Why the LOST Ending Works (and why some of you forgot why it works)

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(Logic-Stoopid Ratio: 8:10. Mood: "Duuude.....")

Preamble: I started watching LOST during the height of my Lord of the Rings obsession, when I learned that trilogy cast member and Hobbit Dominic Monaghan was starring in the ABC pilot. I caught it from the very first episode onwards, missed the second, but was really hooked when I saw the fourth episode Walkabout, revealing that (highlight to read)the only way wheelchair-bound John Locke was able to walk again was for Oceanic Flight 815 to crash on the Island. It was pretty damned compelling for this creative personality.

So I've been there from the beginning, and though I spent last Sunday night driving through New Jersey on the way home from Manhattan, as soon as I was rested and able, I watched the ending with my family on Monday morning.

And it was worth it. The entire series was worth it.

Why? Why, when a series notorious for unanswered questions, for supremely strange puzzles and occurrences, left so many of them still unanswered by the climax, would LOST be worth purchasing on Blu Ray and DVD for those who are wondering what it's all about? Why, when so many bloggers, fans, and critics alike are positively black with vitriol over the finale?

First, there is always that cadre of people who aren't happy with anything. Evidence for the existence of these people ranges from the bitter nature of their Facebook updates and Tweets - bitching about the only cloud on a beautiful summer day, typically - the trends set by past reviewers of the episodes to date (the Vulture reviewer, in particular, readily admits to her own vitriol since the final season started), to, well, who they are as human beings on a daily basis.

It goes to your personality type. If you're a rational, by-the-numbers person (and not 4-8-15-16-23-42, BTW) who typically likes to label everything in life and sort them into nice little boxes....what the hell were you doing watching LOST??! You were bound to be disappointed by everything that didn't make sense, so you deserve to be pissed. You've probably been pissed since Locke and Jack managed to blow open the Hatch.

For those fans who are, by nature, open-minded, upbeat, optimistic, and positive -or at least neutral - who still find themselves legitimately disappointed in the ending, fear not. The last six years of investment in this show will not go the way of your average Miami hedge fund.

LOST, and its finale, are worth it because both were what the show has always been about: the characters.

This was a show whose entire first season was about the survivors: the weirdness of the Island was simply the backdrop to learning about their secrets, seeing how they interacted with each other, see the human side of survival. We grew to love and care for, and at other times hate and fear, these people as if they were real, in the spirit of any good drama.

The Oceanic 815 survivors - most of them, anyway - are what drew most of us to the show, but remember the frustration many fans felt in Season 2 when they kept introducing new cast members beyond the original 815 crew that we all loved. The series couldn't just keep going on a character-centric basis, so they evolved the story: who is the DHARMA Initiative? How did the Black Rock end up so far inland? Who were the Others?. Once they shifted the focus on the story, they had to maintain the mystery as best as they could, introducing all of the mysteries designed to keep you guessing, and bringing in new characters - like Juliet and Widmore and Richard - only within the context of the new storyline.

But never forget that it all started with our core favorites: Jack, Kate, Locke, Sawyer, Hugo, Boone, Shannon, Michael, Walt, Sayid, Jin, Sun, Claire, and Charlie.



Sure, along the way, they created anomalies in the storyline - what was the real deal with Walt? How was Jacob able to leave the Island while Smokey couldn't? The true secrets of the Hanso Foundation? What was the Light, really? - that never got decisively answered, but I'm glad they didn't.

If they had answered all of the questions, we would have inevitably been disappointed even moreso by the answers, much like how the conclusion of Battlestar Galactica felt so rushed, overwrought, and really thin given the context of the show (Seriously, how do you have "angels" appear in a show based in gritty realism? ), because Ron Moore tried to tie up all the loose ends in three hours. No, it wouldn't be good, and it wouldn't be LOST, without a little bit of mystery left to it.

Oddly, not answering everything made the show more like real life. LOST began as a fraud, in many respects: it was a science-fiction and fantasy show posing as a primetime drama. It was a convincing drama that even attracted fans who hated sci-fi/fantasy, real enough to be believable at first, and then gradually taking us down this path to the point where guys who talk to dead people and time travel one day became acceptable parts of the show's reality.

The sense of realism from the show applied to the narrative as well. As horror writer (and LOST fan) Stephen King said, real life doesn't tie up all of its loose ends. Somebody dies, and there are threads that never get picked up again. The endings aren't convenient, not even all meaningful. Similarly, you can't solve all the mysteries in a story if you want it to retain that sense of verisimilitude, because strange things happen in real life to which nobody gets all the answers.

Ultimately, what got me about the finale was the drama, the spectacle and emotion, learning about the real nature of the alternate universe . I watch TV to feel good, as I do with other things, and I felt damned good watching this episode, if a little misty throughout.

