Lostaholics Anonymous: WE HAVE TO GO BAAAACK!

So... you might recall about two years ago I started a support group called Lostaholics Anonymous. I ran meetings every week, where we talked about specific characters, happy moments, sad moments, favourite moments in general, the ending, etc. And then... well, I intended to keep it going, but the last meeting was on January 6, 2011, a couple of days after I'd posted the first Buffy Rewatch post. And from that point on, the work I had to do on the Buffy posts each week superseded our favourite island show, and Lost-Anon just disappeared. I think about it every once in a while, and I think I started the posts as much to chat with my old Lostie pals as much as I wanted to talk about the show itself.

A couple of weeks ago I was chatting with someone who said every fall she's hugely disappointed that she can't find a show that's like Lost. I said TV certainly isn't devoid of great shows (see Homeland, Breaking Bad) but I had to agree, there was nothing quite like Lost, which was as much about putting a puzzle together as actually being a television series with a narrative. She's not alone in waiting impatiently for the new season to be announced, waiting for another show like Lost.

There were moments of excitement this fall when Revolution came out: it had JJ Abrams attached, was about a group of survivors, and had the potential to be a show with a rich mythology without being a Lost copycat. And while reviews were mixed in the beginning, it's really starting to grow on me.

When Once Upon a Time started, we giggled with the 8:15 clock and the Astro bars and Regina living at #108... and then after a couple of weeks I thought, "Okay, enough. Let's move away from Lost and make this its own show." And almost on cue, they did just that. Alcatraz had the same sweeping soundtrack, a mystery, and even time travel, and it was hard to escape the Lost undertones. And sadly, the network cancelled it before it truly had a chance to come out from under Lost's shadow.

This season I'm liking several new shows: aside from Revolution, I enjoy Nashville, Elementary, Last Resort, The Mindy Project... there's a lot of good stuff out there. But I discovered that I've stopped looking for the next Lost. Darlton's masterpiece was unique, and anything purporting to be "the next Lost" will simply come under fire by critics and fans (as it should) for trying to copy something, rather than emulate it. Now in movies and several TV shows, there's a movement towards flashbacks and mystery and serialization, and you can see the Lost influence in there, without actually copying the show.

Recently another person told me he used to come to my blog like it was a drug, and he no longer does so because Lost is over (and much like the other person, he added that he's yet to find the next Lost). And finally, a week ago our beloved Marebabe sent me an email and said, "Do you remember Lostaholics Anonymous?"And asked if I would consider starting it up again.

We're two years removed from the end of the series, and now, I think, our emotions are no longer raw, we can look back on what we love, and choose to forget what we don't. While the show was on, we talked about it to death. When it was over, we wanted to talk about it to get our mixed emotions out. And now, new fans are picking up the DVDs and discovering it for the first time, and looking for a place to discuss the show with others.

So I'd love to come back here and start talking about the show again. Once a week or once every two weeks, whatever works best for everyone. Maybe we could combine a weekly post with a Twitter live chat? (Follow me here and we could arrange that.)

So... who wants to talk?

Lostaholics Anonymous: The Lost Top 10 Episodes

Last week someone posted on my Facebook page asking if I could recommend my top 10 favourite episodes of Lost. That was a really tough question, and honestly, I can't believe I never really thought about it before. (No, really, I hadn't! What is WRONG with me??) I knew what a couple of standouts were for me, and I can easily name favourite scenes and lines and moments, but episodes? Eek. That's a toughie. Often there would be a favourite flashback for me, but the corresponding on-island stuff wasn't as interesting, but in the next episode I'd love the on-island stuff and the flashback would be a little meh. So I guess I never really stopped to come up with anything.

But after he asked me that, I really had to think about it. I know what my favourite episode is, so that was easy, but how do I rank the others? I REALLY had to think about this one a lot, but I think I've come up with them. Of course, I reserve the right to change my mind 10 minutes from now. ;) But what I'm really hoping is that this causes everyone else to come up with their top 10 and share them with all of us.

1. The Constant
2. Ab Aeterno
3. The End
4. Walkabout
5. Through the Looking Glass
6. The Shape of Things to Come
7. The Incident
8. The Cost of Living
9. Live Together, Die Alone
10. The Man Behind the Curtain

Lostaholics Anonymous: The Finale, Part 2

Hello everyone! First of all, my deepest apologies for being so lax in our Lost discussions... I’ve been busy trying to put the Buffy Rewatch together, and I’ve also been trying to catch up on TV. I don’t intend to drop Lost when the Buffy thing begins in the new year... but perhaps it won’t be every week. It’s not me attempting to let it go and move on. I wouldn’t still be talking about Lost if I thought that (and you know me, there is probably never going to be a point in my life where I DON’T talk about Lost... we’re seven years after the finale of Buffy and I’m still nattering on about that, so...) But I think the postings probably won’t be on any regular schedule.

Before we get on to tonight’s post, I just wanted to remind everyone that... my season 6 Lost book is out! I know, I know, you had NO IDEA and really wish I would have mentioned it before now! (Har. Har.) But there’s still time... time to stock up with a dozen or so copies for Christmas presents. Buy one for yourself! Buy one for your boss (that is, if you want a RAISE)! Buy one for your parents to get them watching. Buy one for your favourite Lostie. Buy one for people who loved the finale... buy one for people who hated it.

Wait... what's that you say? You already bought it? And read it? Have you posted something over on Amazon about it? Please do! :)

I received a letter from someone this week telling me that he was already obsessed with Lost to the point where he was starting to wonder if anyone around him really understood where he was coming from, and after reading my season 6 book, it actually made him love Lost more. He was writing to thank me for offering up the perspectives I did. I’m not mentioning that to brag or to use it to make you buy the book, actually... I just always find it so touching that people take the time out of their days to write me to say things like that. Usually people only contact you to say that you made a mistake somewhere in the book or you suck, but I’ve had more people say nice things than bad, and that’s really saying something about the Lost community in general, I think. That letter completely made my day. Thank you to everyone who has contacted me in some way with your thoughts on the book. It was the toughest one I had to write, so I can't begin to tell you what it means to me that you liked it.

My main reason for starting Lostaholics Anonymous was to actually get around to discussing the finale. As I mentioned in my previous Lost-Anon post, many people stayed quiet immediately following the finale because they didn’t want to bring down the tone of discussion. So I figured I’d let the topic lay low for a while, ease us in with other discussions about the characters, and then finally move back to the finale. It was easily my favourite comments board of the Lost-Anon series so far. I was away from my computer for most of the weekend, but I still remember driving back to the city on Sunday night with my phone, sitting and scrolling through the first 20 or so messages on the board and I was just so thrilled by your response.

After six months, those who didn’t like it have finally been able to come out and say they didn’t. And they weren’t mocked or ridiculed by anyone (which is what I would have expected on here... I would have been shocked if they had been) and instead there was just an outpouring of feelings and memories and emotions, both good and bad, with people listening to each other’s points and either commenting on those or offering up their own reasons.

I’ve gone through the first half of the comments and pulled out one line from each of them, and I’m posting them below. These are nowhere near the long explanations so many people give, both for and against, the finale, but it’ll give you a sense of where the discussion was going and how many different feelings were out there. For the next Lost-Anon post I’ll continue doing this, but I encourage you to keep leaving your thoughts, and feel free to debate things. No one will be rude or take you to task for anything.

Thank you for being the best group of people to discuss Lost with. I’m looking forward to continuing the discussion for a very long time with you!

Convergence:
I very much liked the final episode as a stand-alone episode. It was quite beautiful considered in isolation… But I was very much disappointed in it, and in the final season, as any kind of wrap-up of what came before. So is it fair to say I both loved and hated the final episode? Because, I did.

Dusk:
I liked the finale. I don't personally identify as outright Christian but I do believe people that have died do still watch over us.
One thing I also like to think is that Sun and Penny bonded breifly on her boat. Sun left custody of Ji Yeon to Penny.

From Nikki: (This is an amazing idea, and I thank you for putting some doubt in my head that the poor child was left to the Paiks.)

