Of our elab­o­rate plans, the end
Of every­thing that stands, the end
No safety or sur­prise, the end
I’ll never look into your eyes…again
Jim Mor­ri­son

It all comes to an end tonight at 11:30PM and quite frankly I think I will be glad it is over. What started as a sur­vival story on a mys­te­ri­ous island has mor­phed into a bat­tle between good and evil to con­trol the island that no one can find.

Mil­lions of peo­ple want answers to the thou­sands of unan­swered ques­tions and mys­ter­ies, but I for one don’t care if I find out what hap­pened to Rose, Bernard and Vin­cent the dog or any of the others.

How will it end? Will we merge the the island time lines with the alt LA uni­verse? My guess is it will be a vari­a­tion of the first scene of last season’s finale; Jack (the new Jacob) will be sit­ting on the beach and John Locke (the new MIB) will approach and say, “You know how much I want to kill you?” They will stare out to sea and see a boat approach­ing. Locke will ask Jack, “You brought them here didn’t you?” The cam­era zooms in until you see the tran­som. It reads, “S.S.Minnow” Fade to black.

Gotta get one of these…

Donna and I have always par­tic­i­pated in two sep­a­rate Early Retire­ment Pro­grams to aug­ment our 401k’s and etc. We spend a buck a draw or $2 a week on both the Power­ball Lot­tery in South Car­olina and the Mega Mil­lions in Georgia.

Towards the end of last year South Car­olina announced that they would be adding the Mega Mil­lions to their line up. We rejoiced, no more dri­ving “all the way over” to Geor­gia every 5 weeks to buy those chances at early relo­ca­tion to a New Mex­ico life of lux­ury. When they announced the date of the first draw­ing I knew what had to be done. Tick­ets went on sale Sun­day, Jan­u­ary 31st and the first pos­si­ble Mega Mil­lion win­ner with a ticket pur­chased in South Car­olina would by drawn on Feb­ru­ary 2nd, the very same day that the first episode of the final sea­son of TDTVS would be shown.

If I win I won­der how many LOST fans I’ll have to share the $12 mil­lion with?

We watched the last 5 episodes of Sea­son 5 of TDTVS. Amaz­ing how eas­ily we can get sucked into the show. We were sup­posed to drag it out so that we ended up watch­ing the last episode of sea­son 5 just before the 6th and final sea­son begins a month from now. Now what’ll we do in the mean time? Start over? Let’s see 5 sea­sons with a total of 103 hours, divide that by 30 equals about 3–1/2 shows a day…

Tonight’s Final Jeop­ardy cat­e­gory is “16th Cen­tury Thinkers” and I think the odds are pretty good the answer ques­tion will also be the name of a char­ac­ter on TDTVS.*

The title of last night’s LOST episode was ” He’s Our You” which is how Say­wer described to Sayid who they were bring­ing him to, the Dharma Initiative’s very own “tor­turer”, a fel­low named Old­ham. Both Donna and I felt he looked eerily famil­iar. My ini­tial thought was Anthony Hop­kins as Han­ni­bal Lec­tor, but knew that wasn’t even remotely possible.

It wasn’t until I read some­thing today that gave it away — “Hi, I’m Larry, this is my brother Daryl and this is my other brother Daryl.” That’s right, William Sander­son. Prob­a­bly what really kicked him from the depths of my addled brain to near remem­brance was that he played a char­ac­ter named J.F.Sebastian in Bladerun­ner and he seemed to be wear­ing the eye­glasses of anothe Bladerun­ner char­ac­ter, Edlon Tyrell.

*It wasn’t, it was Mar­tin Luther.

When the Losties left on the Island started jump­ing around in time I have to admit I was intrigued, I’m a sucker for a time travel story, but after last night it was almost too much, like too much cheese­cake can be too much of a good thing.

