Rejoice, my friends! We are living in a golden age of television, when viewers have more and better options than ever before. There’s something for everyone, and that something is oftentimes quite impressive. In particular, dramatic narratives have become a go-to form for fans of creative story arcs and complex characters, presenting a more wide-ranging, novelistic approach to visual storytelling than even what most commercial films currently offer. And a pulp paragon of this form is Breaking Bad. It’s so defining, in fact, that some contemplate that it may be seen as this age’s end someday. But let’s be more optimistic than that. There is still a lot of quality TV-watching to be done and now that Breaking Bad has come to an end and fans of the show, myself included, start to turn to other shows, to find quality entertainment somewhere else, I think it’s a good time to explicate my strangely hesitant relationship with narrative television.

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LOST  could be making a comeback if Damon Lindelof’s titty teaser has any weight behind it. Promoting Prometheus  or some shit, the maestro hinted yet again that we haven’t seen the end of the Island.

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[image courtesy of slashfilm]

Fug yeah, Damon Lindelof is starting work on the script for the Star Trek sequel. I’m stoked, stoked, I say!

I can only imagine he may in fact be a bit excited to work on something that isn’t a monstrous, unwieldy bloated mess, too. I mean, I love LOST, despite its flaws; and intrepid LOST fans, spending more than ten minutes after the emotional resonancy of the finale has worn off will bring countless to light. By the end, it must have seem burdensome for everyone involved. But here Lindelof will get to work with a universe, while enormous, isn’t attempting to tie together six seasons of storylines with a bow.

Or, I suppose, not tie them all together! Zing!

No seriously though, I’m excited.

[via fuck yeah lapidus, click to enlarge]

And we thought he was fucking dead! Oh man, what a dumb ass I was. You can’t keep a bad ass 1970’s porn actor down.

Despite hating Kate for something around six seasons and seventeen levels of ferocity, I had to appreciate this.

[via all games beta, click to enlarge]

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It’s been a busy five months of blogging LOST, and so tonight I’m treating myself to a Slurpee and a FAMILY SIZE bag of skittles. Yeah dude, I’m living it up! I remember when I, in a moment of caffeine madness, decided that I would post something about LOST everyday for a month leading up to the beginning of the final season. It seemed like such a good idea at the time, and then by day fifteen I was all “Fucking Hell, Drinkwater, what have you gotten yourself into?”

But it’s been a surreal, exhausting, and really, really rewarding trip. There was a pants-filling moment somewhere during the middle of “Remember That Time On LOST When?” that I realized that people were actually reading the bullshit I was churning out into a WordPress document. Like, people expected and actually enjoyed what I wrote every Wednesday. I’ve blathered to Pepsibones and myself for years, but the idea that people were actively engaging in what I wrote was pretty thrilling.

Nothing was more exciting than seeing people post in the comments, even if it was to disagree with me.

I can’t even begin to fathom the amount of hours, hundreds of pictures, and thousands upon thousands of words I’ve gone through chronicling LOST. And really, it’s sort of trippy that not only the journey of LOST is over, but so is this really enormous undertaking that I’ve been carrying for all of 2010. I’m almost sort of bummed that OL didn’t exist earlier, so we could have done this all together for a much longer time.

Every entry was made possible by absolutely, positively, ridiculous amounts of caffeine, the ability to ignore hundreds of pages of grad work I had to do, and the encouragement of an assload of friends, particularly Tommy Rock, who shared my insane passion for the show. Even our darkest moments of abject hate were spurned by what was really an unhealthy love for the potential and highest moments of the show.

In the end though, this is just a formal “Thank You” and “You’re Awesome” to everyone who has read, commented, and shared my LOST recaps with others. As insane as the pressure of having to deliver recaps every Wednesday was, the support and enthusiasm from people who have come across it has more than made up for it. So big ups, and high-fives to all of you who have accompanied me on Oceanic Omega for this redonkulous expedition.

It’s been radical thanks to all of you.

After the show concluded last night, after the screen faded to black for the last time, after the credits rolled, Pepsibones sat on my couch next to me. He was happy, and had enjoyed the final episode. A lot. And so had I. And he rubbed his temples and he said “I don’t want to have to talk to anyone about this episode.” That’s almost perfectly how I feel about writing this final recap of the final episode of one of my favorite shows ever.

