I'm a big fan of Martin's books and was also a huge fan of Lost and BSG. The ending of Lost gets an F and the ending of BSG gets a C-. Martin is correct in all of his criticisms (except that he got backwards which ending was worse, as between Lost and BSG, because the ending of Lost was so vacuous that it made the entire series insusceptible to rewatching, while the ending of BSG was merely a little bit silly and I'll surely watch the latter series through again someday).

And I'm not taking sides here. I'll hold Martin to the same standard. If a complicated structure is the key to how you draw in your readers, you have to write an ending that answers the questions you have posed.

Martin has an inherent advantage, because a novelist can buy time better than a screenwriter can, but you take your medium as you find it and you need to be equal to the task. Martin is right to fret about "Pulling a 'Lost,'" and Damon Lindelof needs to come to terms with the fact that that phrase belongs in the language. To paraphrase Roger Ebert's memo to Rob Schneider: "Dear Mr. Lindelof: Your finale sucked."

I'm not particularly worried about how the ending of Martin's saga will turn out, I just hope he makes it there sometime in the next twenty years. I think it's easier to get the ending right for a series of novels than it is for a television show, because no matter how many twists and turns the story takes, the author of a book series is always writing towards a known destination. Even if they don't have all the details of the ending worked out, they know where the characters are going, and every page written is one more step in that direction.

The problem for a television series like LOST is that, by the nature of the medium, television writers can't be working towards any fixed ending three seasons away because they might be canceled after one, or they might be a huge success and have to stretch the story out for ten years. TV needs to be always in the moment, which works fine for episodic shows, but caused lots of problems when LOST tried to keep big mysteries running for the entire series run. They might the right call ending it after six seasons and giving themselves a fixed time frame in which to wrap things up, but I feel like by that time it was already too late. In their efforts to sustain the mystery of the island, they had added more loose ends and unsolvable mysteries in the first three seasons than they could ever hope to have answered. I liked the ending of LOST for what it was, but was disappointed by all the things left unresolved.

Emotional catharsis is necessary at the end of any good story, but I don't think it has to be the focus of the ending. For me, a good ending should let you sit back and reflect on the story that has preceded it, and along with the characters themselves, realize the full scope of the journey they have taken. A great ending should let you nod your head and say to yourself, "I see, so that's what it was all about." Personally, I loved the ending of the Dark Tower, because it wasn't an ending at all, and the journey was what it was all about.

LOST is still my favourite ending to a series yet, so -shrugs-

OK, so what have we really learned here. If Martin was show-running 'Lost' it probably would have been a very different show at a million points. Which is cool with me - don't really see Damon Lindelof re-booting 'Beauty and The Beast' in this or any other lifetime and, honestly, I know The Twilight Zone is sacred to a lot of people but I find the show over-reliant on obvious and gimmicky "twist" endings.

But have you read 'Y: The Last Man', Mo? I know people who went nuts that the one thing Brian K. Vaugan never delivered was a definitive answer to this question: What caused the gendercide? Everyone has a theory, but he quite deliberately refused to say one was "right". I'm cool with that, lots of other people weren't and said so at the tops of their voices. Different strokes for different folks.

I’m fine with the fact that Damon and Carlton ended the series on their own terms, as long as they actually did. But the way the last couple of seasons played out, I got the feeling that they locked themselves into a timeframe and had to make concessions based on that timeframe. They’ll never admit it, but did they *really* end the show on their own terms? Or did they end it based on the timeframe they set for themselves 3 years earlier?

Great piece I agree with almost every word - just that I did like the ending of the Dark Tower even if the 7 books were not always very good.

Nice, looks like that is going to be very interesting indeed.

www.being-anon.int.tc

I think there's plenty of structure to the Battlestar ending as well as the undeniable character send offs and that structure works at several levels. There's the end of the journey. It was always a story about them finding earth and they found it and within that story there's the journey from the lie of earth Adama invents in the mini to the fiction of this being earth that he gives as a gift to Roslin. The mystery that is revealed is our relationship to the story: this is a mythological story of our origins and we are both human and Cylon. The philosophical point is the contingency of it and the inseparability of good and evil in that. At the beginning of our story is the act of Chief killing Tory and destroying a fragile peace, just like at the beginning of the Cylon civil war was an act of violence by the Cylon rebels not by Cavil and co. Then there is a statement about the role of the divine in the story, which is the speech of Baltar in CIC, which completely negates the idea that it is the Cylon God as such that is the divine force. The divine is a force of nature beyond good and evil and beyond any name that humans or Cylons want to use to describe their belief in this force. Starbuck's resurrection and disappearance/ ascension isn't explained because it can't be. It is not for human or Cylon to be able to see the divine directly or understand its workings because its essence in the story is its unknowability: only the hybrids can see the turns of the divine through the universe and the price of what they see is their madness or separation. Many people may not have liked these structural answers, but they were answers and they were as much part of the finale as the character endings.

I'd argue that it's not all about structure, nor is it all about character. There is some structural elements involved in the characters, because they are the vehicles through which the story is told. There are also character elements in the structure, because everything the characters do takes place inside of a story. A good story ticks all of the boxes: interesting characters, witty dialogue, dramatic situations, and mystery. Lost was not successful because it had interesting characters. It was successful because it had interesting characters, placed in a mysterious situation, that kept you guessing. Guessing about where the story (structure) was going to take you, and guessing about what the characters reactions to those events would be. To have a finale which focused on only one of the things that made the show work, is to have a finale that is going to disappoint people. Even if you enjoyed the ending, an ending which worked in ALL of the ways that the early seasons did would have been that much better.

I think the real mistake was season 5, not season 6. By the time you are in the final "act", by most storytelling standards I've heard of, you are not supposed to be introducing new information. The final stand of the characters, you should know exactly what is possible, and all of your interest should be on whether the characters can use that knowledge to win, or whether the weight that is on their shoulders crushes them in tragedy. Season 6 of Lost was an EPIC failure because season 5 didn't lay a good foundation for it. Half of the season was spent spewing out a bunch of things that we should have already knew, while the rest was spent giving us new questions that didn't all make sense.

So when the end finally comes, the storytelling method leaves us as viewers juggling whether we should be caring about the characters anymore, because the structure has stopped making sense. A story that doesn't make sense makes us question whether the characters are real or not. It cheapens even the impact the ending could have from a character perspective. In order to enjoy it, we have to ignore all the hand-waving the writers are doing and just focus on the actors we like. I got some enjoyment out of some of those final moments, but it was cheapened by the absurdity of everything. I didn't hate the ending, but with a better foundation, with a season 4 or 5 actually written with an ending in mind, or at least paced better, Lost could have been SO much better.

The difference is, we'll never see the end of Ice and Fire because George takes too long to write one book. Each time he writes a book, he says he is adding another. So a 3 book series turns to 5, then 6. This will never end.

And I loved the Lost ending.