I have been mulling this shit over ever since it aired. Thank God I’m not a TV critic. I’ve been writing things about it but not posting them, because my opinions of the episode have been a moving target: first I loved it, then a few days later I hated it, and now a couple weeks later I’m somewhere in between.

Lost has always been a show that crossed several genre barriers. I thought the finale resolved Lost the character drama in an excellent fashion. It tied a neat little bow on Lost the thriller. But Lost the mystery – well, the charitable thing to say would be that Lost remains mysterious.

The mystery was there from the beginning, so you have to view the finale as somewhat of a failure. Mysteries are fabulous – they are questions, openings, possibilities, sheer potential. But you have to answer them, and answers are hard. Answers aren’t necessarily great television, as I’m sure the writers discovered. But if you don’t answer them, you’re sailing along with David Lynch and Luis Bunuel n’ tha gang, and take it from a huge fan of both of the above who has a lifetime of arguing the merits of surrealism under his belt: that shit ain’t mainstream entertainment. 9 out of 10 TV fans are NOT going to endorse your product.

Like a wild, drug-addled, ADD lover, Lost made up its own rules and then broke them. You have to respect it for that.

But it also kinda broke your heart a little.

So one of the lamest/awesomest tropes of Lost fan philosophizing is the Wikipedia myth run. This is where some trigger in a Lost episode, usually a name like “Jacob”, causes the fans to descend on a Wikipedia entry and use it for the basis of some half-baked theories, say that Jacob’s brother’s name is “Esau” (and the conflict between the two will occur exactly as it did in the relevant myth). You wonder if a show like Lost could even exist without Wikipedia, but that’s not to say the process doesn’t make complete sense – what am I going to do, go down to the library? Have the butler pull volumes two and three of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable from the reading-room and have annotations waiting in my study by tea-time?

No sir, I’m going to do the same goddamn thing.

More...

(As before , this post may contain spoilers for any episode that has aired on broadcast TV in North America.)

So I never wrote up that last Lost, and here it is three days later. My bad.

More...

(As before , this post may contain spoilers for any episode that has aired on broadcast TV in North America.)

Well well. I will admit to feeling a bit disappointed at the close of this episode. So many mysteries solved by new mysteries.

More...

(As before, this post may contain spoilers for any episode that has aired on broadcast TV in North America. It may also spoil episode titles of upcoming episodes – if you consider that a spoiler. I don’t.)

So that happened. Pretty substantial episode there from a plot moving point of view, at least in the island universe. Not so much in the alternaverse, where the Jack-helps-Locke story was mined more for thematic gold rather than plot or mind-blowing revelations.

More...

As before, spoilers may happen for any Lost episode that has aired on broadcast TV in North America.

So was it me or was that fairly awesome? There are the ‘piece moving episodes’, like last week’s ep where Hurley had to get the remaining candidates over to talk to Locke, and there are the ones where the movements of the pieces are themselves exciting, like this episode. Jacke talks to Locke, Sawyer leads a posse over to Widmore, and in the alternaverse, the characters come together both at alterna-Ilana-lawyer’s office and at the hospital.

More...

As before, spoilers may happen for any Lost episode that has aired on broadcast TV in North America (jeez, what am I, a spoiler lawyer?).

I did not expect to like this episode. I figured it would be the last gasp of comic relief before the series switches into the endgame. And sure enough it wasn’t the best ep of the season. But it was better than I feared, with some huge shockers, a couple explosions, a good sideways plot, and some miscellaneous and clumsy question-answering.

More...

Editor’s note: because Lost has become an obsession, and because this site is little more than a log of the terrifying shuffle of my various obsessions, I’ve decided to write something after each remaining episode of Lost. (I always told you I am a huge nerd.) There are only six remaining episodes, so it shouldn’t kill anyone involved. I’m not going to summarize the plot, but instead record any thoughts that came to mind, which I’m sure means mostly bullshit theorizing. Needless to say, spoilers ahead for the most recently aired episode.

More...

Here’s the theory of what the hell is going on on Lost that I personally subscribe to.

(This will make reference to episodes that have already aired. If you consider that a spoiler, fine; stop reading now. Also, I’m not saying I’m the fella who invented this theory.)

More...

Again, what with the busy, cosmopolitan life I lead, there’s not much to report. Only the latest episode of HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT Lost. I keep on drafting posts about how awesome Lost is lately, and I shelve them because they get fanboyishly long without ever feeling like they’ve done the show justice. Suffice it to say this is some of the most complex storytelling I’ve ever experienced. If you’re not watching, you’re missing out – but tragically, I can’t even recommend you start watching, because you’d have to go through a hundred-hour boot camp that contains some headnoddingly dull passages (end of season two, beginning of three – that’s where I stopped watching for a bit there). Just know that the end of three through to season five have been headblowingly awesometastic.

Note to self and/or anyone else: a great service to Lost fans-to-be would be to compile a list of which episodes to watch and which to skip. When I tried to get into Buffy after the fact I yearned for such a thing, too. Get it down to 20 hours for season one two and three, and you could have a winner.

Anyway, fuckit, about this last ep. (SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER etc.) I believe, as many at the AV Club do as well, that Farraday’s theory is wrong, and they cannot change the past. Indeed, he must have realized this during the ep’s final scene. If they were able to, they would prevent the crash of their plane, which would prevent them from going back in time and changing the past. Moreover, it’s a disaster for dramatic tension – if anything can then be gone back on and changed, no actions are permanent, and nothing has any stakes. And it’s hella confusing. No, I’m pretty sure that (as things played out with Sayid and Ben) their actions taken to prevent the Incident will turn out to cause the Incident.

Another Lostie note: let’s not forget the “Adam and Eve” skeletons in the cave. The cave by the beach, where Sawyer and Juliet plan to go. Note the closeup of hand-holding. Also, while I get the sense that despite this season’s extant resurrections, Farraday’s death is permanent, there’s much more of his story to tell, including a) what his previous, brain-frying experiments entailed, b) what he got up to in Ann Arbor, and c) what reason his mother would have for sending him to the island, despite knowing it will cost him his life.

Finally, I think the greatest tribute to Lost is that a group of us can gather a day or two after an episode and spend longer than the episode’s run time discussing it. And not in a “Picard is better than Kirk” kind of way – although perhaps such things are equivalent from the point of view of someone who hasn’t printed out Dharma labels for things.

Here’s a veeeery interesting post from Matthew Baldwin that draws a parallel between the mounting mysteries in Lost and leveling in role playing games.

During each show you gain a little experience in the form of new information: about the island, the characters, or both; every four episodes or so you level up, as some (allegedly) major piece of the overall puzzle falls into place. After leveling up in a CRPG, you typically head to Ye Olde Flail ‘N’ Scented Candle Emporium, sell all your current equipment, and buy the improved weapons that your enhanced abilities now allow you to wield; likewise, after a revelatory LOST episode, fans chuck all their old theories into the dustbin and cook up new ones consistent with the revised facts. Then, having done so, each—the player of a CRPG, or the viewer of LOST—is handed a brand new quest, or puzzle, or plot plot. The ephemeral thrill of leveling vanishes, replaced by a longing to hit the next milestone. You never disembark from the treadmill, it just goes faster.

I think he’s right on with the precedents he sites: Twin Peaks and The X-Files. I guess it’s no surprise that these are two of my favourite shows, and that I seem to like the video games a little bit. Also, check out the post about the surprising amount of swears in Lost scripts. Holy. Fucking. Shit.