this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2026
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Television
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Thank you for pointing out that From is like Lost, so I now know to avoid it.
from is good show tho. Season 4 have just started airing.
And has one of the same producers (Jack Bender, IIRC) and stars (Harold Perrineau (Mike from LOST, the sheriff on FROM)).
Do you just not like mystery-box shows in general, or ones that have shitty/vague resolutions?
The big problem with the subgenre is that it hinges so heavily on the ending. With other genres you can sort of wave off a bad ending and take something away from the journey, but with mystery box the destination needs to be worth the time and emotional investment. I can understand why many people avoid unfinished mystery box shows as a result, especially these days when they could be cancelled out of nowhere.
That's fair. For me, the journey is at least equally important, if not more so. People would go on forums and talk about what it could be.
I think LOST was a big problem for the genre (subgenre? trope?) because at least when I first heard about it, I thought it was a spinoff or knockoff of Survivor. I saw ads for a show about people on an island and I didn't get that it wasn't a reality show. It wasn't until near the end of the first season when the ads teased the hatch Locke found that I began to pay attention. But on top of that, I think they didn't have an ending planned in advance. Not knowing the ending means the ending is almost certainly going to be an arse pull.
I think with FROM (and some others), they learned their lesson and wrote the ending early on. They have a plan for how to get there. But it's still a problem if the show is cancelled.
You're right, that's arguably the main reason why these shows are so popular. People love trying to work out the mystery ahead of the final reveal and, compared to more conventional mystery formulas, mystery box gives them so much to work with. You see a lot of creativity in the wild theories fans come up and no one is wrong until the very end. That does mean the ending is super important to the overall reception of the show as a finished product, though. Like I think the journey can be the bit you remember fondly if the ending was sufficient, but if it's underwhelming then it just all feels like a massive waste of time - at least for me.