Lost Finale Earns a Split Grade (SPOILER ALERT!)

[Warning: some serious spoilers ahead.]

I loved the first two hours and fifteen minutes of the finale. Then the show apparently went off the rails. Wait, was everyone was dead all along? Lame, lame, lame! However, the more I think about the finale, and read what other people have to say, the more I’m convinced that my initial reaction was wrong. Here’s my current interpretation of what went down in the season finale, starting with a little background on how we got here:

The first three seasons of Lost followed the characters in the present and flashed back to their pasts. Then, in Season 4, we followed the characters and flashed forward to their future off of the island. Season 5, of course, treated us to some actual time traveling. So what the heck happens in Season 6? The nuclear explosion at the end of Season 5 led us to believe that we were following the characters in two separate timelines. Wrong! Season 6 follows the characters in the present and flashes to what happens to the characters after they die.

I did not realize this at first. The finale stunned me because I initially thought that the island was purgatory. Maybe even just Jack’s personal Purgatory. That would have been terribly disappointing. If the island was Purgatory, then why did we follow anyone but the main characters? What was the point of all the island mysteries? Why did the relationships between the characters matter, if they weren’t real?

However, the show as a whole makes much more sense if we realize that the sideways world is Purgatory. That means that the island storyline from Season 6 was simply a completion of the island storyline from season 1-5. And the sideways world stands on its own, as the place where all the characters go when they die. (I can’t say it’s the future because it’s the afterlife and it doesn’t matter when they died; time is meaningless there.)

This interpretation is much more satisfying. So the island world was real? Then the island storyline was a terrific capstone to the first five seasons of Lost. So many great moments: the epic mano a mano confrontation between Jack and Locke (with an awesome cut to a commercial break), the escape of most of the main characters, Hurley serving as the guardian of the island with Ben by his side, and of course Jack’s death with Vincent lying by his side, bringing the show full circle. I give this storyline in Season 6 an A.

Sure, they left a few mysteries unsolved, and we never got a physics lesson on the time travel and how the island worked. But who cares? As someone else pointed out, nothing was lamer in Star Wars: Episode I than the fact that the Force was actually caused by something called “midichlorians.” Did we really want the season finale of Lost to end with a lot of expository quasi-scientific dialogue? Not me. I was happy with the focus on the characters, the end of the epic struggle with the Man in Black, and of course Jack.

That brings us to Purgatory. Unlike the real-world storyline, which was terrific, this one leaves me slightly dissatisfied. I can’t quite put my finger on why, though. Was it the fact that everyone was dead? Maybe, but that’s less of a problem now that I realize that the character were alive for the first five seasons and half of six. Was it the fact that it brought a religious aspect to the show? It’s hard to make that complaint when a major theme of the show since Season 1 has been science vs. faith. Nor was the religious aspect of the show sectarian. As the episode made clear with its symbolism (the windows in the church, etc.) it wasn’t endorsing any religion in particular. I say Purgatory, but really the afterlife storyline could have been any way station on the way to the next life. Heaven? Reincarnation? Merging with the universe? Who knows. Maybe the problem with the Purgatory storyline is that the details of what happened earlier in the season don’t particularly matter. (Does anyone care about the Kate episode?) On the other hand, this storyline had some great moments, and all the awakenings and reunions in the finale certainly delivered some emotional satisfaction.

I need to think some more about this. For now, I’m going to give the finale a split grade: A for the real-world storyline, B for the purgatory storyline.

How to Fix the Baseball Playoffs: Emulate the NFL

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig recently formed a 14-person advisory committee to brainstorm ideas for realignment. And boy, did they brainstorm:

[O]ne proposal gaining "strong support" is a concept referred to as "floating realignment."

Aimed to increase competitive balance, and lessen the dominance of the Yankees and Red Sox, the idea is to allow teams to be, in Verducci's words, "free to change divisions from year-to-year based on geography, payroll and their plans to contend or not."

That's pretty radical stuff. The example used by Verducci involved the Indians, who are in a rebuilding phase and also struggling financially, voluntarily moving to the AL East to gain the revenue benefit of 18 home dates against the Yankees and Red Sox. Currently, they get eight.

