Slowly Going Bald

That pic's mainly for my dad, who's developed a near pathological crush on Evangeline Lilly, despite her early work. Anyway, there you go, Dad. It's gonna be a long summer of reruns, so let the photo tide you over.

As for the rest of you, I know you probably weren't even able to sleep or urinate or eat or do anything out of sheer anticipation of my knee-jerk, off-the-cuff reactions to last night's second-season finale of "Lost." Well, ask and it shall be given unto you.

• When Desmond, in a fit of drunken rage (the best kind), told Locke that there's nothing left but the island, he referred to it as a "snowglobe," which I couldn't help think was a thinly veiled reference/jab to "St. Elsewhere," the events of which were all inside some autistic kid's head while he played with a snowglobe. I'd say it's the writers telling us that such theories are bunk, and that the whole show isn't happening inside Hurley's head or something, which would be beyond stupid.

• Last night's episode was merely the last one of the season, whereas the first year's climax was a full-blown finale: The stakes were higher, they packed a lot more action and plot into two hours, and the parallelism of the cuts between the castaways boarding the plane before takeoff and watching them blow open the hatch were heartbreaking.

• The Dharma Initiative is shaping up to be this show's version of Milo Rambaldi. For those who didn't watch "Alias," Rambaldi was a 15th-century inventor whose prophecies unfolded on the show and whose writings influenced the show's overall direction, writing, story lines, etc. Depending on how the "Lost" showrunners handle it, Dharma could be very cool, like Rambaldi, or very bad, like Jenna Elfman.

• How depressed am I that I actually made that Elfman joke.

• Speaking of "Alias": The shift "Lost" seemed to make last night, away from the castaways as subjects and toward the story of Dharma and the island, could in time be seen as the moment the show decided to reboot its main focus, and its future success will be judged on whether viewers are willing to accept that. In the middle of the second season of "Alias," the good guys won, and I'm not talking a minor victory; I mean they beat the huge syndicate of villains, the Alliance, they'd been fighting all along. They took down SD-6, the local cell run by Arvin Sloane, as well as every SD outpost around the world. Halfway through the second year, the show abruptly changed from Sydney's efforts to take down SD-6 while living a double life to her attempts as a CIA agent to pursue the now independently evil Sloane, and the rest of the series hinged upon whether this switch was pulled off efficiently (it was) and whether it was a good idea (not completely). By abandoning the show's original conceit of double agents, double lives, and the pursuit of justice via vengeance, "Alias" lost most of the energy that had kept it going, so that by the end of its third season, it had run out of emotional and creative steam. Case in point: The fourth-season finale involved Russian zombies. So while it's possible that "Lost" could survive such a creative realignment, if indeed that's what happened last night, whether such a move would be wise won't be made clear until next season. Offhand, though, I'd say it's a bad idea.

• Eko was pretty stupid to think that dynamite would open the blast doors. They're called blast doors for a reason, man. Crazy priest.

• First Locke, then Rousseau. Now Desmond Hume. I get it, okay, guys? I get it. You took Intro to Philosophy. I get it. But knock it off. There hasn't been a forced mishmash of supposedly relevant philosophy this bad since the Matrix films, and we all know how those turned out.

• So the plane crashed because it was sucked down by the electromagnet? What's the point of having all the characters know each other from before the crash if the accident was Dharma-related, i.e., didn't involve them at all?

• There are now two shows trying to co-exist within the same space: The first involves Dharma and the hatches and Desmond and the electromagnetic clusterf**k that wrecked the plane, not to mention the multi-layered sociological experiments that were performed there. The second show wants to make use of the fact that the castaways all had tangential relationships before the crash, and that something pretty spooky and otherworldly is going on with the island, see for example the island's ability to restore Locke's ability to walk, Walt's natural psychokinetic abilities launching off the charts, the fact that everyone seems to have pretty relevant dreams about ghosts and/or the future, the whispering voices in the woods, the duplicitous Others, the black sentient cloud of whatever that flies around and at one point had a stare-down with Eko, etc. I like the second show.

And just like last year, I'll have a solid four months for my questions to be answered. ABC is supposed to air the first seven or so episodes this fall, then break, then air the rest. Here's hoping they stick to that, since the uneven repeat schedule this year was annoying. And here's hoping that J.J. Abrams gets back in the saddle to do some writing and directing. He should bring back David Fury, too. "Lost" promised to be a great show, and it was, and it could be great again. Just not the way things are going.

--------