Well. That happened.

It was what it was, and some of us feel that it wasn’t what it used to be.

Let’s not fight! If you loved it, I’m not going to be able to convince you that you shouldn’t have, and trust me, you’re not going to be able to convince me to love it as the end to the series I’ve been watching (though standing on its own, you could maybe suck me in — I mean, Vincent lying down with Jack was like a punch in the gut; I’m not made of stone). There’s no point in having that conversation and it just turning into a hate fest.

Tonight’s the night!

I won’t be blogging the final episode as quickly as I usually do, because I’ll have a late night and a houseful of people — and by tomorrow, speed-blogging will be the last thing Lost can possibly require. I’ll try to get to it later in the day on Monday. But, hopefully, we’ll have some answers and closure and there won’t be too much to say, other than a thumbs up or a thumbs down (accompanied by screaming and the sound of a Jears piñata being savagely beaten).

As you may have noticed, the media is pretty much saturated with Lost news and links and videos these days. Here’s some of the best of what I’ve been able to find:

PENULTIMATE LOST! Previously on Lost: Sun and Jin died needlessly. Tonight on Lost: we try to convince you that What They Died For was a good reason. Did anyone notice that Jacob didn’t exactly give a satisfying answer to Kate, Hurley, Jack and Sawyer about Sayid and the Kwons’ deaths not being a waste? Or about any other aspect of protecting the ‘heart’ of the Island, for that matter? But I’m getting way ahead of myself . . .

Anyway, first, some business: this weekend! They’re re-airing the series premiere on Saturday night from 8 to 10 (come on up if you’re interested), then Sunday is a clip show from 7 to 9 (during which I suggest a round of Jackface), finale from 9 to 11:30, local news from 11:30 to 12 (a.k.a. Jears piñata time at my place), and then live interviews with the cast and creators on Jimmy Kimmel until 1 a.m.

It turns out even 2.5 hours isn’t enough for the finale, and there’s going to be an extra 20 minutes (which would basically be an extra full half hour on television) on the DVD. My coworkers think that if the finale is awful (and since the season pretty much has been) that we should all boycott the DVDs, but hopefully they saw the look of panic on my face and know that I just cannot do that.

More fun stuff: an interview with Damon and Carlton about how much everyone hated the previous episode, “Across the Sea,” and how it’s not their fault that the show we’ve been watching is apparently not the show they’ve been writing; videos of some of the cast interviewing each other; and, finally, a couple of sets of photos from a huge event they had on Hawaii over the weekend (where they actually aired the episode we are watching as I type this). Mainly these photos are fun because Taller Ghost Walt is now HOLY GUACAMOLE Ghost Walt.

Some fun news in advance of the finale: the Jimmy Kimmel special following the finale, “Aloha To Lost,” is going to feature three alternate endings to Lost.They’re billing them as actual alternative endings, like any three of them could have happened, but I’m assuming these were all filmed so that the final storyline couldn’t be leaked, just like a couple of years ago when they filmed several people in what turned out to be Locke’s casket. Also, Ack has some great ideas for a Lost finale party, lots of which I’ve used before and more of which I’ll be using this time around. I’d better get to work — May 23rd is really, really soon!

On a rewatch of “The Candidate,” I also noticed that Claire X told Jack X that she had never met her father, Christian. In the original timeline, she met him when he showed up to pay for her mother’s private care after the car accident Claire caused — so it seems that one of the differences in this timeline might be that Claire’s mom was never in that accident.

And finally, I read something really interesting this week that helped me put my finger on what, exactly, bugged me about the way Sayid died. Damon and Carlton have been trying to say that, by sacrificing himself to save others, Sayid finally managed to redeem himself. Two problems with that: first, Sayid was a zombie — dude was dead for two hours! How’s that supposed to work? But secondly, Sayid didn’t need to be redeemed to us. We already knew that he was a really, really good guy. If you get to pick five items to take to a deserted island, one of them should be Sayid. The person who didn’t know that was Sayid himself — and that’s why his story needed closure. Not so that we would see him in a different light, but so that he would see himself the way everyone else already does.

