Last Sunday night, ABC aired four and a half hours of commercials, with intermittent breaks for the final episode of Lost and a featurette with interviews with the cast and show runners. In the interview with Evangeline Lilly, she said something like “Kate’s strengths were her weaknesses.” Or maybe it was vice-versa. It was a long time ago, and all I really remember were the Target ads.

Whatever the case, that’s a pretty good summation of the whole series: what made Lost so great — and I still say it’s one of the top 5 best TV series ever made, even accounting for the tail end of the plane — is that it seemed to have an infinite supply of potential energy. They were calling up references left and right, from fringe science to pop culture to videogames, constantly tossing big new ideas into the mix. Hardly anything was out of bounds. You just don’t see that kind of fearlessness in network TV, especially not in a series that was so high-profile for a big network.

But then, you can’t really run for six years off of potential energy. (Even with the limitless magical properties of electromagnetism). People kept abandoning the show in frustration once they realized that the entire series was going to be all build-up but no pay-off — it even threatened to throw me off a few times, and I have an extraordinarily high patience for being blue-balled. By the last season, the show runners basically had to come out and admit that they weren’t going to answer every question raised, and a ton of them didn’t even get addressed.

But they said it would be “satisfying,” and I think it was, for the most part. They came up with a way to deliver a mediocre but acceptable “real” ending for the series, and then also a “let’s just throw whatever we can think of together for 18 episodes, and try to make it seem meaningful” ending. I can totally understand how people who were expecting some kind of big pay-off would be pissed; I didn’t mind as much, because I’ve always been more interested in the build-up.

Or to put it more poetically: Lost at its peak was a character from The Flintstones, forever trapped in pre-run, its legs an indistinct blur, the bongos forever playing their mad rhythm, a too-fleeting moment of beauty trapped in time before vanishing in a dash leading towards an uncertain and ultimately unsatisfying destination, like The Gruesomes’ house next door or a Stony Curtis autograph signing.

And for anybody who’s still disappointed that the show didn’t provide more answers, just do a Google search on “The Valenzetti Equation” and “The Lost Experience”. That is what happens when you try to explain too much about Lost. This kind of thing can never end well. So I guess it’s good that they left the obsessive fans to their own alternate-reality game and wikis, and kept the series proper kind of vague.

I do have plenty o’gripes, though.

Whoever did the editing on the before-the-show featurette should have a bright future when the Corporations completely take over and begin their program of revisionist history. At some point during this season, the show runners decided what they wanted the series to be about, and then they began systematically erasing all evidence to the contrary. We have always been at war with Grey’s Anatomy.

In particular, they made it seem as if the key moment of the entire series was Jack giving his “If we don’t live together, we’re going to die alone” speech. That way, the finale seems particularly fitting: they all had to live alone for a while before they could die together. (Another key lesson of Lost, observed by M. Stemmle: the only sure way to heaven is to find your heterosexual life partner).

But the “Live together, die alone” speech was just one part of the first couple of seasons, which talked a lot more about faith vs. reason.

Actually, it was faith vs. science, but that would just open me up to one of my biggest peeves about Lost: the complaints that the show started out science-based and then turned all “mystical.” This is false. The show was at best about “fringe” science, and I think that’s stretching it. Take any fairy tale or bit of ancient mythology, replace “magic” with “electromagnetism,” and you’ve got Lost. I say it was never about science fiction, but about storytelling. It was an attempt to create a new mythology for the 21st Century. In the 21st century, our frame of reference is pop culture and technology. So everything’s based in a layman’s general understanding of technology and science fiction, which isn’t the same thing as science fiction.

(Notice they never actually attempted to explain how the time skipping worked or what caused it. That’s because people in 2008 understand the concept of time travel, from fiction, even when we don’t understand the theoretical physics behind it).

And as far as creating a new mythology: to quote Juliet, “It worked.” You don’t have to be a particularly dedicated fan of Lost to be familiar with the basics: a plane crash on a tropical island, a smoke monster, polar bears, “The Others,” The Dharma Initiative. Even some of the more obscure details are pretty familiar: the numbers, the hatch, Oceanic Airlines and flight 815, the four-toed statue, even Waaaaaaalt.

To compare it with “real” mythology, I’ve yet to be able to make it through The Odyssey, but I could probably only recount the same level of detail: DesmondOdysseus goes on a boat journey to make it back home to Penelope, runs into some harpies, meets a Cyclops, gets home and kills some dudes. I remember just about as many details of the Labors of Hercules.

Every complaint I’ve had about season six still stands — nothing seemed relevant because there was no context for it, and much of it was completely superfluous. But I can see why they made the decisions they did: they wanted to keep introducing stuff instead of just spending the entire season tying off loose ends, hence all the nonsense around the Temple and its goofy resurrection pool. (Even if it means Sayid’s story was ultimately pointless). They wanted to pull one last long con on the audience with the flashback structure, keeping everybody guessing about when or where it was set. (Even if it means that Juliet’s “It worked” about the atom bomb makes no sense). They wanted to give a real ending to the story without completely going into “it was all just a dream” territory, preferably a real ending that had a Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis cave and Jack leaping across a commercial break to attack Locke on a crumbling cliff. (Even though there are so many things that don’t make sense about the whole rules of Jacob/Man in Black/Jack/Locke/Hurley/CJ that you’d never be able to count them all).

