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.

At issue is a column by the Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro about the recently announced TV Everywhere plan cable companies are pursuing. In his column Rob writes:

Yes, you read that right: To watch this new batch of TV shows online, you’d have to sign up for a traditional pay-TV plan.

The TV Everywhere idea has been a dream of some media people for the last few years; see, for instance, Mark Cuban’s defense of the idea. But I don’t get it. At all.

Well, my immediate thought is, “You’re right. You don’t get it.” But after that, words fail me.

First, Rob, this isn’t “a new batch of TV shows”. This is the content you’re already paying for, but you’re now allowed to view it online. In order to view Pay-TV online, you need to pay for Pay-TV. That’s sort of the whole point.

Pegoraro suggests that this is like requiring people to pay for a subscription to the Washington Post in order to take a college prep test course. Ummm… No. That’s not at all the same thing. TV everywhere is, however, the equivalent of saying, “If you want to eat your McDonald’s Happy Meal in the park, you still have to pay for the McDonald’s happy meal.”

Next, Pegoraro asserts that incredibly complicated things like “authentication” are way to difficult to comprehend or apply:

Set aside such operational issues as authentication (how do you verify that one person’s a Comcast/DirecTV/Fios/etc. customer and another is not?)…

Ummm… How do you know if someone is a Gmail user or not? Well, Rob, they’re called “accounts”. When you subscribe, they create one. They come with something called an “account number” or a “user name” and a “password”. When you want to access your service online, you type (that big flat thing in front of your monitor is called a keyboard) those pieces of information into a form, click “submit” and voila! You are authenticated.

Pegoraro, again:

If somebody wants to watch video online, let ‘em: Charge them a fee, make money off their attention through advertising–better yet, give people a choice between watching ads or paying for an ad-free experience. But don’t force them to sign up for an unrelated, non-Internet service.

Sure, because the “ad-supported” model is working so well for broadcasters and newspapers. Even YouTube (ad supported video) is projected to lose between $175 million and $470 million this year. Even TV advertising is a failing venture because people are skipping the commercials. Hollywood has begun writing the commercials directly into the script to stave off that practice. NBC recently announced that Jay Leno’s show in the fall will be “DVR-proof” to force advertising on the public.

Do such actions seem like the tactics of a business model that works?

So let’s take a business model that works (a hybrid ad/subscriber model) and force it to pursue a failing business model because you want content for free – content that may cost millions per episode to produce.

As for the comment that you are forcing someone “to sign up for an unrelated, non-Internet service”, that’s still ridiculous no matter how many times you repeat it. This isn’t a non-Internet service. It’s the same service you already subscribe to, you just have more ways to consume it now. However, if you want to consume it, you have to subscribe.

Finally, Pegoraro suggests that media companies should simply give up and make all their media available for free:

Repeat after me: Trying to introduce an artificial scarcity of easily-duplicated content on the Internet does not work. If you set up boundaries that make no sense to your customers, you will simply cede the field to bootleg redistribution of your work. Fighting this principle is like trying to push water uphill–with a broom.

Well, actually, Rob. Most cable content isn’t available online for free – even through bootleg. Some of the most popular shows on cable are HGTV’s design programs. I challenege you to go find a readily available bootleg source of them. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

…

…

Back yet? What about ESPN sporting events? They’re all available for free elsewhere, right? No? What about NFL games? Surely the satellite guys give those away for free and you don’t need to subscribe to get the Sunday ticket, right? No? Hmmm… Well what about HBO’s programming. You can get Entourage episodes for free all over the net, right? Really? Only the old ones that have been released for sale well after the air date?

How can that be? How can people control such things? How can they possibly defeat the bootleg distribution of their work? Because they don’t make them available online for free? Perhaps.

The fact is, despite Rob’s characterization of Pay-TV as “easily-duplicated content”, it’s simply not true. Look at YouTube. The most popular video sharing site will disable the soundtrack to your video if the audio patterns in the file match copyrighted content. Sure. You could cruise BitTorrents looking for content. And many do. Those sites are constantly defending against their copyright violations and go out of business regardless of the legitimacy they claim (AllOfMP3.com, anyone?).