AEC:
I'm not religious at all- I'd classify myself as agnostic if I needed to pick a label, but the religious overtones of the episode didn't bother me at all. That was a theme of the show, and I'm okay with it…
At first I didn't fully understand the finale. I liked it, but was a little bit confused. However, after spending hours the night of the finale reading about other's opinions on the episode, I began to understand it more. Once I did, I loved it. The last few scenes are some of my favorite of the show…

Lisa (until further notice):
I loved the finale…I'm ok with not having all the answers to the burning questions. Too many answers would have led to disappointment. Maybe it is because Darlton didn't really have all the answers. I'm alright with that.

Marebabe:
From Nikki: (Her response was spread over 2 comments and was very thought-provoking, so I urge you to go and read it):
I must admit that, even when reading Fishbiscuit’s post on “The End” (the ultimate disgusted, angry rant!) I found myself nodding in agreement at times, thinking, “You’ve got a point.” How I wish that were not the case! I still love LOST, and I love this amazing community of LOST fans, but I feel let down by the finale.

QuestionMark:
I think that, in the grand scheme of things, LOST's finale affected people in so many different ways because the concept of afterlife, faith, and a celestial way station will obviously differ from person to person. Death is a personal thing for everyone, and it's totally understandable that people would disagree with how Darlton chose to portray it.

Fred:
in the end, the finale wasn't bad, at least. It contained a certain emotional power that most of the audeience felt deeply, but it suffered more from a poor Season with lackluster episodes that preceded it (perhaps too much was expected of the finale).

Lt McDi:
Something I noticed during all the criticism was a real lack of clear workable ideas on how Lost might have ended better. I've read stuff that revolves around plot points but an end is more than just a bunch of resolved plot points.

AliBags:
I think my disappointment was due to my own tastes and beliefs. I don't like religious sentimentality, I have no belief in an afterlife whatsoever. This shouldn't have bothered me though, because as a teacher of literature I know how to suspend my disbelief! I think I was just didn't like what the Sideways world turned out to be and as I've Nikki mentioned in her book, the fact the one of final scenes was set in a church was a real turn-off…
I watched it again last week for the first time, and this time felt a little more of the emotion. Watching the special features on the DVDs has really helped me too. I have fallen back in love with Darlton. I've just tonight watched the pilot with the commentary again and it truly was a remarkable piece of TV. The Finale was never going to be good as the Pilot but I admit, it isn't as bad as I originally thought.

Quarks:
I absolutely loved the finale… As for why they are in a church at the end, I think that is more for Jack than for anything else. As I mentioned in a earlier comment, Jack was essentially their leader, and he needed to be able to move on before they could all move on together. While it is never explicitly said that Jack is a Christian, he was going to have his father's funeral in a church, and I think this event, of laying his father to rest and finally being able to let go of him, was what caused them to be in the church at the end, not because of what it is, but because of what was going to happen there. Christian Shepherd was who turned Jack into who he was, the man who saved so many lives and the Island, and it was him who needed to guide Jack to the afterlife. And where better for him to do that than where Jack could finally let go of him.

Susan:
Nikki I appreciate your comments about the people who didn't like the finale. I am one of them… I've been told that I "didn't get it" or "wanted everything answered." But the reasons for disliking season 6 have nothing to do with these reasons. If you take away the whole FS, season 6 fits in well with the other 5. But the FS don't fit in, and Lost becomes something different from what I thought it was... In my opinion, they wasted too much of the season on something that wasn't real… To me the FS, which comprise about half of season 6, were just an excuse for D&C to bring back some much-missed dead characters.

Lee:
My feelings about the "Lost" series finale have not changed one iota since it originally aired. I loved it then, I still love it now, and thought it was the perfect ending to the show.

Jen:
I have never been so overwhelmed by emotion as I was by this finale - I LOVED it… As for those who didn't like it, I get it. If it was about the answers, then this episode didn't deliver. But I think that the whole of LOST was a critique of this way of thinking - A critique of the modernist quest to master the unknown. Jack went from a character who needed to master the unknown - to understand everything rationally - to one who realized that the deepest truths of being human cannot be understood with our reason - they are to be understood by understand what story we are a part of (for Jack, the story of the Island) and embracing our place in it. The meaning LOST was in the realm of the non-rational, (not to be confused with the irrational), the spiritual.

Rick Rische:
Count me in the group that loved the finale. As an atheist, I wasn't put off by the climactic scene in the church… And those last 10 minutes are brutally emotional, raw in some places. The scene where Jack and Christian embrace in one of the most powerful scenes I've ever seen on television.

Pamalamb:
If Lost were just any ordinary show I think the details of it all would have been much more important to me. Lost was so much more than an ordinary show; it was a show about so much of what makes life important, and in the end I think it was true to that.

LittleMo:
It’s quite a shame for me really to be left with what for me is an illogical and unsatisfactory ending where only minor changes to those last few minutes and what Christian said could have (in my eyes) 'fixed it' - or at least made it more logical and consistent… I love all the rest of lost - its just the last 10 minutes that don't work for me.

lostinyoureyes:
I am religious (well, I try, anyway), but for a period in my life was fairly agnostic. So I felt very comfortable with the religious overtones in the show in general, but do sympathize with those for whom the finale was a turnoff because of that.

Joan Crawford:
I both loved and was disappointed by the ending. These two halves exist simultaneously and fiercely independent of each other inside my body. In the head area.
From Nikki: (Joanie, never change!)

Efthymia:
The church thing, it didn't bother me at all, and I'm an atheist. They didn't label the "moving on" as Paradise -as far as I'm concerned, they may as well have moved on into inexistence- and I believe they were very careful not to favour any religion. Like you said, it was just a convenient place where all these people could meet. Plus, it wasn't any old church, it was a church we were familiar with, a DHARMA station, so its symbolism might not have been religious at all.
Therefore, any problems I have with LOST (lack of answers, faith's prevalence), I have with the show in its entirety; the issues that bother me are issues that should have been taken care of before the finale. So, yes, I liked it.

Lostaholics Anonymous: The Finale

Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s Lostaholics Anonymous (LA). As I mentioned, I wrote most of this earlier this week, but this is an important entry for me, so I wanted to make sure it was OK, and this week has been a busy one. My book continues to sell well on Amazon (yay!) so please go here to check it out or to leave a review if you’ve already got a copy. I apologize for the EXTREMELY slow mail service... I sent one out on Wednesday this week and was told there’s some “delay” going on at the border, where the border police are searching all packages... ugh. (That, of course, doesn’t explain why the Canadian copies are taking so long to get there!)

Anyway, I do hope you’re enjoying the book if you have one already. I also want to mention that I’ve decided to undertake another initiative on this blog, and I’ll be announcing it next week. I hope some of you are interested in taking part! LA will continue, but I’m going to start focusing on another show, and I hope you’ll like my choice! I owe you guys SO many blog posts it’s ridiculous. I swear every day I’m cooking up blog posts in my head, but never find the time to actually get them onto the blog itself.

OK! And now... it’s time for the finale! Now, I could talk about this endlessly (ask anyone who’s spoken to me since May 23) but I’d like to direct you to the 50-page analysis I have included in my season 6 book.... I wrote 22,000 words (and have to write a much shorter piece for an upcoming book on TV finales I’ll be telling you about soon), and yet I still feel like it’s only the beginning of everything I want to say about it.

I know the finale was polarizing. In the days following the finale, I excitedly took to this blog, talking about various aspects of it and why I loved it, I began to notice certain regular posters had gone silent. And that’s when I realized that while I love the fact that we don’t tend to break out into hostile fights, or people aren’t dismissive or rude to others (which is typical of most other commenting forums), the people who didn’t like the finale had decided to go silent rather than cast a pall over the blog. I felt uncomfortable about that, and welcomed varying opinions. But even when those people began weighing in, they did so with some hesitancy, again worried about offending people.

When I was working on the book, I was concerned about writing the finale. It hung over the writing of the entire book (because, yes, I wrote almost the entire thing after the finale aired... I’m apparently a masochist) and I was at once excitedly anticipating getting there (making notes the entire time I was working on the other episodes) and intimidated about taking on such a huge task. When I’d finished a first draft of it, I sent it to one of the regulars who hadn’t been thrilled by the finale, and asked if he might read it for me to make sure I hadn’t been dismissive of those who didn’t like it, and on the second draft, I infused some of his comments back into it to make sure I was giving weight to both sides of the argument. I was helped, too, by the fact that my editor was among those who didn’t like it, so she was able to challenge me on some of my comments. But in the end, I loved the finale, and wanted to let people know why.

