Hacker News Reader

Comment by cwillu | Hacker News Reader

The cylons did not, in fact, have a plan.

Sounds like they were Lost.

("Lost" was an extremely promising SF show that claimed to have a plan, but was revealed not to. Which is unforgivable when the attraction of the show was figuring out the mystery. My own theory is that the wildly successful first season led to the writers purchasing too much celebratory cocaine, and subsequently just phoning it in, while the business people were happy to milk it like a soap opera.)

Lost had a plan. Then management wanted to drag out the phenomenon. So the story had to expand, it's how all those arcs that never resolved started. Then suddenly, the fad was over and it needed a quick close.

Kinda like how GoT fell off in the last season.

I suppose that happens in tech startups a lot.

(One of the main reasons a side startup of mine fizzled a few years ago was because neither of us wanted to be the CEO, and we didn't know how to find one we'd trust not to kill the magic that would get us the users in the first place.)

Game of Thrones suffered from overtaking the novels. It was less about being dragged out (in my opinion) and more about not having George RR Martin at the helm with a thousand pages material already written and waiting adaption.

Martin is famously slow at writing the books, but that lead to some really deep and complex storylines. However when you try to compress that process into < 1 year and with different writers at the helm as well, then you’re inevitably going to end up with something that feels rushed and stripped of any substance.

I'm pretty sure one major reason Martin hasn't finished WINDS OF WINTER after over 10 years (never mind A DREAM OF SPRING) is that he he finds it easier to spawn new characters and subplots than to wrap them up.

I.e. the TV series looks bad compared to the books because they had to tackle the hard part and Martin hasn't yet shown he'll do better.

That sounds fair too.

They also had to drag Lost production a lot, if memory serves during season 3, due to the writers strike back then that essentially left the production with no material for some time. Personally I loved Lost first seasons, then it rapidly went downhill, and recall the disappointment after watching the series finale. The series however in my opinion established a turning point in how drama is shown in TV series; I see a clear pattern in "before Lost" and "after Lost" series, so kudos to the creators.

I watched a video wherein Damon Lindelof talks about how they wanted to end the show after 3 seasons. With its success, ABC wanted the show to go on for 10. Apparently the network kept negotiating, not understanding the creators weren’t playing hardball, they wanted to end the show.

There has been plenty of hit shows prior to Lost, but I think it was one of the forerunners of the modern TV show, where the producers were planning on making something complete rather than just an infinite ratings monster.

And if having no plan wasn't damning enough, the compounding crime was not at least being as good storytellers along the way as X Files.

I couldn't stand all the unbelivable behavior. When you don't know anything about someone yet, then you can be forgiven for falling for deception from them. But once you do catch them doing something inexcusable, why the f have you forgotten all about that an episode or two later? And then act all devastated when the already known bad guy is bad again later... Seemed to be happening in all different directions with all different characters at different times. I never watched more than a handful of episodes before I wrote it off as pointless contrived drama resulting mostly from inexplicable behavior from the victim(s)-of-the-day.

Just to be clear, X Files was never my favorite show, just another show that ended up having no plan, but mostly didn't piss you off for being stupid, so much so that it could get away with being aimless for a long time.

Another way to say it, X Files ended up being pointless, but it didn't feel pointless all along the way. Lost felt pointless immediately and never didn't (for the admittedly short time I gave it).

> Lost felt pointless immediately

I recall liking Lost early on, when it seemed that they were all in purgatory, and, one by one, we'd learn their backstories, as they found redemption on the Island.

Oh come on!

One of the episodes did it right - it was a snowglobe. But that never went anywhere after that remark.

It’s down to JJ Abrams style of writing. He’s frequently talked about his love for a “mystery box” where he believes a good mystery is better than fact. The problem with his writing is, unlike most other writers who use mystery boxes, Abrams doesn’t even know himself what is inside that box. And you see this across all of his work.

Frankly, I find him to be the most overrated writer and director in Hollywood because of this. I find everything he does to be borderline unwatchable. Though with his recent criticisms for Star Wars and Star Trek, it does feel like his audiences are starting to lose their love for him too.

loved Super 8. Have watched it several times. It's his best movie IMO.

Super 8 has a coherent reveal of the mystery box. Lost did not and disappointed at the end.

The kelvin timeline from when he rebooted Star Trek is sort of mystery box but then we learn who Nero is in a coherent way early on as well. I did not like that JJ destroyed Vulcan and frankly made a confusing alternate, darker timeline at all. The reboots are good movies but they were not good Star Trek movies. Missed opportunities to explore the Roddenberry style themes of humanity and deep moral questions under a backdrop of optimism.

Speaking of the optimism in Star Trek... is it just me, or do Discovery and Strange New Worlds seem to be a bit "over-optimistic?" There's some really long scenes where they are trying to do an inspirational, optimistic Picard-style speech, talking about love and humanity and compassion, doing the right thing, etc.

Yeah those things are great, but spending 15 minutes showing every member of the bridge crew standing up, and repeating "we are Starfleet" every episode kinda starts to get old after a little while. The shows have been great otherwise, but I'm wondering if they are making this over the top on purpose, or if they are just missing the point a little bit.

Super 8 was co-produced by Steven Spielberg, which is probably why the mystery part of Super 8 is cohesive and interesting.

Yeah, I'd rather not see JJ Abrams touch any of my favourite things anymore. So of course it turns out two of his writers became the Rings of Power showrunners. Fortunately they seem to at least know what's in their mystery boxes, but personally I could do without them.

The Star Wars sequels definitely suffered from the fact that Abrams just threw a lot of shit at the wall to see what stuck, then Johnson saw it was all shit and took the story into a different direction, and then Abrams lost his shit in the final installment.

Can we please just get back to writing proper stories again?

Unlike a lot of the old generation of Star Wars fandom, I actually liked a lot of what the sequels were trying to do, and I wanted to see a fresh, revisionist (even deconstructionist) take on the lore. Instead we got A New Hope for the third time and an incoherent mess of wasted potential and mutual sabotage between directors.

It's actually astounding that they would treat one of the most lucrative properties in history the way they did. Maybe they just assumed Star Wars was so big it couldn't fail.

I am old generation Star Wars fandom, and I actually liked what The Last Jedi tried to do. It didn't really succeed, but questioning the Jedi teachings, or at least Yoda's approach to them, that drove Anakin and possible Count Dooku to the dark side, and that Luke had to ignore in order to defeat Palpatine, is an awesome idea, and one of the few things left to really move Star Wars forward at that point.

It didn't come out well, was muddled in other crap, and the whole trilogy was crippled by two arguing directors, but that basic idea was solid. If that was indeed the intention.

I also liked the first half of The Force Awakens, when it was still about the Search for Skywalker, before it turned into Death Star 3.

Combine the first half of TFA with the good bits of TLJ, and you've got a good story.

Well in star wars case, the executives are to take the blame.

They planned a trilogy without writing it? They just shot ⅓ of a trilogy with no plan whatsoever of what should happen next?

agile movie development

You say that but I remember as far back as the 80s there being claims that George Lucas had planned 9 movies, including 3 prequels (which at that stage hadn’t been written).

Lucas then compounded things by selling the rights to Disney, a company famed for milking their IP.

Much as I enjoy the occasional Star Wars saga, I never really considered Lucas to be a great steward of the franchise either.

I skip any show that has only one central mystery. If they solve it, the show is over, so you know from day one it will be never be solved.

Lost was obviously in this category.

A five year mission is a much better premise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com