skulls-and-tea:

sussexbound:

It’s not new, of course, this flagrant use of smoke-and-mirrors plotting and nonsense resolutions. Think of that great study in audience abuse, Lost, which began with a plane crash and then added twist upon twist, surprise after surprise, always dangling the possibility of everything coming together and making sense in next week’s episode. It never did. The script heaped up implausibilities and non sequiturs until nothing could finally account for what the show had actually been about. Lost was an object lesson in the financial reality of television whose job is to keep viewers hooked for as long as possible, and then, when they (and the advertisers) have lost interest, vanish, whether the story is wrapped up or not.

So we get extended and increasingly incoherent narrative arcs that leave fans scratching their heads (Battlestar Galactica, anyone?) because we are doing what readers are hardwired to do. We try to find coherence, unity, and meaning whether there is any or not. We assume that the ending was somehow planned from the beginning, though we should know by now that that is not how television is made. TV—unless it’s conceived as a self-contained mini-season—doesn’t begin with a macro idea which they then break into as many episodes or seasons as they have to fill. Generally, they start small and add to the end, extending and extending with no final end game in sight. We shouldn’t be surprised that it doesn’t finally make sense. All those plot twists and surprises we thought were complex revelations of some master plan were just new bits tacked on, each one taking the story in a direction no one (including the writers) had foreseen when they penned Episode 1.

The fact that they name-dropped LOST and BSG feels like a personal shout-out to me.

Sherlock and the Problem with Plot Twists