But ultimately, thinking about Lost in terms of modern mythology helps me gain a better appreciation of the last season, and even the entire last half of the series. Looking back over what I’ve written about most of the series, I can see that I spent a lot of time complaining that it was a lot of cool scenes that didn’t really add up to anything.

But look at the old mythology: what do those stories mean? I couldn’t tell you specifically why Odysseus fought a Cyclops or fell in with a pack of sirens, even though I remember “the good bits.” And not only am I unable to tell you the point of the Labors of Hercules, I’m pretty sure that there were multiple conflicting versions of those stories, so that nobody can tell you what the cause and effect was. Still, the stories lasted, because a snake-killing baby who later wears the skin of a lion he just killed with his bare hands and then goes to Hades (voiced by James Woods, or something?) is just plain good storytelling.

The value of those stories isn’t in the morals, but in their epic scope, and in the commonality of them. We all know at least enough about them to be a shared frame of reference.

I still say Aaron got shafted, though. Unless that helicopter crashed somewhere in the Pacific a few minutes later, then both his moms raised him to adulthood but he still has to be a baby in heaven.

I don’t have any problem with the idea of devoting a whole episode, this late in the series, to Jim Henson’s Island Protector Babies. I even appreciate their trying to create their own mythology, with their own garden of Eden and Cain and Abel and, I suppose, Lillith? Or setting up the notion of similar stories playing out over and over again on the Island throughout eternity.

My problem with “Across the Sea” is my problem with the rest of the season: the pacing is off. Since the beginning of the season, they’ve spent a bulk of each episode on stories with no real context, so we don’t get any clear idea of why we should care about what happens in them.

And it’s had the side effect of making the stuff we should care about — the story we’ve been following for the past five years — less significant, too. The stakes are basically erased: if somebody dies, so what? There’s still another version of them in this alternate universe. Except I stopped caring about that alternate version, too. It’d be like making Run, Lola, Run and trying to wring tears out of the audience at each ending.

With “Across the Sea,” they establish the hell out of that cave, and make absolutely certain that we make the connection between the “Adam & Eve” from Season 1. And yes, that’s one of the questions that’s been lingering through the whole series, and yes, it’s good that they’re wrapping stuff up. But isn’t that the kind of thing you’d just toss into an episode as kind of a “didja notice?” detail, and not linger on it with a flashback? Especially when the closest thing you’ve delivered to a real answer to the main mystery of the entire series is a woman pointing at a hobbit hole and saying, “That’s where magic comes from?”

Pacing in the previous week’s episode “The Candidate” bugged me too, but explaining that takes spoilers

Sayid’s been kind of a drag ever since he died earlier in the season, so I guess it wasn’t supposed to be that upsetting when he grabbed a bomb and ran off to blow himself up. But we were supposed to be really upset about Sun and Jin, as evidenced by all the crying on the beach. From the folks who’ve seen people get sucked into jet engines, blown up, shot with flaming arrows, crushed by a Cessna, torn apart by a smoke monster, shot with guns, drowned, eaten by rare spiders, blown up again, stabbed by a dishwasher rack, strangled in a hotel room, and dragged down a hole and crushed by debris. And not been particularly upset by it.

But again, half the episode has Sun & Jin having an LA adventure that seems to be ending pretty happily for them. And again, we’re all left wondering which half of each episode is the half we’re supposed to care about. Everybody except Kate seems to be pretty happy in the alternate version — I bet you Jack’s not-yet-seen ex-wife is Juliet, even — and it would neither surprise me or disappoint me if the series ended with that version of reality turned into the “real” one. It wouldn’t surprise or disappoint me, but it wouldn’t really interest me either, because I haven’t really gotten an attachment to anything that’s happened this season. Except for Richard Alpert’s flashback episode, which apparently didn’t amount to much.

I will say that the business with Sun & Jin, although I wasn’t moved by it at all, was handled as well as they could given what they had to work with. There was a pretty interesting observation from Geoff Klock’s blog (I heard about it from Jeff Lester) that hadn’t occurred to me:

He says that the scene had more weight than it seemed to on the surface, because it was loaded with subtext. In particular: they never mention Ji Yeon, their daughter. They’re both stuck, they both know the “right” thing to do would be for Jin to leave so their daughter wouldn’t be orphaned. But they’re being selfish, and they know it, and it’s too much for either of them to say out loud. And I’d agree with that take: anybody who says that that’s reading too much into a flat scene, I’d point to all the earlier scenes in the episode involving Sun & Jin. They made a point to show them coming together, and then to show Jin looking at the photos of Ji Yeon and asking about her. I’d also guess that the only reason Sun got shot in the alternate version of reality was to remind viewers that she was pregnant, and make you worried about what would happen to the daughter. It was actually really well done, with a lot more restraint than you tend to see on television, even Lost.

But again, it was well done within that episode. Not for the season as a whole. Why was Sun struck with aphasia for multiple episodes? Why was it important to Widmore than Jin be there for the experiment with Desmond? Which Kwon was the “right” one one the list of names? I’m getting more and more of a sense that it’ll all turn into the “Adam & Eve” thing: it’ll feel like writers desperately tying up as many loose ends where they can, instead of a long chain of events that all happen for a reason.

