LOST

I like how it turned out to be the prequel for Fantasy Island

I think Slider_Quinn21 notes something with LOST that is also true for ALIAS and FRINGE and SLIDERS: there comes a point when the fans who stick with the show stop caring very much about the secrets of the Island or why the parallel universe in Season 1 of FRINGE is totally different in Season 2 or what the Kromagg Dynasty endgame is for Kromagg Prime and Quinn. Instead, the fans just want to know that the characters -- their friends -- are alright and enjoy a journey and an adventure with the companions they have come to love and cherish.

Even the writers can't explain the Kromagg Dynasty endgame for Kromagg Prime. The entire Kromagg arc seems to be rewritten on the fly from episode to episode with every intention for the storyline in one episode abandoned by the next episode.

The fan consensus is that the Kromagg Prime arc was a really good idea from Marc Scott Zicree that was mishandled later. My opinion is that after "Invasion", the Kromagg arc was a disaster from conception to scripting to filming to airing.

"Invasion" introduces the Kromaggs: they are an interdimensional empire who are xenophobically obsessed with enslaving all humans in all dimensions. The Kromaggs loathe humans and are enraged that the Kromaggs don't seem to have any doubles (at least none that they've found) in the multiverse. They plant a tracking device in an unidentified slider, intending to invade the sliders' home Earth once they stop sliding. This sets the stage for a sequel that is completely inevitable; the sliders' central goal, home, is now entangled with the Kromaggs.

In preproduction for Season 4, incoming story editor Marc Scott Zicree clearly felt the show was in a bad state. It had lost two original actors. Zicree said in an online fan chat that he was "horrified" by the Season 3 episodes at the end. Zicree felt that with Arturo dead and Wade to be lost off-camera, it was time to steer SLIDERS into a more overtly science fiction and technology driven approach: the Kromagg Invasion of Earth.

Zicree's storyline: Quinn and Maggie return to Quinn's home Earth in the S4 premiere, but the Kromaggs have invaded. Quinn also discovers that he is actually from the Kromagg homeworld, that the Kromaggs and a race of humans once lived in peace as an interdimensional civilization of sliders led by Quinn's father, Michael Mallory.

In the Kromagg-Human war, Quinn's father placed Quinn with doubles of Quinn's parents, and placed Quinn's brother, Colin, with another set of doubles. Quinn determines that his birth father's weapon was successful as his biological parents attempted to retrieve him but couldn't; he, Rembrandt and Maggie set off to find the Kromagg homeworld and this weapon.

Zicree's intention: Quinn would find Colin. As for Wade: options were to have guest characters report that Wade had escaped the Kromaggs and was fine or to have Wade appear as a guest-star if Sabrina Lloyd could be secured to give the character an ending. The Season 4 finale: Quinn, Rembrandt, Maggie and Colin arrive on the Kromagg homeworld. Colin begins acting strangely, and Quinn's birth parents declare that they never placed their son Quinn with any doubles and they have no idea who Colin is supposed to be. It's revealed: Quinn's entire Season 4 backstory was a Kromagg trick.

The Kromaggs used Quinn to regain access to the Kromagg homeworld to retake it from the humans and Colin is not Quinn's brother, but rather a Quinn-clone who has been altered to look different with a sleeper personality. Quinn succeeding in reaching the Kromagg homeworld has also shut down the humans' security functions that barred the Kromaggs from sliding in; the finale ends with Quinn fighting Colin while Kromagg manta ships fill the sky. Season 5 would have had Quinn discover: the invaded Earth in "Genesis" was not Quinn's real home Earth. Colin would be killed off or his human personality would override the sleeper personality and he'd stay on as a regular.

Most SLIDERS fans really like this storyline idea and are upset by how it actually unfolded after David Peckinpah and Jerry O'Connell and Bill Dial changed it. I'd argue that the story was a disaster from start to finish.

First, "Invasion" plainly establishes that the Kromaggs are appalled by the existence of humans. "Genesis" declares that Kromaggs and humans once lived in peace and shared a dimension. This is completely mismatched to the xenophobia of the "Invasion" Kromaggs. While it's not unreasonable to note that the "Invasion" Kromaggs were liars and that their stated backstory could be a lie, if one wants an interdimensional race that once lived in peace with humans, it'd be better to create a new species rather than hammer the Kromaggs into this completely opposing template.

