Hurley Would Make an Excellent Defensive End

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard of a television show called Lost and that the last episode is tonight. Since I have a, ahem, slight TV addiction, of course I will be watching. I’ve been watching since Episode 1, because I certainly couldn’t resist a show with the kind of buzz and attention it was getting back in the summer of 2004. What, doesn’t everybody research the upcoming fall offerings and plan out their weekly viewing schedules in advance?

For many years, I’ve tried to entice my husband to watch certain programs with me. I believe it started when we were dating, and I told him we could see each other on Tuesday nights if and only if he’d watch either Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the Gilmore Girls, seeing as I only had 1 VCR and couldn’t tape them both. He chose the Gilmore Girls, much to my surprise (I’m thinking that totally came from the dating portion of the male brain, telling him to pick the seemingly girly show in order to properly impress). Since then, he’s almost categorically denied joining me on the couch for most of my selections. Shame. He’s missed out on some good stuff. (I, however, have agreed to the vast majority of his choices and have fallen in love, or at least deep like, with many of them, sticking with the likes of 24 well after he gave up.) (Not that I’m letting him give up. I’ve got the final season on the DVR and we will totally be couch surfing that bad boy this summer. I need closure, and I tell him he does, too.)

And so. Lost. There are many, many opinions and theories and thoughts out there, particularly graffitiing the great interwebs. I’ll just say I love a show that sucks me in, and keeps me in with a serialized throughline, that pushes the boundaries with science fiction and fantasy to blur reality just enough so that I don’t get exasperated with absurd flights of fancy every single week. I can suspend my disbelief, but only so much. And I’m seriously impressed that the producers put a hard stop on the series so that they could finish what they started, in the manner in which they started, and at the level of finesse with which they’ve created their work, instead of keeping on until the show sputtered to a wimped out halt. That took guts.

Not that I want to see it end. I have a total love hate relationship with TV endings. I hate them, which is probably the main reason I enjoy soap operas so much. And I love them enough to tune into series finales of shows I haven’t watched before that point. Perhaps I live for closure, even if it’s not exactly my closure.

So I’ll be watching tonight. Earlier this week, I told my family that Sunday night I’d be out of commission, and I got some funny looks. Until I explained that this is my Super Bowl, and I’d be watching from the pre-game (clip show) through the post-game analysis (Jimmy Kimmel). And at that moment, I brought a clarity to this show that the writers never have.