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2010.03.28

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All the hectoring got to me, and I've watched those first two celebrity apprentice episodes--i gotta say, i'm surprised you didn't bring up what I thought was a definite top ten most awful reality show moment of all time, i.e. when one of the female celebrities asked a 13 year old boy with an incurable, terminal illness what he wanted to be "when he grew up", despite the simple, previously explained fact that he would never, of course, be capable of doing so.

His brutal retort, "I've never thought about it", made the woman watching the episode with me cry, and I'm only mildly embarrassed to say that I was close to joining her.

OK, mind my rant - keep in mind I've never seen so much as five minutes of one episode of Lost, but I know from my nerd media. And honestly, nothing would piss me off more in the entire world than devoting so much time to a show that didn't solve all its mysteries by the last episode. That would be, to me, the ultimate sign of contempt for an audience: you stuck with us all this time, invested your time and patience, and we're not even gonna bother telling you what the fuck was going on, because we're above such petty concerns as providing narrative closure for the loyal audience who've kept us in the bacon for close to a decade. I guarantee you, if Conan Doyle had ended The Speckled Band' on a note of ambiguous unresolution, people would still be talking about how much of a dick he was, over a hundred years later.

No: if you begin a mystery, you see it through to its conclusion. And if that means the last season is filled with graceless infodump exposition? Well, then the people putting the show together obviously let things get out of their hands - but don't blame them for actually getting around to doing what they have to do for the show to have anything resembling a satisfactory conclusion. Because otherwise? Years from now the Lost season sets are gonna be in the 2/$15 bin at Target and anyone who picks them up is going to consider taking the plunge before remembering their friend from work told them once that the show sort of petered out in the end and wasn't worth the trouble.

There's probably 95% of the audience for the show who actually want some sort of conclusion, 1% who would love it to end on some sort of mysteriously ambiguous note, and 4% who are along for the ride anyway because the attendant never switches the TV from ABC. Because this is an ABC sci-fi show, not L'Avventura.

I don't follow any theories or anything about the show, but from a writing point of view I thought the fact that everyone's story in the sideways world hints at their future, whereas the fact Richard's story concerns only his past (and his wish for death) suggests he dies.

So thematically, if true, it was a comparatively strong choice.

Also, I'm glad they answered the question "do ghosts change their clothes?"

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