Since the book has come out, many people have sent me personal emails and messages telling me that they didn’t like the finale, and after reading my analysis of it they’ve come around to liking it, or to at least understanding it. One woman told me she went back and rewatched it after reading my analysis, liked it, and watched it again, and loved it. I was absolutely delighted to read this.

But it’s not for everyone. The reasons I loved it are many, and listed in my book. Yes, it had Christian overtones, and I do understand why many people were turned off by that. But I saw it as being in keeping with everything that had come before it: I will admit up front that I’m a Christian (I’ve never denied it) but Charlie and Rose prayed to God, we saw Charlie as a practising Catholic in Manchester, and his heroin was hidden in Virgin Mary statues; Eko had biblical verses on his stick, built a Christian church, was a priest, said the 23rd Psalm after burning his brother’s corpse, wore Yemi’s cross; the missing Orientation reel was found in a bible; Ben analyzed the painting of Doubting Thomas; Richard Alpert was a religious man who wears his wife’s cross to remind him of her; Desmond was a monk who made “Moriah Vineyards” wine, named after the mountain where Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac; biblical references abound in every season of the show... for it all to come down to some sort of Christian-seeming reference shouldn’t have come out of left field for anyone.

However, Christian references throughout are things that any fan can handle, Christian or not... using Christian iconography in the finale was less palatable for people. I said at a fan convention in the summer that perhaps if Christian had said to Jack, “Let’s go find out” and they opened the door and walked out onto the beach, where everyone else would be standing, that might have worked better. There were some gasps, and “Aahhhhhs” from the audience, until one woman raised her hand and said, “But if they did that, wouldn’t a lot of fans immediately assume that if the afterlife is the beach, then that means they’d all died in the plane crash after all?” Oh. Right.

So there goes that idea.

But, church aside, I felt like the message being sent out at the end is that the purpose of life is to know who your friends are, who is with you in the end, who was most important to you, who affected your life, and only then will you discover who you were. It wasn’t about being at one with a higher power, but about finding that higher power in friendships and the connections we make in life. It all came down to love... loving each other, loving ourselves, loving our parents and children.

That’s what I took from the show. It’s OK if you didn’t. Because the important thing about Lost was how personal it was. What I took from it and what you did are probably two very different things – it spoke to each of us, and that’s why the reaction to it has been so wide and varied.

The other major criticism of the show: It didn’t answer all of the questions. I’d like to hold off on this one for another post, and instead focus on the aspects of the finale that I’ve talked about here (unless, for you, it was the lack of answers that made you dislike it).

So here’s my questions for you: did you like or love the finale? If so, why? If you didn’t like it, why didn’t you? And now that it’s almost 6 months after the finale aired (Tuesday will mark half a year!), have your feelings about the finale changed at all?

Lostaholics Anonymous: Ben Linus

Hello and welcome to this week’s Lostaholics Anonymous. The book is out now, I’ve done a couple of interviews, and it’s up to NINE reviews on Amazon! I’m so excited!! Every time I check in and see another one I have another little squeal of excitement. I just discovered this week that the first week of the book’s sales were higher than any other first week of any of the series, so that was also a very happy moment for me. I guess all that media I did way back in May paid off after all! ;) (In case you’re wondering, I also have a copy of the gigantic Lost Encyclopedia and I hope to get a review up soon on that one.) Once again, if you’ve bought the book on Amazon and liked it, please head on over and leave a review on there. It helps with the book’s visibility, especially around Christmas when it will get overshadowed by all the Justin Bieber memoirs. ;)

I’m so sorry to be so late on this week’s L.A. post. My day job is bleeding into my evenings lately because I’m too busy, but this was a week I’ve been looking forward to for a while (even though Fringe is on RIGHT NOW I’m writing this up... because that’s how much I care about you guys!). We’ve covered off the main dude, the main gal, the third corner of that love triangle, and John Locke, and now it’s time for... the villain.

Oh yes, it’s Ben Linus night!! Where do I start with Ben??

Last year when we were doing the Lost rewatch of seasons one through five, there was a lot of excitement in the first half of season 2. It wasn’t because it was where Desmond first showed up (OK, maybe a little over here) or because of the science vs. faith arguments happening in the Swan, but because of one refrain... “Two more episodes until Henry Gale! One more episode until Henry Gale!” Oh Henry Gale... you showed up on my TV and my favourite show was never the same.

From the moment he Keyser Soze’d the entire group of survivors and walked down the dock in those rags, Ben Linus was the fave character among many fans. I’m sure there are people out there who didn’t like him (and if you’re out there, I’m dying to know what you thought if you didn’t like him) but many of us loved him. LOATHED him, but loved loathing him. Michael Emerson played him with such aplomb, it was an absolute joy watching week to week and wondering just what this guy was going to do next.

In season 2 he pretended to be Henry Gale, almost got himself killed, but ended up getting two other people killed instead. He appeared to be the head guy, no matter what he’d told Sayid, and by the end of season 2 we just assumed they were all following his lead. In season 3 we immediately saw his vulnerability – he had a tumour on his spine and needed Jack to perform surgery – but he continued to be deliciously evil, while apparently following (begrudgingly, it seemed) some guy named Jacob. At the end of that season we finally got the Linus flashback, and saw there was once a time when this cold, heartless villain had been a sad, sweet, scared little boy who just wanted his mother back.

In season 4 he saw his power slip away, he lost the respect of his followers, and he was forced to follow John Locke, who appeared to have taken his place. It added more of a comic element to Ben (even though he’d always been hilarious before then, IMO), while flashforwards revealed the return of cold, heartless Ben as he turned Sayid into a hitman and then just left him there. Losing Alex was the thing that changed him utterly when he went off the island, and meant he had nothing more to lose, so he could play the game even more wildly than he’d done before. In season 5 we saw him kill John Locke and return his body to the island, but at the end of the season there was a turning point in Ben. Just as he’d resigned himself to having lost all his power, he suddenly came face to face with Jacob and realized his life had all been a sham. He killed Jacob out of feeling underappreciated, but quickly knew that he’d been a pawn of the Man in Black all along, and had never been one of the good guys, even though he’d thought he was.

Season 6, sadly, left us a little bereft of our Ben. He had some great moments in “Mr. Linus” and his sideways world self was a wonderful display of what could have happened to Ben had his life turned out differently (and had he made different choices along the way) but evil Ben wasn’t really there in the way we usually liked. By the end of the series he’d been redeemed, and became Hurley’s Number Two, where he actually became (finally) a useful and important follower of the island.

There are some great Ben moments that cannot be overlooked. The first great Ben moment happens at the end of “The Whole Truth” in season 2, when Locke and John finally let Ben out of the armoury to give him something to eat.

GALE: This must be my reward for good behavior, huh? I guess I earned myself some good will for finally drawing that map for Ana.
LOCKE: What map?
GALE: To my balloon.
JACK: [to Locke] Did you...
LOCKE: No.
GALE: Wow, you guys have some real trust issues, don't you? Guess it makes sense she didn't tell you. I mean, with the two of you fighting all the time. Of course, if I was one of them -- these people that you seem to think are your enemies -- what would I do? Well, there'd be no balloon, so I'd draw a map to a real secluded place like a cave or some underbrush -- good place for a trap -- an ambush. [Gales pours himself some cereal.] And when your friends got there a bunch of my people would be waiting for them. Then they'd use them to trade for me. I guess it's a good thing I'm not one of them, huh? [Pause.] You guys got any milk?

I still remember the glorious shivers that ran through me after that scene. BRILLIANT.

My other fave Ben line:

LOCKE: Can I ask you a question?
BEN: I’m a Pisces.

Ha!! Not only is that the best Ben comeback ever, but considering we know his birthday was on December 19, he’s even lying about THAT!

No, wait... that wasn’t the best Ben comeback ever. This was:

JACK: How can you read?
BEN: My mother taught me.

Again, brilliant because not only is it filled with snark, but if his mother died giving birth to him, then she couldn’t have taught him to read.

Oh Ben. How I miss you.

What are your favourite Ben Linus moments?