You can also find websites that show grainy, handicam captured versions of first-run films – often before they appear in theaters. But the quality sucks. Under Pegoraro’s theory, movie theaters should simply give up the fight and make all movies (regardless of the cost to produce and market them) open to the public at no cost on day one. Better yet, just close all the theaters and let people download the movies for free? Heck, the studio could easily make up those $30 million salaries and production budgets by displaying an ad for mortgage caluclators right along side the film, right?

Ok, so what if they don’t go with a completely unsatisfactory ending.

Let’s assume that the battle between good and evil, wrong and right, darkness and light, black and white, has a point. The season finale introduced a few things that we may need to reconcile.

It is clear that Jacob and company have been on the island a VERY long time. As the sailing vessel (I must assume it is The Black Rock), cruises along the coastline, our would be Johnny Cash (the man in black) asks Jacob if he brought them to the island and is still trying to prove him wrong.

This is where I dive into unknown territory to some extent. I am not a biblical scholar or a religious person by any strectch, so forgive me if I get some of this wrong.

Jacob and Esau were brothers. Jacob was the pious brother while Esau was not. When Rebekah and Jacob conspire to deceive Isaac and Jacob recieves Isaac’s blessings, Esau is angry and swears he’ll kill Jacob.

Let’s assume that the man in black will be revealed in the final season to be Esau. What is the detente that the two of them have respected? What is the “loophole”? Is the rule by which Esau is unable to murder Jacob similar to the accord between Ben and Whitmore? When the smoke monster spoke to Ben, was it Esau who commanded Ben to follow Locke’s every word? Is Esau the smoke monster? Did he kill Mr. Eko as a surrogate for his brother? Eko was, after all, now a pious man.

Are all the “visions” of the dead and or disappeared actually manifestations of Esau? Was it Esau who had kept Jacob locked in the cabin with the ring of ash to contain him?

If you view Jacob and Esau as somehow temporally unrestrained, they could be anywhere or anything. Jacob can clearly raise the dead with a touch of his hand, as he did with John. Can they assume other forms or be omnipresent?

Using the construct of Jacob and Esau, you could easily begin to make sense of many occurrences on the island. Just about everything that has happened and every vision could be explained away with these two playing an odd cat and mouse game to “test” humanity.

As they meet on the beach at the beginning of the finale, Esau says to Jacob, “It always ends the same.” It is clear that they have done all of this before. Did the crew of the Black Rock – like Danielle’s Party – come to distrust one another and kill each other off? Are “The Others” the sole survivors of each such iteration of the cycle of violence? Did they band together realizing that they were somehow a part of the island now? Did Whitmore come to the island as a soldier with the Jughead crew? Ben was the sole survivor of Dharma? Was that the common characteristic The Others shared at the beginning?

And what of Richard Alpert? Did he come to the island aboard the Black Rock? Or further back?

I can see a clear scenario where an island with abundant resources and strange healing powers would be paradise. But to borrow from The Matrix:

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program, entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe, that as a species, human beings define their reality though misery and suffering.

Perhaps the two brothers are running some sort of test to determine whether people can simply live together in paradise or whether they will, eventually, devolve into tribes and attack one another. Is the story of Lost simply a karmic test based on The Lord of the Flies? Could be.

So let’s cast our mind back many weeks and dive in. To set the stage, I’ll refer you to a Doc Jensen column on Entertainment Weekly. If you haven’t read Jensen’s Lost theories, they’re really quite entertaining. The one I have linked hits a very critical point (to me at least) on page two.

I like the washed-out black and white sheen that’s been given to that classic Star Wars moment ‚Äî it gives it a certain old and damaged Orientation Film feel, specifically the one that the castaways found in the Hatch back in the third episode of season 2. As your (quack) doctor in Lostology, allow me to give you a piece of advice: Watch it again, as at least some of it has direct bearing on what is currently happening back in Dharma 1979 on Lost. (Note: This version does not include a short snippet of missing footage that was later found by Mr. Eko, which instructs Swan occupants to refrain from using the computer to communicate with the outside world.)

Note the following:

1. Dr. Candle’s left arm does not move during the entire film.
2. Dharma’s founders were a pair of University of Michigan scientists, Gerald and Karen DeGroot. An industrialist named Alvar Hanso funded their work.
3. Remember ‚Äî nay, MEMORIZE ‚Äî this line as if it were scripture: ”Not long after the experiments began, however, there was…an ‘incident’…and since that time, the following protocol has been observed…”
4. The copyright date on the film: 1980.
5. The year that The Empire Strikes Back was released: 1980.
   Point No. 5 probably has nothing to do with anything.

