Lost: Will It End Like The Sopranos?
Fastforward to May 2010. For six years Lost fans have been following the misadventures of the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815, and it's all come down to one final hour of the show. It looks like they're going to be rescued, but the remaining Others are closing in fast, and maybe they won't get on the helicopter after all. The music begins drumming louder and louder, and suddenly the helicopter pilot puts loudspeakers in the windows of the heli, a la Apocalypse Now, only, instead of the Ride of the Valkyries, the speakers are blasting Journey's "Don't Stop Believing." Just as Sawyer, panting and out of breath from running, spits out, "SON of a BITCH, I HATE this song!" the screen suddenly goes black. Fans everywhere think their satellite has gone out, there are five seconds of blank screen, and the credits begin silently rolling. That sound you then hear is 16 million viewers screaming, "NOOOOOOOOOO!"


Don't worry. It ain't gonna happen. According to an article in the NYT yesterday, while Damon and Carlton loved the ending of The Sopranos, with its ambiguity and stadium rock (seriously, I can NOT get that song out of my head), they won't be doing the same thing. Damon told the NYT, “I’ve seen every episode of the series. I thought the ending was letter-perfect.” He explains that he went upstairs to bed following the show, but just laid there for 2 hours thinking how great it was, and how it was the perfect ending. Carlton wasn't so quick to like it, though, admitting that he was initially frustrated, but after pondering it, realized “In that blank screen, there was a certain kind of purity in the choice Chase made to make it the fulcrum of the ending.” (His reaction was more like mine, taking about a day to sink in and actually like it.)


Tim Kring, creator of Heroes, wasn't as enthusiastic. He hadn't been watching the show lately, and came back to it this season to see how it would end. He found “the storytelling in the finale a bit disjointed, so that you lost the cause and effect of some scenes.” While my immediate reaction after reading this was, "Well, it was a HELL of a lot better than YOUR finale, and you just had to wrap up one season," it also gives me a lot of hope that he's aiming for something much bigger for the ending of his show.


If the enthusiasm of Darlton makes you worried about a similar blackout on Lost, however, don't fear. A Reuters story appeared today where they qualified their statements, and assured that they wouldn't do that.


More excitingly, however, they announced that this fall they will be introducing "mobisodes" to help fill the gap between the May finale and the February startup. While these eps will be tied in to Verizon Wireless (blech), the eps will be about 90 seconds each and will eventually air on ABC.com (they hope).

Cuse said the mobisodes, about 90 seconds each, will give hardcore "Lost" viewers more information that they probably weren't going to get through the show itself. What it won't be, they said, was a mini version of "Lost."

"It needs to be interesting enough and well produced enough that people feel they're
getting enough bang for their buck, even if it's free, the bang for their time," Lindelof said.

Lindelof said the negotiations for the talent took a long time, but they wanted to make sure that all of them were involved in the mobisodes. "Nobody wanted to see two people sitting on a beach that we've never heard of talking and saying, 'Hey, did you hear what Jack and Kate did today?' You want to see Jack and Kate. It's taken us three years to get those deals in place," Lindelof said.

Now, whether or not Canadian fans will be able to access them is a different story. So to the American fans, please find a way to download them and put them on YouTube for us Canucks. ;)


Read the rest of the story for a funny mention of Nikki and Paulo. :)


In other Sopranos news, and for my reader (why isn't there more than one?) who hated the Sopranos finale, check out the Salon review, which referred to the ending as sparking riots of ziti hurling in New Jersey.


The Globe and Mail reviewer (who typically I don't give a lot of weight to, but whatever) liked it.


The National Post reviewer (ditto) did not. (But since their search engine is complete crap, I can't find it to link to it. Read the Salon review; it's better.)


And totally unrelated, here's a funny pic I found on a MySpace site. Anything to get another pic of Desmond on here. :)

In tomorrow's blog: I've seen Knocked Up, and I'm mad as hell. They TOTALLY ripped off my first pregnancy!!!!!