After six years of great foreplay, #Lost becomes an inconsiderate lover – rolls over, turns off the lights, leaves me unfulfilled.

What has been so great about the show, and the reason I have been such a dedicated fan, is the fact that the show often left me feeling…  off.  It often wasn’t until I had spent some time discussing it (usually with my friends Paul and Anne), that I found deeper meaning in the show.  Sometimes I was introduced to someone else’s theories, which forced me to reconsider my perspective and brought me to a new way to see each episode and each story.

It’s fitting, then, that last night was the same.  Immediately after the show, I sent Paul and Anne a message about my overwhelming sense of disappointment in the show. My take was that those who found love or peace on the island made out fine, but everyone else got screwed.  Further, I wanted more answers than the show was willing to provide.

But like almost every other episode, it was the discussion with friends that changed my reality.

Paul pointed me to a post by Doc Jensen.  It contained a simple throwaway sentence that began to refocus my thinking.

Some people think [the sideways world is] an illusion like The Matrix, or a group delusion, or even ersatz pocket universe created by The Monster’s magic designed to give himself a happily ever after — a twist on Joseph’s theory. This theory differs from the more conventional and commonly held theory that the Sideways world is the next life epilogue for all the Island world castaways — that after their death, the castaways will be reincarnated into the Sideways world.

The post was actually put up before the show aired, and it turned out to be quite prescient.  What struck me, however, is that they were both right.  It was a next life epilogue, but at the same time it was also a group delusion.  A next life born from the shared connections of the castaways.  Still it seemed out of place.

I have seen some on Twitter, and I made this point to Paul, that they all were dead all along, and the sideways world was all that mattered.  But then I realized that’s not quite the point.  Everything that happened on the island was the real story, and the sideways world matters hardly at all.

Climbing Jacob’s Ladder

In retrospect, there are two movies I believe Lost has drawn heavily from for inspiration.  The first is Heaven Can Wait (the Warren Beatty version, not that Chris Rock aberation.)

In Heaven Can Wait, Beatty “dies” and is brought to a weigh station.  His escort explains that the weigh station isn’t the final destination, but a gateway to the final destination.  The rules of the weigh station are a collective vision based on Beatty’s idea of the afterlife, and those who share his idea of the afterlife.  In this was, the sideways world is exactly the same. It is a world the castaways created through their shared experience, and where they meet to move on.  It is “their” weigh station – the implication being different groups of people share different visions, and create different worlds.

The sideways world, is the weigh station for this particular group of friends.

The second movie is Jacob’s Ladder (which Jensen mentions in his post.) If you have never seen the movie, I highly recommend it.  I also recommend you do so before finishing this post because the rest of it deals with similarities between Lost and Jacob’s Ladder.

In the movie, Tim Robbins plays a soldier who underwent medical testing during his tour.  His platoon were hopped up on drugs to make they hyper-aggressive.  The film deals with the mystery of those drugs, Robbins discovering the nature of the drugs, and finally coming to the realization that his fellows turned on each other.

The movie jumps back and forth in time between Vietnam and modern day.  As it does, it follows multiple different story lines in which different lives seem to be coalescing.  In the end, however, it turns out that Jacob died in Vietnam, and the entire mixed up world of the modern day was simply his mind trying to come to terms with how he died.

Lost is, if nothing else, the story of how Jack died.  It is his journey.

You Were An Awesome Number Two

If you assume that the entire story, from beginning to end, has been Jack’s story, in much the way Jacob’s Ladder was not a story about Vietnam or the drugs, but Jacob’s death, things begin to fall into place.  A few scenes in the finale provide great clarity.

The two scenes that stand out the most to me were:

• Hurley, seeing Ben outside the church, tells him “You were an awesome #2.”  And Ben replies that Hugo was an awesome number one.
• Christian comments that some died before Jack and some died years later.

We saw Hurley ask Ben to be his second.  The line at the church conveyed a sense that is exactly what happened, and the two worked well together.  That clearly has to have happened after Jack’s death.

The appearance of Boone and Shannon indicates that Christian was correct that some died before Jack.  The presence of half of the Ajira Six – Claire, Kate, and Sawyer – loop in those who died much later.

Jack’s last view was the Ajira flight carrying the six off the island.  Reunited with him at the party, Kate tells Jack she has missed him, implying it has been some time since they saw each other.  It has, because she lived well past him.

As for why Kate doesn’t look 80, or 90, or however old she was when she died, that simply doesn’t fit with the way the rest remembered her.  This was, after all, a collective vision, and they saw each other as they knew each other on the island.