My colleague and friend Paul Rodriguez and I have spent way too many hours discussing Lost. In those discussions this season, we have spent a lot of time on time travel and the question of whether or not you can change the past. Faraday argues that you cannot, then changes his mind to argue that you can. Once he does, however, he repeats the past and warns Charlotte not to come back – which he clearly had already done, and it made no difference at all.

It is my contention that everything we have witnessed this year is a repeat of everything that came before. From the plane crashing to Juliet falling down the well and detonating Jughead, everything has happened before. I am a fervent believer in the Deja Vu theory of time travel. Everything that happened before will happen again.

Faraday, at least on his death bed, seems to understand this. As he lies bleeding, shot by his own mother, Daniel realizes that his mother might well have sent him off to the island knowing that earlier her was going to shoot Daniel. Under his theory of humans as great variables, the one possible variable he failed to account for is she may have known the past, and the present.

So let’s jump back to that video now. You’ll note the first item that Jensen mentions is Candle’s stiff arm. Now think back to the incident at the Swan construction site and the scaffolding that fell on him – landing on his arm. Between Daniel getting whacked by mom, and Candle coincidentally having an arm crusher followed three years later by the video, I have become a believer. My new religion? The more things change, the more they remain the same.

I don’t believe they have changed anything at all. I think the islanders have become a logic puzzle.

If I were stuck 30 years in the past, and had to find a way to change/affect the future. What would my first thought be? Great! Now I can immediately discard that one because I would have already done that 30 years earlier.

Changing time in the way our island buddies are trying to requires what can be described as branching time theory. As you move down the path of time, you can introduce a significant event (Jughead’s detonation) and alter the flow of the time stream. The course of time is altered and you can avoid some specific negative outcome.

However, the fact that our islanders are hung up circa 1977 demonstrates the fallacy of this theory. Instead, the islanders and their 1977 selves exist simultaneously. Their two times are clearly different tracks on the same loop.

In this way, time is more like a cable TV system. Traditionally on cable (though this is changing with OnDemand and Switched Digital Video) channels are being fed down the line all at once. You can choose which channel to watch, but the rest are still moving along at the same time. By changing the channel, you haven’t changed anything but your perception of what’s on at that moment. You have altered your exposure, but everything else exists the same way.

I believe the islanders will now perceive that they have done some good, and will carry out the remainder of their 1977 existence, but won’t actually achieve anything. In fact, I am going to lay a bet on the outcome of the series (I’m not giving long odds on this, just a speculation).

At the end of the series, we will see our “current” castaways fate resolved in some way or another, and the island will be going along as it always has. Our “series finale” cast will be preparing to board the flight from Australia to LA and will have some vague recollection of one another as they do. The flight will take off, and somewhere along the line we’ll see the plane lurch, the tail section go flying off, and the screen will cut to black.

In the end, we’ll realize that the entire circle is beginning again, and has probably been moving along in much the same way, forever.

For the rest of you, you should digest my post from earlier today about Lost and the Infinite Improbability drive if you haven’t. I’m now more convinced than ever that improbability has a lot to do with the show. This post will expand on that earlier thought.

If you believe that the island could be a place where thoughts become reality and the improbable becomes certainty, this episode had a lot to offer.

As an example, Ms. Hawking talks about the Lighthouse station as a tool to determine “the probability” of where the island will be. So probability plays a significant role in determining the location of the island.

During the flight, Jack talks with Kate about the improbaility of Hurley and Sayid being on the same plane by coincidence.

What are the odds that Sayid would be cuffed to a law enforcement officer – the same way Kate was when the plane first crashed?

Who told Hurley to take the guitar on the plane (as Charlie did when they first crashed)?

How improbable was it that Jack would go visit his grandfather and find the pair of shoes belonging to his dad?

Finally, there’s the note. As Jack said, he kept trying to get rid of it, yet it kept returning – highly improbable to be sure. What was absolutely certain to happen, however, was Jack’s reaction to the note.

Locke knew that Jack, reading a note that said, “I wish you had believed me” would immediately think to himself “I wish I had too.”

Under the hybrid zero-point/improbability theory, that wish, in proximity to the island, would immediately be granted – though again, not in the way they expected.

