Lost: Season 5 - Page 48

Just finished S5 and , after singing the praises of the show in its entirety at the end of S4, I'm very conflicted about what I just watched and where the material seems to be heading now. Of course, most of you all now know where it's been taken, so I'm still left stumbling in the dark for a little while, offering praise or criticism that I may want to eventually retract.

It's odd but one feeling I have now is that the show seems, for the first time to me, to be spinning its wheels. Which is curious since the season and especially last couple eps were so densely plotted. And there were plenty of elements to the season I enjoyed quite a bit, including the whole 3 years in Dharma-ville. But finding Locke wasn't Locke (which I was able to call a couple eps in), and that there is yet another set of game players here, is pulling the material in a  direction I'm not real excited to see it go.

I actually enjoyed/wasn't bothered by the Nikki and Paolo material, but I agree with regards to all the Jacob stuff here. The Ben vs Whidmore conflict seemed to offer plenty of room to incorporate larger themes and more twists and revelations. The J v. anti-J feels too extraneous, especially since it seems J is introduced to us and dismissed all in one ep. It may be the 'ultimate' conflict in this story's universe, but it's meaningless to me since they aren't characters I'm invested in. Even worse, this plotline took a character I did care about and killed him off to go on this tangent.

I'm sure the creators involved will get all these separate threads to converge for the ultimate resolution, but at this point it sure seems like there is a conscious decision being made to pad this out about 10 more eps than it needed to be.

I dunno, maybe it's good that I'm left a little dissatisfied now so the next three months waiting for the Bd set won't be torture and I can get on with my life.

Without getting into spoilers for the final season, I'll say that confilct is shown to be anything but meaningless, involves the major characters, and is not at all padding.