You are the very first person ever to get the meaning of the show. Yes. It is a love story. Always has been…always will be.

Yeah.

I’m all for artists coming up with a different interpretation of their work than may be obvious to the fans. I’m even all for the more cynical version, artists putting a spin on their work for the press. But I’ve gotta call BS on that one. The show about survivors of a plane crash on a tropical island haunted by a smoke monster has not always been a love story.

If the guy who made the show doesn’t know what it’s about, I guess you can’t expect anybody else to, either. “Everybody Loves Hugo” just felt like a writer’s meeting where everybody said “oh crap we’ve only got five episodes left?!”

Spoilers for this week’s episode “Everybody Loves Hugo…”

I’ve got no idea what that whole business with Gaia was supposed to be about. (That’s her name on Rome, anyway, I can’t remember her name on Lost). For starters, any time they pick the Black Rock dynamite, you know what’s coming, and I mean come on, guys: you’ve already done that one. They’ve spent all this time developing the character, only to have her accomplish nothing and go out like a chump. That’s not a shocking twist; it’s a waste. Especially when they had her complaining about how she had no purpose now that Jacob was dead. You can’t try to build up sympathy for a character and then just kill her off.

I was all excited at the potential that Libby was going to be coming back, but that was back when I thought they were going to do something with her. Who was her husband? What was the boat race for? Why was she in a mental institution? Again, it was build-up with no pay-off; instead they spent all this time following an imaginary story they just made up.

When they showed Sun writing a note to Jeff Fahey’s character, I realized I’d totally forgotten the whole bit about her sudden treebonk-induced aphasia. The reason I forgot about that: it’s yet another new little plot thing they’re introducing without any context, instead of tying up loose ends.

I guess that may not be fair; they did explain the whispers in the jungle with grace and subtlety. “OH HEY NEVER MIND I think I know what these whispers are after all. They’re dead people right, Michael?” “Yes. See ya.”

And also the smoke monster knocked Desmond down a well for no reason.

Now I’m on the edge of my seat wondering what are going to be the implications of alternate-reality Desmond running over Locke with his car, because they’ve spent a lot of time and energy setting that whole idea.

Now I can just say “they’ve got an episode about a guy who’s on a slave ship that crashes into a statue and then he has to kill the Devil but gets talked out of it and is granted eternal life instead.”

When you think about it, there wasn’t a whole lot of new stuff we learned in this episode. (Except maybe that the Canary Islands in the late 1800s really needed to work on their service industries). But that doesn’t matter at all. It did confirm a good bit of stuff we already suspected — while still leaving plenty of ambiguity — but the most significant thing it did was confirm that Lost is capable of some of the best storytelling on television, when they feel like it. The hour flew by, and I was intrigued the whole time, each commercial break in exactly the right place, and each story development just off-kilter enough to be unexpected. With the way the season had been going up until tonight’s episode (and with the loss of Brian K. Vaughan), I was starting to get worried that they’d lost it.

That’s been the basic appeal all along: with the flashbacks and flash forwards and all the disparate influences, they had free rein to make basically an anthology series, telling whatever kind of story they could think of next. But they’d gotten so bogged down in attempting to form a continuity around everything, that the stories were starting to fizzle out to the point of Cop Haunted By His Past Never Learned How To Love. So we were way past due for a good, old-fashioned story about a poor man taking on the Devil. With ghosts and shipwrecks and horseback rides on stormy nights and all the other stuff they shouldn’t be able to do with a show set on a deserted island.

So now we know basically how old Richard Alpert is, kind of how the four-toed statue got destroyed and how the Black Rock ended up so far inland, the basic idea of why people keep ending up on the island, a reminder of what the black smoke is trying to do via Locke, and a reminder of why the story only remained interested in six of the castaways. And they threw in a little message about ineffability, which I guess is nice.

They also did a good job of ramping up the ambiguity around Jacob and the smoke monster (coming this Fall from Sid & Marty Krofft). Even with one dressed in white and the other dressed in black, they make a point of not explicitly saying who’s good and who’s evil. And in fact, they seemed to go out of their way to put an evil spin on Jacob and a good spin on the “man in black.” After all, the Devil would never admit to being the Devil, would he?

As for the big picture: if in the alternate reality we keep getting shown, the island is sunk; and if the island’s purpose was to keep evil from leaking out into the rest of the world; and if the black smoke’s leaving the island means “We all go to Hell,” then why hasn’t the alternate reality been significantly different? Everybody’s been more or less the same, and Jack and Locke ended up better off, arguably. This episode hasn’t done anything to convince me the “flash sideways” will all fit neatly into context at the end of the series. But it has reassured me that whatever they do for the end of the series, it’s going to be good television.

1. I haven’t had much free time.
2. The only character/actor I cared about any more left “Lost” for another series.
3. I don’t know what the hell is going on this season.