"Genesis" refocuses SLIDERS with Quinn now a soldier and a central figure in a decades-spanning interdimensional war. This doesn't work for me either: the appeal of Quinn, to me, is that he's the American whiz kid making gadgets in his basement, a rebrand of the middle-aged English-Victorian inventor. To turn him into Kal-El of Kromagg Prime is, to me, an absurd turn of backstory that Quinn's creator, Tracy Torme, described as "pretty ridiculous". And it's clear that the creator of this storyline, Zicree, also though it ridiculous because he was going to overturn it later.

The main problem I have with this: SLIDERS is about characters who come from our world (or at least something close to it), reacting to parallel universes being different from the world in which the viewer lives. If Quinn's homeworld is now Kromagg Prime, if Rembrandt's homeworld is now a Kromagg battlefield, then the viewer no longer shares a recognizable version of "home" as a common point of reference. Again, Zicree seems to know this because he was going to reveal that the invaded home Earth wasn't truly the home Earth -- but he was going to let these revelations stay in place from episodes 1 to 21 of Season 4; that's 21 episodes where the sliders are no longer from our home and trying to find their way back to our home.

The secondary but no less glaring issue: if Quinn and Rembrandt think everyone they've ever known and loved is a Kromagg victim or prisoner, then SLIDERS' comedy episodes become awkward and all the worlds where the sliders liberate a dystopian regime make the sliders seem uncaring for fleeing their own dystopian Earth. The Kromagg Invasion of Earth, even if to be overturned later, makes every post-invasion story depressing and hypocritical.

The entire Season 4 arc was, in my personal opinion, a disaster even at this stage. 

The subsequent changes to Zicree's plot just dug it into a deeper hole. "Genesis" as scripted sends Wade to a rape camp, something that horrified Zicree. "Common Ground" continues with the idea that Quinn is being manipulated to retake the Kromagg homeworld and brings up searching for Wade, but "Common Ground" also rewrites the Kromaggs significantly from "Invasion".

The "Invasion" Kromaggs were distant manipulators speaking through a human agent; the Kromaggs now are written as evil Klingons from STAR TREK, a warrior race concerned with honour and military grandeur when the "Invasion" Kromaggs were unapologetic colonizers with a self-image of manifest destiny to justify their campaigns of conquest and enslavement.

"The Dying Fields" rewrites the Kromaggs and the Kromagg arc again, saying the Kromaggs have rape camps because Kromaggs were sterilized by the anti-Kromagg superweapon. Kromagg sterilization wasn't part of Zicree's plot and it undermines the original intention: that the Kromaggs have cloning technology to produce Colin. It's peculiar that the Kromaggs would have cloning technology but use humans to repopulate their fighting forces.

And now the anti-Kromagg superweapon is also changed. "Genesis" declares that Michael Mallory was a scientist who engineered sliding technology; the superweapon was presumably an application of sliding. Now, the superweapon has become some sort of biological agent of sterilization.

Also, "The Dying Fields" has the Kromaggs not recognizing the sliders and actively trying to kill them when "Genesis" and "Common Ground" established that the Kromaggs need to keep them alive to retake Kromagg Prime. The Kromagg plot was stretching before; now some cracks are showing.

Then we have "Mother and Child" where the Kromaggs recognize the sliders and declare that the previous order to keep them alive has been countermanded. No explanation is provided as to why the Kromaggs are suddenly abandoning their plan to use Quinn to reconquer their homeworld. "Lipschitz Live" also features a Colin double which undermines the original intention that Colin was an altered-Quinn clone created recently.

What happened here? According to Temporal Flux, Zicree was struggling to work with David Peckinpah and Bill Dial. Peckinpah seemed irritated by Zicree's desire to work on scripts and do rewrites; Dial was annoyed that Zicree called him out for playing Solitaire during what were to be writers' room meetings. Meanwhile, Jerry O'Connell disliked the idea that Colin (played by Jerry's real life brother Charlie) wouldn't be Quinn's actual brother.