Next week: Sharpen your pens (or... um... typing fingers?) and load those chef’s knives in the dishwasher pointy-end up! After five weeks of talking about the characters, I’ve decided to pause on them for a bit and jump right into the finale. We’re going to start with why we loved or hated it, and whether our thoughts of have changed between our initial reaction and how we feel now, then that discussion will probably go on for a bit (I might even have a couple of biweekly LA posts to deal with it) before we move to some specifics. This is the discussion I’ve wanted to have from the beginning, but figured it might be better to ease us in by talking about our favourite moments, and then characters. But now it’s time to talk about the meat of this thing: the finale. Looking forward to it!

Lostaholics Anonymous: John Locke

I'm getting more and more emails from people this week saying they've finally gotten a copy of my book (I can't believe how slow the mail is sometimes, yeesh!) And my first two reviews of the book are up at Amazon, and I was thrilled!! OMG, it's actually four! (I just went there to grab the link for y'all, and found two more! I'm not doing my authorly duty of checking the page every 42 minutes.) If there's anyone out there reading this who left one of them, thank you thank you!! And here's another plea from me that if you've bought the book through amazon, please post a review (if you liked it, obviously) and if you bought it from me, you can still post a review on Amazon if you've bought anything from them recently. Now I'm all giddy.

OK, but the giddiness must STOP because tonight we're going to tackle what might be my favourite topic on Lost: John Locke. Tonight rather than going through John Locke's life, I'm going to make this a more personal account of him. If you've read any of my books (all now available at Amazon at a reasonable price!) you'll know how much I love to write about this character. I could write an entire book on just him... In each of the books, when I got to the first Locke episode of the season, I'd write a mini-essay on my thoughts on Locke thus far and why that character was so important to me. If you want my full analysis of the character, his backstory, and what made him tick throughout the full series, check out my new book, pages 38-45, 214-221, and page 239. There you'll find everything from talking about his life to the long conflict between him and Jack that informed much of the series' direction. But I want to make this a more personal "what John Locke meant to me" entry. Because he meant a lot.

I remember back in season 1 when I was a casual fan of the show (no, really, I was once a person who just watched it once and turned the channel and never thought about discussing it... to quote Ben, "hhhhhwaaaat??") that even then, I assumed John Locke was the key. It wasn't Jack or Kate, but Locke. There was something mysterious about him. And besides, he'd seen into the eye of that island, and what he saw... was beautiful.

Many people talk about being impressed from the show right from the beginning of the pilot episode, and I remember at the end of that episode knowing I'd found a great new show to watch. But it was when I saw the end of "Walkabout" that I knew I was watching a tour de force show. This show wouldn't just be a favourite, but would become an obsession, and it was the idea that John Locke had experienced some sort of miracle -- a plot twist that is kept from us throughout that episode until the final scene -- that suddenly made him more important.

John Locke lived a sad life. He was a successful hunter on the island in season 1, and seemed to appear from out of nowhere all the time, offering sage advice and being the wizened Gandalf to everyone on the island. He told Jack that he needed to figure out how to lead before he could be a leader. He emerged from the jungle suddenly to talk to Kate and Sawyer and tell them the story of his sister dying when he was a kid. He was confident and brave and intelligent. But then he found the Hatch. And then Boone died. And Jack hated him. And then he looked into the eye of the island... and saw a monster.

His backstories right from season 1 onwards were always the cause of much anticipation and celebration. Walkabout was amazing. Deus Ex Machina was heartbreaking. Remember that scene where John is sitting in the car drinking the coffee and casing Cooper's house when Cooper gets into the car and tells him to go away? Cooper is cold and ruthless and has no heart, and he leaves the car, slams the door, and John sits there. For a moment he looks like he's fine. He takes a sip of his coffee. Purses his lips. Glances at the house. And then crumples and bursts into tears. It's an extraordinary moment, and if I wasn't already convinced Terry O'Quinn was one of the best actors going, that scene clinched it.

I always wanted to hug John. I wanted him to be OK. He seemed like the sort of kid who was bullied, whose parents didn't want him. That scene in "Cabin Fever" where Alpert leaves John behind and tells him he's wrong and the little boy looks after him, looking sad that he didn't get to go with the nice man, breaks my heart every time. He was just a kid. Or that scene earlier in that same episode of the little baby in the incubator looking out at his Mommy, who just turns and abandons him because she's a selfish, unstable brat.

Locke never gives up. And that's part of the reason why he was so wonderful and pathetic and sad and inspirational to us. In "Deus Ex Machina" when he sees his mother in the parking lot at the store and he gets knocked over by a car, then jumps up and begins running after her again, it was the perfect metaphor for who this guy is. He ALWAYS gets back up. His mom abandons him, he lives with a foster family. Alpert abandons him, he just keeps going. He finds his long-lost father and is abandoned and cheated by him, but he finds Helen and keeps going. Helen leaves him, he finds a commune and hangs out with them. They abandon him, he goes home and goes into a depression but pulls himself together long enough to try to convince Cooper to leave the woman he's conning. Cooper pushes him out a window, and it would seem that in that moment, he gives up everything. (Again, O'Quinn astonishes with that tremendous scene where he's trapped in the wheelchair for the first time.) But when Abaddon tells him to go on the walkabout, he pulls himself up, trains, and goes. And then the walkabout says no. He gathers his wits and gets back on a plane. It crashes. And then he gets up and walks. And for the first time, John REALLY, truly believes that the universe is on his side.

On the island he goes through one thing after another, and again, always bounces back. He never gives up, except one brief moment where he puts a gun to his head, but then he's stopped, and keeps going.

And that's why it's so heartbreaking, devastating, and shocking that after EVERYTHING this man has gone through, he's ultimately killed by Ben Linus before fulfilling his life's mission.

But, as I argue in my book, I believe that the Man in Black looks like Locke for a reason, and I outline it there. I don't believe his life was for nothing, because it was his belief, his faith, that drove Jack to become the person he did by the end of the season, and to save the island.

I adore John Locke, and the thought of him fills me with sadness and pain. I think I actually miss his character more than just about anyone, and yet he wasn't even there for the final season. But his life was incredible. When Smokey looks at Ben and says that Locke's final thought was, "I don't understand," he adds, "Isn't that just about the saddest thing you've ever heard?"

Yes. Yes it is.

Lostaholics Anonymous: Sawyer

Hello and welcome to this week's Lostaholics Anonymous. First, a few housekeeping things. My book is now shipping from Amazon, and you can pick up a copy here. If you already have a copy, either from me or through Amazon, here is my first request to go and leave a positive review (if you liked it, of course!) on the Amazon site. It's a tough sell to put out a book on a show after the show is over, especially on a season that was as divisive as this one. More reviews (and more stars!) will certainly help it stand out! And you will have my undying gratitude. And it will end this gnawing worry in my stomach of, "OMG, what if they all HATE it?!"

Secondly, I've been meaning to mention this for WEEKS and I apologize for not saying anything until now, but for months people have been asking me if I'm planning on hosting another Lost rewatch now that the series is over. I don't actually have plans to do that -- I would love to, but it took a LOT of my time last year, and I didn't end up having much of a break at all between books, which left me pretty exhausted by the end of this past summer. (It had been book... rewatch... new season... book.) But, I wanted to point you in the direction of a really fantastic rewatch happening right now with our own Matt Roeser (he of the wicked Lost finale parties). Matt and his co-hort, Justin, were smart enough to bring in guest bloggers so they wouldn't fall behind, and this week they're up to "All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues." Check it out here, and get involved in some pretty amazing Lost discussions.

OK! But now onto our favourite redneck. Now, many people would argue that Sawyer was never that important a character. I mean sure, he was some pretty awesome eye candy, but take him out of the mix, and does the show really change that much?

Well, anyone who says that clearly didn't experience the same terror I did at the beginning of season 3 when Pickett was holidng a gun to Sawyer's head and threatening to pull the trigger. I REALLY thought he was going to do it. And to suggest he's not important undermines the immense growth his character went through.

Buffy was a show about Buffy. And Angel was a show about Angel. And yet, they weren't the ones who underwent the most development over the runs of their shows. That honour fell to Willow and Wesley respectively. Wesley went from a bumbling slapstick punchline to one of the most extraordinarily realized characters I've ever seen on a TV show. Willow began as a shy bookworm and ended it as a confident goddess.