It bugs me to say “I don’t know what’s going on” because I get the creepy suspicion there’s some Echelon-style technology that some executive at ABC is using to scan the internet for “Lost” confusion and present a spreadsheet explaining exactly why the series should be dumbed down. I can’t think how else to explain the “pop-up videos” thing they do for the previous week’s rerun, which does nothing more than explain the scene that you just watched as you’re watching it. This is indeed a series that plays around with varying timelines and packs a ton of detail into each episode; that’s a big part of why people love it. And I’ve seen every episode of the series, and I still can’t remember all the details and side characters enough to pick up on all the call-backs and cameos (e.g. the “Always Sunny” guy was on “Lost” before, apparently). It’d be helpful to have something pop up and say “this guy appeared in season 3″ or “this is the book that was used in Juliet’s book club.” It’s not helpful to have something pop up and say “Claire is Jack’s half-sister!” or “Claire just killed a guy with an axe!”

But even though I’ve never been able to keep up with the details, I’ve at least been able to follow the meat of what was going on. And although the biggest complaint about the series has always been with how they withhold information, that’s also one of the best things about the series. (The other is the enormous range of reference material they draw from, including numbers stations and 70s science communes and horror fiction and introductory-level philosophy). They mastered the art of telling stories in parallel, and then went on to throw in a twist in subsequent seasons: the flashbacks turned into flash-forwards turned into outright time traveling.

With season 6, though, they’ve kind of broken it. Anybody could understand the concept of flashbacks to before they landed on the island. And the reveal of the flash-forwards was done with a brilliant season-end twist; we all started out the episode believing we were seeing more flashbacks, and then realized at the end of that episode that we’d jumped forward in time. And later, when they introduced the time traveling, there were a ton of complaints that the show had suddenly “gotten weird.” But it was easy enough to ask, “Where the heck have you been?” and point out that the show’s always been weird. Time traveling, I can handle, especially with weaselly Dr. Faraday (whose name I already had to look up, see above re: my faulty memory) acknowledging that that’s what’s going on.

Now, the big two remaining mysteries of the series, the only ones that we’re going to get real closure on, are: 1) Who are Jacob and the other guy, exactly? and 2) How do these flash-sideways connect to the ongoing storyline? Lindelof and Cuse have claimed, repeatedly, that we’re going to get answers to both questions, and I don’t doubt that. They also acknowledge that it’s a risky move, and it can be confusing, and that it’ll require patience, and that’s where I have a problem.

Not that it’s risky — I think a huge part of why the show is so successful is that they rarely let it get too conventional. Or that it’s confusing or requires patience — it’s too easy to counter with “they shouldn’t dumb the show down” or, if you prefer, “maybe you should go watch ‘NCIS’.” My problem is that it’s unnecessarily confusing; I think it’s withholding the wrong kind of information. When you strand people on an island and tell me that I’m going to have to wait to find out what the island is and why they’re there, that’s fine; I’m intrigued. When you hold out on the entire premise of the season, though, that’s where I just get annoyed, because I don’t have any context as to why I should care.

I make a habit of not reading too much of the online chatter on message boards or fansites, both because it tends to be kind of lame (that whole ARG that supposedly explained what the numbers were turned out to be a massive disappointment), and because I don’t care about the extraneous details and would rather let the show speak for itself. But this season, there’s a lot of stuff that’s relevant to the story that you can’t get just by watching the show. You’ve got to read interviews and watch extra-content videos, stuff that used to give an “extra dimension” to the show, but now is a prerequisite. In that Entertainment Weekly interview, they casually drop that alternate-Kate killed someone other than her stepfahter, which was revealed in some Comic-Con video. But then they claim that that’s not important. Well, yeah, guys, that’s pretty damn important if we’ve got any hope of making sense of what you’re expecting us to watch each week.

I’d seen a mention somewhere that they were refusing to call the flash-sideways an “alternate reality.” I took that to mean that it’s all part of one reality, that the bomb detonation had somehow rewritten history, and that the parallel storylines would converge in 2007. There’s a recurring theme of fate and determinism, so it seemed fitting that even wildly different histories could somehow play out to bring about the same events; e.g. even if Oceanic 815 hadn’t crashed, they all would’ve found themselves on that island somehow. It wasn’t until last week’s episode (“Sundown”) that suggested that wasn’t the case (Dogen’s story in the present conflicts with the version we saw at the piano recital), and then this week’s (“Dr. Linus”) all but confirms that’s not the case (Ben talks about stuff that happens in the “real” timeline that directly contradict things we saw in the “sideways” timeline).

So in short (too late): each week, they’re broadcasting 30 minutes of clean-up on a series, mixed in with 30 minutes of a different series that I don’t really care about. The clean-up sections are still “Lost”-style frustrating — did we really need to introduce yet another character who refuses to answer questions? Haven’t the castaways learned by now that if you ask somebody a question and they don’t answer, you punch them repeatedly until they answer? And what possible reason could there be for not just looking to see whose name was on number 108 in the lighthouse?

The other series would be like if Marvel had replaced their entire comic line with “What If?” stories. What if Jack had a son with his own daddy issues?! What if Rose worked at an employment agency?! What if Ben had been a history teacher?! You can’t tell me that I’m going to care about these things, later on; I need to care what’s going on right now, when I’m trying to make sense of the whole thing.

I will say this, though: Emile de Ravin has been really good in her limited appearances. Claire was always in the running for least interesting character on the island, but as it turns out, she plays kind-of-crazy really well.

Whoever at ABC is in charge of this archival process, I want to give them a big hug. They nailed it.