I, like others still tuned in week after week, are searching disparately for something to make sense of the show, and I have finally found a theory (or possibly a pair of complementary theories) that make sense of the show.

Oddly, the theory starts with my former barometer of cool – whether you have read Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (which despite the term trilogy now runs to five novels now with a sixth reportedly due later this year.)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide featured a spaceship called the Heart of Gold. The Heart of Gold operated on the Infinite Improbability Drive. The second book in the series, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, describes it this way:

The Heart of Gold’s Improbability Drive made it the most powerful and unpredictable ship in existence. There was nothing it couldn’t do, provided you knew exactly how improbable it was that the thing you wanted it to do would ever happen.

When the improbability drive is operating, the spaceship passes through space based on the odds against something happening. As two of the books characters are drifting unprotected through open space, at the last moment before they die, the spaceship Heart of Gold picks them up. The odds against them being saved and the improbability field around the ship pass the same point of improbability and the two are rescued.

So what does this have to do with Lost? Well, the idea of the island as some sort of improbability field occurred to me as I was reading Doc Jensen’s theory of Lost and zero point energy.

There’s a whole bunch of Men of Faith ‚Äî fringe thinkers, mostly ‚Äî who believe that zero point energy is like magic. It can be mentally directed to make stuff happen (a.k.a. mind over matter), or even grant a kind of omniscience that could allow a person to experience past, present, and future all at once…

Remember the scene in this season’s second episode in which Neil (a.k.a. Frogurt) died? Now, I am convinced that this scene is actually a coded message pointing toward zero point theory. The scene begins with Miles Straume hauling in a dead boar. Then, Neil starts yelling at Sawyer for calling him Frogurt, emphatically reminding us that his name is Neil. Now, earlier in the episode, Neil carried on about the utter pointlessness of their survival struggle. Why work so hard to build a new camp or start a fire if the time flashes will basically take it all away? His cynical consternation reaches a crescendo in his death scene, when Neil rants about their inability to produce simple, conventional energy (”We have no fire!”) before getting killed by a flaming arrow of irony.

I actually saw that differently. I don’t see that as a flaming arrow of irony, I see it as a flaming arrow of improbability. As Neil is ranting about the absence of fire, the combination of zero point energy and improbability come together to provide fire, but not in the way Neil would like.

For other examples, you don’t need to look very far. In last week’s episode, Locke and the crew arrive at the Orchid station. Juliette says, ‘What are the odds this thing would be here at this time?’ A time shift immediately erases the station.

In season one, Walt is reading a comic book featuring attacking polar bears, and the crew walking to the radio tower the next day is attacked by a rampaging polar bear.

How about the odds the heroine addicted Charlie would stumble upon a heroine laden plane?

And don’t even get me started on the long odds against winning the lottery and Hurley’s connection to the numbers.

Could zero point energy and improbability create a field where whatever you thought, no matter how improbable, could blink into existence?

The theory isn’t without precedence in science fiction.

In his 1936 story Evolution, John Campbell described the Probability Time Wave:

“Their PTW tube caught and displayed every possibility that was ever to exist. And somewhere in that vast sweep of probability, every possible thing existed. Somewhere, the wildest dream of the wildest optimist was, and became fact.”

So what if the island is essentially a focal point for energy and improbability? It would certainly explain a lot of the oddities surrounding the island.

Jack’s unresolved feelings for dad? Bing! Christian Shepherd starts walking around the island. Michael wants to get his boy off the island? Done! He just needs to screw his friends first. The island is providing everything people want, but doing it with strings. You want fire? Ok! But it’s going to kill you.

Now this theory may cover the “funtional” aspects of the island, but it does not even begin to address questions about the storyline of Lost. However, I expect improbability to play an important part in the answer.

I don’t have anywhere near the patience to closely follow every new show from week to week and report on their current chances of a DNR order. I have, however, watched a pant-load of television – mostly on DVR – this week and have a few early favorites (which will likely get cancelled) and a few shows I think will die quickly (that most likely will live on forever).

So, in no particular order, here are my guesses as to what gets cancelled, and what shows will make TV history.

Chuck – Monday, 8/7, NBC – The pilot was pretty good, if a little slow. The premise is weak (watching a web video embedded with top secret government information will dump those secrets straight to your brain), for no other reason that encoding for web video is so bad you’d end up brain fried or (more likely) the video would be so large there’s no way it could be sent, downloaded, or viewed in the time it happens in the show. Perhaps if they had the new wideband cable modem.

