LOST Without It

For the last six years, I knew that when the last episode of LOST ended, there would still be a question on my mind.  I spent probably too much time than was healthy wondering what that question would be.  But it wasn't "what the hell just happened?" or "so wait, they pulled the purgatory card on us?" or even "that was the last shot we've been anticipating all these years?"  My question was "what am I going to do with my life now?"  I have spent a long time caring about LOST, more than I would like to admit, and now that it has run its course I am both relieved and at a loss.  And I am sure as hell not going to start watching American Idol to fill the void it has left in my life.  I may be on a slippery slope of watching reruns of The X-Files, so I suppose this could be classified as a "rebound phase."  I'm not sure if this is entirely healthy or not.

I have been inserting famous one-liners from the show into daily conversation.  I have been drawing parallels between events in my life and specific episodes of the show.  I even listened to Mama Cass' "Make Your Own Kind of Music."  This is how Charlie must have felt in the episode where Locke got him to kick his heroin addiction.  Only I'm not psychologically or physiologically dependent on it, and finding a crashed prop-plane transporting hollow statues of the Virgin Mary filled with LOST episodes wouldn't solve my problems.  Because I've said it before and I'll say it again: things have to be end in order to be meaningful.

I was both disappointed with the off-island ending and satisfied with the on-island ending.  The very fact that Hurley, who was originally conceived as a comic relief character, became the replacement Jacob.  You realize that there were really no "good guys" in the show except for the Losties, and even then Hurley, Desmond, and Kate were probably the only ones who was good all of the time.  Jacob, even though he was supposed to be the protector of the gay light/life force of the universe, was kind of a dick and made a lot of people die.  (And as we learned the hard way in season 5, dead is dead.)

We also learned that time travel is not as useful as you may think, that you should never give up even if you're paraplegic, that whatever happened happened, that the universe has a way of course-correcting itself, that polar bears can travel through time, people can talk to ghosts, that punching someone in the face is always the best solution, that childbirth is incredibly frequent and usually takes only a few minutes, that sometimes people have secret other families, that heroin comes in universal, unmarked packaging, that you can be fired as a monk, that it's not Penny's boat, and that if we can't live together, then we're gonna die alone.  And we will never see the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 the same way ever again.

There is definitely potential for a spin-off with Hurley n' Ben, and their whacky adventures of protecting the extremely gay light while at the same time not being paranoid assholes.  And since Hurley can see dead people, deceased characters from the show can make cameo appearances.  Rose and Bernard can also be recurring characters.  Another good spin-off would be the antics of Richard Alpert as he tries to reintegrate into society after being absent since the 1800's, while at the same time coming to grips with mortality and with the fact that he is once again aging.  Lapidus can open a Jimmy Buffet bar with Sawyer as a hard-drinking, wise-cracking waiter, Miles can do his own ghostbusting show, Claire and Kate can have an awkward quasi-family sitcom where everyone thinks that they're lesbians but they're really not, and once Hurley gets Desmond off the island, he can sail around on his boat solving crime around the world.  ABC execs, are you listening?  I smell multiple cash cows here.

And here's this post's twist ending: I have actually been dead since the second installment of Edible/Audible.  How did I write this post?  It's all part of the mystery.