In fact, I’m going to include an extra paragraph in here because occasionally people end up here from my company’s blog or from the auto-generated announcements on Twitter, and the “read more” link is removed, making it easier to read ahead and see something you didn’t intend to. I remember before The Crying Game came out, I saw a message on USENET (yes, I’m old) where the poster put in “spoiler space” but not enough for larger monitors, so I accidentally saw the big twist of the movie. Which kind of ruined the movie (not that it was all that great to begin with), but I couldn’t really be angry at anybody because it was unintentional. Actually, though, it was made even more interesting because I knew what the twist was, but I kept expecting it was going to be about Miranda Richardson’s character — after all, she’s on the poster. I spent the first half of the movie wondering how they were going to do the reveal and then hey! there’s a penis I didn’t expect to see. So if you’re still reading at this point, it’s your own damn fault.

What’s most remarkable about the finale was how so much of it has been telegraphed — not just from the beginning of the season, but from the last finale — and yet it still worked. For me, anyway. The stuff that I knew that was coming still felt like a punch in the gut, and the stuff that I didn’t expect I completely didn’t expect.

Just barely 24 hours later, and it’s already made my list of all-time favorite misdirections, with the line about the box: “So they’ll know who they’re up against.” For starters, that’s an expression I never perceived as having a double meaning; it’s a double entendre that got skillfully turned back into an entendre. Second, everybody involved with the show — making and watching — knows how it works at this point; it’s all about being ridiculously vague and opaque. They were being so ham-handedly and blatantly obtuse about not letting on the contents of the box, that they effectively hid it in plain sight: I had another of my “Oh, I’m smarter than the show” moments and just spent the rest of the episode believing it was a bomb. And third: it’s the exact same reveal they did last season finale, and it was still a surprise! At this point, Locke’s corpse is getting more play than Bernie’s.

In the category of stuff that’s been telegraphed: Juliet’s had the Grim Reaper looming over her shoulder the entire season, if not longer. But even knowing it was coming, it was still a pisser, and I was still holding out hope that the series would give us all a pleasant surprise. Having Jack or Kate get wrapped up in the Evil Dead magnetic chains, for example. When the episode ended, I was trying to boost my own spirits with the thought that triggering the bomb could’ve worked and reset everything, and we’d come back next year to find Juliet at her medical practice getting into inappropriate relationships with guys who know to look both ways before crossing the street.

But that really wouldn’t work with the dramatic structure they’ve built up so far, and it’s the rare case where the happy ending would be a cop-out. For every time this season they’ve shown us Juliet being awesome, they’ve also had a moment where they reminded us — practically looking at the camera and addressing the audience directly — that dead means dead. Characters on this series die when they’ve exhausted their last flashback (hers was the only one that didn’t include a visit from Jacob, implying no more destiny left), when they’ve accomplished what they were supposed to accomplish (she hit Jughead with a rock), when they’ve finally and completely won you over (she’s hot and she can knock out a dude with one hit, while wearing handcuffs), and when their actor has been cast in a different series (she traded down). I’d be really, really happen to be proven wrong, but that seemed to be about as close to a final exit as anyone’s ever going to get on “Lost.”

Locke, on the other hand, seems to have gone out like a chump. It was so cleverly done that it didn’t sink in until later, but everything that I’ve liked about his character this season was pretty much invalidated with that one reveal. He didn’t gain the confidence that comes from finding his purpose, he didn’t get to see himself vindicated by finally getting the upper hand over his manipulator Ben, and he didn’t get the satisfaction of discovering that he was indeed special. Instead, he died believing that he’d failed, after leaving the one place on the planet where he wasn’t constantly dicked around for his entire life. And he had failed, since everything heroic he thought he’d done was actually his being manipulated by “Jacob’s Enemy.”

As for Jacob’s Enemy: somebody in the comments on here said he was looking for a clever bit of magic from the plotting, a sign that they weren’t just “making it up as they go.” I think this is as close as you’re going to get to magic on a long-form American television series. They picked up seeds that were lain down from the first few episodes — Locke’s speech to Walt about black vs white on the backgammon board, the ongoing theme of faith vs. rationality and destiny vs. free will — and personified them, making them the major players in the battle that’s going to form the climax of the entire series. The show’s frequent allusions to philosophy always seemed like attempts to make the show seem smarter than it really was (and that’s probably exactly what they were), but can now be sold pretty convincingly as this is what the show’s been about from the beginning.

Not all of it worked — the re-telling of Jack’s “count-to-five” flashback not only ruined one of the strongest moments of the pilot, but it made Jack seem like an even weaker and more annoying character — but for the most part, they did a masterful job of going through the past four years, jettisoning the bits they didn’t need, and tying everything else together. Did they mean to do this all along? No chance in hell. But that’s not a bad thing, and it’s a shame that people, including myself, have been making it out to be a criticism. The only artistic, non-commercial reason to be doing episodic storytelling instead of movies or mini-series is so that the story can change during the telling.

The most clever part of the Jacob/anti-Jacob thing is how they managed to avoid turning it into a strict Good vs. Evil dynamic. Which is remarkable, since they did it in one episode, while they’ve had 2 years for the Ben vs. Widmore dynamic and never managed to get that more interesting or sophisticated than “Evil vs. More Evil.”