As the days counted down to the conclusion of LOST, I began obsessing over the enormity of what Lindelof, Cuse and the rest of the team had undertaken. The show had become nothing short of a leviathan. It was a cultural phenomenon that had snared millions of people along the way, and dragged them along in its wake. The nature of the storyline had sprawled out continuously, from plane crashes to smoke monsters to immortals to alternate dimensions. It grew continuously, exponentially, with every new twist bringing a thousand new questions.

I asked myself over and over again, “How do you end a show like this gracefully?” I flashed back to other epics I had loved. From Star Wars to Lord of the Rings to Battlestar Galactica, and while they’re all close to my heart, all of them are with their flaws. A task of this size cannot be executed perfectly, it’s built into the nature of the undertaking.

The ending to LOST was no different.

And I loved it.

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I’m going to tell you something, and you’re not going to believe me. I had faith that last night’s episode was going to be good. No, seriously. I spent all yesterday talking with friends about LOST, and I kept saying the same thing over and over again. “Yeah man, I don’t know, I just think it’s going to be good.” It’s faith though, yo. What was it based on? Just pure gut. Call me Jack Shephard. I texted my friend Tommy, I talked to Pepsibones. It was going to be good.

There’s something about being an idealist, or an optimist, or whatever you want to call it. But I always believe the best is going to happen somehow.

And sometimes! Sometimes I’m correct. Usually I’m wrong. But I wasn’t last night. What They Died For was easily one of the best episodes of the season, and it’s probably in my Top 10 of the series. Yeah, I went there. It was one of those episodes where LOST is hitting all its high notes. Ridiculous WTF moments, mythos building, and some emotional bullshit thrown into the mix.

I’ve made my ass-crush for Jacob known all season long. Perhaps it’s because I relate to his unyielding optimism. Despite the fact that he’s watched for centuries as man has let him down, he continues to believe that they have the potential for good. I mean, if he hasn’t been crushed by thousands of years of selfish behavior, how could I let Lindelof and Cuse break me in one week? Call my ass adamantium, ’cause my will is unbreakable.

Jacob sits down the remaining candidates and explains to them what they have to do, they have to kill Smokey. Does this not make sense to anyone else? I have always understood that there needed to be balance on the Island, and if MiB was dead, wouldn’t that throw off the scales just like Jacob did? Intriguing. There’s also always the chance that Jacob is using for the sort of Obi-Wan double speak that has rocked out throughout the entire show.

“What do you fucking mean he killed my father, Kenobi? You fucking liar! Don’t give me that manner of speaking bullshit! Ghostly prick!”

Last week there was a serious wrinkle thrown into the whole “The point of the Island is to prevent him from leaving” bullshit, when that Annoying Mom from Juno told the two Wonder Twins that their job was to “Protect the Light”. I just puked in my mouth a little bit. So maybe, perchance, Jack’s role is to dismiss Smokey and then protect the Honeypot Glowing Vagina at the center of the Island?

Bueller? Anyone?

If anything came out of last week’s train wreck of an episode, it was the humanizing of Jacob, and I sort of dug on that. What I took from Survivor: The Island where all the Candidates and The Lecherous Freckled One sat and spoke with Jacob is that the dude done fucked up by throwing MiB into the Honeypot. Some sort of odd corruption took place when he dinged that donkey-wheelin’ douchebag out and he floated into the light. Smokey was born, and it then became Jacob’s job to protect the light at the center of the Island, and prevent Smokey from leaving.

In a manner of speaking, I am reading the two jobs to be mutually exclusive at this point. Smokey taking off from the Island would extinguish the light, and so Jacob/Jack has the wonderful task of preventing him from leaving, and then preventing anyone from corrupting the light.

Two things:

First off, I dig the human twist to Jacob. There’s something romantically awful about his plight. The guy’s spent thousands of years trying to prevent Smokey from leaving, while living under the notion that he was eventually going to be killed. Jacob is some weird Cain from Cain and Able. A man filled with good, yet charged with killing his own brother and having to live with the consequences. That shit is heavy! Dude needs a hug.

Secondly, how exactly would anyone find the light if they weren’t deserving of it? Isn’t that the general gist of this week and last’s week episode? It seems to be what he told Jack when he totally became THE ONE.

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