It would seem to me: Peckinpah and Dial decided to throw out Zicree's original intention and declare that Quinn's Kromagg Prime homeworld backstory was true, at which point Zicree gave up on the show and switched his focus to DEEP SPACE NINE. Why did "The Dying Fields" and "Mother and Child" abandon the arc of the Kromaggs keeping the sliders alive? It was to upset Zicree and get him to stop showing up to work, presumably so that Peckinpah could focus on his lifelong mission to kill himself with heroin while Bill Dial played Solitaire.

Then we have the Season 4 finale, "Revelations" where Quinn nonsensically does not go to Kromagg Prime despite boasting of having found a way to get past the Kromagg Prime security lockout that blocks incoming sliders. We have an aimless runaround where Quinn finds a pretty acceptable superweapon to free our home Earth but unfathomably expresses no interest in using it, leaving it to Rembrandt, only for Rembrandt to forget about the superweapon also.

It's no longer clear what the point of the season is: the sliders are clearly not attempting to liberate Rembrandt's home Earth since they don't make any effort to seize technology to make it happen. They are clearly not trying to get to Kromagg Prime since they have the coordinates and the means to arrive but do not use them. It's inexplicable.

To me, the appeal of TRACY TORME'S SLIDERS is that it's a simple concept. The sliders are people lost in the multiverse, trying to find their way back home. That's a 15 word summary.

MARC SCOTT ZICREE'S SLIDERS concept, even before it was altered, is that the sliders are people whose home Earth has been invaded by an interdimensional dynasty of conquerors except one of the sliders is actually from this dynasty's homeworld and this homeworld is now occupied by humans who have a superweapon that can drive away the dynasty except later it'll turn out this human who was thought to be from the homeworld isn't from the homeworld and the invaded home is not actually the home of the sliders because their real home is fine and for God's sake, that was 82 words and it's still confusing.

TRACY TORME'S SLIDERS is a simple idea that I can explain in 10 words or less. I can't explain MARC SCOTT ZICREE'S SLIDERS in 82 words. I don't think I could explain it in 100 words or even 1,000 words.

This is why, to me, MARC SCOTT ZICREE'S SLIDERS is a failure from start to finish. You can't claim the sliders are searching for home if home is a battlefield they're escaping, and then separately, a place to which they've never been. You can't present the sliders as representing the viewer's world if the sliders now come from two different Earths that don't reflect the audience's Earth.

It's confusing. You can't sell a confusing message.

To me, the 'best' route for Season 4 without Arturo and Wade would have been to have Quinn sliding alone (and sadly lose Rembrandt but retain Cleavant to guest-star as a double a few times). If we can't do the original sliders, then reformat the show to be Quinn sliding alone, five years after the Season 3 finale. Maggie has left Quinn offscreen. Quinn is still searching for a way home.

He encounters a homeless young girl who broke into Quinn's basement looking for a place to sleep and accidentally triggered his sliding machine which through a combination of technobabble and luck, brought her to Quinn. Quinn takes on the new kid as his protege, recreating a version of SLIDERS' original formula of older and younger characters. Just keep it simple.

Anyway. I've never gotten past Season 5 of LOST, but it's pretty clear to me that LOST kept its focus on the characters. LOST is about troubled people on an island of supernatural phenomena. LOST ensured that it was about the people, and that meant that LOST could always be explained in 11 words.

Yeah very much the same reason, I got hooked on the show. They really hit lightning in a bottle with that cast. I wasn´t one of those hardcore fans from the very beginning though, I missed a few episodes in the first season and found myself disinterested. I ended up later giving it another shot via torrent sites and getting hooked that way. I think its probably my favourite show too.

I agree Lindelof copped a bit of unfair flack although I really hated the flash sideways stuff and thus S6 was very weak for me as a whole, not necessarily, the end though. Speaking of Lindelof, did you ever see The Leftovers? I started watching season 1 but wasn´t that drawn in by the characters, but I keep hearing a lot of good things about it so I will probably persist with it.

i really liked it.

was a bit surprised that it was criticized.

(but i felt the same way about After Earth)

The only people to treat the 'maggs right were the people at inkworks.

agree!

It's funny.  LOST was a huge success primarily because of the mysteries.  WHY IS THERE A POLAR BEAR?  WHO IS THIS FRENCH WOMAN?  WHO ARE THE OTHERS?  ARE THEY DEAD?  WHAT IS THE MONSTER?

