I actually decided to watch the two hour recap with the cast. I normally don’t watch these recap shows that Lost seems to do every season. I found it to be a nice perspective from the cast and it answered a few questions, exposed a few shortcuts, and was a nice recap overall. The most obvious shortcut was how Locke/Man in Black didn’t know Jack had become the new protector of the island as soon as he drank from Jacob’s cup. Though this is a deep deep nitpick, and really inconsequential, for some reason it dispelled some of the mystique and bugged me. The man in black seemed to know who all the candidates were as soon as the landed on the island. Maybe Jacob was telling him and I’m wrong, though why Jacob tell him all the candidate names is beyond me. Either way it was an incredible small item and i’m sure to be flamed for even mentioning it. If so, sod off, its my blog.

The finale itself started like all Lost shows start. Giving you the answer to the question from last week while at the same time throwing another even bigger question in your face. I think that has been the hallmark of the show all along. Every season the creators managed to answer some big nagging question from the last season like “Who is in the hatch” or “Is Linus a bad guy” or “How does Richard not age”. Of course, after they answer those they throw another in your face like “What the hell is with the button” and “Ok, Linus is a bad guy but he lives in a quaint neighboorhood on the island, where’d that come from?” and “Wow, that’s why he doesn’t age, but how does Jacob do it?”.

This season they did that on an episode by episode basis. That’s not to say they didn’t do that in years past but it was especially pronounced this year. Last night we find out that “being like Jacob” really doesn’t mean a whole lot. Yes, you can find the source, and apparently after a few hundred years you can make people immortal and possibly travel in time/see into the future/bring people to the island/be an annoyingly vague prick etc etc. And as soon as we get that answer we are saddled with Desmond going to do something really bad or really good.

I think it’s funny that Jacob’s description to Richard of the cork in the bottle was actually a literal one. Desmond removed the cork to some kind of “magma” and the earthquakes began to shake the world. Or at least the island. Of course, like with every big Lost episode, a dozen more questions got introduced but this time we just will never know the answers. What is the mysterious light? Is it somehow intelligent? It seems to heal some people, the asshat russian guy that blew up Charlie comes to mind, but not others like Jack, who quietly dies in a bamboo field.

Other big questions are who built the island cork, how did they manage to build it in the first place and not die down there? We know the man in black made the wheel that moves the island, but how the hell does that work? Is there like a spaceship down there with an AI that has gone insane? Why do some dead people get stuck on the island? Just because the sideverse was the afterlife, don’t you dare go thinking that the whole show was purgatory or something, because it wasn’t. How could Jacob do the things he does and Jack and Hurley have no idea how to do anything? Jacob seemed to have a lot more control over things but honestly we may be able to chalk that one up to experience of being the protector. Why did the ash keep the man in black out? Why was the one Chinese guy in charge of the temple able to keep the smoke monster out? Could Jacob appoint junior protectors like he could advisers ala Richard? What the hell was the man in blacks real name?? Surely he didn’t waltz into the other other other’s camp and say “Hi, i’m Man”.

Of course, there are all those other years past questions that we won’t get answered but can probably surmise. The big statue was probably built by some group of people that Jacob brought to the island at some point. Same with the temple. The polar bears were either brought by the Darma initiative or, my personal theory, the island has moved many times and one time it moved to be in the Artic and since moved to the tropics. Though could polar bears really survive in a tropical island for generations? I dunno.

So we did miss out on some important questions being resolved but we did get some other big answers. The sideverse was the afterlife. I guess the atom bomb didn’t do anything and you really can’t change the past, another question we’ll never have answered. I really don’t know what to make of the whole your all dead thing. Clearly there was a lot more past/future/experiences/whatever for Hurley and Linus. They seemed to acknowledge a lot more history than just sending Desmond back home with the whole “your a good number one”, “your a good number 2″ stuff. It is a nice way to end a show I suppose. All the dead people come back, everyone says hi, they hug and live happily ever after. I guess it was all a big fairy tale after all.

