s2e23: Live Together, Die Alone

Ohhh, I've wasted my life.

I suppose we shouldn't really be surprised that after all the posturing, all the promises, ultimately what we got in the season finale was a whole bunch more questions - and, by my count, one answer. There were more sightings of the ABC7 severe weather bulletin than loose ends tied up. (Incidentally, that bulletin makes me want to put my foot through the TV screen. Hey, WLS - if I were curious as to what the weather were doing, I would flip over to the Weather Channel. I'm trying to watch the fucking finale of Lost, and now I can't see Charlie's head because you need to show me a thunderstorm watch six counties away.)

I guess that we learned more than we did last season. Last season the Others shot Sawyer and took Walt and blew up the boat, leaving Michael and Sawyer stranded and Jin missing. And Jack and Locke blew up the hatch door, revealing... a tunnel descending into the ground. And that was all we really got.

By those standards, finding out that the electromagnetism brought the plane down at least qualifies as an answer - though again, it was pretty much the only one. (Yes, there's "also, it's not just an experiment," but those are kind of the same answer if you think about it.)

Otherwise, we get plot points that leave questions: Jack, Kate, and Sawyer being taken away (why on earth those three?), Michael sailing away (would it be wrong of me to hope that's the last time we see him on this show?), Locke and Eko MIA (if we're assuming Desmond died, could they possibly have escaped unaffected?), Charlie and Claire all lovey-dovey ("I love you, guy who kidnapped my baby, like, a week ago!" - seriously, who gives a crap at this point), and Desmond's girlfriend apparently using her immense wealth to pay two guys in the Antarctic to monitor electromagnetic anomalies, because for some reason she knows that those are connected with Desmond. (Or maybe she doesn't and she's watching them for some other reason, so there can be some emotional reunion late in Season Three. But I bet it's the first one.)

More things left hanging:

* Sayid, Jin and Sun?
* That statue? Four toes??
* Are we ever going to see the "security system" again, and are we ever going to find out what the hell it is?
* Are the Others Dharma or aren't they?
* Why are everyone's lives so interconnected?
* Is the rest of the blast door map ever going to be used?
* If Inman is a big tough army guy, how come he went down like such a sack of dirt?

A whole season and we learned so little. Lost can probably parcel itself out for seven or eight years at the current rate. Also, J.J. Abrams? Never tell me what is the coolest ending ever again. You've lost your L.A. privileges. And yet I'm totally going to wait four months (also, buy the DVDs the day they release) and then let myself get pulled along again. And if you're still reading this... I'm guessing so will you.

s2e22: Three Minutes

Were the episodes before the two-hour finale this space-filling last season? We got virtually nothing new out of "Three Minutes," if you ask me - we learned for sure what Michael's up to, but it only tells us about 10% we didn't already know. The Eko plot was largely undeveloped. The only thing we really learned about the Others was that, oddly enough, Michael's description of them was largely accurate in terms of what he actually knew. "Three Minutes" is apparently the amount of worthwhile time Michael spent with the Others. Two whole weeks and he was just tied up the whole time? Awesome.

There were a couple nice character moments - Charlie pitching the statues and Locke seeing him do it, and Sawyer telling Jack he's the closest thing Sawyer has to a friend - which, interestingly, were pretty much back-to-back. Also, Sayid is really gunning to take over the #1 spot on the Most Bad-Ass Person on the Island list; Eko's slipping fast and Locke's diminishing faith is turning him back into kind of a wimpy jerk. Oh yeah, and then an obviously not seaworthy boat rolls up.

Next week: a two-hour season finale! Desmond reappears, as does the security system (I'm guessing from the clips). At least some people get onto the boat (was anyone manning it?). The pneumatic tube doesn't go anywhere except to a big pile in the middle of the jungle, so The Pearl is obviously just another hoaxy experiment. The blast doors close again; Locke tries to smash the computer. And according to the voiceover, a number of questions will be answered, including what really happened to the plane. Drew declared that it looked too good to be true, but I'm hopeful. Here's to a few nice answers and a sweet cliffhanger.

s2e21: ?

My sentiments exactly. For a late-season episode, this one was surprisingly underwhelming, especially since it spent most of its time doing dramatic reveals on things any smart person should already have been aware of.

