One New York Life

Despite my friend Matt’s incessant linking, I tried to keep my exposure to the onslaught of “this is my definitive version of what happened” to a minimum. For two reasons. First, my initial thoughts when the credits rolled was that I liked it… kinda. I was in a tenuous situation where reading too many thoughts could talk me in to the author’s interpretation. I didn’t want to read any interpretations until I knew which thoughts were mine and which weren’t. I only cheated with Low Resolution and the Open Thread on OverthinkingIt. Second, I needed to digest the finale, think about it, sleep on it, and possibly watch it again. The only litmus test I used was Twitter because getting deep in 140 characters isn’t possible. In the closing scenes — from Christian’s speech onward — I knew reaction would largely fall in to five camps: cop-out (they didn’t explain anything!), totally didn’t get it (they were dead the whole time?!), sci-fi people picking apart the idea of spirituality (get your God out of my show!), didn’t care about the mythology (they’re all happy!), and trying to reconcile the finale with the series as a narrative (so, what IS the Island?). Let’s look at them individually.

First, the easy one — those who totally didn’t get it. The vast majority of these folks, somehow, interpreted Christian’s speech and the church as the characters were dead all along. This is despite Christian explicitly saying “the things on the island actually happened and they mattered” and the writers, time and again, telling fans that the island characters were alive in the regular sense. The time they spent on the Island and the time they spent in the flashforwards were real. In the sideways universe, they were dead. In the flashbacks they were, well, I’m still kind of in flux there. Given the sideways universe, and what Christian said at the end, is it possible the flashbacks can be interpreted as part of the sideways world? Where time has no meaning and there’s no “now”? More on this later. Really, the folks who think they were dead the whole time either 1) were totally out of it by the end and just heard them say the world “dead” or 2) were connecting Christian’s empty coffin in season one (which is admittedly troubling) with this empty coffin or 3) way over-interpreting the imagery of the plane’s wreckage over the credits.

Next, the cop-out — or, as they put it on Ron and Fez today — “They had a story-telling Ponzi scheme and couldn’t pay it off so they just said f*ck it.” Here’s the thing, I’m not sure at what point in the series they decided the monster was going to be black smoke in its natural form, but I think that was the point at which they collectively decided “you know what, Dharma is here to study the Island, they don’t know what’s going on, I don’t think we’re going to really describe it ever.” And, really, I can understand why these fans are mad. They wanted to find out what Dharma was doing that created all these crazy things on the Island. Instead, they discovered that the science experiments were meant to figure out why crazy things happened on the Island. It was a chicken and egg scenario and the writers, validly if not lazily, took the easier route. These folks probably feel robbed and, really, they’re not wrong. The problem is that they were expecting a logical, pseudosciency explanation for a monster made of smoke and seeing dead people and black horses and forest whispers. These people ARE the Dharma Initiative… they all wanted answers they couldn’t find.

The third group is a subset of the last group. The folks who find some of it to be a cop-out but are mostly mad that in the last three episodes they decided to say “it’s magic” and be done with it. Across The Sea was Cuse and Lindelof’s version of a creation myth. The light has always been there. Asking where the light came from is like asking what was before the Big Bang. If we assume the sledgehammer of symbolism, the light’s first guardians — who were probably also the first humans — were “birthed” from the cave. The Island’s the source of life. It’s Eden. A magical place that can move around the Earth and will cause doom if it falls in to the wrong hands. Even though we didn’t know it at the time, it being underwater in the sideways world was a fancy way to say “there’s no life here.” This group’s reaction was the easiest to call because we just saw it last year with Battlestar Galactica’s Daybreak. BSG spent an entire series being about spirituality and the hand of God (or gods) driving the characters from the colonies to Earth. When the finale confirmed, in fact, God really was driving the characters from the colonies to Earth, the genre folks freaked, called it a cop-out, hated it, and asked why God was in their science show. The Internet Atheists are an interesting bunch — they have their own idea of how we got here, and they will angrily argue that any other interpretation is wrong… and the irony is unapologetically ignored. Much like the BSG finale, though, the clues toward all of this being about spirituality was around well before Across The Sea. That they willfully chose to ignore it is their bad, not the writing staff’s.