Sort of seemed like they are doing it to show how clever the writ­ers and pro­duc­ers of the show are. See how smart we are? Remem­ber way back in episode X of sea­son X when char­ac­ter A did that thing in the jun­gle and there was what appeared to be a throw away com­ment to soon to be dead char­ac­ter B? Didn’t seem like much at the time, but now, in sea­son 5 episode 4, it is a major plot point that lays out the story arc for char­ac­ter C.

Well I’m hooked now, so, I say:

It’s so dreamy, oh fan­tasy free me
So you can’t see me, no not at all
In another dimen­sion, with voyeuris­tic inten­tion
Well-secluded, I see all
With a bit of a mind flip
You’re there in the time slip
And noth­ing can ever be the same
You’re spaced out on sen­sa­tion, like you’re under seda­tion
Let’s do the Time Warp again!

Dur­ing one of the episodes of TDTVS on Wednes­day night, Sayid is tak­ing Hur­ley to a safe house (which turns out to be just the oppo­site) and they are hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion. I don’t remem­ber exactly what was said, but it went a lit­tle like this:

Sayid: I’m not tak­ing any risks after Ben­tham died.
Hur­ley: You mean Locke.
Sayid: ..Yes, I mean Locke.
Hur­ley: I need a cool code name.

I think this would be a cool lit­tle applet to put on the ABC Lost site, sort of like the Sawyer’s Nick­name Gen­er­a­tor. The writ­ers and pro­duc­ers are fond of cre­at­ing char­ac­ters who names have a hid­den mean­ing relat­ing to philoso­phers, schol­ars and writ­ers. John Locke is actu­ally the name of a 17th-century philoso­pher, so when they made up a pseu­do­nym for him to come back to the world from the island, they gave him the name of a 19th-century philoso­pher, Jeremy Ben­tham.

So in that spirit, since I did so well in alge­bra in high school and am into com­puter stuff, my Cool Code Name™ is George Boole.

The Shape Of Things To Come

Some­thing Nice Back Home

Cabin Fever

There’s No Place Like Home (Part 1)

There’s No Place Like Home (Part 2)

What the heck, just fin­ished watch­ing the last 5 episodes of Sea­son 4, gonna have to twid­dle our thumbs for the next three weeks until Sea­son 5 starts. I just love the photo from Cabin Fever, looks like TDTVS and TDTVS2 had a crossover episode…

For your marathon plea­sure I have once again cre­ated a Best of the Year page which includes my favorite post for each month. Some months the pick­ings were slim and oth­ers were chock full of picks, but I stuck with one per — Best of 2008.

The first show of Sea­son 4 is num­ber 70 with an even dozen left to go. We will fin­ish watch­ing all the pre­vi­ous shows a week and a day before Sea­son 5 starts. It would have been per­fect, fin­ish­ing up the day before, had ABC not moved the sea­son pre­mier on me.

This flash­for­ward (which becomes the theme for this sea­son) con­cerns Hur­ley and the fact that he keeps see­ing his dead friend Char­lie from the island. Char­lie has some­thing to tell Hur­ley, but Hur­ley doesn’t want to hear it, he has to go back to the island.

Real time on the island the Losties split into two fac­tions, most fol­low Jack in his quest to get every­one res­cued by the peo­ple on the freighter off shore. While some choose to fol­low Locke to the Oth­ers old home, the Bar­racks, in an effort to avoid the freighter folks because, they like Ben, think that they are com­ing to kill everyone.

Sixty-eight of eighty-two is Charlie-centric and the title comes some­thing he is told by a new­comer to the island (para­chuted on after her heli­copter crashes.) Naomi tells him that his old band put out a Great­est Hits album after he “died” in the crash of Flight 815. It also comes from a list he makes of the 5 great­est things that have hap­pened to him so far after he vol­un­teers for a pos­si­ble sui­cide mis­sion to shut off a jam­mer in an under­wa­ter Dharma station.