It’s clear that Jacob is all about the free will. Not only did he tell Ben “remember you have a choice” instead of “hey buddy let’s put down the knife there you go,” but he visited each of the characters at moments they had to make an important choice. He taught Kate that she could steal without repercussion, he gave Sawyer the pen he needed to set him on a lifetime of revenge, he made sure that Sayid got to see his wife killed randomly to spark his eventual killing spree, he brought Locke back to life to live as a paralyzed victim of society, he put Hurley on a plane trip that would lead to more misery, he crashed Sun & Jin’s wedding, and he taught Jack to stop being such a whiny martyr and just pay for another damn candy bar already.

Or, if you want to be more charitable, he went through and gave them all the tools or warnings (in Sun & Jin’s case) they needed to make their own decisions at pivotal moments. Except for Jack; I’m still not sure what the point of that one was. It probably would’ve been easier to make it a clearer white vs. black distinction, but leaving him as the personification (or god, or manipulator, whatever) of free will is vague enough to give everyone something to think about for the next nine months.

And if he’s free will, then his opposite must be destiny. Assuming it’s that simple: how much are supposed to infer about the anti-Jacob? Is he a direct opposite, or is he some kind of subordinate? There’s evidence that he’s the smoke monster — he appeared to Ben while Locke was conveniently off-screen, manipulating Ben’s guilty conscience to do anything that Locke told him to do, like for instance, kill Jacob. But was that him, or something else acting on his behalf? (Fake Locke acted surprised when Ben told him about the incident, but there’s little reason to think that’s anything more than an act: we find out later that Ben is being outclassed by truly master manipulators). Was he appearing as all the visions on the Island, or some of them, or none of them? Is he the one who Locke spotted in the cabin? There’s plenty of evidence he’s taken the appearance of Jack’s dad, but was that him? Did Locke & Jack’s dad ever appear together when Ben, Sun, and Frank Lapidus were around?

It’ll be interesting to go back and rewatch the season (if not the last two seasons) at some point, to see if it’s possible to tell where the seeds were planted and when they truly knew where they were going with the rest of the series. There are still huge questions left unanswered, things that the series seems to be telling us aren’t important anymore: What was the whole deal with the Island’s keeping Michael alive? (I’m assuming that one’s going to get written off as a plot thread that went nowhere). How did Desmond get unstuck in time? How much of Eloise Hawking’s reproduce-the-plane-crash theory was total bullshit, and are they really going to say that’s enough explanation for why Sun stayed in the present? I think I can wait a few months to start re-watching, though.

And it kind of sucks that we didn’t get some greater hint of what was happening next season, like we did with the “We have to go back” season finale (still the best one, even if the results didn’t quite live up to the promise). Unless I’m missing something, everything that happens next year depends on one question: did it work? Did the bomb cause “the incident” or correct it? (By the way, it was indeed awesome that they used Miles to acknowledge what everyone in the audience had been thinking). Every other question about who died or who survived seems pretty meaningless unless you know how much has been reset. Since the next season, according to the teasers, is going to be called “Destiny Found,” that would imply that the anti-Jacob’s plan worked, at least at the beginning of the season. Since they’ve gone on about “The Constant” and “The Variable,” it would seem like the series hasn’t made its stance on temporal paradoxes and causality 100% clear.

I don’t like the thought of having to wait until 2010 to find out did Jack eat that candy bar?

Probably my biggest problem watching “Lost” is that I have no way of gauging how smart I am compared to the source material. I’m embarrassingly dense about most of the naming and the historical and literal allusions, as well as some of the details from previous seasons. For instance, I keep waiting for angry bearded Dharma guy to get his comeuppance with a gruesome death, but the internet tells me he’s already gotten it. Apparently, he’s the guy who was stuck in the hatch before Desmond showed up, until he went crazy and killed himself.

On the other hand, I’ve read enough comic books and seen enough science fiction concepts translated and re-translated through years of pop culture, that all the time traveling and alternate reality stuff seems more obvious than the show (or its fans) are letting on. I keep reading complaints that the series “got all weird” this season, and I’m just left wondering: what series have you guys been watching? Because the one I’ve seen had polar bears, numbers stations, smoke monsters, psychic premonitions, and miraculous healing all within the first couple of episodes. When the characters are spending entire episodes going over how time travel works, I’m left wondering: is this supposed to be complicated? Am I missing something complicated, or are they trying to pander to the millions of ABC watchers who are trying to keep up?

So I make this observation: if an “incident” on the island in 1977 caused a massive amount of energy to be unleashed, resulting in a hatch to contain the energy and the warning that you weren’t allowed to go outside without a hazmat suit, the solution to that isn’t to go back in time and detonate a nuclear warhead. In fact, it seems extremely likely that going back in time and detonating a nuclear warhead is exactly the “incident” in question. But I can’t tell if that’s supposed to be obvious, or if they’ve already addressed it, or if it’s nonsensical based on the hand-waving “electromagnetic energy” the show is basing everything around.

Which wouldn’t be a big deal — I’m perfectly content to just shut up, stop speculating, and wait to see what they come up with next — except that we’ve been building up to the big season finale and I have yet to be able to tell where the big tension is.

