Lost n Vegas

So, so much going on right now.

Have I mentioned that it is less than a week until I leave for Las Vegas? Things are so crazy at the office right now that it seems completely surreal at this point. But only three more work days....Three more work days....Three more. I just keep telling myself that in the hopes that sometime soon I will finally wake up to the bright sunrise of Saturday morning.

And speaking of my office, how many effing times am I going to try to open my office door with my home key? Why would the key to my home ever fit my office door? And more importantly, why do I keep doing the same thing -- pretty much 4 out of 5 days every single week -- and never, ever seem to learn? Is it because it's so early in the morning, and I haven't really woken up yet or something? Or is it because of the fact that the PDAs and web-based email access and emailing me .wav files of my voicemails and the cell phones and everything else, there really is very little line anymore between home and work, so I am making a purposeful metaphor by trying to use the key to one place to enter the other.

So the Lost stuff is quickly fading away, as I knew it would. When something this bad gets on to the airwaves in a big spot, it's all the rage for a couple of days, and there's always going to be the contrarians out there beating the bushes about how great it was. As I wrote about here recently, I accepted a long time ago that you just can't do anything about the contrarians. The more prominent and the more obvious the situation is, the more guaranteed you are to have those people out there claiming the opposite of the obvious. With most people as I have mentioned previously, it is some unstated (and sometimes, unconscious) desire to feel smarter than others. Other people will come right out and state it in fact, as we have seen on my blog comments over the past couple of days -- that they "get" the story in a way that nobody else does, because they are smarter, and they really understood it while nobody else on the planet did. It's part of what makes the world go round I guess. But in any event, it's fading now which I think is good. That big of a copout just should not be talked about publicly for very long, and ultimately with so precious little actual content to discuss, there just isn't a lot there to captivate the public.

One other item -- I finally went and read Doc Jensen's two-part column about the Lost finale yesterday on ew.com -- he managed to keep this one to a mere 16 pages so I guess we should be happy it wasn't longer. Jensen is basically the only person I've ever met who aboslutely puts me to shame as far as the amount he writes, most of the time about seemingly nothing when it comes to his ridiculous overanalysis of this show. But strangely, Jensen's 16-page opus on the finale made just a very passing mention of the closing montage, which showed a bunch of plane wreckage strewn across the beach, and no shots of the Losties. Some have speculated that this somehow is the remains of the original Oceanic Flight 815, except that there were no survivors at all, which would somehow suggest that perhaps all that we saw in six years of Lost was just a dream of some kind much like Sideways World ended up being. Others have said this is the remains of the Ajira plane that Lapidus tried to pilot off the island at the end of the finale, which means that it crashed and all those aboard were killed off. My answer? Who cares? Once you've gone and made Sideways World just a purgatory for whenever everyone finally dies to come together again to get ready to "move on" to the afterlife or whateveritis, who cares whether Lapidus, Sawyer, Kate, Miles, et al ended up getting off the island and escaping, went on to live another 50 years back in their "real" lives, or whether they just plummeted to the ground minutes after Jack saw them fly overhead as he himself died in the same bamboo field where he originally found himself in the pilot of this series. The only thing that matter is, we saw Sawyer and Kate there in the church at the end, so eventually they died, and it really doesn't matter how. Don't get me wrong -- it is so quintessentially Lost to end the entire series with an ambiguous scene that deliberately leads some to question whether or not the entire plot of the entire series ever even happened. In an unintentionally comedic way, that is about the best possible way Lost could have ended its run, and the most symptomatic of how they addressed the rest of the plot points on the show in the end. Maybe the whole damn thing never even happened!

I wish.

I'll leave you with this funny Lost link today (shit, forgot to check with Jordan again about whether or not it is ok to link to this), which I picked up from the comments to Goat's blog. Jordan of course will have no need to watch this link, and in fact he will I am sure be totally flabbergasted as to why the narrator is asking all of these obvious questions, but to the other 17 million of you out there, this is just a smattering of some of the interesting questions still remaining about the series, in a roughly chronological order of the time when they first arose and have never been addressed.

And with that, I think I shall end my Lost coverage for now. As I said, the show had a great run, it declined dramatically after the midpoint when the writers officially put an end date to the show and were thus forced to actually decide upon the ending, and then the execution of that ending was done about as poorly as a show could do it over the final two seasons, and in particular in the last episode. But at this point, sure the shock of having been anally lubed by the show's producers and writers is still there, but it's wearing off fast. We've been through this before as many people have commented, be it Dallas or St. Elsewhere or most recently, the Sopranos, and at this point already I am ready to let it go.

Six days till Vegas. Later in the week I should be back with some more reminiscence about past trips to the desert and to the World Series of Poker.