Some critics panned the "goopy" New Agey aspects of the reunion of the castaways in the Afterlife, and while I'm partisan on the New Agey-count, I nonetheless found it deeply moving, and I'm very grateful that the writers chose to return to the relationships between the characters instead of just sticking to the plot. You would have had to have had a heart of uranium-235 not to have teared up, even a little, during the episode's final moments.

LOST managed to integrate nearly every story you can imagine - romance, sex, horror, sci-fi, comedy - into a single, coherent, for the most part believable epic. And it worked: why else would so many of you be pissed?

So, LOST is what it is, and what it is is a unique, wonderful, compelling, and intelligent story - far more intelligent, admittedly, than most of the audience members, myself included - that I will gladly share with any willing novice (or unwitting captive). It is a novel for TV combining a surreal story with a believable verisimilitude and emotional core that that no show will ever again be able to match. And the ending suited the series quite well.

Yes, I'm done gushing. Now, off to get some dinner....

"Light Up The Fire", by Rumi

One of my favourite poets....(yes, I have favourite poets...I'm an English major and a writer, hello?).

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"Light Up The Fire".

I gaze into the heart, lowly it may be,
Thought the words be higher still.
For the heart is all the substance,
The speech an accident.
How many phrases will you speak,
Too many for me.
How much burning, burning will you feel,
Be friendly with the fire, enough for me.
Light up the fire of love inside,
And blaze the thoughts away.

By: Rumi

From The Love Poems of Rumi by Philip Dunn

A Beautiful Journal from Author Whitley Strieber

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I've been reading Whitley Strieber's books ever since I was eleven years old, and when you read my writing, the influence of his non-fiction, moreso than his fiction, stands out in my work. Especially the non-fiction passages that read like the following link.

Here is his journal entry from today, about a recent experience he had. It's simply beautiful.

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On This Earth Day....

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(Logic-Stoopid Ratio: 10:0 Mood: Erudite)

On this Earth Day, I am tired of the bullshit.

I am tired of the endless debating, the statistics for and against anthropogenic(or human-caused) climate change, the wringing of hands over policy, and the occasional chirps from the peanut gallery on all sides of this topic.

I'm sick of the sophistry, for which the left, centre, and right of the political spectrum all share the guilt.

Most of all, I'm tired of the lack of common sense over this whole business coming from everyone who fails to see the one big, undeniable common-sense rule that we as a species are breaking: you don't shit where you eat.

That's right. For all the complexities, vicissitudes, paradoxes, hyperboles, dialectics, red-herrings, and other big, hard-to-pronounce words and terms that swirl around all talk of the environment like twister jetsam, the relationship between each human being and his or her planet boils down to simply not taking a crap in the same place where we derive our nourishment.

In a comment to a video link of Michael Jackson's "Earth Song" on my Facebook wall this morning, my colleague, friend, and vitriol-supplier Julius Parente implies that I am against "progress". I have accurately cited our definition of "progress" as a major factor as to why we are ingesting our own waste on a daily basis. This is what he and other political conservatives like him do: they engage in creative wordplay, redirecting your attention away from the issue for the sake of forwarding their own agenda.

And what is that agenda? That, too, boils down to simplicity: conservatives want the freedom to shit wherever they want. They don't want to make the lifestyle changes, because even if it's killing us, it's preferable to having to give up one's SUV.

They argue that jobs will be lost, economies ruined, lifestyles destroyed, entire civilizations pushed to the brink of collapse, masses made homeless, civil liberties taken away, and the world generally coming to an end.....if we choose as a species to obey our common sense and not shit where we eat.

To take a page from Aaron Sorkin, this is what conservatives are good at: "making you afraid of it, and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections."

But it's not just conservatives. Socialists and liberals all have their agendas, their own ideological axes to grind, and they've helped to discredit a legitimate movement by inserting their own pre-existing desire to tax the hell out of you and give more power to the state, in the name of environmentalism. Nowhere do you find room for individuals or businesses to do right on their own: the state is mother, the state is father.

Shame on you. You've given the right wing bullets to shoot at you, because you didn't know when to keep your ideological fly zipped when a far more important challenge, one that is beyond politics, knocked on your door and said "what up".

This is too bad, considering that the one thing the centre-left does do well, at its finest, is encourage everyone to aspire to more than what we are now, to become better, and to make political decisions that manifest those high ideals. Were it not for these progressive elements, I would still be a second-class citizen based on my skin colour, women would still be shackled to their stoves and beds, non-Christian beliefs would still have "occult" status in the minds of the majority, and society would be a lot less great than it is now (to say nothing of homosexuals and Jews...watch now, as they distract us away by stating that I accused them of anti-Semitism. I deal in facts, not ideologies, bro).