Exciting news on the finale! Originally, the plan on May 23rd was a clip special from 7 to 9, the last two hours of Lost from 9 to 11, and then a Jimmy Kimmel special (“Lost: The Final Rose,” which cracks me up) from 11 to 12. But news has just come out that Carlton and Damon got permission to extend the finale by half an hour, so it’s actually going to run from 9 to 11:30, immediately followed by the Kimmel special featuring a large portion of the cast. Apparently the local news just isn’t going to happen. Probably because, in every town across America, the only important news will be that Lost is over. Right?

Other fun stuff: the night before the finale, Saturday May 22nd, ABC is going to air a special version of the original two-hour pilot. So, obviously, my apartment will be available for anyone who’s interested! And if you’re wondering why the preview for next week’s episode only seemed to show stuff from previous seasons, that’s because Damon and Carlton are so afraid of giving too much away that there aren’t going to be any more promos with new material between now and the finale.

Oh Locke X is alive! I am SO RELIEVED. I’m starting this episode about 40 minutes late because I just spent 2 hours telling people all about how the world isn’t going to end in 2012 (clearly, the world ends on May 23rd as soon as the finale of Lost airs). So, I have a lot of pent-up energy, and I thiiiiiink that’s going to come through in this very bitter blog post.

Won’t it be awkward if Flocke gets his “last recruit” and then kills all of them? That’s the going theory over at the Ack Attack. Nothing much else is new this week, other than Damon and Carlton talking to a real, live, superfamous cosmologist about time travel, wormholes, and everything else that may or may not be going on on Lost Island.

One part of this article really made me think: I know we’ve complained that it is completely clear that some of the weird stuff that came up in the first season was clearly not meant to be resolved in the way it has been. But that’s a little unfair: we’re looking at a final endpoint, and expecting them to have had that specific endpoint in mind and have worked backwards. Damon points out that it’s a bit more important for them to have had some endpoint in mind for each specific mystery they brought in, not necessarily have interwoven all of them into the ‘final’ answer — and honestly, I think they succeeded in that. The article also acknowledges that time travel was used as a device to get at the themes of destiny vs. free will, and so I don’t know that we can expect that time travel to be “explained” as much as we can expect its impact to be large. Damon and Carlton also point out something interesting: you can always attack time travel or other science fiction aspects as a deus ex machina, but keep in mind that using physics means there are rules that they have to follow, or, thinking of it in a more helpful light, rules they can follow — scientific elements help keep the narrative on a track, even though it might seem like they allow the narrative to fly off in any direction.

I’m also reassured that they’re not going to try to come down on one side of the coin as far as the Big Philosophical Questions “Are we living with order or chaos?” and “Is there a God”? Instead, it sounds like what they’re doing is saying, “Those are age-old questions that any narrative is going to be struggling with, on some level; we’re bringing that into the context of ordinary people in extraordinary situations and tossing in the added complications of time travel, supernatural beings, multiverses, and other Big Questions that haven’t necessarily been asked in tandem with these particular Big Questions.” When you think about it that way, it’s extra cool that the Jack/Locke ‘man of science’/'man of faith’ issue has actually turned more into a Jack/Flocke ‘man who thinks we live in a world that carries meaning’/'man who think we live in a world of people who suck’ debate.

Some cleanup from the intervening week:

“Happily Ever After”? That should not be a good sign. But it was! The credits, however, were a great sign — sometimes I hate knowing when a surprise character is going to be showing up, but that was an incredible list, and a nice preview for what I thought was an incredible episode. In Betsey’s words: once Widmore shows up, things get sciencey. Here’s one person who was not in the credits: the actress playing Charlie’s lawyer was not the actress who played Walt’s mom, though there is lots of internet confusion on that point.

A bit of news: Lost is going to take a break on April 27th. According to people who pay close attention to the scheduling, this means there will be a new episode on May 18th just before the finale on the 23rd.

Also, today Carlton tweeted “Tonight a new chapter in the season commences,” so, you know, squee. And just to set this straight at the start of my discussion: awesome. Incredible. Maybe the second best ever, after the incomparable The Constant. And I love the direction this new chapter is headed in.