The fourth group, and this is where I started when the credits rolled, were people just glad to see the characters who they came to love end up happy. This group is probably the easiest to explain. People ultimately wanted these characters to be happy, so we were willing to forgive a lot of stuff for a finale that made some jokes, went over some of the good times with us (Star Wars jokes, nicknames, etc), and let the characters find what they were looking for. These are the people struggling to defend a finale that left so much unsaid and unmentioned (like why the Others stole children, who the heck was helidropping food on to the island, where exactly Christian’s body ended up in the real world, or who was the “Wallace” Jacob wanted Hurley to summon) and using platitudes like “it’s about the characters, not the island.” That’s kind of bull because The Island WAS a character — maybe the most important on the show — and we really don’t know that much about it. For me, that’s the only cop-out. I think “Across The Sea” was supposed to tell me that The Island was someone’s version of Eden, and the fact we can’t really describe Eden is why we can’t describe the Island. What the cork meant, and the cave meant, and what the monster was, and what the light was is left up to individual interpretation and, really, that’s the nature of spirituality.

The final group, which is what I’m slowly bleeding toward, are people struggling to put the finale in the proper context of the entire narrative. You’ll be able to spot these people as they try to break down The Church. I found the Church to be the least bothersome part of the Purgatory. Christian’s speech summed it up entirely and it’s partially Beer Snob Mike’s Cosmic VCR Blu-Ray Player Theory. At the end, you get to look back on your life and see what would have happened if you made those seven or eight life-altering decisions differently. Lost has always been about love. Cuse and Lindelof have stated it explicitly on occasion. The people in the church were the candidates and the people who they loved the most. When Boone died, I’d argue his great love was Shannon. When Shannon died, hers was Sayid. When Libby died, it was Hurley. All these people waited for each other to be ready so they could move on as a group. As always, Jack was the bull-headed guy who came around to spirituality last, but that doesn’t matter since there’s was no “now”. The characters had the ability to flash around both their real lives and their perfected version of it. In that way, maybe the flashbacks really DID take place in the sideways world. The characters were looking back at the life decisions that got them to the church together at the end. Since there’s no “now” in the sideways world, they can experience their whole life at once outside the rules of linear time. They got to see what made them special while waiting for everyone else to come around… and that’s OK, too. Michael doesn’t get to go with one of the nice ladies he murdered because Hurley’s love overrules that relationship. Walt knew the island people for about 40 days and never saw any of them again. He went home with his dad, went to a decent high school, probably was a first round NFL pick, was special in the same kind of mysterious way that Hurley and Miles were special, and found people to love. Ben and Eloise don’t get to go simply because they don’t want to. I like the idea that people who miss their soulmate get a second chance to find them in the end. Ben’s redemption is that he gets an off-island life with a regular family. He earned it. Then there’s Eko.

Think about it this way. If this wasn’t the first time we saw the sideways universe, doesn’t that redefine Mr. Eko’s final moments? After Eko was smashed to death by the Monster, the final scene is of him when he was still a child — before he became a warlord and made awful decisions — with his arm around his brother Yemi, casually tossing a soccer ball in the air and peacefully walking away. Be this by design, or by fortuitous coincidence, isn’t this how you’d envision Eko moving on? The church is just a construct. That’s why it had a stained glass window with symbols from multiple theologies. The church doesn’t matter — it’s just the vessel by which these people chose to move on. In the same way, we got to see the version of Eko he’d want to be forever, the innoncent one, embracing his brother and moving on. There was no Eko in the church because Eko had already found the only person he loved. And, really, I think that makes Eko’s sad end a little better.

My personal contextualizing of the finale has been easier than it’s been for some. I think the reason is simple — I’ve always thought the Island was a spiritual place that existed to give characters something they wanted and test them. The writer at Overthinking It refers to it as “Total Redemption Island” (based off my comment!). In a 2006 column I wrote for Inside Pulse, I said:

For most of the first season, the writers led the viewers into believing the island is a spiritual place. Many theories coming out of the first season had the island as heaven, hell, or purgatory. This theory was supported by various instances where people see the dead on the island. Jack, in early episodes, sees his father walking around on the island and is eventually led to his father’s empty coffin inland on the island. Sawyer is visited, he thinks, by the soul of a man he killed in the body of a wild boar (the man’s dying words were: it’ll come back around, which you hear in the woods during the episode).

