Not As Lost As You'd Think

This week we said goodbye to the survivors of Oceanic 815 and all the other lost souls of “Lost.” I was a big fan. I see there has been a lot of discussion on the net about the finale, much of it very wrong-headed in my opinion. So here are my thoughts on what we saw.

Most importantly, the survivors were not dead all this time. My evidence for this is a) the producers said so a couple of seasons back and b) otherwise the story doesn’t make sense. There were characters like Ben, Desmond and Juliet who were not on the flight and had their own histories. They were not only seen through the eyes of the survivors. The last shot of wreckage on the beach was the plane carrying Kate, Sawyer & Co.

The sideways alternate universe was some sort of afterlife or more precisely, the anteroom to it. Jack was the last one to realize it, but then he was usually the last one to realize a lot of things. And since it was the afterlife it was outside of time which is why there was no “now” there and people like Hurley who presumably died long after Jack were there.

The polar bear: the Dharma Initiative did animal experiments. You’ll remember the comment when Sawyer and Kate were locked in cages about how much faster the bear figured out how to get food from the machine. The Dharma Initiative was just what it said it was, an organization trying to tap into and exploit the energy at the heart of the island. This is why Jacob (we can assume) had them all killed when they got too close, to protect the island.

It was a great series about grand themes: sin and redemption, the power of love, the overarching need and supreme difficulty of letting go. None of the characters was untainted. Even Hurley told a lie toward the end. But all at the end rose above their flaws to achieve something magnificent – which can also be said of this series. How wonderful it was to have a show that didn’t insult our intelligence. I suspect it will be a long time before we have that again.

Gimme Shelter

Tomorrow should be fun. The whole country is doing a defense drill. I can’t remember another like it, at least not in recent years. Our government happily assures us that nothing ominous is on the horizon and cautions us not to read anything into this. It’s just an exercise, the lack of which would be irresponsible. I am reassured. It’s not as if there’s a maniac in some not-too-far-off country trying to develop nuclear bombs and threatening to wipe us off the map or something.

As a humble civilian not too much is expected of me. At the sound of the siren one is supposed to sprint to the nearest bomb shelter within 2 minutes – I have visions of my grammar school gym teacher standing by with a stopwatch – and stay there until the all-clear. Luckily for both me and my gym teacher, I don’t have far to run. Like all new houses, mine comes equipped with its own bomb shelter. It’s just behind my back as I write this, the entrance being maybe a meter away. So I’m confident I can make it by the deadline.

The thing is, it’s my walk-in closet. I can spend 10 minutes in there if I have to, so I’m ok for the drill. But would I really want to stay there for hours in a real emergency? I don’t think so. Salient point: there’s no bathroom. That means after two, three hours tops I’m out of there. Way back when Saddam was lobbing scuds at us and we had to have a sealed room, we sealed the bedroom and bathroom so we could wait it out in comfort. Those were the good old days.

I have no one to blame but myself, of course. When I was planning this house, a shelter didn’t seem like such an issue. I thought it was a waste. Kibbutz houses are small and everyone uses this space for something else, be it bedrooms or offices. Then a few months after I moved in, Hizbullah started shooting missiles at us from Lebanon and I wondered whether I should be sleeping in there. That’s out of the question. I’m too old to sleep on the floor and the bed’s too heavy to move. But there’s no need to worry about that now. Tomorrow is just a drill and I can stay there for a few minutes. I may even get some cleaning done.