First bit of business: I rewatched the entire season this weekend (good times), and I noticed a few things. The first is not that significant — I noticed that Ben volunteered very quickly to go get Sayid in the Temple, when traditionally Sayid and he have been in an epic power struggle (translation: Ben has always been terrified of Sayid, and shouldn’t “volunteer” to be alone with him, ever), and I realized that while we have hated Ben and thought of him as evil for several seasons, he thinks of himself as someone who “remembers [the Oceanic crash] like it was yesterday,” who was just following orders, who has known these people for years and is kind of part of the ol’ gang and would of course save them from a Smoke Attack, and who was just as invested in the fate of the Losties as we are. Anyway, I’m also starting to get some bigger-picture ideas. In particular, I’m starting to develop a slightly more complicated theory about the relationship of the Man in Black to the bodies he inhabits. Specifically, I think he does have a relationship with their bodies; he isn’t just wearing a Locke Suit over whatever it is that he really is, but is using bits of either the soul or the conscious brain that remains in the body.

RICHARD. And “Ab Aeterno” means “from the beginning of time” in Latin, y’all. It turns out he’s not quite THAT old, however. Jacob’s game of Human Chess might be on that kind of timescale . . .

The post is going to be a little lighter this week; I’m about to start a few nights running the telescope, so I’m going to post this before going to bed late tonight and then sleep right through the time when I normally do the bulk of my research. I’ll fill you in on any news at the start of next week’s post!

At the start, it sounded like we were going to learn a lot about Ilana tonight too, but it eventually transitioned to being a Richard-only episode. And we start getting answers from the very beginning: Ilana was tasked, by Jacob, with protecting the six “main candidates.” I love how Jack is now totally willing to listen to other people’s stories.

I’m starting to grow a bit concerned that everything I said about alternate timelines is wrong. Not the physics — I mean I think that the point at which the timeline split might not have been when Jughead went off (or didn’t).

• Instead, some folks are wondering whether the real difference is not whether the Incident happened or not, but whether Jacob died or not, or whether he “touched” each of the Losties or not. The counterargument to this is that Jacob died in 2007 and we see changes going back much earlier than that, but first, Jacob could be a being that exists “out of time” (once you kill him in 2007, his effect disappears from all timelines), a bit like Desmond, or could be a time traveler who actually, at some later point like 2010, went back and took all this action that led to what we saw for the first five seasons. Killing him in 2007 could prevent all of that from happening. I really don’t think we have much to go on here, but I wanted to be sure to let you know that a really big chunk of the current theory focuses on the death of Jacob instead of the Incident as the source of the X timeline.
• In that case, maybe there isn’t a single split timeline for everyone. Perhaps, in the X timeline, we’re seeing the result of a world in which Jacob didn’t touch Jack, Kate, Sawyer, etc. The theory is that their lives would have been the same up until the point where Jacob touches them, and all of those small changes add up to the big one that is the Alternate Timeline.
• That might be a little confusing, but think of it this way: let’s say that in today’s timeline, you meet someone new, who turns out to be really significant in your life. Up to that point where you meet, you’ve both led entirely normal lives. If I then step in and create an alternate timeline where that person actually moved to France years ago, their life is going to be different as soon as, well, they move to France. But your timeline is going to be the same right up until the moment where you “fail to meet” someone who otherwise would have changed the course of your life. So, we can think of this alternate divergent timeline as being one single alternate Universe, or we can think of this as you and this person coming into this alternative reality at different points in time.
• This theory is attractive to a lot of folks because they think that Lost was throwing us a red herring when it showed the Island underwater in the season premiere; that seems too ‘easy’ to some people, and the changes seem to some to involve more than just a bomb that didn’t go off (although I’m fully on board with the idea that tiny, tiny changes can have enormous effects on the timeline, that doesn’t mean you have to be!).
• I’m not sure I’m really in love with this theory. For one thing, it doesn’t make sense for Sayid in particular, since Jacob touched him in pretty much the exact moment that Nadia died, after absolutely all of the action up to Season 5, yet in the X timeline his life was completely different before that point. Same for Hurley. On the other hand, though, it’s possible that some other changes that took place due to Jacob’s absence in the X timeline is what caused the differences for Sayid et al.

I actually have very little cleanup from last week, except for this amazing video of Michael Emerson being hilarious.