The Unanswered Questions

For three years now, Paul and I, like many others, have discussed and debated which questions Lost needed to answer.  Today there are countless people who really want to know where the four-toed statue came from.  Who built it? When?

I have come to accept that questions like these are only questions for rabid fans.  The questions that were going to be answered were the questions important to Jack’s story.

While that may irritate some, it makes perfect sense from a storyteller’s perspective.  In any story, there will be things that are important and things that aren’t.  When telling the story, you want to paint a picture. You may mention that someone is wearing a red shirt.  Unless the story you’re telling is Star Trek, that detail is likely irrelevant.  To ask why a red shirt and not a blue shirt is to miss the point – it’s not about the shirt, it’s about the man wearing it.

The writers of Lost understand that, no doubt.

It will be sold via the Xbox Live Marketplace for about $15.  They hadn’t given out a release date, but yesterday they said March 3rd.  So don’t call me that day, I’ll be shelling some krauts.

It may be interesting to draw that analogy out a bit further.  It occurs to me that your ISP (and most other companies, frankly) are very much like your significant other.  And on a certain level, that has serious implications for consumer satisfaction.

When you are dating, most of your friends will never hear about how great your bf is on a daily basis.  When he screw ups, however, you’ll tell all your friends.  You’ll tell just about anyone who asks.

That’s actually very similar to your ISP.  Typically, most ISPs have tremendously reliable service. When that service fails – on the voice, video, or data side – you’ll tell everyone.  If the repair guy is late or doesn’t show, you’ll tell everyone you were stood up.  If he tracks mud on the floor, you’ll tell everyone he was a slob.  If it isn’t resolved when he leaves, you will tell everyone he left you unsatisfied.

Since everyone has similar experiences, they’ll commiserate, tell you that guy is just no good for you, you deserve better, it’s just a shame that there are no decent guys is no competition in the ISP marketplace.

A week later when you are browsing freely, cuddled up watching TV, or talking to your mom back home, will you mention that they’re taking care of you today? Will you talk about all the great things they do for you? All the great places they take you?  Probably not.

Most of your friends will eventually grow to think your boyfriend is a big douche who’s always running around and never makes you happy.  How many of them have ever heard you say anything good about your ISP?

The fact is, like relationships, telecom can be messy.  You may not always get what you want.  You may feel you just can’t count on them.  You might think you’re putting a lot of yourself your money into the relationship, and they just take you for granted.

But like relationships, we’ll get through this together.  Let’s just get a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, browse the web, or just settle down to watch Sleepless in Seattle OnDemand.

You may have the flu if you have some or all of these symptoms:

• fever *
• cough
• sore throat
• runny or stuffy nose
• body aches
• headache
• chills
• fatigue
• sometimes diarrhea and vomiting

*It’s important to note that not everyone with flu will have a fever.

Very helpful. If you sometimes get fever, but not always, and you sometimes get diarrhea and vomiting, but not always, that leaves:

• cough
• sore throat
• runny or stuffy nose
• body aches
• headache
• chills
• fatigue

In other words, the Swine Flu could look just like any other non-specific illness. That’s not terribly helpful at all. Maybe the CDC should provide more of a narrative description:

On Day One, you will notice giant red spots on your forehead. Those will grow into huge sweaty red welts. The coughing will be uncontrollable, and you’ll wish you were dead. Then the real fun will start….

At least then I’d know what to look out for. Instead, I have non-specific symptoms and no real way of knowing whether I have the Swine Flu without a tedious trip to the doctor.

So I did a little digging and found some more useful information. I dug through blog post after blog post and compiled these actual, specific symptoms from first hand accounts. If you have any of these, seek medical attention immediately

Swine Flu Symptoms

• An urge to watch Babe and Charlotte’s Web over and over again.
• An overwhelming sense of cannibalism from eating bacon.
• Smelling like Des Moines, IA.
• Random snort and oinking sounds (separate and distinct from your normal Tourette’s).
• Developing a random stutter.
• Falling in love with frogs (or general inter-species romance).
• A tendency toward Stalinism.

So there you have it. An actual, helpful list of warning signs. Now you can consider yourself prepared.

P.S. (For those who missed them, the stutter joke is a reference to Porky Pig and the Stalinism crack is a reference to Animal Farm.)

A priest (Donald Pleasence) summons a professor (Victor Wong) to an old church to see a canister of liquid Satan.