The thing about Lost is, many characters evolved -- think no further than Jack's journey from man of science to man of faith. But Sawyer was a special circumstance because he was so complex. Not even the audience knew what he was thinking, and that's a combination of great writing, of evolving a character because he was interesting to viewers, and great acting on the part of Josh Holloway.

When we first see Sawyer, he's an angry, belligerent man who separates himself from the group, setting himself apart as the "every man for himself" type who looks out for himself and no one else. This is not a team player. What we didn't know right away was that Sawyer was also broken -- his parents had died when he was young, he'd taken on the name and con game of the man who was responsible for their deaths, and he'd just killed a man in error in Sydney, having been used by a scumbag who just needed to get rid of someone who owed him a debt. He has a child by a woman he had fallen in love with during a long con, and he'd set up a trust fund for his daughter for when she comes of age. When we finally realize there's a lot more to Sawyer than meets the eye, he became a lot more than just a pretty face.

By the end of season 1 he was playing well with others, helping to build a raft to try to procure rescue. At the beginning of season 2, he was faced with a new group of people -- The Tailies -- and had begun to realize when he set himself apart from them as their enemy that it meant he was part of the other group. It didn't stop him from turning on all of them in The Long Con and declaring himself sheriff, but it wasn't long before he was part of the foursome that had been kidnapped by the Others, and when he was hauled off to the cages and forced to break rocks, he realized he had fallen in love with Kate. They slept together, but he soon figured out that Kate still had feelings for Jack. He returned to the camp where he joyously discovered Dharma beer, joked around with his buddies, realized that Hurley had missed him, and he slowly began to integrate himself into the group. When Locke showed himself and led Sawyer off to The Brig, he was finally face-to-face with the man he'd devoted his entire life to destroying.

And this was where Sawyer became James Ford. He killed Anthony Cooper and then fell to the floor, devastated to find out that that pain in his gut hadn't gone away. Killing Sawyer had done nothing to change the way he'd felt for most of his life. Suddenly, he was 8 years old again, and writing that vengeful letter. Cooper's death didn't bring them back to life, and vengeance hadn't paid off. James now returned to the group very angry and isolated. At the beginning of season 4, he believed he was about to be rescued, but he had a connection with John Locke now, and when all signs pointed to the freighter folk being imposters, Sawyer left Kate and Jack and joined the opposite side. And it was with Locke's group that he became more of a leader. He rushed into a burning building and grabbed Claire out of it. He found Aaron in the crook of a tree and saved him, then led the group back to the beach. And when he could actually taste freedom, he knew someone had to stay behind in order to get the helicopter to the freighter, and so he did something that no one else could bring themselves to do: He jumped.

Back on the island, he time-jumped back to 1974, began a relationship with Juliet, and suddenly found himself a real sheriff, with a real sheriff's badge (that was embroidered onto his Dharma jumpsuit), and people looked up to him as their leader who was there to protect them.

Three years later, he was happily in a relationship, content for possibly the first time in his life, when Kate and the others returned. And with them came the complex feelings he'd had before, the memories of what had gone on between him and Kate, the pain of losing her, the animosity with Jack, the jerk he'd been with Hurley, and the realization that Locke -- the only other person who knew about what he did to Cooper -- was dead. Soon he found himself unveiled as a Dharma imposter, on the run and wielding a gun, and beating the living crap out of Jack in the jungle. And then... Juliet was dead.

In the final season Sawyer was dealing with the grief of losing the woman he loved after all -- and the reality of realizing too late that she'd been the one he truly loved -- and he went AWOL, shunning Kate but aligning himself with the Man in Black. After Jack defeated the Man in Black and saved the island, Sawyer joined Kate and the others as they left the island on an airplane. After he died, his sideways world existence was a reflection of the one he'd lived in real life: he was a cop, people listened to him, he was there to serve and protect, but he still had his demons. While on the one hand he was on the good side of the law, on the other he was still searching for his Sawyer, determined to get the same vengeance he'd found on the island. Constantly torn in two directions, his life was as fragmented as his image in the mirror that he smashed at the precinct. But in his awakening moment, he was reunited with Juliet, and he found the peace, happiness, and love he'd been seeking. Sawyer no longer meant anything to him, and all he cared about was her.

As much as he seemed to stand apart from the other characters throughout the series, if the finale showed that everything came down to connection, then Sawyer's story was of great importance: When he separated himself from them all, living a solitary life, he couldn't get ahead. He only found peace and happiness when he connected with them and worked together as part of a team, or leading them.

Sawyer was a character who you loved despite everything he did: whether he was conning Kate or Jack or Sun, or mocking Hurley, or taking advantage of Shannon's agony when she was having an asthma attack, or undermining Jack, there was just something about him that made him charming enough to keep liking.

But he was also a character that divided fans, like Kate did. Many didn't like him, or thought he was all but useless in the show's final season. The adamant Skaters were furious that he didn't end up with Kate, while the Suliets were over the moon at what happened in the sideways world with him in the finale. So where do you stand? Do you think Sawyer was a worthy character on the show?

Lostaholics Anonymous: Kate

Hello and welcome to another week of Lostaholics Anonymous. This week we're going to talk about a character who has split audiences down the middle: Kate Austen.

Kate was the first character who got her own full flashback, season 1's third episode, Tabula Rasa. As a little girl, Kate hung around with her childhood sweetheart, Tommy. The two of them tried to steal a NKOTB lunchbox from a local convenience store, but were caught. Crisis was averted when Jacob purchased the box for her, and she and Tommy took it back to his house, where they filled it with their favourite childhood objects, including Tommy's toy airplane. They included a cassette tape of the two of them talking and imagining what they'll be like when they've grown up -- will they get married?

Kate's mother Diane was married to Sam, Kate's military father, but they broke up and Diane married Wayne, a louse who beat her. The show implied that he may have molested Kate in some way, or at least made inappropriate moves on her. When Kate discovered that Wayne was actually her father, she killed him, disgusted that he could actually be in her. She became a fugitive, and was chased to Australia, caught, and ended up in a plane to LA that never got there.

But what interests fans the most isn't what happened to Kate before the crash -- it's what happened after. Namely... Sawyer or Jack? Now, shipping is something I tend to beg people not to do here. You start a shipper war, it takes down the whole blog. So, for this one meeting, I'm going to let you battle it out. Just please... keep it nice. Don't be inflexible; listen to the other side and be polite.

So... in this corner, we have Kate and Sawyer. He's the bad boy who excites her, who she sleeps with and truly does care about, but who makes her feel guilty about what she's done. He reminds her of another bad boy, the one she killed, and just like she didn't want Wayne to be a part of her, she doesn't want to admit that she's actually attracted to a man who's killed someone before. But Sawyer loves her, and even though he plays games with her in the beginning, she's the one person who makes him stop lying to himself and everyone else.

In this corner, we have Kate and Jack. He's the doctor, the good guy that her parents would be proud of, but he also makes her feel guilty. Throughout season 1, on the one hand he tells her that whatever she did isn't his business, but then he wears a key around his neck that would open a briefcase that she wants, hinting that he has the power over her to open it or keep it closed. He does love her, and off the island they fall in love and become a couple. She excites him and makes him feel like a better person, but Kate also keeps secrets, and Jack can't stand secrets. Ultimately, on the show, Kate chose Jack while Sawyer chose Juliet. Do you agree with her decision? Do you care?

For me, the most important thing about Kate was her relationship to Aaron. In season 5 it was like we were introduced to a new Kate. Where she could never make up her mind between Sawyer and Jack, her love for Aaron was unwavering. She came alive with him, and laughed and loved unconditionally and was loved unconditionally in return. Jack and Sawyer always seemed to want something from her, but Aaron just wanted her to be his mommy.

And therein lay her dilemma, because she knew she couldn't be his mommy. So she left him and returned to the island, finding Claire and bringing her back. Along the way she reignited Sawyer's feelings for her momentarily, before the death of Juliet reminded Sawyer that he actually loved Juliet more. But that wasn't Kate's fault; she wasn't there for Sawyer, and she wasn't there for Jack. She was there for Aaron.

Kate has always been someone who has been used, makes decisions, and then has the people she love turn on her for those decisions. No one ever seems to agree with her, she tries to make decisions that will help others, but so often those decisions backfire and she ends up hurting people by accident. Kate has a lot of guilt and pain in her, but she soldiers on.

