My personal sign is when you start seeing awkward collaborations start cropping up. One time when I was thrifting, I picked up a graphic novel that had the Justice League, team with the Power Rangers of all things. I glimpsed into what the plot was about out of morbid curiosity and it was just a plain generic time and dimension thing.
Nothing ever connected between the teams at all. DC Comics, while fledgling at times with how they go about their series and movies, still have far more relevance than Power Rangers do. I think the Power Rangers are just grasping at straws to keep being relevant when people have largely moved on from them.
What pissed me off the most about Lost is that, very early on, I pegged onto the fact that they were naming a lot of characters after prominent social philosophers; all of whom wrote about things like inequality, the social contract, human nature, etc…
And a few others. As they introduce these characters, they set them up in opposition to each other and I’m thinking "okay…this means something. They’re trying to say something about society in a Lord of the Flies type of way.
I remember myself and a friend of mine discussing the show endlessly after each episode wondering what it all meant in that context. And then…nope…they were all just dead all this time. It meant…precisely…jack…shit.
And it couldn’t have been an accident that they so many promininent social philosophers showed up. They CHOSE to name those characters that…for no other reason than a fuck-you-red-herring.
I can’t even begin to describe how much that angered me. I’ve despised JJ Abrams ever since.