The secret agent that protects Chuck is hot, but that’s about all this show has working for it. I’m hoping the pace picks up a bit for the second episode tonight, but I don’t have faith.

My guess: Chuck gets stale pretty quickly. Viewer numbers will decline accordingly. My guess is this one’s gone by the new year.

Reaper – Tuesdays. 9/8, CW – For those who don’t spend a lot of time watching the CW (ok, that’s most of you), and for those who didn’t even know there was a fifth broadcast network, you really should give Reaper a chance. The pilot was directed by Kevin Smith of Clerks fame, and was really quite good. It suffered from some of the slowness of Chuck, but not near the level. I attribute the slowness to the setup for the show (which involves a premise even flimsier than Chuck’s, but it’s supposed to be.).

On the morning of his 21st birthday, Sam discovers that his parents sold his soul to the devil before he was born. On the big 2-1, he is forced to become a bounty hunter for the horned one (played by Ray Wise, best known as Dr. Alec Holland from Swamp Thing… ok, maybe not best known, but I loved that movie). Hell is overcrowded and the evil doers are escaping. Sam’s job is to capture them and drop them at the DMV (hell on Earth).

I wasn’t terribly happy with the casting of the man in red, but what are you going to do. Sam comes across the way Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother would adapt to being Satan’s henchman. It’s really quite amusing. His best friend Sock (played by Tyler Labine) comes across like a guy trying hard to be Jack Black. My wife found it annoying, but I liked him.

My guess: I’m hoping for good things from Reaper. I suspect they’ll keep it on simply because the CW has no viewers anyway, so why not be daring.

Dirty Sexy Money – Wednesdays, 10/9, ABC – Peter Krause (Six Feet Under, Sports Night) returns to TV as Nick George, the lawyer for a mega-wealthy family (think the Hiltons, but with guys) who have more money than brains. Nick’s dad had been the family lawyer until his plane crashed. Nick, never a fan of surrendering dad time to the Darlings, has been pursuing a life as a legal advocate for the underserved.

Unlike Chuck and Reaper, the premise on this one seems perfectly plausible. Somewhere in America you know there is a Nick George – called at all hours of the night to fix the legal messes of the society set. Hell, Britney’s just quit for nuttiness not to far removed from the pilot’s. Nick is asked to transfer title to a yacht won by one of the Darling boys in a poker game, only to discover on arriving at the dock the kid is being arrested for human trafficking because said yacht was full of illegal aliens.

Perhaps the best part of the show, however, is the ringtones that announce the family’s calls. Juliet Darling (Samaire Armstrong), the Paris Hilton-esque airhead that wants to pursue acting, rings in to the sound of Rich Girl by Hall and Oates. Brian Darling, the abusive minister who is having an affair, rings to a chorus of Hallelujahs!

My guess: The show is darker than a lot of your typical TV fare. It’s more dramedy than comedy, and more cynical. I hope it stays on because it has a lot of potential, but it may have trouble finding an audience. I think it would have been better as an HBO series.

Journeyman – Mondays, 10/9, NBC – Journeyman’s pilot was sort of hard to follow. The show jumped around without any explanation in (I assume) an effort to make the viewer as disoriented as the poor guy that suddenly starts jumping through time. It was a strange tactic given that TV viewers usually watch as a way of escaping feelings of confusion and overwhelming stress. Mrs. Quip couldn’t watch it. She started to, but the jerking around couldn’t hold her attention. Maybe the second episode will be better. They should hope so, or they’ll end up bleeding audience pretty quickly.

The premise should seem pretty familiar. It’s basically Quantum Leap, but without the annoying sidekick, the cheesy special effects, and the temporary displacement of whoever he jumps into. Like Sam Beckett, Kevin McKidd (who plays the title character) bounces back to the past to correct historical flaws that would have a negative impact on the Earth of today. Unlike Beckett, it’s not a one-time, one-place bounce. McKidd’s character jumps completely at random – sometimes from moving vehicles. He’s also discovered that his ex (for whom he still carries a torch) is a fellow time traveler, and not dead as he had believed.

My guess: This is a show that could have a good following if it doesn’t cause epileptic fits in the viewing audience. The bouncing through time makes for a tough program to watch for those of us with adult onset ADD.