The finale has left me a bit frustrated in not having the big answers but satisfied with the small ones.  The death scene was nice in that it showed all the cast members emerging from their shared ordeal and ‘moving on’. Nice way to be subtle Abrams. It was good to see the man in black get what he had coming. Of course, Jacob got what he had coming too, they were both kinda assholes. Neither one was good or bad in my opinion. Well ok, MIB very bad, Jacob kinda in that gray area. Still, the finale was a just a tad bit lame. I couldn’t help thinking back to the Battle Star Galactic finale and thinking “That’s it?”.  Look, Abrams, Moore, yes we know “Its about the characters?” but ya know what, it’s also about the damn story. Just tell us what the fracking light in the cave/what starbuck was already!

In the end, the show was really just about average schmucks, from Jacob to Hurley and everyone in between, getting pulled into a crazy situation that in the final end, death, didn’t even matter all that much. Locke forgave Linus. Hurley eventually died and someone else took his place, presumably, and the island went on. The island, though the centerpiece of the whole show, was really just the stage. One were we don’t get to see all the props.

Don’t fret about having your favorite show gone. I hear Spielberg is making his now.

And that brings us to the spin off show Ghost Hunters Academy. Ahem. You may vomit now. Please, producers, directors, people that make these shows, do not ever use the word “scientific” in the same sentence with “medium” or “empath” because we’ll think you’re a loon. The academy provided us with a a team of twenty somethings, with two psychics undercover, investigating old places that the TAPS team have already looked at. They are training them to walk through dark places and shout “what the fuck was that!” at a VCR and then pee all over the floor (see southpark episode). Two of the trainees eventually reveal they are psychics of some kind and proceed to show us how silly and naive twenty something people can be.

The entire season was Steve and Tango, whose interaction is actually quite funny and fun to watch, yelling at the twenty somethings and telling them how they were not looking for ghosts the correct way. In the end, two of them got shipped off overseas to Ghost Hunters International, with the most intense Scottish ghost hunter in the world with a nifty multispectrum (technobabble) camera, to work them and hunt ghosts overseas. If I had known I would get a free trip around the world I’d say I was a medium too. All you had to do was setup some cameras and shout “What the fuck was that!” at a shadow and get a free world tour. Sign me up for that!

At the end of the day the credibility of the TAPS team is highly suspected. Their evidence looks suspicious in several cases, they don’t outright say “psychics are themselves an unproven theory and therefore shouldn’t be used to try to explain another unproven theory”. But, with three spinoffs and countless clones out there, the ghost hunting world is very much entrenched in reality TV and the homes of countless people thinking its real, or people who think its fun to watch, cause i’m not in the first group. Nope, no way. Yes, that’s why I watch these. The story I am stickin too.

One thing I noticed while watching the show, and all science fiction shows, is the technology level. It’s fascinating to me how scifi shows are made in that they are always made to the technology level of the society makin them. Meaning, there’s not much super advanced in BSG. Yes, they can go faster than the speed of light, have talking toasters (cylons), and some other neat gadgets. But honestly, how far advanced is this civilization? Really, all they have over us is much bigger space ships and faster than light travel/communication. Big woop.

I watched some of the replays recently and watched as a character died of cancer. The show is more of a powerful drama than a scifi show. It struck me as being very curious. Way before we can go faster than light will we have cancer cured. I’ve read stories where some advanced techniques have cured incurable cancer recently. Other advances will come soon enough that will blow away most day to day concepts. I saw a mind controlled video game recently that is available for purchase right now.

Bottom line? Most scifi’s build their world around one or two really powerful advances, faster than light, mind controlled computers, etc, but none i’ve seen embrace everything. The next 50 years will see some amazing advances. From curing most diseases to space travel to things we can’t even imagine.

Who cares right? Yes, it’s not some big revelation. Just a neat idea I noticed about many different shows and works of fiction out there. Some are exceptional of course, and go beyond the normal mold. But it’s very interesting how we stick to some baseline idea of what life is like and augment it a bit with a few neat things. It will be interesting to see what the shows of the future will be like. Every generation adds a bit to the mix. The next few will be very interesting and fun.