Lost to end... but not yet.

I'm a fan of the TV series Lost. I found this article yesterday suggesting that the series will have a definite ending. That is, instead of the series marching along until the ratings — and artistic merit — trickle out somewhere around the 8^th or 9^th season (I'm looking at you, X-Files *sniff*), Lost will tell a coherent story with a definite conclusion.

That's if the original creative team have their way. So far ABC seems to agree with them, but that doesn't mean anything, especially if the ratings are high near the end and the fans ask for more.

The intention was always to tell the story within the framework of about 100 episodes. They will be somewhere in the 90s at the end of next season, meaning that the show will probably only last 5 years. This would be similar to the sci-fi series Babylon 5, which was supposed to go for five seasons. Hopefully what happened to B5 doesn't happen to Lost. B5 was supposed to run five seasons, but early in the fourth the producers found out the series would be cancelled at the end of that year. They accelerated the story line to finish the main story arc that year. However, near the end of the fourth season they were told that the show would be extended for another season. The fifth season was, thus, disappointing since a lot of the action stuff planned that year was done the previous year, and a disappointing secondary story arc became the primary arc.

At any rate, the comment about Lost having a definite end is promising. The only issue I have, really, is that it sounds like the writers are making up the story as the go along. Nothing wrong with that, really. A lot of novels are written that way. Hopefully they've at least outlined what will likely happen by the end of the series (assuming ABC doesn't mess it up).

Speaking of ABC messing it up, I was pretty peeved at ABC for running only six episodes of Lost in the Fall and then going into hiatus until February. They replaced it with a show called Day Break. It smacked of ABC tricking Lost fans into supporting another quirky show with a vaguely sci-fi premise. I was so peeved that I refused to watch Day Break. Maybe a bunch of other folks felt the same way, because Day Break was cancelled.

Also cut was the show The Nine. This had an interesting premise. Nine people (including two criminals) get caught up in a bank robbery. We see the start of the robbery, and we see them getting rescued. We don't see what happened. The characters were changed by their experience, mostly for the worse. As the show progressed, we saw what happened in the bank in short flashback snippets.

I watched a couple of episodes of this. It was an interesting way to tell a story, but while the acting was good the story fell flat. Most of the story was what happened after the robbery, and I really didn't care much to find out what happened to these people after the robbery. It was during the robbery that I wanted to know about, and that information came out in little bits. It might have worked as a movie premise, but it didn't grab me as a weekly show. It, too, has been cancelled, though it will likely come back in May and finish the rest of its 13-episode season. Unfortunately that won't give them time to finish the story arc. So why watch a show you know was cancelled before the end, with the mystery likely to be left up in the air?

On the other hand, that's what happened to Firefly, and I was very happy to watch it! I doubt that there are enough fans of The Nine to justify a movie, though.