So far, everybody has reacted to the whole time travel business by doing exactly what they were supposed to do. I was disappointed that Farraday’s fate seemed to be pretty much “go back in time because I know you’re supposed to go back in time,” and I’ve been concerned that the same thing was going to happen with Locke. And then this episode pretty much made that explicit: Locke is important only because he went back and made himself important. There was a scene earlier in the season where he meets Richard Alpert during his time travel, and that was intriguing: who is Alpert, and how does he know the things that are going to happen? Then we see it played out from another angle: he knew it was going to happen only because Locke told him so. The whole gestalt of “Lost” is that the questions are always going to be more intriguing than the answers, but I didn’t expect that the answers would be this mundane.

So ignore the plotting for a second, and get back to the “meaning” or the overall themes of the series. Locke & Jack have basically switched roles: Locke is now a leader, and Jack is the one who’s blindly doing what he believes he’s “supposed” to do without thinking of the consequences. Locke has found his purpose, while Jack is just wanting to escape from the ruin he’s made of his life while off the island. Locke knows why he’s here, Jack is still asking why they came back, what it is they’re supposed to do, and grabbing at anything to give himself purpose. (For Locke, it was pushing the button; for Jack, it’s apparently Farraday’s journal and his plan).

That’s a very neat shift in characterization, one that’s been pretty well handled. It’s just that there’s a giant snowball of plot points bearing down on this philosophical character study, waiting to be answered. For one, apparently Sayid has been waiting behind a bush this whole time, just waiting for somebody to walk by and threaten to shoot Kate. And I’m still wondering how Sexy Bounty Hunter and the rest of the castaways on the other island are going to come back into play. (Incidentally: I’m assuming that when “The Island” vanishes, that includes the side island with the polar bear cages, right? And that’s where Frank and the gang are hanging out now?)

Our momentum leading us into the 2-hour finale is based on two things: Locke says that he’s going to kill Jacob; and Alpert says that he watched Kate, Jack, and the others all die. I suppose the third question is what’s going to happen when/if they detonate the warhead; will they be able to change history, or is that the “incident” that started the whole mess in the first place? It says something when the least interesting aspect of an episode of television is a group of castaways and seemingly immortal people swimming to an underground temple to detonate a nuclear bomb. I’m not sure what it says, exactly, but it’s something.

And is it time to start with the “who or what is Jacob?” conjecture again? For the longest time, I was sure it was going to turn out to be Locke: he went back in time and somehow inserted himself into the timeline as the main prophet of the island. Now I’m wondering if it could be the Jughead bomb that the Others are worshipping, Beneath the Planet of the Apes-style.

And then they gave me a clip show. Bad form, Bad Robot.

Come to think of it, why do we even have clip shows in the age of DVD box sets and downloadable season passes and time-shifting? I’m sure they justify it by saying it’s needed to get new viewers up to speed, or to satisfy the people who gave up on the show in season 2 and are now wondering how they went from “survivors of a plane crash” to “commune in 1977″. But that’s what the hour before the show is for! The rest of us are just left feeling cheated.

The two real episodes were about the characters (along with the writers, apparently) figuring out the rules of time travel. The first one, “Some Like it Hoth,” was focused on ghostbuster Miles and his issues with his dad, who as it turns out in a convenient twist is Marvin Candle from the Dharma orientation films. (“Lost” gets away with implausible coincidences like this by having characters comment on it. That seems to be Hurley’s sole purpose on the series now).

It’s getting harder to believe the illusion that everything on the show has been carefully and expertly orchestrated, but you have to give them credit for being able to take all the plot twists and developments and force them into a consistent Philosophy of The Entire Series. Namely: the nature of free will vs. destiny. It could get a little ham-fisted at times, back when Jack and Locke were left to try and provide some deeper meaning while everyone else was just interested in the polar bears and the Apple II that could somehow save the world. Locke had faith that entering the code and pressing the button actually did something significant; if not, then why was he here, and what was his purpose?

It’s not exactly subtle now — considering this season’s subtitle is “Destiny Calls” — but it is pretty clever that they’ve extended that to the other characters. If they’re unable to change anything in the past, then why are they there? This episode gave one possibility to one character: Miles could develop a relationship with his father that he never had. (Resolving the problem set forth in his flashbacks, meaning he can die soon).

The most recent episode, “The Variable,” was apparently a “game-changer,” based on what I’ve been reading online. Either I missed something, or internet fans of the show are over-reacting. To me, the whole episode seemed like it was asking the question “what if they could change the past?” and acting as if just raising the question was intriguing enough; they didn’t have to actually accomplish anything.

It could just be the inevitable disappointment of a series that’s in its winding-down phase. I’ve accepted for a while that the answers to the questions are never going to be as intriguing as the questions themselves, but it’s still kind of a drag to see that played out. Ever since Faraday’s character was introduced, I’ve been wondering about the implications of that scene: why did the footage of the plane wreckage make him start crying? Who was the woman with him in the room? What was significant about that moment?

And now, the pay-off: he doesn’t know, an unidentified and mostly irrelevant caretaker, and Widmore (secretly his father) was about to show up. I’d started to expect more from Faraday’s storyline, and he basically ended up with the same fate I was scared Locke would have: he was important only because he went back in time and made himself important. His supposedly brilliant mind went mostly unused — he came up with an idea of how to prevent “The Incident,” but it’s not an idea that any of the other characters couldn’t have come up with independently.