The Big Bang Theory – Mondays, 8:30/7:30, CBS – The bog bore theory. Seriously, if everyone thought nerds were funny, they wouldn’t be nerds. The script is dry, the acting is poor. If you want to catch this one, you’d better do it quick. I suspect another comedy will be tucked in between How I Met Your Mother and Two and a Half Men before you’re done loosening the belt at Thanksgiving.

Back To You – Wednesdays, 8/7, Fox – Kelsey Grammar’s return to TV alongside Patricia Heaton from Everybody Loves Raymond proves two things. First, Patricia was definitely not the funny one on ELR. Second, Kelsey Grammar’s as a blowhard pompous jackass has gotten stale. He’s trying to be Frasier the anchorman. It’s really a bit tiring.

My guess: People liked Frasier, so maybe they’ll like this, but I don’t see.

Big Shots – Thursdays, 10/9, ABC – Christopher Titus is a great comedian. I’ve always liked his stand up and was a fan of his Fox show Titus. I think the string has ended, though. I’m not sure if it’s his fault or the rest of the cast, but I found this show to be just awful. Think of the rich kid you went to high school with. You know th guy. He was loved by everyone, and had everything he wanted, but always came across to you like a used car salesman. This is a show full of those guys. They’re CEOs of major companies now, and live a life of cocktails and women. It’s great for them, but watching it is painful.

My guess: I can’t imagine this show having any staying power. I’d put money on a November/December exit.

Moonlight – Fridays, 9/8, CBS – Beginning to build Occult Fridays as a staple of their lineup, CBS adds the Vampire Detective show Moonlight to the time slot following Ghost Whisperer. If the premises of Chuck and Reaper leave you shaking your head in disbelief, wait until you hear this one. The main difference is the former two are comedies, this one is a drama.

Mick St. John (sounds like a porn star name, huh?) is a private detective who also happens to be a vampire. His mission is to hunt down the bad guys, while keeping the vampire’s a secret. In the pilot, a young reporter – on that Mick saved from his crazy ex-wife she-vampire years ago – begins writing articles about the vampires feeding on girls in LA. It seems a wannabe vampire is killing co-eds and the real vampires are catching the heat. Only by solving the crime can Mick keep the public from looking for vampires.

My guess: I love vampire flicks. I’ve always been fascinated by the myth. I loved vampire movies (pretty much all of them). There have been very few vampire flicks I have missed. That said, even I can’t watch this. Look for the sun to come up on moonlight around the fourth week.

So that’s the run down. There are a few unaired shows that I have my eye on. Pushing Daises, for instance, has the potential to be good and I’m even looking forward to Cavemen with a morbid sense of curiosity. I’m still looking for that gem, though. I’m still hunting for the diamond in the current lineup. Dirty Sexy Money and Reaper have been the two I’ve liked the best, but there’s always time for a new series to catch my eye.

Let’s set the wayback machine for the VMAs last week. This show had it all – award winners trashing the network that hosts the awards, has-been rockers duking it out over whored out former TV stars, single moms trying to whore themselves out (but nobody was buying), and militant rappers getting peeved that the awards weren’t rigged for them to win. Your entertainment dollar was simply not going to go farther than the 2007 VMAs

Britney was supposed to warm up the audience, but left everyone feeling cold. Blame it on the hair, the lip-synching, the magic act that wasn’t, the drinking, the allergic reaction to eye drops (what?), or any of another 100 oft-repeated excuses for the train wreck we witnessed, the sad reality is we want to see a nubile 20 year-old in skin tight leather dancing like a tramp or tongue kissing Madonna (actually, skip that last part). The fact is, Brit is now a single mom who, with every public appearance, reminds us of the line from Sweet Home Alabama.

Look at you! You have a baby! In a bar!

Here’s some advice Brit. Put on some clothes, write/sing a grown-up song, and stop trying to convince us that you’re the hot little vixen of Baby One More Time. That ship has sailed. You were used up by a douchebag, and the only guy that still wants you is this loser.

Next up… Kid Rock and Tommy Lee. Even with Britney and Kanye melting down at the VMAs, this is probably the most pathetic story of the night. These two guys get into a brawl over a woman who, by her own admission, paid off a poker debt with sex. Yup. That girl is a class act that is worth fighting for. Go get her, guys.

