One of those wonderful rapid-fire assaults of absurdity! ASS DAN!

After trying to puzzle out the answers to Lost for so long, I find myself now accepting the lack of answers with great vigor. I think the producers really have a good hang on where things are going. Anyway, here’s an email conversation I had with my friend Matt, after he suggested I post it online I brought it here:

Matt: Have you seen this before? http://vodpod.com/watch/2937393-lost-answers-song-parody

Derek: That was pretty well done, and kind of sweet that they really did touch on a lot of those this season. It’s not as bad as some people make it out to be, although I’m sure if they think it can only end with all the answers they have getting checked off then it will disappoint. The way the finale will really be successful is if you feel like there was a purpose to what you’ve seen before and the you feel like there’s some closure to the characters’ stories. Like Doc Jensen said, “don’t go into it looking for answers, try to find meaning” because it’s turtles all the way down.

Matt: I think you’re exactly right. If they don’t tell us about Eko’s brother or the polar bears, big deal. For me, it is going to come down to whether or not they figured out how to explain the purpose of the Jacob storyline (the greater mythology of the entire show), while still making it worthwhile (actually interesting and digestible) for those people (I count myself in this group) who really liked the show for its storylines in the first 2 seasons (action adventure/a little sci-fi) and not for the very same Jacob storyline that they’ll be explaining.

I want to know what was the big deal with Walt and if they get off this island, not necessarily if there was a connection between all these people and grand theories of good and bad and Daniel Faraday mumbo jumbo.

But yes, they have explained the numbers and who the Man in Black is/was? and where he and Jacob came from. We shall see…

ps. But what is at the END of the universe? Just JC riding a bulldozer pushing forward? Nobody knows…

Derek: I’d take it a step further and say what they think answers are is very different from what some people think answers are. Like I considered the polar bears settled, they were brought by the Dharma Initiative, kept in cages and trained/genetically modified to be able to live successfully on the island. After their destruction they were able to swim over to the main island and set up a cave home. Question raised by answering that question: Why did the DI bring them over? Because they found a giant donkey wheel in a frozen pocket underground. If you’re going to strap an animal to a wheel and turn it then there’s no better animal suited for that than the brute strength of the arctic polar bear. And then who cares if they end up on the other side (in Tunisia), we’ll have more for our experiments on this wheel.

New question: Where’d the donkey wheel come from? Well, the Man In Black designed it, and knew it was important, so important his mother was willing to destroy it and his village. Did he actually go back and complete it? Yeah, probably, but it didn’t work like he expected because he’s a smoke monster now, he needed real people to turn it, and so influenced Ben/Locke to do it eventually (as Christian). And why is it frozen now? Well he mentioned water was a key to the success of the manipulation of the island’s light, but if they get into any more mechanical detail it’ll be absurd and no longer interesting/related to the characters, here’s a nice stopping point in the question path. But there are Lost fans with an engineering slant and think they want to know exactly how everything works, but that’s how you end up with scenes like the Architect in the Matrix Reloaded and Midichlorians in Star Wars Episode 1.

So there’s a case study of how a mystery is puzzled out on Lost. We have to take lots of information, a guess or two, and figure out a lot on our own. It’s more rewarding than them just telling us “yeah, the whispers are ghosts,” so I prefer that. The characters are what really connects us to the show, and so yeah, it makes sense that if they’re curious about something (why are we here?) they will find out the answer. But the Dharma food drops? That doesn’t affect their lives at all anymore.

I went to a Lost special interview with the producers last night (simulcast into movie theaters) and they not only mentioned that we’ll be seeing Walt again, but also illuminated the point that Walt was special, and apparently it scared the Others (this was hinted at when they found the dead birds outside the brainwash room in a season 3 mobisode). Apparently Walt was so special that Ben decided he’d be more comfortable with him far away from the island. The producers also mentioned that they prefer to answer questions with people, examples: What’s in the hatch? Desmond is WHO is in the hatch. What’s the Smoke Monster? Oh, you mean WHO is this Smoke Monster person. Because it’s always about the people!

