Today's Apocalypse Sign: The Lost Weekend

No, not this Lost Weekend but this Lost Weekend

“LOST” SERIES FINALE EVENT SET FOR SUNDAY, MAY 23 ON ABC


Finale to Air on a Special Night, Sunday, May 23 from 9:00-11:00 p.m., ET,

Preceded by a Recap Special from 8:00-9:00 p.m., ET
(The above already is a lie because the Recap part is a two-hour special from 7PM to 9PM ET)

This show has inspired people to push little old ladies and screaming babies out of the way so as not to miss the "15 minutes after the hour" start time (obviously so you can Tivo the show and starting it at that time allows you to miss all the commercials). I apologize for insulting those who know this fact as second nature but trust me, there are still people living in caves out there.

I have been a loyal follower of  Lost  since it first came on the air, as many of you have been. I also, like many people I suppose, wondered if this was going to be a very updated version of Gilligan's Island or was there to be more to it. Unlike Gilligan's which had two very hot babes and some good slapstick comedy, Lost was a tragedy from the beginning. So it immediately in my head begged the question, how long can this go on?

Two hot babes and slapstick comedy can go on for years and never wear itself out. Twenty years after Gilligan's ended there were still endless drunken bar debates on who (Ginger or MaryAnn) you would take out behind the wood pile first. Right? Thought so. And...your answers changed depending on your mood on any given night, right again. Then there was the whole, "the Professor is gay" conspiracy and was Gilligan just a retarded monkey. Good times.

But Lost had that reality-show touch and allowed us to put ourselves into the show continually in what I call, "what would I do if it was me" scenarios. Clearly that many people surviving a plane crash could have and probably would have turned into a beach version of the cannabalistic movie Alive. But then again maybe not.

The casting of the characters in Lost was perfect and that made the show most of what is has been. It did however get a little weird for me when people started to seemingly leave the island and then come back to the island.

I never did fanatically follow to extent that I would use the internet or podcasts to try and decipher each weeks show...maybe I should have.

The last couple years, watching Lost went something like this from the beginning of the season:

1.     Watch this week's episode. Discuss various occurrences (sometimes during the show courtesy of rewinding live action) with my better half.

2.     Watch #1 above the next week before the new episode so as to read all the little tags at the bottom of the screen to see if discussions of various occurrences were a victory for me or my better half.

3.     Watch new episode and repeat actions in #1 above.

4.     Repeat 1 - 3 for the rest of the season.

This last season we have taken to recording two weeks of episodes and watching them both on the Thursday night after the most recent episode...and THEN repeating that process through this week. This weekly choreography of television watching (by millions of people of course) I suspect is the cause of many recent problems in society (economic problems aside of course). If we were being watched by aliens (Hulu commercial??) performing these weekly rituals around a talking box what would they think? Maybe we are...

Some people are hosting huge Lost watching parties like this one. Whole bars are devoted to the show each week. Some people are going all out to keep it real. And finally a Lost party planning primer. Gotta love the Dharma toilet paper wrapper.

Here is the super Lost link. View too long and YOU might end up on an island.

News Flash!!! The Finale has been expanded by an additional 30 minutes. This adds to the 2 hour introspective preceeding the finale as well as the rebroadcast of the pilot episode tonight! That's 5 1/2 hours of Lost this weekend. As close to an overdose as you can get...

And now that I have lost my train of thought while looking for a stupid link for the bar line above, I shall end this as mysteriously as the show is....two words:



Dharma Time