Num­ber 66 of 82 is Locke-centric that involve short range flash­backs that don’t involve leav­ing the island. Ben tells Locke that to be really free he needs to kill his father, but he can’t. For­tu­nately, the Oth­ers have files on every 815 sur­vivor and it just so hap­pens that there is some­one who has a motive to do the job for Locke. Turns out Lockes’s father is the very same man who conned Sawyer’s par­ents when he was a kid lead­ing to their mur­der suicide.

Will you still need Desmond, will you still feed Desmond, when it’s episode sixty-four?

Off island, Desmond is in a monastery, but just as he is get­ting the hang of it, he gets punched by the brother of the woman he left at the alter to become a monk, he get drunk on the monks wine and gets fired. As he is leav­ing the monastery he bumps into a beau­ti­ful woman who needs a litle help, sparks fly. Her name? Penny.

On island he has this elab­o­rate future vision that involves some­one para­chut­ing on the island and Char­lie get­ting an arrow in the throat. He is sure that the per­son who lands on the island is Penny, his long lost love and to have his vision come true he thinks that all the flashes he sees must be allowed to hap­pen, includ­ing the arrow in the throat. In the end he saves Char­lie and the para­chutist isn’t Penny. Related?

This was episode fif­teen of sea­son three mean­ing we are about 3/4 of the way through its 22 episodes. It was also episode 62 of 82 mean­ing we are about three quar­ters of the way through all 4 seasons.

On island Kate wakes up in the woods hand­cuffed to Juliet and in their lit­tle adven­ture they are drenched in a down­pour, have a wrestling match and fall into a mud pud­dle while avoid­ing the smoke mon­ster not once, but twice. Loce has dis­ap­peared with the Oth­ers and in the end Jack, Kate ans Sayid are reunited and head back to the beach camp. Much to the cha­grin of kate and Sayid, Jack insists the they take Juliet along.

The off island flash­back shows Kate try­ing to con­tact her mother to find out why she turned her into the Feds. She gets unex­pected help from another woman, who unbe­known to her was conned by Sawyer and is car­ry­ing his child. Unfor­tu­nately for Kate, mom loved her abu­sive hus­band, so when Kate thought she was pro­tect­ing her from him by torch­ing the house he lay passed out in, she was really hurt­ing her.

Num­ber 60 of the 82 episodes of TDTVS so far’s main pro­tag­o­nist is John Locke.

Off island we see him reluc­tantly reunited from his con man father who “stole” his kid­ney a while back. John’s father is con­ning a woman and her son finds John to get him to help spoil the plan. As usual John is pow­er­less to stop dear old dad and as a con­se­quence of his actions gets tossed out an eight story build­ing, break­ing his back which is how he ended up in the wheelchair.

When he started out with Sayid and Kate their goal was to res­cue Jack from the Oth­ers, but some time after their visit to the Flame Sta­tion it changed dras­ti­cally. A lib­er­ated pack­age of C4 is put to “good” use in blow­ing up the Oth­ers link to the out­side world, a small submarine.

One of the best bits of dia­log on the show ever comes from this episode. Locke is in Ben’s cabin hold­ing Ben’s daugh­ter Alex hostage, when unex­pect­edly, a group of Ben’s friends show up. Locke takes Alex into a closet. Richard Alpert comes into view and Ben says, “I want you to bring me the man from Tal­la­has­see.” After Tom leaves and Locke and Alex emerge from the closet, Locke asks about the man from Tal­la­has­see and asks if that is a code­word. Ben replies that they have no secret codes, although per­haps they should have one for “a man with a gun is hold­ing my daugh­ter hostage in the closet”.

Episode 58 of 82 is jammed full of excite­ment on-island. Hur­ley whoops up on Sawyer in a game of ping pong and because he lost he can’t use his trade­mark nick­names when talk­ing to or about the rest of the sur­vivors. Else­where a cow­bell leads Sayid, Kate and Locke to a new Dharma sta­tion, the Flame. The Flame is run by the man with an eye patch, Mikhail and we get Sayid shot in the arm, fist fights between Mikhail and Sayid, Kate and an Other, Ms. Klugh, in the base­ment, Locke play­ing chess aganst a coupter and finally a giant ass explosion.