And to me, all of that was cool.  I desperately wanted to know who the Others were.  I loved learning about Danielle and other castaways on the Island.  I wanted to know what made it special and whether the world was still out there.

But Lindelof was very clear from the beginning through the structure of the show that this was about people.  It's why he devotes 50% his airtime *every week* to these people.  And not just Jack/Kate/Sawyer/Locke - to each of the main characters.  He didn't just want random nameless people going through something extraordinary (like, for example, The Walking Dead).  He wanted you to know each one of these characters and how they got to be the people they are now.  That when Jack or Boone or even Nikki made a decision, you understood how those decisions were forged.

It was plot-heavy but it was extremely character heavy.  You got to learn mysteries about the people every week, even if the Island plot was Hurley building a golf course on the Island or finding a Dharma van.

So it's so strange to me that people could watch 3 years of flashbacks (the flashbacks stop then and expand into other forms of storytelling) and not think "huh, why are the mysteries so lame?" - if a teacher spends half the class talking about World War II, don't you think you should focus on World War II when you are studying for the test?

With The Leftovers, as I said in my previous response, Lindelof starts fresh.  People all over the world disappear.  But we don't spend time with the President of the United States (like in the Y: The Last Man adaptation or every disaster movie ever) or a scientist trying to figure out what happened.  We spend time with families in a small town that were affected in different ways.  There's no effort to explain what happened any more than explaining a hurricane.  In season two, Lindelof changes the theme song from a dour instrumental to a peppy folksy song called "Let the Mystery Be."

He's not going to explain it.  If that's why you're here, you're free to stay for as long as you want, but you need to love these characters and how they grow and change. 

(Slight spoiler but they do, on some level, dabble in explanations, but it's all dabbling).

I think Lindelof is great with characters and specifically three-dimensional characters that exist in a real world.  I think he's also great at coming up with cool stories.  I think his payoffs are sometimes not as great, but in my opinion, the characters can carry the lamest of explanations.  I'm sold.

I also think Carlton Cuse doesn't get enough credit or blame for LOST.  I think the work he's done after LOST has been hit or miss but mostly strong - I really liked Bates Motel, I thought the Strain was fun, Colony was pretty solid Sci-Fi, and Jack Ryan is...fine?  But I don't think anything he's done as been as solid as The Leftovers or Watchmen.  I can see that Lindelof might've been more about characters and Cuse might've been more about story.

A point of intrigue for me: Damon Lindelof's writing is based on a technique explained by JJ Abrams as The Mystery Box technique.

Abrams explained that as a little boy, he bought a 'mystery magic box' from a magic store that continued some random magic trick. Abrams never opened the box; imagining what might be inside was far more compelling than actually finding out.

Lindelof never wrote for Abrams' ALIAS, but ALIAS seems to be founded on this formula as much as LOST. ALIAS, a spy-fi action show, is supposedly about the mysteries of Milo Rambaldi, a fifteenth century alchemist whose blueprints and scientific formulae add up to some unknown, world-changing endgame of cataclysmic or utopian promise. By the middle of Season 2, it becomes clear: the writers don't know what the Rambaldi endgame is and don't care. Rambaldi is a plot device to create MacGuffin plot devices. ALIAS wasn't about Rambaldi; ALIAS was about Sydney and Jack and their twisted and troubled daughter-father relationship as they chased down Rambaldi artifacts.

Abrams's Mystery Box seems to have been an inspiration to Lindelof.

That said, any storytelling tool can be misapplied. The Mystery Box was a serious problem on THE X-FILES where Chris Carter was obsessed with what was inside the Box and built his show around brief glimpses of what was within -- but Carter kept changing his mind as to what was inside. The alien colonization of Earth became the Spartan Virus depopulation of Earth which became the colonization of space which became a cloning project which became... something about Scully getting pregnant again. And THE X-FILES was just as incoherent with character arcs. Even in Season 11, THE X-FILES couldn't figure out if Mulder and Scully were a couple or not from episode to episode. THE X-FILES failed to satisfy with both its mysteries and its characters.

