Stathol wrote:
You know what really killed the X-Files? In the later seasons it got too bogged down in creating this false sense of intrigue by dangling hints in front of the audience of what appeared to be some kind of intricate, but coherent conspiracy plot happening just "behind the curtain". They resorted to a carrot-and-stick game with the audience's misplaced hope that eventually the curtain would be pulled back and the deep secret revealed. Only, there was never anything behind the curtain to begin with. It was a ploy. And for a while, it worked. But eventually people just got fed up when they realized that were only being jerked around, and that the writers fully intended to keep jerking them around in perpetuity.
And then Lost happened. I don't know how Lost happened, but it did. Maybe people changed between the X-Files and Lost. Or maybe it's just that the X-Files stumbled into this technique in mid-stream, and its audience just wasn't as willing to go along with it, whereas Lost was pretty blatantly obviously a plot sham from the get go. Either way, ever since it went off the air, the networks have been furiously dogpiling on the "ooooh, it's a mystery! myyyyyysteryyyyy!" genre ever since, trying to find the "next Lost". Witness "Persons Unknown" (lol, cancelled), "Terra Nova", etc., etc., etc.
I'm going to keep watching Alcatraz for now, since I found it enjoyable enough and I do really like Sam Neil for some reason. That said, my suspicion is that it's yet another one of these shows. Hopefully they'll prove me wrong, but if I don't start seeing some indication that the writers have actually story-boarded this thing out, I'm probably going to bail on it before it makes it to the end of season 1. The show seems good, but not X-Files or BSG good, and that's pretty much my threshold for putting up with this kind of crap.
Okay, I didn't watch Lost. I tried, but I got bored fast. But everything you say here applies completely to X-Files (oh how frustrated I got at the lack of resolution to
anything, EVER), BSG (reimagined) where they painted themselves into a corner with a mystery they had no good answer thought up for.
I will give Alcatraz the benefit of the doubt because Fringe (an Abrams offering which I love) obviously had some forethought put into the mysteries it was unravelling, and actually DOES resolve them as it uncovers new ones. Terra Nova dispelled the notion fairly quickly in this short first season that it was just another "Ooooh, look, a mystery!" It was obviously planned out as well, the writers had a good idea where they were going, and simply revealed it to the user gradually (but not TOO gradually. 12 episodes and all the mysteries are resolved, rather elegantly and believably.)
Where's Alcatraz going to go in that area? Is it another X-Files/BSG or does Abrams have a path for its plot already worked out? I don't know. What bugs me is one never really knows until it's too late and you've wasted a pile of time on the show.