Conservatives are good at appealing to inertia, and the baser, cheaper, bigoted, lazy, close-minded elements of the electorate. The voters don't have to think, don't have to spend money, don't have take responsibility for anything other than keeping a job and not suckling at the government teat, don't have to sacrifice. With conservatives in charge, nobody has to work for progress, and certainly not the government.

To my friend, I am not against "progress", Julius: you, and all those like you, are, in fact, the ones who hate progress.

You work against progress every single time you imply a false dichotomy between "trees" and "jobs' to avoid talking about facts, knowing that on a level playing field, you will lose a fact-based discussion on the environment each and every time.

You work against progress every time you cite the political hypocrisies of the other side as the reason why you're not trying to do better yourself.

You work against progress every time you thumb your nose at the messengers who bring you the truth, simply because of the political colours you think they fly, or because you don't like them personally.

You work against progress every time you present junk science as fact to the genuine seekers of knowledge, aiming not to educate, but to convert.

And you work against progress when you close minds to the possibilities that simply changing existing industries, institutions, and practices to be more harmonious with the surrounding environment while maintaining our standard of living can bring a future greater than the grim invention your colleagues have concocted to scare citizens back into being okay with eating, drinking, and breathing in their own waste.

You want to know what progress is? I'll tell you.

True progress means using your brain. It means looking back at nearly half a millennium of industrial development as a necessary and vital stage of our growth as a civilization, and changing how it operates now so that our technology and standards of living don't continue to contaminate our air, our water, our food.

True progress means recognizing that the technologies have existed for nearly half-a-century that do not destroy ecosystems and climates, and all it takes is for us to implement them.

True progress means recognizing, and encouraging, the integration of green technologies into the economy for the sake of sustainable job creation and growth, and thus recognizing that "trees" and "jobs" are not mutually-exclusive.

True progress means recognizing that the well-being of other species in the food chain that we currently dismiss as unimportant or irrelevant can, in fact, be key to our own survival, especially if our current practices are killing them.

And true progress starts by doing what's right, even if it's not easy at first.

I'm done talking to the peanut gallery, since peanuts generally don't have much to contribute to a conversation in real life.

Instead, I will appeal to your common sense, reader. Outside of scientific data and methodology, which can and has been tampered with to suit ideological agendas of all sides, everything about the following is undeniable and incontrovertible:

The planet created us.

The planet provides our basic biological needs to simply live.

Thus, we have a vested interest in sustaining the healthy functioning of the planet.

Of all species, ours is the dominant one, in terms of our power and ability to alter the world.

Of all species, ours is the only one that is aware of all global systems at once, how they interact, how they affect us, and how we affect them.

If six billion individuals produce even one unit of anything into the surrounding environment, that amounts to six billion units of that "anything' being put into the surrounding environment.

We know that many of the products we emit are toxic.

We know that those toxicities end up in the same land from which we grow food, in the same waters from which we drink, and in the air that we all breathe.

We know what we are doing.

We know what it does to the systems that sustain us.

We know what it does to our bodies and our homes.

We do it anyway.

And we can choose to stop.

A Native American saying states that "no tree has branches foolish enough to fight amongst themselves". In the end, this is not a matter of choosing sides, because we are on the same side: the side of life. Things like money and jobs and houses matter, of course, but they are part of the larger whole.

Currently, that whole is not harmonious with all of its parts, and that's where our work lies: creating harmony between our everyday lifestyle and the planet itself. If you want to discuss how best to go about that, then great: speak your mind, but don't deny the fundamental facts about what we are doing and what effect it has on this world. Don't ignore the inconvenient truths. And don't lie.

"Every day on this planet, by definition, is Earth Day: today's just the day we notice everything we've lost along the path of "progress", and hope for the things we can yet save." This was my status update today on Facebook.

Progress has led us here, this is true, but if we humans, outgrowths of the Earth itself, stop fighting amongst ourselves over the very entity that sustains us, then progress will also lead us out. We can redefine progress.

And on this Earth Day, as with every day, I wonder when we're finally going to start.

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My name is Jody Aberdeen and I am the President....(this one was for you, Mr. Sorkin).



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Avatars

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(Logic-Stoopid Ratio: 9:1 Mood: Smartypants)

With Avatar coming out on DVD, I'm surprised to find that most people don't know about the word itself.

The avatar originated as a Hindu religious construct, thousands of years old. It means "descent", referring to the physical appearance of a deity in the flesh, having descended from heaven to Earth. It is essentially an interface, or representation, if you will, of an aspect of divinity in daily life, for the purpose of interaction between mortals and the gods.

