It's Over

Watched the Lost finale last night, and enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I expected it to revolve more around the cosmic good-vs-evil finale, with the Sideways scenes (the first few seasons had flashbacks, then flash-forwards, and this season, parallel universe/flash-sideways) heading toward some sort of irrelevant convergence.

What I didn't expect was for the episode to really revolve around the Sideways scenes, with epiphanies and tear-jerking character moments every 10 minutes or so. The Sideways reunions--Jin and Sun, Sawyer and Juliet, Sayid and Shannon, Charlie and Claire, Daniel and Charlotte--I don't know that I've ever cried this much watching any show. Some people are complaining that the show didn't pedantically answer every mystery, like the origin of the numbers, but seriously, I didn't care. Sometimes numbers are just numbers, and besides, any explanation they gave would fall short of our expectations, reduce that delicious sense of mystery to a simple, "That's it?"

In the end, though Lost was a show on an island with lots of mystery, it wasn't about the mystery. It was about the characters, about the pains and triumphs of life, and the possibility of redemption. You could perhaps say it was about Mystery in the spiritual sense, that sense of pursuing answers to questions that can never be truly answered: fate vs. choice, destiny vs. coincidence, knowledge vs. faith, that which can be seen vs. that which can't.

The finale touched on all these things, but did't dwell on them tiresomely the way some previous episodes had. The time for debating was over. The final two-and-a-half hours were about the characters, having made their decisions, taking action and embracing their fates. It felt just right.

And even though no other show has ever been so ruthless in killing off characters, by the end, even death couldn't stop the show from celebrating life in all its variety. I truly loved the series, start to finish, and though I'll miss it, I'm glad it ended when it did and the way it did.

This Is (Not) The End

Lost finale tonight. I'm excited, yet a little disappointed. While it is cool that we're finally seeing this season take the show closer to the Stand-like vision the creators talked about back in Season 1, it feels as if a lot of the journey (with Dharma and the Others and Widmore's group) consisted of side trails that led nowhere.

But maybe it'll all tie together. And the journey was fun.

More tomorrow, after the show.

My Theory, Which Is Mine

BTW and apropos of nothing, I know I've been remiss in not mentioning the Lost finale. If you neither know nor care about Lost, you can skip the rest of this post and not miss anything.

Suffice to say that I enjoyed the season overall and it ended with a bang (literally). At this point, Sun appears to be the only character from the original cast who is still alive, but that can't be right, can it? Of course not.

But the reason I'm posting is, I don't spend time on the Lost fanboy discussion boards, so I don't know if this has become generally accepted as conventional wisdom or not. But I want to get this down in print: my theory about the new character introduced in the season finale, the unnamed man in black who was Jacob's antagonist (and has thus been named Esau by fans) and who pretended to be Locke this past season, is that he is the smoke monster.

Done.

Don't Get Me Wrong

I like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. And I love Lost. And I'm still hanging in there with Heroes.

But it just sort of came home to me that three of the series I watch on a weekly basis are dealing with time travel this season. And it's getting a little exhausting.

Still, just finished watching last night's Lost and I've got to say, "Holy crap, what a twist at the end." I love this show.

Game Over, Man! Game Over!

So Lost has been running this Alternate Reality Game for several months now, basically since the end of last season, with the basic conceit being that Dharma is recruiting new members. You would log onto their site and every couple of weeks or so, a new test would appear that you could take part in, and by the end of the testing, you would be assigned to some project that would get you ramped back up into the story of Lost leading into next season. My dossier said I was going to be assigned as a psychologist. Hah.

But it seems that the financial crisis hit the makers of Lost just as hard as it's hitting everybody else, because the big announcement from Dharma was, "go to dharmaspecialaccess.com and watch a video of Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof saying, 'There's not going to be a cool game, just a few behind the scenes videos. Sorry."

So the game is no more. Boo. But Lost season 3 on DVD is coming next week. Yay. And the new season starts on the 21st (ETA: of January, that is). Double yay. I've been waiting for this a long time. Now I have to think seriously about getting an HD converter and DVR from Cox to watch it properly.

God Hates My Mother-In-Law

She watches two (2) shows a week, both on the same night--Survivor and Lost. And it seems like every Thursday for at least the last two months has had some kind of severe weather alert, so that there's always a weather graphic on-screen and the breaks are always full of cut-ins by the weather guys showing radar images and saying, "It's not serious yet, but we're cutting in to tell you it might be." In fact, Lost was completely preempted last night because of tornado coverage.