In the second half of the series, there was a LOT of Kate Hate. People loathed her, either because they didn't want to see her with either man, or they didn't think she contributed much to the show, or they were simply annoyed by her. But I always liked Kate. I liked that she didn't listen. I liked that she did things her way. I liked her tomboyishness and her independence. I liked her vulnerability. I liked that she put others before herself all the time.

For me, when Kate walked up to Jack after the concert in the finale and says, "I missed you so much," my heart breaks every time. We can imagine that Kate left that island and probably pined for Jack for the rest of her life, and to see him again must have filled her with so much joy. And yet it's Aaron who is the spark that causes her to remember... her connection to him is so strong. Who can watch the scene where she says, "Bye bye baby" without crying? I can't.

I loved Kate, and I miss her as much as any character. But what did you think about her?

And my Finding Lost: Season 6 book is finally available for order on Amazon; copies of this gigantic book started shipping last Sunday. I heard that it's taking entire trucks to bring one copy to people's houses!* Get your copy here!

*This might not actually be 100% true.

LOST: Jack Was All About Fun

This week's Lostaholics Anonymous featured a long discussion about Jack, and I realized I'd forgotten to post the above image to go with it, which was sent to me late last week by artist Richard Rische, designed by his friend Mike Steffler. Love it.

I mentioned that as much as I adored that character, he was always fun to poke fun at because he was just so damn serious. A friend of mine forwarded me this video last week asking if I'd seen it, and I said not only had I seen it, but I used to post it on a regular basis here because it killed me every time. And in light of our discussion, I thought hey, let's post it AGAIN!! This might be my all-time fave Lost fan video.

Lostaholics Anonymous: Jack

Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s instalment of Lostaholics Anonymous, the place where we Lost fans gather and continue to discuss our favourite aspects of our favourite show.

Before we begin with this week’s meeting I just wanted to mention that I’m continuing to take orders for Finding Lost: Season 6, and am now actually sending out the copies to people (Batcabbage will be the first person to hold a copy outside of North America, and the race is on to see who within North America will be the first to receive theirs!) If you’re interested, the cost is $28.95 CDN if you live in Canada, $28.95 US if you live in the U.S., and $29.95 U.S. for overseas (that’s surface mail, which will probably take 4-6 weeks to get there... if you want it via airmail, it’s $48.95, but I’d go with the surface option if I were you!) You can paypal me at my email account, or just drop me an email if you have any further questions. I’m sticking in 5 bookmarks with each order (one for each of your Finding Lost books) and signing and personalizing each copy.

Otherwise, you can go to Amazon and grab a copy here... and save some money!

OK! So back to the meeting... As mentioned last week, I’m going to start focusing on the characters, and this week we’re going to begin with Jack.

The entire series opened with Jack’s eye, and the moment he became aware of his surroundings, Jack was a hero, leaping up to run to the beach and save everyone he could. He resuscitated Rose, he calmed Claire, he yelled for Hurley and Claire to get out of the way, he called to John Locke and forced him to stand for the first time, he helped Boone busy himself as Boone recovered from the shock of the crash. And then, and only then, did he crawl into the woods to try to deal with his own huge wound on the side of his ribs.

By inadvertently establishing himself as the alpha male, Jack became the one that everyone looked up to, and he didn’t want to be leader, but once he realized that the survival of the people depended on it, he stepped up and accepted the responsibility. The first flashback we get is Jack’s (the first full-length one is Kate’s, but the first person we see on Oceanic Flight 815 is Jack), and the first person we see as a child is Jack. In the first season he had three full flashbacks (White Rabbit, All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues, and Do No Harm) and his flashbacks were featured in the pilot and finale episodes that season. Most of his background focused on the father who dogged him for not having what it took.

In season 1 Jack was mostly a hero, although he had his moments of annoyingness, which early on garnered him some loud detractors. While Jack was no doubt the reason most of the people were alive, he had this holier-than-thou attitude about him that could grate on viewers. (Much of it, unfortunately, can be chalked up to an inconsistency in the writing in the first season.) One week he was pleasant to Kate, and seemed charming and adorable; the next he was in her face, demanding to know her past and dangling the key in front of her and reminding her that it was around HIS neck and SHE couldn’t have it.

In season 2, Jack was defined as the nemesis of John Locke. Locke believed in the island, and had faith that there was a greater force at work. Jack believed no such thing. He argued with John until he was blue in the face, screaming that science was the only thing he believed in, and he wasn’t going to put any stock in faith in a higher power he couldn’t see. Much of his lack of faith stemmed back to his past, and in season 2 those flashbacks focused on those. We saw he’d miraculously saved a woman from being paralyzed, then married her, only to break up with her again when she couldn’t deal with his intensity. Jack was obsessive-compulsive, needing to fix things and doing whatever it took to achieve what he needed to... but in many ways, just as his father said, he simply didn’t have what it took, and was always frustrated.

In season 3, Jack was taken by the Others, and when he saw Kate with Sawyer, he told them to go, and he stayed behind. He seemed to become chummy with them, cozied up to Juliet, and bargained a way off the island... until Locke blew up the sub. Cue Jack vs. Locke, Round 2.

In season 4, Jack broke ties with half the group, taking the other half to the freighter folk, believing they were there to rescue him. He was wrong, but somehow he managed to get off the island with the people he was with, and through flashforwards we saw him make a happy life with Kate... until the guilt of leaving everyone behind finally caught up to him. Jack might have been an alcoholic obsessive person who could never stay in a healthy relationship, but he was a good person. He knew he’d left them behind, he knew that he might have been wrong, and rather than dismissing every single word John Locke had ever said to him... he focused on all of them. He remembered everything Locke told him, and those words began to eat away at him. He began to wonder if maybe the island really WAS a higher power, and that he should have listened to it.

And so... in season 5... he came back.

Zapped back into 1977, Jack at first was very Zen-like, allowing Sawyer to lead, and he to follow. I, like many of the viewers, went back and forth on Jack, but at the core I always wanted him to be happy. I was sad when he was, and with our sympathies and perspectives having been aligned with Jack from the very beginning, it was hard not to want the best for him, regardless of his attitude. (That said... when Pierre Chang said that Jack’s psych profile said he was suited for janitorial work, I thought I would pee myself laughing.) Oh Jack... we love you, but you are SO much fun to make fun of.

Returning to the island took faith, and great courage. Jack had finally believed John Locke was right, and when Daniel showed up and offered the idea of a bomb to reverse everything, Jack went with it. He finally had faith in something that was bigger than him, that didn’t make logical sense but which he believe in with all his heart anyway.

His bomb zapped them back to 2007, where they continued on, and throughout season 6 we see the culmination of Jack’s long journey from denial to faith. He sits with Richard Alpert in the hull of a ship and waits for a stick of dynamite to burn out, because he knows he’s too important to blow up. He helps Desmond because he knows Desmond is important. He drinks the water because he believes his purpose in life is to be the guardian of the Source of the island and all life. He gives up the guardianship because he will instead risk his life to save the island right away, and will die after killing the Man in Black. He’s become the very person John Locke always was, and he didn’t have a miracle to prompt his belief the way John Locke had.

The journey of Jack was an epic one, and one that lay at the core of Lost for all 6 seasons. The show opened with Jack’s eye opening, and closed with his eye closing. I’ve been brief in my rundown of Jack (if you want the REAL recap, check out Finding Lost: Season 6 for a very, very long analysis and summary of the character of Jack, his journey, and the history of his relationship with John Locke).

So now I turn it over to all of you... what did you like about Jack? What did you not like about Jack? What are some of your favourite Jack moments? They could be funny, or poignant, or sad.

Lostaholics Anonymous: Week 3

As we enter week 3 of Lostaholics Anonymous, I have to say what a joy it is to reconnect with so many of you, and hear your familiar voices chattering again (okay, they’re cybervoices, but that’s all I’ve ever known, and in my head I’ve created voices for all of you… yourblindspot, for example, sounds like Daffy Duck). j/k

Last week we discussed the happy moments, and I found myself smiling as many of you recalled those moments and the happiness they brought you the first time around, or subsequent rewatches. We talked about “Tricia Tanaka Is Dead,” and how it seemed like an inconsequential episode at the time, but by the end of the series had taken on an entirely different resonance (and I thought that might make an interesting topic coming up; what episodes do you watch really differently now? But that’s a discussion for a later meeting). I loved so many of the moments you all came up with, and enjoyed the discussion that often there are sad moments and funny moments, but then favourite moments that fall in between – moments like that bittersweet, wonderful phone call between Desmond and Penny – one of my ALL-TIME fave moments of the entire series, but one which I couldn’t categorize as a funny one. A happy one, yes.