The overwhelming message of the first season is the island giving the castaways something they desire in a way to give them a second chance and to make them want to be on the island. Locke is given back the use of his legs, he’s wanted and respected, and he’s away from his cubicle job. Kate is no longer being hunted for murder and is able to assume a new identity, for a while, but is given a life not on the run. Michael is given a chance to bond with a son who really wanted nothing to do with him. Walt is given Locke, someone who appreciates him. Hurley, who hates what winning the lottery has done to him and his relationships, is allowed to be just another dude again. Claire is given her baby and the ability to raise it with someone. Charlie is able to get off heroin and is given the chance to create a family. Every character, in their flashback episode, is given something they desperately wanted. This frequently led the discussion toward the Island of having some spiritual meaning. Were the characters dead? Were they sucked into an alternate universe a la The Langoliers? Was the island some sort of utopia that responded to desires and fears?

As it turns out they weren’t dead, but they were on some sort of utopia that responded to desires and fears. Really, I think that’s why the finale worked for me and, when you wrap it around everything else the series has done, it does work overall. It’s not like the clues weren’t always there that the Island was reacting to the characters’ hopes and dreams; but people wanted real-world explanations for it other than “it’s magic” and weren’t ready to accept a finish without a tidy resolution. Given where the series went, I don’t believe that Lindelof and Cuse “always knew what they were doing” — though I do believe they always expected the final shot was going to be Jack’s eye closing after he died doing something heroic — but I do believe they never intended to come up with an explanation other than “it’s magic” for the Monster.

Ultimately, I think the “history of television” will look back on Lost favorably. It was one of the first shows to really embrace an online audience. It was the first show to use the Internet over its first offseason to keep people engaged with their “online treasure hunt” stuff. It was the first show to promote a season by creating three-minute web episodes to fill in some blanks. It was the first show ever to create a “DVR Moment” — that is, a moment specifically designed for people to pause live television, screen grab, and devour — when the Blast Door Map was revealed in Season Two. It’s likely X-Files would have been this show had it come along a few years later but, well, it didn’t. When we look back at it, I think we’ll remember it as a one of a kind show for a network. It really embraced all audiences, all media, really never listened to the network when it came to dumbing down the content, and ended on their own terms in a way they knew would probably be unpopular. I would ask the people who hated it to look at it through a lens where the Dharma Initiative were people searching for the same answers as you and to remember that the show was more about mysteries than answers.

The unfortunate part of this ending is the people who liked it and the people who hated it are never going to find a middle ground on which to agree. Both groups will think the other is extremely stupid and will insult each other (“you didn’t get it” vs. “you accepted crap”) and platitude each other (“it’s about the characters!” vs. “it’s about the explanation”) forever. A lot of this is Cuse and Lindelof’s fault for fostering the overthinking of the series and never really shooting anything down unless it was just too off the wall. They left everything in play and, really, they couldn’t pay it off. Due to the nature of the Internet, it will get increasingly heated and Lost will probably go down as one of the more divisive finales in history. And, really, maybe that’s fitting.

For a show that spent a lot of time on the Man Of Science vs. Man Of Faith debate, they turned it over to the audience to debate forever. The Men of Faith probably liked it. The Men of Science probably hated it. And, again, that’s probably fitting.

In 2007, Murtz Jaffer at Primetime Pulse asked me to write a piece on whether or not Lost was still the best show on television. Lost had just picked up after the interminable and horribly planned 13-week break between the first six (KATE DAMMIT RUN!!) and final sixteen episodes. This followed episode 10 — Trisha Tanaka Is Dead. You can read the column on this blog or its original context on Primetime Pulse. You don’t really need to read the whole thing, but following last week’s post about Heroes I thought it was relevant to point out I was correct.

In three years, the same people praising Heroes for their quick pacing are going to be the same people saying Heroes ran out of steam. Watch, and remember this column for reference. Don’t get me wrong; I’m a fan of Heroes. I love the show but unless they have some incredibly creative story up their sleeve, there’s not much to tell after this season. This season they have the Heroes vs. Exploding Peter. Next season they have the Heroes vs. The Paper Company. Following that they have the Heroes vs. each other. What follows that? What happens when Heroes has to slow down?

Apparently the answer is “steal the Senator Kelly storyline from Marvel”. Are we ready to see if people with powers get banished to an unmapped island in the Indian Ocean or incinerated by giant robots? Will Peter travel to a dingy future where there is a Mutant War?

I’d also point out from the same column:

My prediction for next season: Lost will run an uninterrupted season[...] and people will come back.