Seriously, every Thursday. I'm sure she thinks it's like this all the time anymore, because that's all she ever sees.

Lost Blows Up

I know, I know. I promised myself that April was going to be a big month for this blog. I was going to post new stuff almost every day. But it hasn't worked out very well this week.

I'm almost through the DVD's of Lost Season 3, but I'll wait till I'm done with them to write more about that. Last night, Lost returned to hiatus with a ferocious episode that seems to be setting up a mad rush to the season finale. Characters die! Characters we thought were dead improbably survive! Expectations are thwarted! Expectations are met!

And watching last night's episode, it occurred to me how much of Lost is an exercise is cute structural tricks. The opening flash-forward sets up a mystery that we know we'll probably see answered by the season finale. The first scenes at the beach set up another mystery that will probably be answered soon. ABC's promos have told us that at least one character will die in this episode, so when Sawyer gets caught out in the open with snipers shooting at him, we think, "Oh no, not Sawyer!"

But he dodges a hail of bullets trying to save Claire, only to have her house blow up before he can get to it, and we think, "Oh no, not Claire!" but we're also thinking, "So this is why she didn't escape with Aaron," so mystery solved. But turns out she's okay, and the real death, when it comes, is a shock.

Meanwhile, the flash-forwards answer a mystery from a previous episode: why did Sayid agree to work with Ben?

Meanwhile, previous episodes have told us about the Oceanic Six, the six crash survivors who made it back to civilization--Jack, Kate, Aaron, Hurley, Sayid, and Sun. But those six are still separated. So when we get a scene late in the episode which sets up their reunion, we think, "Okay, finally, they're all getting together." But it's not to be. By the end of the ep, they're still separated, and one's heading in the wrong direction.

But the thing that makes Lost work for me (and it doesn't work for lots of people I know) is the way the writers are able to work really good character moments in among the tricks. The scene which teases at getting the Oceanic Six together segues into a really nice confrontation between Locke, Sawyer and Hurley that works because of the layers of character development that have occurred over the past three-and-a-half seasons.

Lost Season 3

So I'm finally working my way through the Lost Season 3 DVD's, and I've got to say, so far, the season hangs together much better without the long gaps in between episodes (if you don't know or have blocked out the memory, they tried an experiment with Lost last season--responding to complaints about reruns, they aired the first 5 or 6 episodes at the start of the fall season, then put the show on a mini-hiatus, returning in February or so to air the rest of the episodes).

It's still a pain to have them separated into multiple groups, which means we don't even find out whether Locke's alive or dead, for instance, until episode 3. But being able to watch the episodes back-to-back really keeps that annoyance to a minimum and makes it easier to notice the good things going on. There was a lot of stuff going on under the surface in those early episodes when the Lostaways were being manipulated by the Others. Elizabeth Mitchell as Juliet turns in an incredible performance every episode. There always seem to be about three layers of thought and deception and self-control going into every twitch of her face.

She scares me.

I love this show.

After I get through Lost, I'm going to start going through 30 Rock on Hulu.

Lost Is Back + Eli Stone

Well, Lost has returned, and the first two episodes look very promising. As the show enters its fourth season, it is entering a mature phase which allows it to do some very interesting things, story-wise. In the early days of the show, it used to surprise people with how much every detail seemed planned to fit into a larger pattern. Something that seemed insignificant in episode 1, like Locke wiggling his toes on the beach, took on much greater significance a few episodes later when we learned he had been in a wheelchair before crash-landing on the island. And soon, viewers were scrutinizing every single detail to figure out what it might come to mean later.

Now the show has several seasons of material to echo back on, so that we might notice a detail and say, "Oh that's a call-back to a season two episode," without realizing that it is also foreshadowing something else we don't even suspect yet. I think some of that happened in the season four opener, which was Hurley-centered. The episode raises all sorts of questions:

If Hurley sided with Locke on the island, against rescue, how did he end up being one of the Oceanic Six who ended up back in civilization?

Who are the other three members of the Oceanic Six?

Is Kate living with Sawyer in the third season finale, or has she started a new life with someone else?

Are the other characters still on the island, or are they dead?

Was Hurley the one whose death prompts Jack to tell Kate "We have to go back" in the third season finale?

