All Together Now

Promo images and logo © 2010 ABC Studios composited by BSL.

This post is currently down for maintenance.

The End

I was right — about the wrong thing.

The series finale of Lost, a two-hour-plus final chapter long known to have been titled...



… revealed that the so-called flashsideways scenes threaded throughout this season took place not in an alternate timeline, a theory that I espoused in my first ‘Lost’ in Thought post in February, nor in an altered version of the original timeline, as I theorized earlier this month, but in the afterlife. The storylines that many viewers expected to be the result in some way of the EM/Jughead Incident turned out to be utterly, well, incidental to the narrative of the series — except insofar as they reaffirmed how bound together these characters were and granted them a rather happy ending.

Don’t Let Me Down

Well, I guess my episode analyses are going to mirror one another to a degree, the
way this season of Lost is at times mirroring itself, and the first season, and the series to date.


Screencap © 2010 ABC Studios.

I’ll have no individual writeup here of last week’s episode, “What They Died For”, in advance of tonight’s two-part series finale, “The End” — just as there was no writeup of the first individual hour of the season, “What Kate Does”, following the one for the two-part season premiere, “LA X”. My laptop has started acting hinky again, the Internet connection has been at a crawl, and I’ve come down with a cold.

Season 6 ends tonight and thus so does Lost as a whole. Its finale begins at 9 p.m.
EST on ABC, following a two-hour series retrospective at 7, and runs until 11:30; then, after the local news, the one-hour Jimmy Kimmel Live: Aloha to ‘Lost’ comes on at 12:05 a.m. with cast members and creative staff. That’s all true for the USA, at least. What reminds me of viewers outside our borders is that also immediately following the finale will be a live online chat at the CTV website [bad link] featuring my friend and Finding ‘Lost’ author / Nik at Nite blogmistress Nikki Stafford. My plan is to kick back and enjoy the last Lost as much as possible as television, ideally after catching up with comments from my clique at Nik at Nite and Jeff Jensen’s Totally ‘Lost’ insights for Entertainment Weekly [bad link].

Birthday

This post is currently down for maintenance.

Mean Business

If you’ve ever left a comment on a blog, you may very well have come across word verification — and if you’ve been following this blog at all the past several months, you may very well have seen my lists of verification-word definitions.

As I explained in my first such post (“Mean”), then illustrated in one last month
(“Even Meaner”), word verification is a check that authors on Blogger/Blogspot can select to help ensure that it’s humans leaving comments and not spamming robots. When one has comments enabled on one’s blog, among the info at the end of a post (labels, time stamp, etc.) is how many comments there are. Clicking on that line takes you to the comments page and/or a pop-up window where you can read the comments to date and submit your own. When verification is turned on, below the comment box will be a jumble of letters that usually could almost be a word — as opposed to the total mess of consonants and numbers often seen when filling out forms online — but isn’t, except on the rare occasions when the randomizing algorithm ends up with an actual word accidentally; you must type those letters correctly for your comment to be accepted. Some blogs also have moderation turned on for all or at least older posts, so your comment won’t show up until the proprietor of the blog has reviewed it.

I’ve taken to sharing definitions for my verification words in my comments, should a definition come readily to mind for the word on the screen at that moment. The idea is similar to Sniglets, which Rich Hall popularized on HBO’s Not Necessarily the News and in a series of books back in the ’80s, but in reverse. While I lay absolutely no claim to being either the first or the best at this, I amass these definitions regularly when commenting on other blogs and now offer them up periodically here on mine, often when there’s a dry spell. In this case, although I have posts in the pipeline, the Internet connection has been troublesome and my metaphorical batteries are low, so it’s a fine time. You’re not only welcome but encouraged to leave definitions for your own verification words when leaving a comment on this or any post here.

Boing!

Not to be confused with “Bing!”, although I’ve joined my grandparents for dinner
the last couple of nights.



On Wednesday, Grandmom and I spoke about Lost. I’m taking a break from that subject for at least one post, however, since the coming weeks will be full of it.

Fixing a Hole

Okay. I’ve been working on a theory for a while now about the alternate timeline on Lost. At heart it’s not all that complicated (really), but I had written it up as part of a post on other general musings that in typical fashion for me keeps getting longer and revised and left fallow and revised again thanks to my intermittent concentration as
the show keeps marching on.


Screencap © 2010 ABC Studios.

The gist of things is that the apparent flashes to a new reality we’ve been seeing are
not actually flashing sideways — or diagonally, i.e. one universe over plus several years back — but rather flashing back to the selfsame universe where all the events we’ve seen to date have taken place. It’s just that in the wake of “The Incident” there’s been some very considerable course-correction.

I recall hearing at Nik at Nite that in an interview or podcast, around the time of Desmond’s head trip in Season 3’s “Flashes Before Your Eyes” and his subsequent attempts to save Charlie’s life based on visions of his death, the producers said there was only one timeline on Lost. When Mrs. Hawking appeared to Desmond during that episode’s funky flashback narrative, she explained that the universe had a way of course-correcting to what should happen, a nice way of allowing for both free will and destiny. This was illustrated by Charlie ultimately dying no matter what Desmond did, although there’s also a convincing argument to be made that Desmond’s actions in warding Charlie away from the previous would-be deaths course-corrected Charlie’s path not to a substitute death but to the one he was “supposed” to have; we’ll never know, presumably, who’d have performed Charlie’s actions at the Looking-Glass station and died his heroic if somewhat senseless death had Charlie died earlier in the jungle
or in the ocean or at Claire’s tent.

Carry That Weight

This post is currently down for maintenance.

Soup and Sociability

The can of Campbell’s soup is back in effect. Which signals, as regular visitors here know and the rest of you can find oat in another post, that one’s blog is being updated more sporadically than usual. I’ve plenty of reviews and bits of commentary almost ready to go, but I keep dropping them to get my old Lost entries back up, the look at this past week’s episode finished, and my grand think-piece(s) on the series in shape.



Did I say “find oat”?

Cold Beans

I went to McDonald’s for an iced coffee the other day and had the following exchange at the register.