Speaking of Kanye, I don’t think I could sum this one up any better than Joel McHale (host of The Soup). After recapping Kanye’s choice words about his perceived snub at the hands of MTV, McHale said, “Geez. 50 Cent didn’t whine that much when he got shot.” True dat!

In our last glimpse backward at the VMAs, perhaps the one shining moment in the telecast came when Justin Timberlake (surrounded by the vapid cast of The Hills) excoriated MTV for filling its programming with non-stop reality TV and begged them to actually play music occasionally. It seems Timberlake may be one of the few people who owes his soul to MTV, and at the same time feels bad because he’s old enough to remember that MTV used to stand for Music Television.

Finally, back in the present, let’s dip into the overflowing cup of comedy gold that is O.J. Simpson. The same week that his book (If I Did It) comes out, and the world may read his claim that he’s not a criminal (at least not a murderous one), he gets arrested for storming into a sports memorabilia show with armed accomplices and trying to steal pieces of his life. It’s not clear whether he actually owns any of what he tried to steal. And it’s not clear if he was armed, but a tape of the incident clearly demonstrates his anger and rage as he barks out instructions that no one is to be allowed to leave.

Wow, O.J., armed robbery and taking hostages. That’s a hell of a good way to prove you’re not a killer. Maybe next time you could sacrifice a small puppy on national TV and tell people your killing is limited only to the animal kingdom. By the way, aren’t you supposed to be out there trying to catch the real killer?

I am not at all a fan of the American Idol genre of television programming, though I have commented fairly extensively on my addiction to CBS’ Rock Star series (Where is RockStar:Van Halen?).

When I first tuned into AGT, I had to revisit my opposition to singing competitions because of Cas Haley. This ia a guy who comes across on TV as a generally decent and normal guy. He also happens to be one hell of an entertainer. He would be my choice for the winner with no doubt were it not for the ventriloquist.

Normally, the ventriloquist bit wears thin pretty quick. It has been a long time since anyone with their hand up a puppet’s ass has made me laugh or even smile. The fact is, there are only so many bits you can do with a dummy – and before I saw Terry Fator, I thought they had all been done to death. This guy is phenomenal. He’s a singer, a ventriloquist, and most impressively an impressionist. Not only is he is one of the best vocalists on the show, he does all of his singing in other people’s voices. He has done Roy Orbison, Garth Brooks, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole (and Natalie Cole), Kermit the Frog, and Louis Armstrong.

If you haven’t watched the show, I don’t really blame you. It’s not an easy thing to get into. However, if you have some time to kill tonight, you ought to tune in just to see Cas and Terry perform one last time.

To recap, Charlie’s not dead yet, Juliet may or may not be lying, Locke is probably still alive, the smoke thing may or may not be the ghosts, and nobody apparently thought it would be easier to just cut the power cable to the underwater lab. Let’s dive in…

Jack and Juliet have a plan to dynamite some others. If the number they did on the tree is any indication, they may just be successful. But the question is whether Juliet has actually switched sides. She told the survivors the lab was flooded. Imagine Charlie’s surprise when he discovered that isn’t true. The Amazon babes with guns pointed at him clearly didn’t get the evacuation order.

Did Juliet lie, or did Ben lie to his people to keep them from trying to dismantle the blocking?

Locke is laying at the bottom of a big pit with a gunshot sound, but since he was shot in the kidney, and gave his up to his dad, it’s unlikely that will matter. Since the bullet didn’t pierce any vitals, the Island should heal him nicely.

My friend Anne points out the odd conflict with the ghost of Ben’s mother. She appears at Ben’s window one evening, but then “can’t” cross the barrier the next day and leads Ben into the woods. Now some have speculated that the ghosts and the smoke monsters are actually the same. If that’s the case, why could they get into the camp once, but not again?

Finally, Anne was terribly upset by a simple question I posed. If you need to disable the underwater lab, and you are following a “Power Cable” to its location, why not simply cut the cable?

Now the easy answer is “they didn’t have anything to cut it with”, but that ignores the dynamite. They had enough dynamite to fell a really big tree, so clearly they could have made quick work of the cable. For that matter, they might have been able to package the dynamite in something water tight, and simply lower it down to the lab, charge it up, and destroy the lab.

In either event, there were ways to accomplish the goal without getting Charlie injured or killed. They really should have spent some time thinking about that…