I agree with your take on LOST. An enjoyable episode. Jack also didn't bug me this week--though it annoyed me that Hurley just went along with the poorly-explained plan.
Part of the problem LOST has is how commited the writers are to their structure--i.e. write one episode centring around each character, for most of the season. This meant that the sideways!verse stories mostly crawled, because not many of those stories were particularly interesting. And this was true of the flashbacks and flashforwards as well. The fact that each episode has only one protagonist gets in the way of what should be ensemble storytelling, and most characters end up being reduced to one or two character traits or incidents that define them--like Jack and needing to "fix" things, or Sayid being put in a situation where he has to be a torturer/killer again, or Locke being conned by his father or a father-analogue, or whatever. They do sometimes tell good stories about the individual characters but to me they don't do so often enough.
The Willingham thing amuses me. I personally don't care what he thinks. I think it's a shame that what he is saying is upsetting fans. It wouldn't be so bad if he just were a writer who misunderstands the characters greatly--this is the thing about (i.e.) Jeanty, whose comments about Buffy/Spike are hilariously off, but who seems sincere and not trying to create problems and/or demean fans. But again--not really a problem for me, because I don't really care what IDW is doing.
I like what I see of Whedon as a person, mostly. I agree that he can get too whiny. I feel sometimes like you can tell he's trying to hold it back in some interviews, and then finally lets out his frustrations (some understandable, others not as much) in other ones. He's trying I think to be polite, but he's very passionate about his work. There's a lot of speculation of troubles between him and SMG or Charisma Carpenter but it's very difficult to assign blame or whatever from our perspective--and there's really no reason to try, since there's no way we'll get all the facts. At any rate, I like him more as a writer than as a person (some glitches aside), which is fine--it's not like I'm ever going to meet him.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2010-04-22 05:52 pm (UTC)Part of the problem LOST has is how commited the writers are to their structure--i.e. write one episode centring around each character, for most of the season. This meant that the sideways!verse stories mostly crawled, because not many of those stories were particularly interesting. And this was true of the flashbacks and flashforwards as well. The fact that each episode has only one protagonist gets in the way of what should be ensemble storytelling, and most characters end up being reduced to one or two character traits or incidents that define them--like Jack and needing to "fix" things, or Sayid being put in a situation where he has to be a torturer/killer again, or Locke being conned by his father or a father-analogue, or whatever. They do sometimes tell good stories about the individual characters but to me they don't do so often enough.
The Willingham thing amuses me. I personally don't care what he thinks. I think it's a shame that what he is saying is upsetting fans. It wouldn't be so bad if he just were a writer who misunderstands the characters greatly--this is the thing about (i.e.) Jeanty, whose comments about Buffy/Spike are hilariously off, but who seems sincere and not trying to create problems and/or demean fans. But again--not really a problem for me, because I don't really care what IDW is doing.
I like what I see of Whedon as a person, mostly. I agree that he can get too whiny. I feel sometimes like you can tell he's trying to hold it back in some interviews, and then finally lets out his frustrations (some understandable, others not as much) in other ones. He's trying I think to be polite, but he's very passionate about his work. There's a lot of speculation of troubles between him and SMG or Charisma Carpenter but it's very difficult to assign blame or whatever from our perspective--and there's really no reason to try, since there's no way we'll get all the facts. At any rate, I like him more as a writer than as a person (some glitches aside), which is fine--it's not like I'm ever going to meet him.