Who is Abaddon, and does he really work for Oceanic?

Why is Hurley having visions of Charlie? Is Charlie simply a hallucination, like Hurley's friend Dave from the mental hospital, or is he a manifestation of the Black Smoke reaching all the way to the continental U.S. (or something else like it)?

Enough questions for now. One scene I really liked in the season opener was the moment where Hurley closed his eyes and counted to five to get rid of the Charlie-vision; nice call-back to Kate doing the same thing in the pilot, upon Jack's earlier advice.

After Lost, ABC has started running a new show titled Eli Stone. It's funny and entertaining, but it must be one of the most intellectually dishonest shows I've ever watched. The show itself is Ally McBeal with a sex change (and with a less entertaining senior partner), but the thing that really gets my goat is that it takes on hot-button topical issues with either a populist or liberal slant, then throws in a disclaimer to keep from offending the half of the audience whose intelligence or politics they've just insulted.

For instance, first episode: a mother suing a pharmaceutical company because she claims her child became autistic after receiving a vaccine. Now, the link between vaccines and autism is not proven, and even if it were, the cost/benefit of vaccinating and becoming autistic versus the chance of dying from whooping cough or something is a complex issue that can't be sufficiently debated in an hour-long dramedy. The show's solution: demagogue the issue by having a jury find in favor of the link between a vaccine with a fictional preservative, but throw in a couple of lines of dialogue stating that the link is not, in fact, proven, plus a disclaimer at the end.

Second episode: poor Mexican immigrants suing a pesticide manufacturer. Evil chemical company making poor people infertile, how dare they? But they can't prove it, so the poor people lose. Evil big-city lawyers working for deep-pocketed corporations! Even worse, turns out the poor Mexicans are illegal immigrants who snuck into the country in a truck, then paid a con man to help them become naturalized. He pocketed the money and filed no paperwork, so now the poor, poisoned, infertile people are going to be deported. Solution? Eli gives an impassioned speech about how illegal immigrants love America more than people who are born here, so we should give them a pass, although "no one's saying illegal immigration isn't a problem."

The writers try to have it both ways: yes, we acknowledge that some people might think this is a problem, but our solution is to just pretend it isn't.

Bad enough the show is a clone of a better show. Worse is when it preaches without conviction. Worst of all, it's just entertaining enough, in a time slot where there's nothing better on, that I'll probably keep watching.

Lost and Test

We had the season finales of Lost and Heroes this week, and both pretty much kicked ass. I was a little, a smidgen, disappointed in the Heroes finale, simply because we're still not seeing these characters really cut loose. Well, that and the fact that master villain Sylar died, then came back long enough to set up the start of next season, then died again for real, and then... wasn't dead? I don't know. And of course, the fact that Peter didn't really need Nathan's sacrifice- he should have been able to do what Nathan did himself.

The Lost finale was exactly what a Lost finale should be. It answered a ton of questions, while setting up a ton of new questions, and ended with a twist which indicated that the show is once again going to be fundamentally different next season. I love the way that every season seems to be at once the same show and yet a different show from the season before. And the finale also made obvious that these guys haven't been blowing smoke when they say that they know where the show is going. They're not just making it up as they go along.

I put together a podtestcast, but I'm having trouble posting it. It was a lot harder than I'd though it would be, and the result is kinda dull, so I may redo it. Or not. We'll see.

Old Radio

On Sunday evenings here in Tulsa, local AM radio station KRMG plays old-time radio shows. This past Sunday, they played an old Jack Benny, which was a revelation. Things were just so different then, you can't imagine.

No, I'm not talking about corny humor or Rochester as a racist stereotype. Frank Sinatra was the guest star, you see, only this was early in his career. So there were no references to him as the grand old lion of show business. No Rat Pack. No Vegas. No mob rumors. No "Chairman of the Board." No "New York, New York."

No, the jokes were all about how skinny Sinatra was. How insubstantial. How he looked like a pencil wearing a toupee. At one point, he's talking to a female cast member, and they start to go through a door. Sinatra can't open it. Because he's so skinny and weak, you see.

The woman, of course, opens it easily.

It's like observing an alternate universe. Really.

Lost, by the way, after an uneasy start to the season and a long hiatus that almost made me give up hope? Rockin'. And guaranteed three more seasons. (warning: the link to Zap2It will try to give you popups)

My random prediction? Sun and Jin find out they are brother and sister.