Meanwhile, a team like the Rays or Orioles, facing the ordeal of competing annually (and often futilely) against the mighty Yankees and Red Sox, could switch over to the AL Central for a season and have, at least theoretically, a better chance of making the playoffs.

One proviso is that no team could join a division more than two time zones outside its own. Keep in mind that this is merely a proposal and very preliminary. But apparently this could even entail teams switching leagues, the numbers of teams in each division changing from year to year, and possibly having interleague games throughout the season in some years if each league winds up with 15 teams.

Holy cow! Obviously such a proposal has its problems. As Bill Simmons pointed out on a recent podcast, this gives owners of small market teams an incentive to tank so they can switch to the AL East and get the financial reward of playing against the Sox and Yankees. But at least the Committee is thinking outside of the box.

Here’s my half-baked proposal: split each league into two divisions. Six teams from each league compete for their respective league championship. Those six teams consist of the two division winners and four wild cards. The two division winners get homefield advantage and a first-round bye. The four wild-cards play in the first round, and the two winners advance to play the two division winners. Then things proceed normally. The two second-round winners play each other for the league championship, and the league champion plays in the World Series.

This proposal is inspired by pro football. The NBA and NHL let too many teams into the playoffs—it’s hard to care about the regular season when half the league makes the playoffs. On the other hand, baseball lets in just four teams. That’s too little. The NFL gets it just right. Six teams per conference, with the top two seeds in each getting first-round byes. Six teams per conference strikes the right balance in letting in the really good teams while still ensuring that making the playoffs is an actual accomplishment. And I love the fact that the top two seeds get first-round byes. It makes regular season games that much more meaningful.

So why not just adopt the NFL approach wholesale? Realign each baseball league into four divisions, like football, and send the division winners plus two wild cards to the playoffs? Because baseball can’t support four divisions. First, MLB have to expand by about four teams to fill out the divisions, and baseball doesn't need more crappy teams in marginal media markets. Second, having four divisions would make existing divisional inequities worse. Thanks to the salary cap, the balance of power in the NFL is always shifting. But in baseball, powerhouses like the Sox and Yankees outspend their rivals year after year. Pity the poor suckers stuck in a four-team AL East. Having two divisions and four wild cards lessens the pain.

Another advantage to having just two division winners and four wildcards is that power imbalances between the divisions matter less. If one division really sucks, the other division can send three or even four wildcards to the playoffs. Why reward mediocrity?

The most obvious downside to the two-division plan is that it would lessen the number of games between traditional rivals. Because the Sox and Yankees would share their division with more teams, they would presumably play fewer games against each other. But there must be a workaround. Maybe MLB could remedy this by increasing the percentage of games played within each division.

Problem… solved! You’re welcome, Bud Selig. Feel free to show your appreciation by cutting me a big fat check. Actually, what the heck—just cut out the middleman and send it directly to the law school. That tuition isn't going to pay itself. Thanks!

Lost

Just watched the second episode of Lost. It was a Kate episode, so it wasn't very interesting. But I'm still optimistic about the final season. The season premiere was lots of fun, and I like the two-timeline (two-universe?) concept. I'm also liking the addition of John Hawkes (Sol Starr in Deadwood, Dustin in Eastbound and Down) as one of the Others.

Bill Watterson gives first interview in 20 years

Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson gives his first interview in more than 20 years:

Ah, the life of a newspaper cartoonist -- how I miss the groupies, drugs and trashed hotel rooms!

But since my "rock star" days, the public attention has faded a lot. In Pop Culture Time, the 1990s were eons ago. There are occasional flare-ups of weirdness, but mostly I just go about my quiet life and do my best to ignore the rest. I'm proud of the strip, enormously grateful for its success, and truly flattered that people still read it, but I wrote "Calvin and Hobbes" in my 30s, and I'm many miles from there.

An artwork can stay frozen in time, but I stumble through the years like everyone else. I think the deeper fans understand that, and are willing to give me some room to go on with my life.

It's good to see that Watterson hasn't gone completely Salinger on us. To be fair, he hasn't has been entirely absent from the public sphere-- he wrote an excellent review of a Charles Schultz biography for the Wall Street Journal in 2007:

We discover, for example, that in the recurring scenes of Lucy annoying Schroeder at the piano, the crabby and bossy Lucy stands in for Joyce, and the obsessive and talented Schroeder is a surrogate for Schulz.

