Lithose
Buzzfeed Editor
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I never watched Lost, and thought Prometheus was dumb but an okay movie. Sorry, I still think the show is bad (But I haven't watched all the episodes yet). Seb describes why just fine. Grief porn is also a great description, of both the show, and why it's just horribly boring. Maybe I quit it too early, but grief is a difficult emotion to garner empathy with unless it's contrasted against the hopes and dreams of a character we're already involved with OR it stems from a plot we can connect with. It's not like a set of tits in a porno where I just have a biological reaction to it (Which is the only reason porn is effective.). Grief is one of those things that actually requires understanding of the nuance, understanding of the "fall" from happiness to grief. That's how you develop some empathy (Not sympathy) for the grief people feel in stories, and that's what makes characters interesting.
These characters might BECOME interesting in their own right later, sure, as grief becomes ONE emotion out of many in a fully fleshed out person. But as I grit my teeth through the first 3 episodes, I didn't see that happening. All I saw was a slow plodding of nebulous, bland plot points until the next grief-splosion (Or outrageous/stupid action inspired by said grief); which again, I don't care about, because it's bursting from a character that I don't know enough about to even care why he's sad. The only thing I can do is sympathize with him or her that they are, indeed, sad (Because the actors are decent at conveying it).
What makes this worse is that the plot doesn't really inspire us to empathize with the grief either--because the plot point doesn't offer closure, like the kind you'd find if someone died in a tidal wave or a terrorist incident. When someone disappears people don't just go into grief mode. Usually they try to find out what happened, in fact, denial, anger or the other stages of "loss" are far more appropriate when there is no "closure" yet--the first thing we do is try to deny the worst, while working toward figuring out a solution. So the showsvery firstplot point stimulated an emotion/reaction (Desire/curiosity) in me that ran counter to what every character IN the show is feeling (Absolute grief and acceptance that the people are dead). And while that's fine for the characters IN the show, since it's been two years (And over that time, those feelings would transform into loss/grief as hope is lost), formethe total elapsed time between finding out people DISAPPEARED (NOT killed) and the current story wasoneminute.
So the plot didn't really give me (And I assume others) a vehicle to develop any empathy with these people--we're all still stuck in that "the fuck?" mode, burning to have questionsanswered--in denial (At best) at the powerlessness to answer these questions. We are feeling like we want to work toward a mystery, meanwhile though these jack asses we are watching have already skipped past those initial reactions, and shot all the way into stage 4 full grief mode. It feels alien, it feels difficult to connect with, because the plot slapped us with an emotion completely contrary to the stage the characters are in--we didn't experience the the slow acceptance of not being able to find answers, or the failure of any authority to do so. We are TOLD this happened, and then a bunch of sad as shit people are plopped in front of us..
Like I said though, as the story progresses, the characters might unfurl enough to garner some empathy; if they eventually aren't one dimensional grief vehicles, that is. But the first few episodes just felt especially awful due to the above and that's not just because people are hating on lindolff, it's because the show did a poor job of giving us something to connect with.
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