A Ben episode! Amazing — let’s watch this sad little man ruin what’s left of his pathetic life. This week’s episode was, clearly, driven more by character than by plot and action. I know that some of us are starting to get a little tired, and to wonder when exactly all of the answers are going to suddenly start pouring in. I’m beginning to see, though, that it seems that Damon and Carlton want the ultimate resolution of the show to be about the characters, not about the Island or the explanations behind everything that happens on it. Perhaps we just need to accept that and get used to it? I think, maybe, that some of us fundamentally disagree that this show is about characters as ordinary human beings, as opposed to being about characters in extraordinary circumstances that we want to know about. At the end, though, they threw us the “WIDMORE IS WITHIN SIGHT OF THE ISLAND” bone, so I think they also knew that we needed something at this point.

Just a little cleanup from last week:

• A Lost fan has been keeping track of translations of Dogen so you might be interested in checking that out.
• Remember a couple of years back when Claire was in a house in Dharmaville/the Barracks that was attacked and exploded by the crazy freighter mercenaries? It was in The Shape of Things to Come. At the time, some people made the point that it was highly unlikely that Claire could have survived such an explosion, and some people have gone back to that and developed a theory that Claire died as a result of that episode and has since been “infected.” I don’t think we have enough information to really make a judgment, but hopefully the Claire situation will be cleared up soon.
• I love that I get to say things like “Remember the attack by the crazy freighter mercenaries” and #1, you know what I mean, #2, it’s far from the craziest thing I could say about this show, and #3, man, that feels like a thousand years ago.
• And this might be the best idea EVER.

What did you all think? I loved this episode. It felt like old Lost again. That’s probably in part because some of our favorite characters, and Sayid in particular, feel like they have been basically absent from Lost for years, and now all of the sudden he’s back in a very big way. But it’s also because there was some great action and some amazing setup for what’s coming next.

Last season, I made a lot of extra work for myself by constantly updating the blog throughout the week. This season, I think I’ll try to do some catch-up work on the previous week in each new post. A few things that have garnered a lot of attention in the last week:

• Apparently, neither Sun X nor Jin X are wearing wedding bands, and Sun is going by her maiden name, Paik, instead of Jin’s last name which she had adopted in the original timeline.
• In trying to figure out why, exactly, Kate wouldn’t be a candidate, some have pointed out that while Jacob did interact with her, it wasn’t exactly successful; if she had listened to his advice and kept on the straight-and-narrow, she probably wouldn’t have ended up on the Island at all, which may have been the effect he was going for. It’s possible that Flocke’s accusation that Jacob has been manipulating all of the Losties for years is not necessarily true in Kate’s case. Also, there is some evidence that in the X timeline Kate is wanted for the murder of someone other than her stepfather.
• Also, if Locke X’s dad is just a cool dude and not a con artist, then Sawyer X should not have had the same childhood problems, since it was Locke’s dad who conned his parents.
• We’ve been starting to figure out that there’s more than one way (more than 6 ways?) for an apparition to appear on the Island, but we’re still trying to figure out what the ‘rules’ are and who can be responsible for what kind of image. For example, the creepy kid that Flocke saw in the jungle was visible to Sawyer, but not to Richard. I don’t know why, but it took forever for it to finally click with me: we know that sometimes more than one person can see a hallucination, like the time that Sawyer saw Kate’s horse in the jungle. But it didn’t occur to me that what those scenarios had in common was Sawyer. I’m just so used to him being outside of the mythological arc, and not used to him being, you know, Potential Savior of the Island.Maybe he’s got a special ability, just like Hurley’s ability to hang out with his dead pals.
• And finally: haha, Jacob’s Ladder. I get it now.

Another treat from the Ack Attack before we get to this week’s episode: if you see this and don’t totally want a Jears hoodie, you have no soul.

I have always loved Locke-centric episodes, and this episode starts off trying to sucker punch us right in the gut: with Locke being totally adorable, looking completely happy, and having an effervescently positive attitude. And then he has to go and describe Jack X as a “nice guy,” which is probably going to be how this version of Happy Locke ends up turning into Totally Freaking Miserable Locke X. That is, if you subscribe to the theory that the X timeline is going to, eventually, beat these people down to exactly the same horrible position they were in on the original timeline. That’s what I’m tending to believe, but I’d be very happy if Lost proves me wrong.