Reading these strips in light of the information Mr. Michaelis unearths, I was struck less by the fact that Schulz drew on his troubled first marriage for material than by the sympathy that he shows for his tormentor and by his ability to poke fun at himself.

Lucy, for all her domineering and insensitivity, is ultimately a tragic, vulnerable figure in her pursuit of Schroeder. Schroeder's commitment to Beethoven makes her love irrelevant to his life. Schroeder is oblivious not only to her attentions but also to the fact that his musical genius is performed on a child's toy (not unlike a serious artist drawing a comic strip). Schroeder's fanaticism is ludicrous, and Lucy's love is wasted. Schulz illustrates the conflict in his life, not in a self-justifying or vengeful manner but with a larger human understanding that implicates himself in the sad comedy. I think that's a wonderfully sane way to process a hurtful world. Of course, his readers connected to precisely this emotional depth in the strip, without ever knowing the intimate sources of certain themes. Whatever his failings as a person, Schulz's cartoons had real heart.

At an intellectual level, I can understand Watterson's desire to withdraw from public life. But personally, it strikes me as a huge waste of a fine writer. He doesn't even need to draw any more comic strips. Just get a monthly column in a newspaper or something. (Or, dare I say it, write a blog. He always hated commercialism... well, you can't get less commercially rewarding than a blog! Trust me on this one.) Throw us a bone, Bill!

Long live the long take

Check out this article on the “20 Greatest Extended Takes in Movie History.” Two of the takes really stood out for me. These were fight scenes from two action movies, Oldboy and The Protector.

Most fight scenes these days seem to be shot in the Bourne Identity style, featuring quick cuts and a shaky camera. I actually enjoy this style in movies where the fighting is supposed to be brutally realistic. It can capture the confusion of a real fight. But in some films, like the Batman movies, the quick cuts just annoy. The movie is about a guy who wears a cape and rides the Batmobile, for God’s sake! Show us what is going on.

Words cannot express how much I love this scene from Oldboy:

The camera slowly drifts down the hallway as Min-Sik Choi’s protagonist battles his way through multiple protagonists to reach the elevator at the end. But this isn’t your typical martial arts movie where the bad guys considerately charge at our hero one at a time. No, Choi must fight his way through the whole crowd over the course of three solid minutes. It's exhausting. Even the music sounds tired. Just a terrific scene.

The other extended take I wanted to point out is from The Protector:

In contrast to the scene from Oldboy, this camerawork here is almost playful, occasionally leaving Jaa to glance down at the people streaming through the lobby below, and allowing Jaa to slip behind a wooden screen, revealing his location periodically by shoving an unfortunate guy’s head through the carving. I say playful, but a lot of work went into this shot. I can’t even imagine how difficult it must have been to film. According to the article, this take took one month and five takes to shoot. If there’s one flaw, it’s that Jaa never really confronts more than one guy at once. Not a surprise—Jaa has never been like Jackie Chan, who likes to choreograph elaborate fight scenes with multiple opponents.

John Scalzi wrote an interesting article awhile back that argued that Bourne-style jump-cut scenes may become less common as more and more action films are shot in 3D. In Avatar, you may have noticed that Cameron shot a lot of long takes and avoided quick cuts as much as possible. That’s because rapid cuts in 3D require your eyes to repeatedly refocus. Think Transformers gave you a headache? Believe me, it would have been much worse in 3D.

Long live the long take!

Our prisons are now safe

U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit votes to uphold Wisconsin prison's ban of Dungeon's and Dragons.

Bad Boston Accent Alert

30 Rock producer Robert Carlock stands behind Julianne Moore's Boston accent, claiming: "I know people who sound like that. Take the train." [Hat tip to my friend Laura for the link.] Um.... no. Let's go to the tape:

I'm a Boston native, and I have NEVER heard anyone who sounds like that. It's like she's an alien from another planet, dropped into Boston and trying desperately to imitate a Boston accent, but failing miserably because her mouthparts just can't handle human language. For a real Boston accent in a movie, look no further than Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting (he lays the verbal beatdown around the one minute mark):

How do you like THEM apples?? Anyway, Moore's accent is like Peter Sellers' French accent in the Pink Panther movies: hilarious despite (or perhaps because of) its complete disconnect from reality.