The Mystery Box approach has been both misused and well-used for SLIDERS fanfic. From 2000 to about 2005, numerous wonderful fans wrote heartfelt and passionate Season 6 stories, tearing open the Mystery Box of SLIDERS to finally explain and resolve all the mysteries of the series.

Rembrandt finds the original Professor who helps split the Quinns followed by retrieving Colin followed by rescuing Wade followed by revealing that the Earth Prime in "Genesis" was not the real home Earth followed by revealing that Colin is a clone with a sleeper personality programmed by the Kromaggs followed by defeating the Kromaggs followed by giving Maggie, Colin, Mallory and Diana a happy ending followed by the original sliders getting home.

The reaction to these stories was often mixed even though these stories boasted some wonderful scenes. The contrivances to make all of the above happen would be unconvincing. The contents of this version of SLIDERS' Mystery Box turned out to be... a set of plot convolutions so unwieldy and random that even a resurrected Ernest Hemingway would fail to wring a strong story from them. There's no shame in struggling to craft a tale out of these fragments.

Starting from 2009 or so, however, we started to see a Mystery Box approach to Season 6 fanfic where the authors clearly preferred to keep Box closed, to delay opening it for as long as possible, to keep the Box at a distance when it was finally opened.

These 2009 and onward fanfics start with Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo already alive and well when the story begins. The Mystery Box holds an answer to the questions: how are they alive? How has the Kromagg invasion somehow been undone? How did they find each other again?

These latter-era fanfics present the opening of the SLIDERS Mystery Box as both tantalizing and unwanted. What if the contents of the Box are insufficent to answer our questions? What if there is a terrible price to be paid for Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo coming back from the dead?

In many ways, withholding the explanation for how the sliders are alive is a tacit admission; the writers of these 2009-onward SLIDERS stories *know* that the explanation won't be that great. The Mystery Box contents can never live up to the speculation around what's inside.

But the true secret of the Mystery Box here might be: the fanfic readers and writers don't actually care how the original sliders are back. They just want to feel it and believe in it. They want to see Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo deal with the trauma of being merged-erased, sent to a rape camp, losing every friend, and dying; they want to see them survive and endure.

These 2009-onward writers frontload their stories with the reunion of Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo. By the time the Box gets opened, it's just a formality; it doesn't matter how the sliders came back. They are already back. And it's a good thing that it doesn't matter because the plot devices to bring the sliders back to life aren't any better than the ones in the pre-2009 fanfics.

This Season 6 Mystery Box for SLIDERS is actually more potent when unopened. Yes, SLIDERS fans may be very concerned with the Kromagg-Human War and the secrets of Colin Mallory and the fate of Logan St. Clair. But the story that will speak to these fans most deeply is the one where Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo are reunited and restored. SLIDERS fans on some level know that the Kromagg-Human War and Dr. Geiger and whatnot are only the bridge they have to cross in order to get back to Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo -- and if offered them a zipline to swing right over this bridge, the zipline is preferable.

If your fanfic focuses on the rationale for how Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo back, if you open the Mystery Box and lay it out piece by piece and point by point, the reader will only see the forced logic and strained contrivances; their disbelief will keep the story and characters at a remove.

But if you start your fanfic by making the reader happy to see Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo together again, if the characters and emotions feel real, then the reader will tolerate the rationale for the resurrections being strained and somewhat unconvincing and contrived.

I think this goes back to Slider_Quinn21's point: when a story leaves the audience satisfied with the characters' journeys, then it's alright for the Mystery Box content to be disjointed, contradictory, unresolved, and not even that interesting and often out of focus. The audience will forgive that. Or at least Slider_Quinn21 will. Again, I have not finished LOST, but my sense from Slider_Quinn21 is that even if the Island wasn't ever explained, the character arcs were satisfying.

Gave The Leftovers another crack and well into season 2 atm. Definitely has improved over season one.
I can see what you mean about Jamison being the spiritual successor to John Locke, the very same thought occurred to me as I was watching it. Also getting a lot of Twin Peaks vibes as well with Garvey´s sleep-walking which I know Lindelof was a huge fan of. I feel though that its still quite a bit different to LOST in that, the mysterious event that occurred seems to be the primary influence for the majority characters and if not explained in a satisfactory way might end up affecting my liking for the show whereas LOST was really a hangout show in disguise.