THE LOST EFFECT

Heather Havrilesky, the Los Angeles-based television writer for the New York Times uses the analogy of lab rats lured through a maze by the promise of false treats to blast the current writing trend started with The Ending of Lost to current dramatic television. She concludes that "Lost" ruined the market for nuanced, character-driven dramas in the same way that the Star Wars franchise dumbed down action movies. Her immediate point is her disappointment in "Homeland" and "American Horror Story." From the Times piece:

"[Lost's] finale was the crowning disaster, the Scooby-Doo ending to end all Scooby-Doo endings. After hinting for years that their nonsensical mess would add up to something, not only did the producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof fail to address a tiny fraction of the trillions of mysteries they introduced, but they threw out the Lostpedia with the bath water, scrapping all of those riddles for the equivalent of Lucas’s teddy-bear victory dance: a celestial moment with the survivors, hugging and holding hands in the afterlife.

"This is all ancient history — or would be, if not for the fact that the implosion of “Lost” was like a dirty bomb that made the world unsafe for serial dramas to this day....

"The problem lies in the fact that the dead-end suspense and pill-popping, knife-wielding darkness of today’s TV dramas shove more subtle pilot candidates out of the way. The empty thrills, the ticking clock that never runs down, the pointless twists and turns that are neither motivated nor resolved, all degrade the audience’s palate until all we can taste is blood, all we can see is teenagers in hot pants, all we can hear is flat dialogue and all we can expect at the end of season is a giant, flashing question mark.

"And that’s sad, because it’s also true that television writers are taking big risks in their laboratories these days. They’re experimenting with speeding up and slowing down the time line, trotting out unlikable characters and testing our tolerance for crazy, for demented, for morbid. Instead, they should focus on testing our tolerance for smart, complex characters and nuanced stories, just as “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” and “Mad Men” did. Because some of us have been burned too many times to head back into that jungle maze yet again."

The analogy of writers using "thrill pills" to lead lab rats (viewers) through a dead end plot arc dead ends through a maze of story lines to a WTF? conclusion was a long running criticism of the LOST anthology and brought up here several times.

It is a cheap story format to throw out bizarre events, cloaked clues, mysterious dangerous secondary characters to scare, threaten, or haunt your main characters - - - but just throwing elements at them is like endlessly shooting bullets in a video game that leads to no where except shooting more bullets.

Maybe the most inadvertent Easter Egg of the whole lost series was Daniel Faraday's lab rat (Eloise, named after his mother) time maze which meant nothing in The End.