I'll ask: is there a person in the world who didn't think the button was an experiment from the very first second? Maybe there is actually more to it and maybe there isn't, but The Pearl was largely a waste; if all we learned was that the button for sure didn't do anything, that hardly seems worth all the question mark trouble.

And if you thought Libby was going to make it... no. She did survive, but not even for as long as the marshal did in Season One, and she got even less information out - the single word "Michael," which naturally was assumed by Jack and Hurley to be an inquiry into Michael's condition and not an accusation.

So that was basically the entire episode. Didn't learn much, did we? I imagine this sets the table to some degree for the next two (incidentally - only 23? Or is the finale two hours?), but still. For a mid-May, late-season episode, this felt dangerously close to filler.

Next week: Sayid is smarter than everyone else, and we appear to get another on-island flashback episode in which we see what Michael was up to for... what was it, a week and a half of island time?

Brief speculation

Jack's dad = not dead?

I'm sure I'm not the first person to come up with this theory, but I did arrive at it independently this evening. Consider:

*Jack's dad was directly responsible for Jack and Ana Lucia being in Australia.
*Jack's dad crossed paths with Sawyer in Australia.
*Jack's dad might also be Claire's dad.

That's a lot of connections to various castaways, no? Also consider the fact that we never actually see Jack's dad's body (empty casket, anyone?). Also consider that Jack's dad has shown up on the island - it would seem the island can cause hallucinations, but it's also been hinted that certain things or people may just appear. The horse in "What Kate Did" was certainly flesh and blood as far as could be told.

Also, we know there's a big twist coming at the end of the season. How big would it be if Jack stumbles down some dank corridor buried in the jungle, opens a door, and sees his father standing there in a suit? I can even picture how they'd probably shoot that.

Of course, I hope I'm wrong, because I like to be surprised. But if you could bet this stuff in Vegas, and they had "Jack's Dad is 'Him'" at like 20:1 odds, I might lay down a sawbuck.

s2e20: Two for the Road

Bizarre episode. With the exception of "Henry" telling Locke that he came to get him, 95% of it seemed to be distracting filler designed to keep you blissfully unaware of the ending. Do I have to be suspicious of any backstory that doesn't feature Jack or Locke from now on? Because whenever they kill a character, they always make that character the flashback. Because I like my flashbacks to be wholly, 100% pointless.

Of course, Ana Lucia has always been kind of a dead-end character - her presence on the island didn't really give us much. Even when they threw Jack's dad into the mix, it didn't do a whole lot to make her backstory anything other than self-contained - the same of which was pretty true for Shannon and Boone. Characters like that only exist to affect other characters - Boone affected Locke, Shannon affected Sayid. Ana Lucia - I don't even know. Sawyer, now that they got down? Jack, because that's what Jack does? Nobody, because we all hated her?

The Libby thing is even weirder. Is the goal to turn Hurley into a ball of rage? Would that even work? And why bother establishing the beginnings of a backstory for Libby if you're just going to kill her off? It's like they filmed the rest of the episode and then Rodriguez and Watros drove drunk and the producers were like "Quick, just kill 'em both." Except this episode was probably filmed after that happened.

Anyway, I was at least partially right about Michael - he has to be a tool of the Others somehow. He kills "non-good-person" Ana Lucia, then shoots himself superficially, making it look like Henry shot him and escaped - and this also allows him to stay among the castaways in their confidence, the most effective mole yet. As Drew pointed out, his story about two dozen Others living in tents doesn't really jive with the whole "they aren't really jungle people" thing, which we've already seen. So he's clearly just telling the kind of story that will lead everyone else right to the slaughter - or rather, the metaphorical slaughter, since I guess the Others want some of the people for certain reasons.

As silly as some of this stuff is getting - the Ana Lucia/Jack's dad backstory was pretty ridiculous and appears to have been ultimately pointless in the extreme - the show as a whole probably has me about as hooked as it ever has, because I just have to see where this is all going. Eko presumably does not die next week, so what saves him in that fall? Isn't next week the one where we're scheduled to learn about the door, or is that two weeks? Either way.