If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll recognize that the description is technically accurate, but fails to capture the real essence of the film. A better description might have been:

Trapped in an old church, a priest (Donald Pleasance) and a professor (Jameson Parker) try to prevent Satan’s return to Earth.

Not much longer, and yet it sells the story better. But I don’t get the sense that the TV Guide writers are trying to be accurate or sell the movie. They’re just cranking out copy.

Anyway, this got me thinking about TV Guide and whether it may actually be challenging to sum up a movie that badly in one short sentence. So I figured I’d give it a try. Consider this my audition to write for TV guide. (Feel free to leave a comment with your own movie summaries.)

• The Bourne Identity – A man with memory trouble (Matt Damon) kills people.
• Top Gun – A pilot with daddy issues (Tom Cruise) flies Naval aircraft recklessly.
• Jaws – Three men (Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider) who need a bigger boat go fishing.
• Titanic – Two young lovers (Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet) experience extreme moisture.
• American Beauty – A man (Kevin Spacey) and his wife (Annette Bening) have marital problems.
• Jurassic Park – A team of scientists led by Sam Neill visit an amusement park accompanied by a lawyer.
• The Day After Tomorrow - The adventures of a climatologist (Dennis Quaid) studying weather.
• Rocky – A boxer (Sylvester Stallone) who may be mentally disadvantaged and has an aging coach (Burgess Meredith) tries dating.
• Forrest Gump – A mentally challenged man (Tom Hanks) waits for a bus and tells stories.
• The Silence of the Lambs – FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jody Foster) deals with a difficult inmate (Anthony Hopkins).

I have read the excerpts of Latimer’s book and frankly don’t find all that much wrong with it. I’ll likely buy the book and consume it all simply because I liked the way the excerpts were written. His publisher is right. He has an engaging style. Was he in the room or across the street at the EEOB? Who cares. He was clearly closer to the President than 99.9% of Americans will ever get in their life, so let him have his say. We might find it interesting.

The treatment Latimer has received in the last 36 hours, however, has left me perplexed. It reminded me a lot of McClellan’s welcoming reception and that reminded me of something Peggy Noonan wrote.

William Safire, himself a memoirist of the Nixon years, said to me, a future memoirist of the Reagan years: “The one thing history needs more of is first-person testimony.” History needs data, detail, portraits, information; it needs eyewitness. “I was there, this is what I saw.” History will sift through, consider and try in its own way to produce something approximating truth.In that sense one should always say of memoirs of those who hold or have held power: More, please.

Noonan, and by extension Safire, were spot on. I think that every White House staffer should not be discouraged, but rather should be required to write a book, and tell the story of their time there. Our history demands that those making it (whether the President or his secretary) should provide us with as much detail as possible. When these books are written we should not denounce the writer, we should simply ask for the next installment from the guy who sat next to Latimer so we could see how he remembered the events.

One of the most interesting conversations I have ever had was with the woman who sat next to Monica Lewinsky in the White House. She once gave me her take on the woman behind the blue dress and it meant more to me than any ABC News special report.

Do I buy the caricature of Latimer as an opportunist trying to parlay his brush with fame into a financial windfall? Absolutely. Do I also believe that much of what he says is probably exactly as he remembers it? Absolutely.

That’s why we need more of these books, not less. We need to be able to compare notes and make our own determination about what happened, who these people were, where they made mistakes and where they proved they were only human.

Now, the latest to weigh in against Latimer in protecting the Bush years is James Carville.

This little dweeb needs to be glove slapped… People that have the honor of working in the White House ought not be going out and publishing this…

I couldn’t disagree with Carville more.

The people that need to be glove slapped are Carville and his ilk for attempting to silence future tomes. If Dana Perino, Tony Fratto, or Ed Gillespie recall events differently, let them write a book and give us their take. By the time all the ink dries, we might have a semi-complete picture of life inside the GWB administration.

As with most topics I write about here, the subject of zombies has prompted some interesting discussions with friends and colleagues. In the case of World War Z, my only complaint about the book is its reliance on the slow moving, arms raised, schleppy zombie made famous by George Romero films. I, as a matter of preference, would much rather have seen the speedy, violent zombies of 28 Weeks Later / 28 Days Later or the Xbox 360 game Left 4 Dead.

I firmly believe that when the zombie apocalypse (ZA) finally comes, it will look more like the rage virus. Honestly, it would have to. The fact is a slow zombie is simply not that hard to defeat. They’re kind of like cows. You could hunt them with a dent mallet. Granted, if you were set upon by a pack, it may be harder to fight off. However, the spread of the contagion would either have to be immediate or a single mass event would have to hit most of the population at once.