Two for two.

originally posted on Inside Pulse: October 4th, 2006

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While Season One of Lost spent a good amount of time leading viewers to believe the island had some sort of spiritual significance, the second season wasted very little time in letting us know the island was something very, very different. Season two opens to the sound of an alarm going off and a man moves to a computer to enter something. We follow him through a morning routine of doing dishes, brushing teeth, exercising, until he’s interrupted by a blast. It’s our Castaways blowing open the hatch. Someone is inside, and has been there for quite some time if his psyche is any indication.

The man in the hatch is Desmond and he’s been shipwrecked on the island for some number of years. He’s been pushing a button every 108 minutes to “save the world” according to him. Inside the hatch are all the comforts of life, including a stocked pantry all marked with a logo, later discovered to be the logo of the DHAMA Initiative. Locke, emissary of the Island, decides this button is his destiny, which is why the island led him there. But, while the hatch and the button are the first indicators that the island isn’t something spiritual, it certainly wouldn’t be the last, and it also wouldn’t be the first misconception cleared up by the season’s end.

As for our raft group, they are adrift. Jin has gone missing, Walt’s been kidnapped, and Michael and Sawyer are left together to bicker and place blame on one another. They are attacked by a shark. The shark is revealed to have a similar logo to the one we saw in the station on its tail.

The raft eventually drifts to the north shore of the island where we find more survivors of Oceanic Flight 815. We discover that 22 other people survived the crash. But, while the other survivors have been having spiritual experiences and running from the smoke monster, these people have been terrorized by the Others. On the first night, the Others invade the camp, kidnapping three people. Two of them are beaten to death by a new character, Mr. Eko. Later, nine other people are taken, including Zack and Emma, the two children survivors of the plane, leading people to wonder what, exactly, the Others’ obsession is with children. Emma carries a teddy bear later seen when the Others are walking through the woods, but we don’t see who’s carrying it. During the second attack, Ana-Lucia manages to kill one of them, finding a list with the names of the people who had been taken on it. How did they know their names?

Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote this for Inside Pulse last season. If anyone is trying to catch up. I’ll run season 2 on Monday and Season 3 before next Thursday

Originally Posted to Inside Pulse: October 2nd, 2006.

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I got on the Lost bandwagon late into the game. Well, that’s not entirely true. When I first started seeing promos for Lost in 2004, I was ready for it. I couldn’t wait. I was ready to jump on board right from the beginning.

Then I missed the first episode… and forgot to tape it. I hadn’t yet discovered the wonderful world of DVRs (TiVo, to use the trendy lingo).

Since I wasn’t really proficient with bit-torrent at the time, I never caught up and I never got on board. I knew Lost was the kind of show I would have to catch from the beginning and I’m a little OCD when it comes to my television shows. I didn’t want to watch it from the middle and I knew trying to catch up in re-runs would be hit or miss, so I wrote it off.

Read the rest of this entry »

This column was supposed to run lead on Inside Pulse as part of big Lost feature which supposed to coincide with a “huge interview” that the TV crew scored. It was a combination of two questions: “Can Americans handle serial television?” and “Is Lost still the best show on television?” Of course, the interview fell through and it’s been languishing in the approval queue since. I’m going to post it here so it gets out there somewhere, because I thought it was good. The context is that it was being written after the “ratings disaster” that the media made up in February where the show hit it’s lowest rating ever of “only” 12 million people… on Valentine’s Day. If only there had been some explanation…

A warning, this column includes information up to and including the most recent episode, Tricia Tanaka Is Dead. If you haven’t seen up to this, and are anti-spoiler, this column is not for you.

When we first began to talk about this Lost feature, we started tossing around ideas for columns. I, of course, chose my topic at the last minute. What really made my decision was the general hate and bile that the Tricia Tanaka Is Dead episode has received. One of my friends has gone so far as to insist the episode doesn’t really exist. Which leads to the question:

Can the American television fan handle serial television?

Let me preface this by saying that I’ve watched One Life To Live for about six years now. I know serial television. I know the frustration of wanting a story to run its course. I fully understand the “GET ON WITH IT” mentality. I’m also fully willing to entertain the notion that years of watching daytime television tempered my patience. I know that, sometimes, you have to wait to get your answers. Extending that patience into primetime shows isn’t that hard. In comparison with daytime (200 episodes per year), prime time television, even Lost, (22-24 episodes per year) moves at the speed of light.

