrap up or lack thereof ruined it for me. Prior to it, I could not wait to buy this box set you just purchased and watch it over and over. It is done, dead even.
I will say that an explanation for the food drops did heal a little piece of that hurt I was left with. But why could that have not made it into 120+ hours of show? Seriously?
And as icing on the cake, AGAIN if this was really JUST a character story, why the black light in your box set? Why the mysterious note? Why the hidden DVD? Because that was part of the magic of lost at one time. Uncovering mysteries.

Anonymous said...

To wrap it up. Here are some blatantly contradictory quotes from the writers if you still doubt that they had no idea how they were going to wrap things up and just winged it.

------------------------------

We’re still trying to be … firmly ensconced in the world of science fact. I don’t think we’ve shown anything on the show yet … that has no rational explanation in the real world that we all function within. We certainly hint at psychic phenomena, happenstance and … things being in a place where they probably shouldn’t be. But nothing is flat-out impossible. There are no spaceships. There isn’t any TIME TRAVLEL.

But about four years later,

[Time travel] has been in the DNA of the show since the very beginning.

--------------------

"There were certain things we knew from the very beginning. Independent of ever knowing when the end was going to be, we knew what it was going to be, and we wanted to start setting it up as early as season 1, or else people would think that we were making it up as we were going along. So the skeletons are the living — or, I guess, slowly decomposing — proof of that. When all is said and done, people are going to point to the skeletons and say, ''That is proof that from the very beginning, they always knew that they were going to do this."

Yet in the episode that the skeletons are revealed in we are told there clothes decompisiton place them to be about 50 years old, yet we find seasons later these are the skeletons that are a couple thousand years old. WHOOPS!!!

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The last couple of seasons have made totally irrelevant the central rivalry between Ben and Widmore, the latter appearing to be the main villain of the story. Yet about 19 episodes before the end of the series, we were introduced to a brand new character, the Man in Black who is now basically the real "big bad".

Not only that, but Ben was revealed to be both a pawn of Jacob (and the Man in Black), but more importantly had ultimately no knowledge at all of anything that's happening on the Island, or why.

Despite this, here's what Carlton Cuse had to say on the subject

"Ben is such a formative character, he is the biggest bad guy we know on the show. To get to know him is a signal that we've become an answer-mode kind of show."

An answer mode kind of show huh? I thought this was a character mode show from the begining?

---------------------

On the Libby mysteries....

"Given everything else we have to tell, that's going to be a mystery that's going to have to get answered in year 4."

They even added

"The question the audience wants answered is, How did she get from A to B — from Desmond to the mental institution? We know the answer to that question, but the only way to tell that story is through another character's flashback, and that character would have to be another character on the show who is not among the beach dwellers."

BUT.....last year they say

"We feel like that story's told, it's done. We've told as much about Libby as we want to tell."

-------------------

I'll end with this one...

"Look, it would be nice to look back and say, 'We love every episode of Lost and every episode turned out the way we wanted it to'. There are s**tty episodes of Lost that we wish we had never written.But had we not written them we would be in a different situation now, because WE RAN OUT OF IDEAS, we STALLED, then the network realized what we had been saying from early on - that Lost needed an end date.

Really? I thought they knew where they were going all along.

In closing, I'm glad that you still love the show man, I really am. I would give anything to be able to love the show the way I used to and to have excitedly went and purchased this box set as well. Sadly though, that shall never be.