And it’s not like they’re leaving you hanging on stuff mentioned in that song like “what’s in the guitar case?” “How’d the Black Rock get where it was?”, “Why does Richard not age, (and start the Others)?”. And that bit about Jin time traveling made sense to me, those bearings are the only way to get OUT of the island’s sphere of influence, to get inside can be from any degree, and he simply floated within range of it, as opposed to those in the helicopter. Although I will say, I’m more partial to the sci-fi elements, I love that they wove in time travel, I think that might be my favorite season (so far). But it doesn’t seem like they’re going to close the time loop on that incident in which Sawyer, Juliet, Locke, Miles, Charlotte and Farraday were in a boat getting shot at after they found an Ajira water bottle at the beach camp. That seems like it should’ve happened with Widmore’s people or something. It seems like our time now, but then again, maybe it’s further into the future and we’re just suppose to assume it’s new people brought to the island (as we never got a good view of the shooters).

Matt: Phew.

Why aren’t you writing your own blog? Very good sir! I need to pass this off as my own to my coworker now.

Derek: Haha, you’re more than welcome to it! I guess I could post it on my blog (although it has more of a design slant to it) it is SO rarely updated that it might be worth putting up there!

I’m quite excited to see what happens when Conan O’Brien takes over the Tonight Show Monday. He has always been my favorite late night talk show host, he is more absurd and out there than anybody else, very affable and hilarious.

But I really wanted to share this article because it helped me empathize with what he is going through. He has my full support, here’s rooting for you, Cons!

Obviously the writer’s strike has taken a toll on things this season. New shows have been hard to come by, and good shows at that… I can only name one. It is an American remake of a British sitcom The Worst Week of My Life. It is about a guy, to whom an inordinate number of bad things happen, and through association, his fianceé and her parents are dragged into the bad things as well.

It is an interesting exercise in television writing as they start out each episode with a barely-there status quo where everybody has had enough time to cool down from the last horrible incident (normally shown in a short clip) and quickly builds motivation upon mishap upon excuse to bend the story toward a relatively believable yet insane ending. It is fairly predictable in the short term (something important is introduced and almost assuredly going to go wrong) but you swiftly end up far from where you could have imagined it going in the beginning of the episode. You definitely would not want to hear about an ending out of context but it would probably make you wonder how they got to that destination.

The acting is uniformly top-notch, especially last week’s episode with Fred Willard on it. Comic genius that guy, he was also recently on Pushing Daisies (a great new show from last year if you even remember it). And for those out there that think women just aren’t as funny as men, I’ve got news for you: Erinn Hayes is an incredible comic actress. I’m willing to see anything she’s in thanks to this show. Additional proof of her awesomeness here: Children’s Hospital, the Rob Corddry web series.

Worst Week is on Mondays at 9:30 ET on CBS, and a great companion to How I Met Your Mother at 8:30, although I would skip all two and a half of the men between the two.

Similar to my Y rant, once something I love reaches its end, I am compelled to tell you all about it. Maybe it is part of the letting go process, attempting to give it to others, in hopes that it will live on with them. But then again, I would have been willing to tell you about it at any point in its 60 episode run, because it is the best thing I have watched in a long time. It is an amazing hyper-realistic examination of modern American city, represented here by Baltimore, Maryland.

It starts out as a twist on the old cop show formula, in that the crime is not solved by the end of the hour long episode. The case is allowed to breathe through 13 episode seasons. It gives time to the showcase minutia of detective work, really develops characters, and becomes a very satisfying experience. This means it requires you to watch TV a bit differently, however. You will need to pay attention to things. Threads are dropped and picked up multiple episodes later, and it will be all the better if you remember who that guy was and what he was doing.

As the series progresses, it does not bother telling the same stories of drug dealers and the po-lice after them. It shifts gears each season, introducing a new facet of the city, while never neglecting the people you already know and love. You get to see the plight of the blue collar dock workers, the back door dealings of the politicians, the heartbreak of the school system, and the crushing responsibility of the media to report it all.

And in the end (as it has been with each season finale, but especially now), it somehow manages to be satisfyingly closed and open. They managed to combine a circular “life will go on” with a “this story is complete”. We know exactly how the lives will work out for most characters, except for two, and I will happily continue to imagine their possible lives far into the future. Creators David Simon and Ed Burns have made something really special here, it is the most riveting and rewarding show I have ever seen. Congratulations to them and everybody involved! I will never be able to get you out of my head.