As if "Lost" fans needed any more reasons to be pissed at the series finale ...
After the ABC drama ended in 2010, many cried foul over the the show's many loose ends, the bullshit magic cave explanation for the mysterious island's powers and why Allison Janney was forced to rock this tragic hairstyle.
Yeah, in retrospect it wasn't all great.
According to Entertainment Weekly's resident "Lost" expert, the two-part, 104-minute series finale has been shortened by 18 minutes on Netflix, leaving showrunner Damon Lindelof asking: WTF?
For viewers that loved the finale (yours truly) that means 18 fewer minutes of sobbing in a fetal position on your bedroom floor while your family members remind you that it's just a TV show. For those in the other camp, can you imagine how many more things you could have complained about?!
In an exclusive statement to EW, Lindelof said:
"I am totally befuddled by all this. Love it or hate it, the finale that aired is the definitive finale and to alter it in any way defies explanation. Something tells me that this isn’t Netflix’s fault … that it’s an honest mistake and something got miscommunicated -- I seem to remember ABC had to make an edit for rerun airings that tightened the show into ‘format’ (42 minutes to accommodate commercials), and somehow that [version] mistakenly got sent to Netflix. This sometimes happened with our finales -- we’d ask for extra time and ABC would agree to air, but then we had to do another tighter version for subsequent airings and/or international [markets]. We usually left these (painful) cuts to the discretion of our editors … but as the show lives on in DVD form and on Netflix, there is ZERO reason to have the shorter version out there."
"The Leftovers" showrunner added, "I have no intention of ‘changing’ nor Special Editioning the finale … we continue to stand by it, but this is a fix that needs to happen, so at least people can love or hate it in its entirety," with the hashtags #WhatHappenedHappened and #RestoreTheLostFinale.
Watching the Netflix version like ...
Luckily, the streaming service quickly responded to Lindelof and the outcries from the passionate fan community with a tweet that restores our faith in humanity.
The current theory is that Netflix most likely received the shortened, syndicated version of the finale. Regardless, the real finale in all its emotionally draining/confusing glory should be back up soon. Phew.
Now ...
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