Lost is...over..sniff...
Okay, so the sixth season of Lost aired on Monday, and, having watched the penultimate episode only the night before I was primed and ready for it. I'll go into specifics in a second, but let me first up say that I loved the way the show ended. It did everything I needed it to, providing me with emotional highs, closure to the main story arcs and a sense that there was still more I could read into the story, still more I could gather round the water cooler (If I had one) to talk about what it all meant.

After six years and so many sprawling plot lines, it was inevitable that some questions would remain unanswered, but you know what? That's absolutely fine. That's Lost. If everything had been tied in a neat bow, fed to me on a silver spoon, I'd have been disappointed. There's still aspects of the show I don't know and probably never will, and I'm okay with that. What was the golden light, who was Jacob and MiB's mother, what was the deal with Walt? To name a few. But the show's strength was always its characters and the writers and actors imbued them all with real depth and warmth that made me really care about them. I've lived and breathed alongside them on that island, and to see their fates played out before me gave me many moments of triumph along the way. Seeing Claire and Charlie reunited at the concert during Aaron's birth had me blubbing like a little girl, as did Sun and Jin's reveal - even though it included scenes of their death. And Jack's, 'I'll see you in another life, brother,' line in the cave turned me into a wreck.

Watching Jack and Locke brawling on the cliff in the rain was just amazing, with its shades of 300, and the symmetry of so many images throughout the episode spoke of such carefully crafted plotting that I sat in real admiration of J.J. Abrams, Carlton Cuse, Damon Lindelof and all the other writers. Watching characters I'd grown to love over the six year run of the show meet their fates, grisly or otherwise, was a real treat, and I don't think I've invested in a show as much as I did Lost.

And the ending. Finding out that the Flash Sideways were a kind of celestial waiting room, where all the characters had to find themselves to 'let go' and move on was a stroke of genius, as it made sense of the strange connections established in what I had assumed was a cracked, parallel time line established by the detonation of the hydrogen bomb at the end of Season 5 (which, as it now turns out, clearly didn't go off...). I guess a lot of folk read this as confirming the suspicions many had early on that everyone died in the crash and that the island was some form of Purgatory, but Christian spells it out for Jack, that everyone had to find each other, and that what happened on the island really happened. In a lovely piece of symmetry from the opening episode, we saw Jack lying in the bamboo field, and where we begin with his eye opening, we end with it closing. Perfect. Oh, and the dog lives too. Jerry Bruckheimer would be proud.

So, emotional journeys, wonderful character moments and a sense of closure. I couldn't ask for anything more, though I have to say that I felt kind of sorry for the Man in Black. Yeah, he did some terrible things along the way, but didn't he just want to leave the island after glimpsing the possibility that there was life beyond its shores? Perhaps as Old Smokey he really shouldn't have left...great evil, blah, blah, blah, but perhaps if his mother had just let him go in the first place, all this could have been avoided. Yeah, and if they'd given Gwaihir the Ring there'd have been no trek across Middle Earth. And wouldn't that have been boring? That's what I thought of Lost's finale, what did you think? Genius, dross, not enough answers, satisfying in every way...? Let me know.

Farewell Lost, I'm going back to the Season 1 box set to start again, armed with the knowledge of what's really going on...

Paul Gray
And in other news, I read that Paul Gray, the bassist for Slipknot was found dead on May 24th, which made me pretty sad, as I'm a big fan of the band. Having just watched BBC2's documentary "I'm in a Rock & Roll Band", I've developed a newfound respect for the bass player, the so-called, 'other one'. Often without the fiery charisma of the lead singer, furious noodling of the lead guitarist or pounding aggression of the drummer, they were sort of the quiet ones at the back. There are of course, some obvious exceptions, like Gene Simmons, Geddy Lee, Paul Simonon, Peter 'Hooky' Hook, Steve Harris and, of course, Mark Gibbons. And if you don't know who any of these guys are, Google them now.

So you ignore the bassist at your peril, for a powerful bassline anchors the greatest rock songs. Just look at Ace of Spades. I know Slipknot weren't to everyone's tastes, but when they exploded onto the scene with their self-titled album in 1999, it was like a hand grenade in the midst of bloated stadium bands that shook the world of rock and metal to its core. I equate their impact to that of Nirvana, who did something similar, playing a stripped back rock that was powerful in its simplicity and lo-fi approach to rock. Anyway, this Maggot wishes Paul's soul well wherever it is now. Maybe he's meeting up with Jon Bonham, Keith Moon and Kurt Cobain before moving on...

Cancellations
Don't you hate it when you're just getting into a show and the network pulls the plug? Why is it that dross like Two and a Half Men (A show by Chuck Lorre, whose other work, The Big Bang Theory, I love) and the innumerable cop procedurals get into their tenth seasons and beyond, while shows that demand a bit of investment and eye-on-the-ball smarts get canceled before they have a chance to grow? Shows like Flash Forward, Firefly, Invasion etc... I understand that the American TV landscape is a harsh place, where cut-throat execs roam with their snipping shears of doom, but it seems to me that by canceling shows that don't hit stratospheric numbers of viewers they're actually shooting themselves in the foot.

Now it seems to me that you get a lot of people watching a new show, then there's obviously going to be some drop off from the fly-by-nighters who aren't interested in continuing, but there's a loyal core of fans who get the show and stick with it, loyally tuning in every week to see what happens next. Aren't they the ones you're sticking it to by canceling the show, the ones who stuck with you and put their faith in its potential? It's a rare tv show that gets to choose its time to end. The Wire did it beautifully, BSG did it well, as did Buffy, and as I mentioned above, Lost managed it too. To an extent Angel did it too, though a lot of what went into the ending was a tad rushed and the open-ended charge into the monsters felt a little...unconvincing as a finale. Listening to Joss Whedon's commentary for that final episode, I can see his point that it's representing the fact that the battle against evil never ends, but it still left a sour taste in my mouth, like that explanation was bent to fit how they ended the episode.

Take Flash Forward for example. It started well, and though, admittedly, sagged a tad in the middle - not helped by a mid-season break in a terribly chosen spot - it was picking up pace toward the end and was establishing a nice balance between dangling bemusing threads and answering some of the earlier questions. And then it gets canceled. Arse. We've yet to watch the final episode, though I read that it's been edited and put together in such a way as to provide some element of closure to its multiple plot lines since the show's producers knew they weren't going to get any more episodes. We'll see. And 24, another of my favourite shows, is ending soon too (can I take the trauma of so many cancellations!?). We'll see how they end that in a convincing way, though knowing Jack, it's going to be ridiculously over the top, violent and with plenty of utterances of the word Dammit! Which is just how I want my Jack Bauer.

Right, back to work now, and I promise I'll have something vaguely writing related to talk about next time.