The problem is: what do you do with everyone else who doesn’t much care for soaps and, by extension, doesn’t really know how to deal with shows that don’t give them instant gratification? For all the hatred it receives from fans wanting all the answers now, Lost is a well-paced show. The first season essentially did nothing but introduce questions. After the show was renewed, they set up for the long haul. Was the island really a mystical place? Why was Jack seeing his dead father? What was the monster? A polar bear on a tropical island? Why is there a giant metal hatch? People devoured these mysteries. Fan-sites popped up and people couldn’t wait to tell other people their theories, no matter how far out they were.

Season two spent some time answering these mysteries while introducing new ones. We know that an electromagnetic event caused the plane to crash. We know that the dinosaur is really a cloud of black smoke. We have a feeling that this smoke is what causes people to see their long-lost relatives, but we’re not quite sure. We know people have been on the island for quite a long time. We know that the Others aren’t really bearded, dirty island natives that steal children to eat them, but we don’t know exactly what they’re all about. While it seems like Lost is never giving answers, it is. But for every answered question, the show introduces another one. For instance, we learn that a giant electro-magnetic system failure caused the plane to crash, but what was causing the electro-magnetic event in the first place? Why were DHARMA’s Powers That Be making a person press a button every 108 minutes when they certainly could have wrote a 10 line computer program to do it automatically? Where was the other computer that Walt was IMing dad from located?

This is how serial television works. You never get all the answers. Unfortunately, in the current world of instant gratification, brutally short attention spans, and the god-awful negative nature of the Internet, a show in this format struggles. Columnists love to be the first person to declare a show dead. They need to be the first person to claim: “I don’t watch this show anymore, sheep, and therefore I’m better than you.” Columnists want to be the one to declare a show dead, and they want people to agree with them; therefore they point out every perceived weakness in a show, exploit it, and then claim some other show on television is the most brilliant show ever and you should be watching that because they’re edgy and different. Ignored in all this is the fact that, even with the viewers remaining, it’s the #3 show on ABC, the best 10pm show on ABC in a decade, and one of the top 10 shows on broadcast television.

Lost, granted, has had its problems. Most of them aren’t the writing team’s fault. The writers and producers don’t control the asinine scheduling of ABC. They didn’t choose to be broken up by constant reruns last season, forcing joke websites like Is Lost A Repeat to pop up. They didn’t decide to air six episodes, take three months off, and return to an uninterrupted season. They don’t create the promos that say “THIS IS THE BIGGEST EPISODE EVER AND ALL SORTS OF STUFF WILL BE REVEALED” when really they’re just revealing that the other tail section people aren’t dead. This doesn’t work with a show like Lost. People are voracious for it. Interruptions are a frustration. Fox figured this out a few years back when it started airing 24 in uninterrupted seasons. 24, for all it’s predictability, is still regarded as one of the best shows on television even though it follows, essentially, the same formula year after year: Jack is coaxed back into working for CTU, something bad happens, he follows a lead to a person, that person dies, something leads him to another person who dies, which leads him to another person who reveals the BIG BOSS is really behind everything before he dies, and so on. Have you ever, even for a moment, wondered why people fall in love with nearly every show HBO airs? The Sopranos has more plot holes than Dr. Sam Beckett’s memory and more untied plot threads from Season One than in both seasons of Lost, yet it’s still critically acclaimed. Sex In The City is a comedy about four of the most annoying women in the history of the world and ladies world-wide shed tears when it came to an end. No show on HBO has ever aired a re-run mid-season. Coincidence? An uninterrupted season for a show where full, can’t-miss-an-episode attention is required is almost essential.

Think about this for a minute. If there hadn’t been 13 weeks where writers had nothing to do but criticize and re-criticize the first 6 episodes of Lost, where would we be right now? The season premiere gave us essential information about the Others. The third episode (Further Instructions) was the Boone episode, which was excellent. The fifth episode (The Cost Of Living), which included Eko’s death, the introduction of Eyepatch, and more information about the Smoke Monster, was very good. The fall finale (I Do) was a strong episode, if not strong enough to carry a 13-week layoff. Not In Portland, the Juliet episode, finally started giving us some insight into the Others and was great. Flashes Before Your Eyes, the Desmond episode, was one of the better episodes in the entire series. So far, this season, there haven’t been many complete and total clunkers. According to previews, Eyepatch is going to be revisited next week, six episodes after he was introduced. If the shows were running uninterrupted, the writers are paying off the set-up rather quickly. In reality, we’re finding out about Eyepatch months after he was first introduced. It’s frustrating. With the entertainment options out there these days — including the ability to wait until September to watch the complete season uninterrupted without commercials on DVD — ABC is shooting itself in the foot.