We laughed, we laughed some more… and now, I’m about to bring tears upon all of you. For this week we’ll discuss those sad moments. Now, as we all know (and as any fan of Joss Whedon’s work knows all too well) there can be joy and catharsis in our tears. While watching Charlie slowly drown is something that makes me cry every time, there is a beauty to the way that scene was put together. These scenes make us cry, and sometimes, depending on what else is going on in our lives at the time, we cry harder than we might have at another time, because these scenes simply provide the outlet for our pain.

So, I’ll introduce the topic. As someone mentioned in the comments last week, it’s tough to come up with really sad moments that don’t involve a death of some kind. So let’s start with the obvious one, the one that made all of us cry. I’ll show a longer version of the scene because it’s important to see how happy Charlie was the moment right before it all happened… and how that hope was drained seconds before his death by the sudden dire knowledge that the boat wasn’t Penny’s and that he had NOT bested fate:



Listen to the music in that scene; it’s the music that I think makes it SO glorious… you have the manic action music right before the grenade goes off, but as Charlie realizes his destiny, the music suddenly stops . . . in fact, all of the sound within the scene stops, and instead we get the piano music and the mournful violin. It’s that music that gets me every time. Charlie fulfills his one final role – warning Desmond that the boat isn’t Penny’s – and then he slowly, silently, dies. This is a scene that is so painful, and yet we watch it over and over again for the sheer beauty of it. It’s scenes like this that make you realize how important the music is, and, in this case, what a genius Michael Giacchino is (and what a shame it is that he’ll no longer do television… wah).

OK, and what would one drowning be without the other? Here we go:



Notice the recurrence of that same piano theme that Charlie died to. It’s not by accident – the creative team knew how deeply we associate that music to the drowning death of Charlie, and they evoke those same memories with it here. What I find interesting is that they removed the mournful violin, when in earlier seasons, that violin was the motif they used to indicate a Sun storyline (it has a distinctly Asian flare to it). But maybe they removed it so they could separate it from Charlie slightly.

I’ll never forget the way I sobbed when the camera cut to the sub slipping deeper and deeper into the waters. Or the pain when the last shot we get of them is their hands slipping away from each other. I remember my initial thought being, “You BASTARDS! You can’t even let them die together? Howl… howl… howl!!” (To quote a famous king.) But while their hands slip away from one another, we realize their souls are entwined. Their bodies are just the shells that once housed their spirits, and we know that where they ended up (i.e. the sideways world and beyond) they are together.

OK, another moment that made me cry. This is possibly my favourite scene of the entire series.



Oh Richard. My love for you is endless. Desmond who?? Many people (including me) railed about the fact that Nestor wasn’t nominated for an Emmy for this scene, but he was made a cast member, and couldn’t really be nominated for one episode out of all of them. But let’s look at the scene on its own. The addition of Hurley in the scene was risky at the beginning… it could have gone in an entirely comic direction, but it doesn’t. It’s just GORGEOUS and heartbreaking and beautiful and perfect. Love that transcends time and even spiritual boundaries. God, I LOVE this scene. Once again, the music makes it – Giacchino created a new musical motif for the Richard/Isabella love scenes, and what we hear in this scene is a variation on the one we saw at the beginning of the episode, when she first died. Everything from Richard closing his eyes, to the sudden realization on his face that she really IS there, to the peaceful and assured manner in which she talks to him, just breaks my heart. I can’t talk enough about how much I love this scene.

OK, so now the scenes that don’t involve a death of a loved one of some kind. This one breaks my heart every time I see it, and in fact, the last time I watched the episode I actually jumped ahead of it. This is a sad scene that is so incredibly painful for me that it doesn’t make me happy, nor is it cathartic. But is it perfectly acted and written? Yes.



(OK, for me the real difficulty begins at 3:20… sorry for the long preamble but this is the only cut of this scene I could find that didn’t have Kelly Clarkson singing over it.) I’ve probably said this before, but Aaron looks a LOT like my son (only my son is even cuter… says the completely unbiased mother). He has platinum blonde hair that’s the same length, he sleeps on his back the same way, and he’s 3 years old. (When the episode first aired he was obviously younger, but now he’s the same age.) As a mom, I think my biggest nightmare is losing my children in any way, and watching her say goodbye to him slays me. I have friends who have adopted children, and friends who ARE adopted children, and it doesn’t matter if you are a biological parent – if you raised a child as if you were his or her mother, you are his mother. In this scene Kate walks away from the little boy who changed her life entirely.

This is actually a great example of an episode that changes in retrospect, because we now can watch the scene of Kate talking to Claire’s mom and saying she’s going to find Claire and bring her back, and know that she did exactly that. So this is a little easier for me to watch now than it was before.

Now, I have plenty of other moments I could mention here, but I want to leave a bunch for you guys to talk about and not hog the mike here. ;) So I’ll leave you with my last one. In “LA X,” after Ben realizes that Locke is in fact the smoke monster on top of being the Man in Black, Smokey sits down and tells Ben what Locke’s final thought was – “I don’t understand.” He adds, “Isn’t that just about the saddest thing you ever heard?” And, as I say in my Finding Lost Season 6 book, YES. Yes it is. Every time I watch this scene I feel my throat catch when he says that, and I picture Locke with the cord around his neck, the life being choked out of him, and I think of how confused he was and what a horrible last thought that must have been.

Now, I’m cheating a bit because I found a video that actually splices together the scene of Locke dying with the scene of Smokey recounting it, and trust me, it makes it much, much sadder (whoever edited this is brilliant, despite the pixelated quality of the video he was working with). But check this out:



I’ve talked about this at length on here, but Locke deserved better than that. I’m always devastated to think that all of his searching and understanding that he discovered in his life came down to one confused moment, and then… death.

Now, as I look back through all of these moments, I actually see a pattern, one that brings me to my first real mention of the finale in our L.A. meetings. All of these sad moments were sparked by love. Kate leaves Aaron because she loves him so much she knows that he deserves his biological mother. Richard’s heartbreak stems from the fact that he loves Isabella with all his heart, and has lived the past 140 years with the sadness of having lost her. Jin dies holding Sun’s hands because of how much he loves her and can’t bear to be apart from her ever again. Charlie closes the door and dies so that Desmond might live, and so the prophecy that Claire and Aaron would safely leave the island could be borne out. His last desperate message is the one that ends up saving a lot of lives by warning them.

Locke stands alone. Smokey’s story isn’t told out of love, and when Locke died, he was on the verge of suicide because of the way he felt so defeated. But I think that despite his lone wolf persona, Locke had a great love of mankind, which is why he worked so hard to try to help out the greater good. He always believed he was helping everyone, and he left the island so the others could be saved, and when he was told that one condition of saving everyone was that he would have to die, he accepted it without hesitation.

Which brings us to the finale, which all came down to love and togetherness. All of these moments lose their bitterness in that final scene of the series, when we realize that Aaron and Kate and Claire would all be happy, that Charlie is alive again and has found his Claire, that Locke now “understands” and has found inner peace, and that Jin and Sun will always be together. So despite the fact that during the finale, I cried more than I did for all of the above scenes combined, it really was a happy ending, and one that satisfied me.

So, now I turn it over to you… bring on the sadness!!

For our next meeting, I was thinking about starting to break down the show by character, and then after that, by theme. How does that sound? So let’s start with a doozy next week, and begin with… Jack. ;)

Lostaholics Anonymous: Happy Moments

Hello everyone and welcome to Week 2 of Lostaholics Anonymous. There seemed to be an overwhelming group of people out there who excitedly raised their hands and still want to talk about Lost, to which I say, "Yay!" followed by "Whew," since if you weren't still interested my upcoming season 6 Lost book would probably die a quick and painful death (available in fine bookstores near you in about another month!)

Last week I suggested that we'd ease into our routine with a discussion about our favourite moments. But once I started making a list of my own, I realized that they represented a cross-section -- happy, sad, moments that just made me love the show even more -- and so I thought maybe to keep things simpler we'd talk about the happy moments.

