That’s right, banner picture! As previously mentioned, there will be some big changes coming soon! Most notably, the site theme is due for a change. It’s not that I love LOST any less, but the show has been over for more than a year and … wow it really hurt me to even write that … but it’s just been past due time to update. In addition I haven’t been writing on here as much as I used to and chasinglilly.net just hasn’t been as popular as it used to be. A change has been long-coming. The change will be abrupt. Indeed, many of you who dislike the idea of layout changes may be quite cantankerous toward the fact. Those of you who follow my Twitter may not actually find this change very surprising. I’m not going for a general template. I’ve never been much for them. The new theme will follow:

The Hunger Games.

Yes, my new theme will be based on the best-selling book series by Suzanne Collins, which is also being turned into a movie by Lionsgate to be released next Summer. For those of you who have never heard of it, do yourself a favor and PICK UP A COPY! They’re amazing books, and I am so incredibly psyched for the upcoming film(s).

The change actually makes a lot of sense. For a while now my blog has been utterly baseless. I’m sure most people who visit the site react like…

It’s fine. It’s cool. But there’s nothing to latch onto. Other than the LOSt-inspired theme, there is no commonality upon which to build a group of readers. It used to be based around LOST with the Dark Territory podcast and write-ups on the episodes and such. That was my (to steal a line from Jim Groom) digital story. For the past many months the blog has kind of LOST it’s way (heh see what I did there?). My realization of this fact makes me feel…

So, yeah, this Hunger Games decision is great! I’d been planning to hack out a template based around it, but the entire writing theme blew my mind! And it just came to me tonight and my reaction was like…

Thus beyond simply being a blog-image-template, The Hunger Games is going to be my new THEME. This will help me get posting more, start spreading information, and help me get involved in the various communities surrounding the series. I’ll be posting stories related to the books, news on the upcoming film, Suzanne Collins in general, etc. Don’t worry, I’ll still be posting pointless stories about my life. It also helps that The Hunger Games fan base is really just starting. Of course, that’s not to say it isn’t already rather well, okay HUGE. But compared to Harry Potter or LOST, the fan base is starting it’s exponential growth period. And I want to be part of that.

Of course there are already quite a few great fan sites out there like mockingjay.net, Hunger Games Movie, Hunger Games Trilogy, Down With the Capitol, and The Hob just to name a few. Those are just the ones I follow on Google Reader. Of course there are many others, but I would like to make an impression of some sort on the community. And with support, we can! I think it would be awesome if I could start blogging news and maybe Will and I could even start up a little podcast of our own about the series. I converted Will to a Hunger Games fan a few weeks back. In fact we have already been talking about doing a Hunger Games short film as a future project, something I am very supportive of. I hope this idea has your

and that you all will support me in this endeavor. And be sure to go support the fan sites already in existence listed above!

Happy Trails,
Sam.

I just felt the need to say that it was beautiful, and that LOST had literally the perfect ending. Nothing could have been more fulfilling. This post doesn’t even need a signature. Perfect. *Final piano note*

The show is tentatively named “Odd Jobs” and will follow two ex-black-ops cops (O’Quinn and Emerson). They are two of the best actors on television (don’t deny it, their awards speak for themselves!) and it’s great they’re receiving the recognition they deserve and getting a high-budget show written for them as actors. Emerson had become good friends with O’Quinn on the set of LOST, and watching them mess around behind the scenes was always fun. When questioned about the new series, Emerson said:

“I really am AMAZED that what started out as some kidding-around on the set of LOST has turned into a network TV reality! I’m still reeling from this sudden turn of events. I’m an actor who has never even succeeded in testing for a pilot and here I find myself involved in a project custom-built for Terry and me! Can’t tell you how thrilling it is to be part of the Bad Robot family and enter into this exciting collaboration with Warner Brothers and NBC! Have we ARRIVED or what?! But best of all will be that day when Terry and I show up on the set of a brand new show, look around, shrug our shoulders and say “Let’s get started!” My fingers are crossed! (Did I use enough exclamation points? Ha!)” – via EW

According to trustworthy officials at chasinglilly.net, this is the tentative artwork for the series!

ABC and NBC had a pretty intense bid competition for the new show, but in the end NBC got it. I’m actually kinda happy for this. It would seem like too much of a LOST copy if suddenly ABC had a new J.J. Abrams show with the same cast members and everything. Which is why I agree with the EW article that I don’t want the two actors to reprise their roles. However, I don’t know if the show should be a comedy. Buuut… who am I to say? I’ve never seen either of them in a comedic setting, so they might be great!