The only true complaint about last week was that nothing happened. I answer: so what? Every single episode of a serial drama can’t have giant, series-shattering events occur; it’s not supposed to. Take-a-break episodes have occurred every season. The only difference between then and now is that now it’s cooler to hate Lost. Now, wheelspinning episodes are a reason to criticize the show for not revealing enough in a timely manner. After all, instead of an episode where we find out that DHARMA apparently had enough of a presence on the island to include janitors and DHARMAwagen vehicles with 8-track players, that they were constructing a road to somewhere, and they apparently left in enough of a rush to leave poor Roger dead in the jungle with cases of beer and quite a number of documents, people see an episode that was a waste of time. I’m glad to be in the part of the 13 million fans who humbly disagree.

Lost’s power is in a delicate balance of introducing new questions while occasionally clearing up older ones. Some episodes won’t do much of either. It’s part of the deal when watching serial television. I have read the sentence “collapse under the weight of its own mythology” more than I care to think about. I don’t even know what that means. Collapse under the weight of having too much story? That’s a bad thing? Folks point out how well Heroes is paced compared to Lost. Heroes clears up mysteries week after week, keeping people interested. I ask the Heralds of Heroes this: where is Heroes going in seasons two and three? Will you still be watching when it turns into X-Men vs. The Brotherhood Of Evil Mutants? Or are you going to complain that Heroes blew through its whole story in the first two seasons and should have taken a pacing lesson from Lost?

Aaron Spelling once tried to make a daytime serial (soap opera) because he thought people would watch a daytime show paced like one of his many successful prime-time dramas. He ran out of story in less than three years. When the Heroes defeat whatever super villain is behind the paper company, what’s left? In three years, the same people praising Heroes for their quick pacing are going to be the same people saying Heroes ran out of steam. Watch, and remember this column for reference. Don’t get me wrong; I’m a fan of Heroes. I love the show but unless they have some incredibly creative story up their sleeve, there’s not much to tell after this season. This season they have the Heroes vs. Exploding Peter. Next season they have the Heroes vs. The Paper Company. Following that they have the Heroes vs. each other. What follows that? What happens when Heroes has to slow down?

Unequivocally, Lost is still the best show on television. On a weekly basis, one still can’t predict what’s going to happen. The worst thing they can do is cave to the pressure of revealing too much, too soon. That’s what would actually sink the show. The best thing they can do is what was being discussed earlier this year: pick an ending date. They could tell the entire story of these castaways in six or seven seasons. Having an ending date will let them pace the show. It will keep the show from “sticking around too long” and turning into the X-Files’ later seasons. There’s a distinct, planned story to tell. Pick a date and stick to it.

Don’t believe the “fans” and critics that say the story has become too confusing. It hasn’t. Essentially, it’s still the same people who have crashed on an island that isn’t just an island. Let the people who think the story is too confusing go back to their easy to grasp CSIs and Law & Orders where you don’t have to think too hard, violating people’s rights is cool, and everything is wrapped up with a neat little bow by the time the hour is up. Let them watch Heroes to turn on it next year when the story gets “campy.” Let them watch Ugly Betty until they realize there’s only so many ways you can say: ‘HAHAHA, SHE’S SO UGLY. ISN’T THAT FUNNY??’

My prediction for next season: Lost will run an uninterrupted season from November to May, 8pm to 9pm, and people will come back. Dumbing down the show is the worst thing they can do. Then, all they’ll manage to do is alienate the existing fans and make a far worse show. Uninterrupted seasons are the way of the future and the sooner ABC realizes this, the sooner their shows will become successful again. Remember this: there isn’t one single popular show on television that people won’t or haven’t turned on, except for the “brilliant” shows that got cancelled. Think about that for a minute, try to prove it wrong, and then you’ll realize the nature of the beast you’re dealing with.

Calm down, be patient, and trust that the writers have a plan. Everything will be answered in time. Lost is too good to give up on and you’ll only hate yourself later.