I think the other problem I had with the episode is that, as reluctant as I’ve been to admit it, the actress playing Faraday’s mother isn’t all that great in a large part. It takes a while to realize: she’s a woman of somewhat advanced years from somewhere in the British Isles, accent and all: to Americans, that just exudes class. But there’s a ton of moments in the episode that hinge on her being able to convey “a mother’s anguish” that just come across as “gas.”

So the big question is whether Jack, Kate & the Gang will be able to (with the Others’ help, possibly?) pull off Faraday’s plan, or whether they’ll even try to. At the moment, though, I’m not feeling as intrigued as I am wondering about all the loose ends. There’s nothing too glaring; it’s mostly a bunch of minor stuff that seemed to have greater significance when it was introduced.

• Why does “Marvin Candle” assume all the fake aliases? He seemed to know everyone at the Dharma Initiative. Some of the orientation movies were made before 1977, and he was already using fake names back then.
• Why would Faraday’s mom have pushed him towards his time travel research and encouraged him to go to the island? If his “destiny” was just to be on the island, then it seems like she could’ve let him enjoy the piano and his girlfriend for a few decades, and then push him onto the Island at the last minute. If she were pushing him to develop some way to change history, then it seems like she wouldn’t have encouraged him to take Widmore’s job once it’d become clear that he hadn’t.
• Why was it supposedly such a big deal for all of the Oceanic 6 to go back to the Island? And what’s with Locke’s body taking the place of Jack’s dad, including the shoes? Was that all BS?
• Speaking of Locke: when are we going to get back to “the present”? Could they please do something interesting with Sexy Bounty Hunter, instead of just killing her off?
• Are we going to learn why Sun got left in the present?
• How about the old prophecy that if Claire’s baby were raised by anyone else, it’d be a disaster?
• How come Richard Alpert didn’t remember the guy who’d told him to bury a nuclear warhead on the island? That seems like it’d be much more memorable than the brief encounter he had with John Locke. Faraday’s mom should’ve remembered him as well.

I guess technically, this week’s episode of “Lost” (“Dead is Dead”) was another character-centric flashback-heavy episode, except focusing on Ben Linus instead of one of the “good guys.” But that was okay, for two reasons:

1. Ben is now officially twice as interesting as any of the good guys (except for Kate, where he’s a dozen times more interesting).
2. This episode was co-written by Brian K. Vaughn.

I really hate it when people give one person all the credit for a particularly good movie, TV show, videogame, whatever. There’s always a ton of work from a ton of people involved in these productions. Instead of being the product of one person’s genius, it’s just as likely that they got some really good material to work with, or everyone else brought his best work to the project, or any of a thousand different variables. Plus, titles on TV shows in particular are somewhat nebulous; from what I understand, it’s often the work of a group of people that gets credited to one person.

But still: the guy’s got a streak going here. This one felt like it had a momentum that even flashbacks to stuff we kind of already mostly sort of knew were unable to stop.

My favorite aspect of this episode was seeing Locke finally starting to get his pay-off after getting piled on for the past fifty years or so. The guy has basically two settings: desperation, or condescension. It’s amazing how much mileage he gets out of it from context: sometimes, his forced calmness and condescension have you convinced he’s evil incarnate; other times, like this episode, you’re rooting for him.

He never says it outright, but getting killed may have been the best thing that ever happened to him. He’s spent his whole life having people tell him he doesn’t have a greater purpose, he’s not special, and his stubborn conviction that there is meaning to all this and that he does have a crucial part to play is nothing more than naivete. Now, coming back from the dead seems to be a pretty clear sign that he was right all along. And it’s a very subtle shift in his character, but he no longer seems to be trying to convince himself that he’s in charge and he knows what he’s doing; as far as he’s concerned, he’s got proof.

Of course, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they turn this into some kind of weird temporal-causation-loop type thing, and the only reason he’s been “chosen” is accidental or arbitrary. (As in: he’s important because he went back in time and told people he was going to be important). But I say he should enjoy the moment as long as it lasts.

Other things I liked about this episode were Locke’s revelation to Jin and Lapidus that he was still alive:

and that they somehow managed to find an actor who looks eerily like a younger version of Widmore:

At least, to me. I could tell who he was supposed to be the second he came on screen, and it took me a minute to realize it wasn’t the older actor in a bad wig.

As for the smoke monster: I’ve got a bad memory, so I can’t recall what exactly we saw back when Mr. Eko got “judged.” Was he really responsible for his brother’s death, or was he convinced that he was, or did he just want to be killed as penance, or did they really just want to get him off the series? Whatever the case, I like how this episode handled Ben’s “judgement.” We got to see that he really did feel genuine remorse, and that there is still the barest hint of a human that will do the right thing even when no one’s watching.

But he didn’t get any points for that. The Island just dug the knife in deeper and said: “You feel bad? Suck it, you should feel bad. You won’t get any resolution, or acceptance. Instead, here’s a reminder that your worst fear has come true: you’re not the leader, you’re not special, you have to play second fiddle to the bald guy and you damn well better do everything in your power to protect him.” We don’t have a word for that, but I believe you call it “cold.”