This is just great. I’d heard rumors the two actors would get back together in a project again soon. Apparently O’Quinn talked about it even while on the set of LOST for the entire last season. I remember hearing reports the two were headed to TNT for some drama, but this is the best it could have been in my opinion.



Happy Trails and Namaste,
Sam.

Update #2: Sam is mad due to the Emmy’s the other night.

Update #3: Due to the previously mentioned extreme hunger, Sam’s anger has been increased 100 fold regarding this.



IMPORTANT: For your convenience, parts of this post have been written in the 3rd person. And here commences the post:

First off, what the heck? No, seriously! What the heck!?

• What is Sam talking about here? Get caught up on the info about the Emmy’s over here and here. Note: this ends the 3rd-person portion of the post.

How did LOST not win? Not only how did they not win everything, but how did the most anticipated television season/series finale of the last decade not win a single award? Not even Terry O’Quinn?? I mean, Aaron Paul? Seriously? Bryan Cranston I can totally understand beating Matthew Fox (though I love him) for lead actor in a drama, cause Bryan Cranston is a pretty incredible actor. But Aaron Paul beating BOTH Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson? That’s just… *choose your expletive combo*. While I am in awe of both Terry and Michael, Terry was the clear winner. He essentially played three separate characters in the sixth season alone (pre-Island Locke, post-Island Locke, and the Man in Black), and in such a way that I was taken aback multiple times.

I’m almost tempted to say Aaron Paul won because both Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson have won in previous years, but that excuse is crap, cause Mad Men has beat LOST in best drama for the past few years in a row. And yet again Mad Men beat LOST in the Best Drama department. That. Is. Crap. Sorry, had to say it. LOST has something no other series on the list has, an ending. It’s done. The LOST team ended LOST, and just how it should have ended. The finale did what the perfect finale should: it tied up every important character thread since the season, and finished answering nearly all the questions we posed in the first two seasons. It brought the series literally around full-circle, ending right where it began, in the same way the great epics of literature do. It was an immensely symbolic action, and for me more than anything finalized LOST’s place in television history. It began with an eye opening, it ended years later with that same eye closing in the same location. It was beautiful. It made everything in the last six seasons worth it. And it deserves recognition.

Yet here comes Mad Men. And what is Man Men anyways? Most people seem to make the same statements every year: “Oh, well Mad Men beat out LOST for Best Drama again. I mean, I don’t watch Mad Men, but I guess it’s good or something.” Nobody watches the show.

I have seen an episode of Mad Men, and honestly I didn’t like it that much. I’m sure there’s something good hidden there, but it didn’t soak me in, it didn’t make me feel invested in anything or make me want to keep watching. As my friend Will puts it, “From the first episode of LOST I watched, I was sucked in. I just realized these were pretty amazing characters.”

And HOW did LOST not win for cinematography for “The End”? As a photography enthusiast myself, my mind was blown after seeing the series finale. Some of the lighting, the mood, and the shots were beautiful. LOST should have won for just the shot of Locke staring out at the boat in the ocean with the storm rolling in. It was moody, crazy, and exactly what it should have been.
And how did “The End” not win for writing? I mean I’m sure the Mad Men episode “Shut The Door. Have A Seat.” had great writing, too. But Damon and Carlton did the impossible: they ended LOST. Correctly. They deserve an award all of their own for that! I figured the fact there was a whole thing where the Emmy’s allowed the “too-long” series finale to be accepted anyways was a pretty sure sign LOST was going to win.

I feel like Mad Men and Dexter beat out LOST for the same reason the academy award for picture of the year is always given out to a R-rated film which deals with what some self-proclaimed intellectuals would like to call “more serious, adult scenarios.” Nothing frivolous like time-traveling bunnies, island deities, and love after death.

Of course, after complaining about LOST I could go on to the other categories, such as how the heck did Jim Parsons (from Big Bang Theory, which you prob also didn’t know) beat out Steve Carell, Alec Baldwin, and the great Tony Shalhoub for best comedy actor? Tony Shalhoub deserved it for his great final season of Monk in my opinion.

And going back to the best supporting actors in a drama, where oh WHERE was the mention for John Noble as Walter Bishop?? Besides Terry O’Quinn he deserved it most of all. All of you should go watch the Fringe episode entitled “Peter” for yourselves. He is a truly brilliant actor, who is not getting the recognition he deserves. And once again, I can only think it’s cause Fringe is a sci-fi show. As such, the actors and drama cannot be treated seriously. That’s dumb, and shows a serious flaw in the award-system. Cry all you want. It’s flawed.