In 2010, we - as in Western civilization - have appropriated the term to mean a representation of a real person in another medium, like wearing a diving suit while exploring the ocean. Mostly, we apply this to computers - i.e. your chosen MSN or Facebook profile pic is your "avatar" within that environment, and users interact with you via that representation - and, of course, in the film Avatar, which makes literal usage of it, creating bodies that act as the medium of interaction between the research scientists on Pandora and the Na'vi people.

Purists hate it when we Westerners appropriate terms from other cultures for our own usage, but I've always felt there's a creative aspect to appropriation, a synthesis of ideas to create a new way of seeing an old concept. And we all use "avatars" every day, although many of them are as much a show for our inner selves as they are for others in our daily experience of life.

Your personal avatar represents who you want to be as much as who you are now (or who you think you are). I suspect that out of the ten or so Hindu avatars that allegedly walked the Earth, their devotees were as much looking to create in themselves the qualities of the particular gods that were made manifest in the flesh. With Facebook in particular, profile avatars express complex feelings that words cannot, while ensuring that the outsiders know it's you who they're looking at.

Then, there's life itself, especially when you're a teenager...

Most teenage boys' hero worship involves hockey players and quarterbacks, or martial artists. Not so much me: mine were all fictional characters on TV.

In Grade 9, I had transferred out of French Immersion and was starting out with a new group of peers. Given that I wasn't terribly popular before, and that I didn't want to have the same level of bullying recur at the new place, I decided to reinvent myself. So, I chose this guy...



I never completely grew out of the noble, upstanding, fish-out-of-water and terribly polite Mountie, but Due South's Constable Benton Fraser served the purpose of reinventing myself as an overall "nice guy", someone who you could be friends with and who would be nice to other people. Someone with a sense of order, Canadian, decorum, a quiet, polite hero. The nice guyishness has stuck, though I find it somewhat disturbing that ultimately he's almost undone by a woman two seasons in...oh well.

I also had small periods of time when I used to see things through this eyes of this science fictional character... Of course, Babylon 5's Captain John J. Sheridan was far more badass than I ever could have been in high school (or even now), but the idea was to teach me to build up some backbone, become someone who would fight for principle, even if, for me, the weapons came in the form of words. Plus, he was "The One" of Three people who had a destiny to change the course of the galaxy. He brought different races together, commanded fleets, saved Earth from dictatorial rule, and created an Interstellar Alliance between them. And they made a line of plush teddy bears named after him, in at least one episode, anyway....

Of course, university changed a few things, and when I joined Phi Delta Theta in second year, I realized I had to start looking towards the type of future that I wanted to be, and the man I wanted to become. And when I became Chapter President, a time that coincided with the release of my all-time favourite movie trilogy, suddenly this figure appeared from the shadows to claim his rightful place as my new avatar...



Now, choosing Aragorn as my avatar wasn't merely my usual delusion of grandeur acting up. Rather, I wanted to feel that I was someone who was headed to great things, that I could serve the Greater Good, help others, the realization of the "destiny" that I had started to feel I had in high school. From him, I learned courage, character, healing others, love and dedication, and fellowship. This especially became true after my buddy and pledge brother Michael described me as "the heart, and the butt, of the Chapter" (the guys didn't let me get away with taking myself too seriously. They still don't. That's what lifelong friends are for.)

Today...well, I've come back to reality. I'm not going to be a Mountie, a Captain, or a King. I'm 29 years old with less than half a year to my thirties. I'm single and not completely loving it. And I'm still getting this writing career off the ground. And though I may still have some greater destiny in store for me, I'm not nearly as sure of anything anymore, except that life will be what it is whether or not I like it, and it's all in how I approach it. I'm in between the guy who is looking for it all, and the guy who has it all. As such, it's appropriate that my avatars waver between these two (I'm tempted to photoshop them into a hybrid)...

Ted Mosby is a romantic, a dreamer, an overthinker, and a creator of his own destiny. We already know his show, How I Met Your Mother, has a happy ending: what we want to see is, well, howit all went down.

The other guy, Richard Castle, is where I hope to be in a few years. A successful writer, artist, and badass. A father, and yet despite having been married (and divorced) twice, he still has the ability to fall in love, as the on-screen angst with Kate Beckett will attest. It's the success that appeals to me, one that I look forward to so much.

As I said, the avatar represents as much who you want to be as who you are right now. I'm pretty happy when I see my Facebook friends shuffle around their profile avatars: they capture us at our best, even if they don't always bear our faces, they show who we would like to be. They express how we're feeling, what we're looking for, so much more symbolically and powerfully than words.

Whichever avatar you choose, make sure it says something about the characteristics within you that are now rising to the surface like lava bubbles, or the abilities you feel you need to attain by summoning the power of your chosen figures.

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