The Plan

Man plans, and God laughs

While I'm trying to avoid working on what has become an unwieldy beast of a Lost post (it was about the last episode, yet it has become something about everything), I thought I would drop in for a minute to give you my pre and post-finale plans of attack, so you could make fun of me when I don't come even close to sticking to them.

Pre-finale I want to finish the above mentioned meandering post about What They Died For, which I have been working on for two days and is turning into something I may die for, and get that up in time to for you to read it and be nice and bored before the action begins tomorrow evening.  But who knows, as this one has mushroomed from a blow-by-blow recap of an episode into a meditation on all things Lost that just so happens to make less and less sense each time I try and rewrite it.  Nevertheless, sometime before the finale airs tomorrow evening, I'll post the sucker.  I may just have to slap it up in all its unedited, grammatically null glory, but we'll see. 

Either way, something will be up here by tomorrow afternoon, because that is when I shut down the computer and immerse myself in about a dozen hours of Lost.  I'll watch the enhanced pilot episode (which airs tonight at 8:00) tomorrow via DVR.  I plan on starting said pilot episode around 5:00 pm, so that I can be finished in time to watch the 7:00 Lost retrospective, which then leads into the 9:00 series finale, appropriately title The End.  And then I will pop on here to put up a quick and dirty first impression.  Depending on how physically and emotionally spent I am by that point, quick and dirty could take anywhere from fifteen minutes to two hours, but let's pretend it's going to take about a half hour, and that it will be posted by midnight, which will be thirty minutes after the end of the The End.

Yeah, let's pretend that is going to happen.

Then I'm going to go back to the couch, which will likely still have a whole body impression left from the previous six to nine hours I've spent lying on it, and watch Jimmy Kimmel's Aloha to Lost special.  I should likely be exhausted enough by that point to find Jimmy Kimmel very funny indeed, so that should be a good time.  

And then I either go to bed or write all night.  I have no idea which it will be.  If I feel as I did following What They Died For, then I'll write all night.  That episode left me jazzed and full of energy.  But even if The End is two and a half times better (at two and a half times the length), it may turn me into a an emotional wet noodle.  If that happens, then I won't even start writing the true Recap to End All Recaps until Monday morning, and post it sometime Monday evening.  So, best case scenario: I stay up all night and you get something Monday morning.  More realistic scenario: I actually sleep a bit and give you something Monday night.

And then I will write intermittently about Lost for the rest of my life, so make sure and check back every once and a while for the next forty or fifty years.  You never know what you may get.

Finally, I heard Alan Sepinwall mention that he's heard the two and half hour finale is about 100 minutes of actual program.  If that is true, get ready for commercial overload.  Two and a half hours is 150 minutes, so a 100 minute episode means two commercials for every two minutes of Lost.  Basically, it is going to feel as if every other minute of the finale will be a commercial.  

By the way, it's been reported that ABC is charging $900,000 per thirty second add spot.  There will be 100 of those spots during the Lost finale, so even I know that equals ninety million bucks in add revenue.  For one finale of one show.

And you thought Hurley won the lottery!

Let no one kid you that networks are not still money printing machines.  They are in trouble because they are also money spending machines, but the money is still there to produce any kind of show they please.  The only reason there has been no next-Lost isn't because they cannot afford to produce one; it's because they don't even know how they produced one in the first place.  Keep in mind, the executive at ABC who came up with the idea for what he called "Cast Away - The Series," and who green-lit the eleven million dollar Lost pilot based on JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof's outline, was actually fired for doing so before said pilot even aired.

I think we can all agree that most networks are not burdened with an overabundance of brains.

So, before we begin this insane weekend excursion we are all about to enjoy together, let's say a little prayer for former ABC chairman Lloyd Braun, patron saint of all things Lost, and the man who each week we hear say, "Previously, on Lost."

 Bless you, Lloyd.  And may you find success in all things.

 (Lloyd Braun, previously of ABC, who greenlit Lost, Grey's Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, and was fired for it.  

He also developed The Sopranos with David Chase.)