In World War Z, the contagion is slow to spread. Brooks gives the impression that a year or two passes between the first outbreak and the pandemic. That’s simply too slow for a zombie virus to move unless the zombies themselves are so fast, and so hard to kill, that they can rapidly turn new zombies. Compare Brooks’ approach to that of 28 Days/Weeks Later or even the disaster of a film called Quarantine. (If you haven’t seen Quarantine, think of it as the Blair Witch Project of zombie movies – shaky handicam story telling that rapidly becomes painful to sit through.) The contagion in those movies spreads rapidly enough, and the zombies become fast and violent enough to quickly become a problem.

What has been interesting to me is the almost universal agreement on the topic of fast versus slow zombies. Just about everybody I have raised the issue with agrees that fast zombies are much scarier, much harder to kill, and much more likely when the ZA is upon us. I have to wonder, then, why franchises like Resident Evil or the remakes/knock-offs of Romero films generally portray the zombies as stupid and slow.

It seems to me that the future of zombie films has to lie with fast, violent zombies. Purists may disagree, but the only movies I can see remaining true to the schleppy zombies would be flicks like Shaun of the Dead that actually mock the speed.

• Skipper – 83% GOP
• Gilligan – 69% Dem
• Mary Ann – 61% GOP
• Ginger – 83% Dem
• Professor (the only “near tie”) – 47% Dem 41% Libertarian
• Mr. & Mrs. Howell – both at 72% GOP

The outcome made me wonder what the result would be if I looked at other classic TV series. As I discussed the idea with some friends, one that drew a lot of discussion was “Friends”. It seems there is a lot of disagreement about how Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Phoebe, Joey and Monica would cast their ballots.

Now here’s your chance to tell me what you think.

You’ll notice I added “Green” as an option for Phoebe as a number of people indicated their thought that she’d lean that way.

On Sunday I’ll be speaking on a panel about gaming and advocacy. The purpose of the panel is two-fold.

First, we are looking to teach gamers how to advocate for or against policy issues that impact them. It seems not a week goes by that I don’t see an article about some misguided state legislator who has determined that video games are the root of all evil. They typically then go on to craft legislation that seriously impedes the rights of gamers. We hope gamers will begin to take these issues seriously and organize to become a significant political force.

The second purpose for the panel is to talk a bit about how political groups and causes are using games to convey policy messages. Following the Obama team’s use of paid advertising in an online racing game, the use of such tactics is getting pretty advanced. I, for one, am looking forward to hearing from my fellow panelists as well as the audience on that topic.

If I pick up nuggets of wisdom from the panel, I’ll be sure to pass them along via my blog as well as my Twitter feed. Follow me @MichaelTurk (if you aren’t already.)

Finally, it looks like 11 of my 20 readers have voted in the “How Would Gilligan’s Island Vote?” poll. If you haven’t, I hope you’ll weigh in. I’ll be posting the reply’s over the weekend.

• The Professor – This would normally be an easy lift. He’d likely be the typical liberal academic. Definitely a Democrat.
• The Skipper – Former Navy man, the guy everyone looks to for tough leadership. He’s definitely a Republican.
• The Millionaire and Lovey – They’re unabashedly rich, and have no qualms about it. They’re Republican.
• Ginger – Like the prof, she’s the typical Hollywood starlet. She may not actually be liberal, but that’s the trendy thing, so she goes along. That’s a Democrat.
• Mary Ann – A girl from the heartland with mid-western values. She probably digs God, Guns, Country, and country music. She’s a Republican.
• Gilligan – He’s kind of clueless and rarely gets anything right. He’s a Democrat.

Like I said, that was easy enough. Until, that is, I started talking to my friend Paul about the list. He’s a liberal, so he views the world through a skewed perspective, but he had some interesting thoughts.

For instance, the Professor, he argues, is a dedicated academic, but also has a heavy lean toward technology. That may indicate he is more Libertarian. Ginger, he suggests, strikes him more as a Patricia Heaton type. He thinks she would actually lean GOP. What about Mary Ann? She may be a farm girl, but she also comes across as a bleeding heart. Could she be a closet lefty? Could “means well, but usually gets it wrong” be applied equally to paint Gilligan as a Republican? While we agree on the Howell’s, could they actually be limousine liberals?

So I decided to change the focus of this post. Rather than declaring how the Island would vote, I’m asking. I’d love to get your thoughts. I’ll tabulate it all and report back on the consensus (if there is one) view.