Basically I’ve LOST (haha, get the pun?) all faith in the Emmy’s, and it’s going to be very hard to get it back. However, even so, this doesn’t change my opinion of LOST in the least. LOST changed the way television can be approached, and that’ll always keep it special.



Happy Trails and Namaste,
Sam.



PS – Post-rage, I realize some of my comments about Mad Men being unworthy and the Emmy’s being “dumb”, “incredibly flawed”, etc. were probably a bit harsh…. ah well!

I just got back from a post-finale IHOP trip with some friends/fellow fans, which included a lot of good discussions about this episode. So while I’m currently too emotional, breathless, and blown away to write a full post about it, I figured I had to write a little something.



Ohhh where to start…



What an AMAZING episode. Everything has come to this point. Every thought, every theory, every tangent, every second of LOST has led to this episode. I’m putting this fact out there now: the LOST series finale is the greatest two and a half hours of anything ever. And that is no exaggeration. Writing: AMAZING. Acting: FANTASTIC. Special effects: INCREDIBLE. Cinematography: BREATHTAKING. Music: HEARTBREAKING. And on and on it goes…

I’ll admit the fact they didn’t answer a whole lot in terms of the nagging questions. But you know what? Who cares. I certainly don’t. And the fact that a huge fan like myself has come to the point where the ending was so good I don’t even want to know the full answer(s) is saying something. Every emotion since the first episode has culminated into this last fight, and this last goodbye. And the show took our feelings and threw them all around. Every single commercial break I was overjoyed, teary-eyed, or flat-out in awe.



Wow. The photography of the show was mind-blowing. LOST has always been the most beautiful show on television, but this episode blew even itself out of the water. The shot of Locke standing at the edge of the cliff with the storm coming in, the boat coming towards him, literally left me jaw-dropped. And then the sweeping, spinning camera angles of the incredible Jack/Flocke fight, combined with the dark and moody weather added up to be one of the most astoundingly epic scenes in television history. And of course, we can’t forget Jack’s huge Super Smash Bros. downward-punch before the commercial break (credit Mel Kobran for saying it was “Smash Bros. like”).



They even showed us the inside of the cave, which I never thought we would see. A strange symbol-covered stone in a pool of seemingly electromagnetic water. The stone seemed almost like it was a cork of some type. When the cork was removed, the Island began fall apart and sink. Now what could that remind us of? That reminds me of a certain conversation Jacob had with Richard in Ab Aeterno, in which he described the Island as a sort of “cork” to keep the evil from destroying the world. Of course it’s also interesting that the water from in the pool disappeared once the cork was removed. The only place I could think it would go would be into the hole from which Desmond pulled the cork from. Someone pulling a cork and water rushing into it, causing something catastrophic? Sound familiar? It sounds to me like when Ben went into his secret room to call Smokie. He reached into a puddle of water, pulled some sort of cork, watched the water disappear, then waited for the monster to show and destroy Widmore’s men. Maybe these two examples are just coincidence, or maybe they were meant to foreshadow what was to come.



The producers have said since the beginning they knew what the last frame of LOST was going to be, and I believe them. How poetic, how symbolic, how amazing that the show would begin with the opening of Jack’s eye, only to end with him slowly closing it. In the same position of the bamboo forest, no less.

This is The End. Nothing has ever felt more right in this television show, and I never thought I would say that. Here’s to LOST. And here’s to the most amazing, meta-physical/spiritual ending to any television show ever.

Well I’m tired, and emotionally drained. Time to go watch the Jimmy Kimmel after-show and then sleep, happy that God didn’t end the world at 8:59 PM like we all feared he might. More to come, OF COURSE…



Happy Trails and Namaste,
Sam.

The other fault is the language of the show. No, I don’t mean profanity, I mean literal language being spoken during the show. Or am I the only one confused as to why literally one second everyone is speaking Latin and the next everyone is speaking perfect English. Was this done just to help the audience understand what was going on? What are we to imply about the time period, or either mothers’ descents. It’s not like LOST to do something like this simply for the audience’s benefit. Heck, they had Sun and Jin speak solely Korean for nearly five seasons!

Despite this, I’m not sure I could ask more from an hour of television. From a purely film making perspective, the cinematography was great; lighting was very moody and atmospheric; editing was fast (in a good way) between all the different shots; acting (forgetting the aforementioned) was great; and the score by Michael Giacchino was superb. From an entertainment standpoint, I thought the story was tight, well-told, epicly vast, yet very quick; the graphics were perfectly minimalistic; and the action was compelling and emotional. From a LOST fanatic view, I watched it in awe and thought the episode answered some of the biggest and most pressing questions I’ve had about the show since the very first episode.