Lost could become a very serious show at times, often bogged down in the mystery, in impending death, suspense, and large philosophical issues, so the comic moments were always met with much relief, because it kept the show from becoming WAY too serious. I think my problem with a lot of other shows out there is their lack of a sense of humour -- FlashForward took itself far too seriously; The Event ain't funny at all; V was all overblown and big... whereas Hawaii Five-O knows how to laugh, and No Ordinary Family, which debuted last night, was as funny as it was fun to watch. You could argue that Buffy was a comedy as much as it was a drama (and as many of you know, I've been involved in that very argument in a very public setting) and I think the best shows are a perfect mix of the two.

So without further ado, let's talk about some of our favourite funny or happy moments.

Hurley sharing an Apollo bar with Ben. One of the reasons I loved this moment so much is that it wasn't outwardly funny -- a non-fan wouldn't have seen the humour in that scene at all. But here was the show's favourite funny guy sitting down with the island's arch-villain, and handing him a piece of chocolate. Ben looks at him strangely, stares at it for a second, and then takes it without a word, chewing on the candy and its caramel fitting as if this was the most natural thing in the world. This amazing scene was the precursor to Ben and Hurley eventually becoming the guardians of the island together.



Hurley trying to maintain his ruse of NOT being a time traveler as he’s grilled by Pierre Chang. Now this scene WAS played for laughs, and big ones. What makes it even funnier for fans is the fact that earlier, Hurley had asked Sawyer who the President was in 1977 and Sawyer laughed and didn’t answer, reassuring Hurley he’d never be asked something like that. When Chang asks him that very question, Hurley’s face is like Ralph Kramden’s on The Honeymooners when he was on Name That Tune, and “Swanee River” starts playing (come on, someone out there must remember that ep… if not, it was parodied when Brain went on Jeopardy on Pinky and the Brain…) Hurley makes a valiant effort to try to keep on top of Chang’s questioning, but quickly falls apart. Brilliant moment.



Sawyer teaching Jin how to compliment his wife in English. “Tricia Tanaka Is Dead” is one of the funniest episodes of the series; at the time it seemed like some one-off throwaway episode, but watch it again and see just how many zingers are in this one. Sawyer’s just shown up again after being on the other side of the island (well, actually, on Hydra Island) for ages, and he discovers the beer and will drink it, no matter how old it is. As he clinks his can to dead Roger Workman, he begins to teach Jin the only English he’ll need to know. Both he and Jin are hilarious in this scene.

The Shambala scene: In that same episode might be one of the single happiest moments in the series, when Hurley defies fate and the VW van roars to life as he and Charlie are hurtling down a hill. The happy, fun-loving music, paired with Sawyer, Charlie, Jin, and Hurley riding around in the van laughing, made all of us forget they were trapped on a mysterious island. It was a moment of pure joy.

Of course, there were several laugh-out-loud lines, and I’m sure many of you will be able to quote those for our delight.

And now I’ll just mention two of my absolute favourite scenes in the entire series, which I love because they straddle the dramatic/comedic sides of the show.

Hurley’s cannonball: This moment is glorious in its happiness, devastating in its sadness. On the one hand, Hurley jumps in the water assuming his curse is gone and he and his friends are about to be rescued. He’ll go home, see his Ma, and introduce her to his new friend Charlie. It’s probably the single happiest moment in the series. But the moment he surfaces – about 3 seconds after he was happiest – he realizes Charlie is dead, they’re not being rescued, and he’s probably still cursed. It’s a gorgeous combination of all of the show’s best elements.

Hurley (I see an onrunning theme here) and his Ma, when he tells her what really happened on the island in “The Lie.” I’ve talked about this scene before, but it’s still one of my favourites. First, he looks like he’s going to cry. Then he manages to sum up the first four seasons of Lost in about a minute and a half, while the loopy Hurley music plays and his Ma looks confused. But at the end, he suddenly breaks down again, telling her they left people behind and he needs to go get them. His ma leans forward, touches his hand, and tells him she believes him. It’s such a lovely moment in the series, where she tells him what he needs to hear, and Jorge Garcia displays a tremendous range of emotions.

So those are some of my favourite moments. Of course, now that I think about it, maybe this one trumps them all:



So, let’s discuss our fave moments in Lost. What made you happy at the time? What makes you smile or laugh now that might have seemed different at the time? Did you think the comic moments were a good blend with the dramatic ones?

Next week: The moments that made us cry.

Lostaholics Anonymous

Date: September 22, 2010

[INT: Meeting hall. Several people are gathered inside, some huddled against one another, whispering. Some sniffling is heard, while others quietly weep in the corner. A few people are wearing tan-coloured jumpsuits with strange patches on the chest.]

Nikki: Hello everyone, and welcome to the first meeting of the Nik at Nite chapter of Lostaholics Anonymous, LA for short.

[A brunette in the back corner suddenly wails loudly.]

Sonshine Music: You said ‘LA’!! The plane never even MADE it to LA... waaaaaah....

Nikki: Sorry, Sonshine. It’s been a long summer, and I know we’ve all been through a lot, but this is a place we’ve made together, where we can all talk about what we’ve been through. We are gathered here today, on the sixth anniversary of the plane crash, to discuss, OK, bear with me as I say it: Lost.

[A few people erupt in extreme sobbing. A couple in the corner leans on each other for support, and the man is mysteriously wearing cabbage leaves on his head.]

Nikki: Many of us know each other already, having spent the last three or four years discussing the ins and outs of Lost on my blog, Nik at Nite. We’ve anticipated the beginning of many seasons together, we’ve discussed the minutiae of each episode long into the night, we’ve had disagreements, and we’ve expressed joy at just being together and getting to know one another. We followed the show right to “The End,” and some of us liked it, others didn’t. We chatted about the show for a week or so after it ended, and then I sadly had to disappear to go and write a book. Some of us were forced to let it go quicker than others, and for me, that moment came when I watched the book go to the printer. And then I suddenly felt as empty and bereft as so many of you did.

[The sobs quiet, while the noises of nose-blowing can be heard throughout the hall.]

Nikki: And so we’re here now, and we’re going to ease each other through this withdrawal process. We will follow a few of the normal therapy steps, but Lostaholics Anonymous isn’t like other programs. We’re not here to cut Lost out of our lives. We are here to continue the discussion and come to terms with the fact that we’re not weird for wanting to talk about it. We need to accept that Lost will always be a part of us, even if we move on and watch other shows. We’re not betraying Darlton by watching other television shows; we’re just moving on in a way. We’ve all dealt with our withdrawal in different ways, some of us… um… [Nikki spots a few Jearded folks throughout the audience] in more, uh, unique ways. But now we can do it together.

[Nikki puts up a large poster on the wall behind her.]

Nikki: So now, if you’ll all say it along with me, it’s time for our serenity prayer.

All: “Jacob grant me the Serenity to accept that Lost is over, the Courage to continue to talk about it without feeling sad, and the Wisdom to let it go.”

Nikki: Now, does anyone want to start?

[One of the crazily bearded men stands up in the middle of the room.]

Man: WE HAVE TO GO BAAAACK!!!

Nikki: OK, OK, I understand, but… wait… Blam, is that you? Where the hell did that beard come from?

Blam: I, uh... oh... this? Um... well, see, I haven’t had time to shave because I’ve been rewatching the episodes, and for some reason on a rewatch Jack’s beard didn’t look so disgusting, and the next thing you know, uh... You know what? A diagram would explain it better. Does anyone here have a napkin and a pen??

Nikki: You know what, it’s OK. Listen, guys, what I want to do each Wednesday (because Wednesday nights still feel like Lost nights, regardless of what night season 6 appeared on) is discuss an aspect of the show. You can contribute as little or as much as you’d like, and this will just be a place to get our Lost fix as we slowly let go of our obsession. So far this new fall season of TV, despite half of them touting themselves as the new Lost, just hasn’t given us anything that feels remotely Lost-like. So for now, we’ll grieve the end of our show, discuss some of the finer points now that we’ve had more time to think about all of them, and talk about new shows that we should be watching.

So, this week I’m just looking for a show of hands. Who’s interested in being a part of this group? And let me know if you have any particular topics you want to discuss. Let’s start our group discussion below.

Next week: Our favourite moments.