I’ve given up theorizing. There. I said it. I’m done reading Wikipedia late into the night, scouring the internet for clues. I’m done hanging on Darlton’s every word during the ABC Official LOST Podcast and watching the numerous theory videos on YouTube. I’m done reloading my page for new theories on DarkUFO and on my iPod Touch. I’m done waiting for Lostpedia to put up the info on the latest episode, and scrolling down to the “Trivia” section to see what facts I may have missed. Oh whoops… I just did that anyway. But you get the point. If you’re like me, you’ve been devoting your time to this show for the past six years, and you’ve realized this is the end. On Sunday, May 23, 2010 LOST ends. And I’m ready. I’m just in for the ride.

And maybe that explains my reaction to this episode. I’ve already talked to multiple people who said they either didn’t understand or else didn’t like the answers this episode gave. There was also one person who said the episode didn’t answer anything, but that’s clearly wrong, so we’re going to forget this person. The people who didn’t understand, I would urge you to watch it again, wait for our Dark Territory Podcast later this week, or else read the Lostpedia page on it. I suppose this is more of a response to those who “don’t like” the answers.

The number one reason people didn’t like the answers is because they seemed “too mystical.” I understand this from a certain perspective, but at the same time you have to think about what kind of show LOST is. So… what kind of show is it? Well LOST is a little bit of everything. It never claimed to be a realistic show or have a tangibly discernible answer. It never claimed to be a faith-driven show about morality and fate. It never claimed to be a temple-raiding, hieroglyphic-filled adventure show. In fact it never even claimed to be a sci-fi show. The only things it ever claimed to be was a drama and mystery show. And it is those two things which it has done masterfully throughout every storyline, genre, and character. It was also these two things which caused LOST to change the industry’s view of what a television show could be.

My point here is that while there are more realistic and sci-fi elements to the show, there is also a very important mythical element. As dharma_smokie so aptly put it, this story has necessary mythical elements and is in some ways even infinite. That’s just something we need to accept, and I feel like we should have a long time ago. Honestly, did you think they could explain a gigantic, animate, shape-shifting, cabin-dwelling, murderous, pillar of black smoke in terms of hard logic or rigorous science? I thought the explanation of Jacob throwing his brother down the waterfall into something his mother called “worse than death” was, while very fantastical, still more than acceptable. The entire Jacob/MIB story is epic and fantastical, and thus deserves such an explanation.

That doesn’t mean I accept this episode provided the entire answer, or that I wouldn’t welcome more explanation/specifics should the show choose to reveal them. However, it is an explanation, and one that (whether or not you “like” it) does make sense of things. Here’s a question: at what point did we start getting annoyed at what few answers LOST DOES give? How spoiled are we that we’re trying to pick-and-choose what answers are acceptable in the greatest mystery show of all time? What kind of backwards, screwed up system have we thought up? We’ve been asking for the past six years, and now we have the answer. As fans we tend to over-think things, especially if you’re the type of fan who blogs and reads about LOST all the time. We get caught up in little details that end up being little more than nothing, or create vast networks of theories to explain all of the perceived intricacies. Then we complain when the show goes in a completely different direction than we felt it would or feel it should.

Those of you who have been following our podcasts for a while may recall how mad Will and I were with the explanation for the time flashes in Season Five. We had thought up an entire explanation linking the events to electromagnetic stability, Christian Shepherd, previous Island events, and more. The real explanation ended up being “the wheel was off it’s axis.” I realize now that I was just caught up in little nuances. See? Even I, the smartest LOST fan ever (sarcasm) can get mad when the show does things I don’t expect.

And that’s why I’m done, and you all should be, too. Quit getting annoyed about what LOST does explain, and keep watching it for what it will explain. They’ve done it. I applaud Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse, Jack Bender, JJ Abrams, and everyone else who has brought this vision to life. You’ve changed the industry in ways we can’t yet imagine. You’ve brought fans together, and helped form relationships that have certainly affected our lives. You have done the impossible, and we all love you for it.

We have three and a half hours left of the greatest show to ever grace my television. And then it’s over. I wonder if they’ll show a big “The End” after the final episode. I’ll tell ya one thing: I can’t wait.



Happy Trails and Namaste,
Sam.

I’m currently writing a big LOST note to the entire fan community and everyone who has helped make the show over the years. You can consider it my early LOST farewell letter.

I have many other posts in the mix to put up as well. But I figured I’d give you all a quick update as to what’s going on and that I do indeed still exist in the land of the living!

Happy Trails,
Sam.