The off island Sayid flash­back seemed almost an after­thought to add drama and plot to the on island shenani­gans at the Flame Sta­tion with some help from a creepy cat.

Episode 9 of Sea­son 3 is num­ber 56 of 82 and is a Jack episode. In the off-island flash back we see him vaca­tion­ing in Thai­land where he meets a mys­te­ri­ous (is there any other kind on this show?) local woman who helps him fly a kite, has sex with him, looks into his soul and she tells him he is a leader and a great man, but this makes him lonely, fright­ened, and angry and he makes her tat­too Chi­nese char­ac­ters on his arm to that effect.

On island he strikes a bar­gain with Ben that he will help doc­tor his now infected back to pre­vent fur­ther dam­age he is pre­vents Juliet from being exe­cuted for killing some­one while help­ing Sawyer and Kate escape. One of he oth­ers who speaks Chi­nese tells Jack his tat­too means, “He walks amongst us, but he is not one of us.”

We are less than 7 weeks to the Sea­son Five pre­mier of TDTVS and ABC has started toss­ing out pro­mo­tional pho­tos. Here is one that shows all the main cast mem­bers. Where is Jin? Was he left off because he actu­ally did die on the freighter? None of the other main dead peo­ple are in there either (if you don’t count Locke who was in the cof­fin in the final scene of Sea­son Four), Chris­t­ian, Claire (of course there is some spec­u­la­tion that she isn’t actu­ally dead) and Charlie.

Here is the link to the full res­o­lu­tion image — clic­kee — just look at the faces, smooth as babies bottoms.

Episode 53 of 82 cen­ters around Kate and cen­tral part in the on island love tri­an­gle of her, Jack & Sawyer. Kate is taken to where Jack is being held and tells him he has to oper­ate on Ben to save him or they will kill Sawyer. Jack refuses. She fig­ures out a way to climb out of her cage and breaks into Sawyer’s. They end up doing the deed, but Jack “hap­pens” to see them on a secu­rity cam­era. Think­ing that Kate cares for Sawyer he agrees to oper­ate to spare Sawyer after all. Very soap opera-ish episode in that regard.

In the off island flash­back Kate, or Mon­ica as she known here, falls in love with a cop named Kevin while still a fugi­tive and on the run. Our groom is played by none other than Cap­tain Tight­pants, Nathan Fil­lion from Fire­fly. In the end Mon­ica can’t really stay mar­ried, so she has to leave. She drugs Kevin’s iced tea and runs from him. I can only hope that the pro­duc­ers just thought of try­ing to work in a way for Kate to have the knock out drugs on her lips and kiss him, like Mal had Saf­fron do to him in the Fire­fly episode “Our Mrs. Reynolds”, before dis­miss­ing it.

Episode 51 of 82 finds Sawyer in the past, con­ning a con­vict to get his sen­tence shorted, that he is serv­ing for a failed con on a woman, who vis­its him in the slam­mer to say they have a child together (is this her try­ing to con him?) Sawyer in the present is still a con­vict of sorts (he and Kate are still locked in sep­a­rate cages) and his attempted con to aid an escape fails, lead­ing to him being on the receiv­ing end of con.

Episode 50 of 82 is Locke cen­tric and a return to more of a Sea­son 2 style with nice writ­ing that wraps the present on-island hap­pen­ings with the off-island flash­backs. Plus we get zero cov­er­age of the weird­ness that is occur­ring on the “Other” side of the island with Jack, Kate and Sawyer.

When Locke wakes up in the jun­gle after the hatch implo­sion he now doesn’t know what to do, when he found the hatch ini­tially he felt it was his des­tiny to save the world by push­ing the but­ton every 108 min­utes. Then anther hatch was uncov­ered and it seemed to reveal that push­ing the but­ton was all a psy­cho­log­i­cal exper­i­ment and really meant noth­ing. But when he devised a way to pre­vent the but­ton from being pushed, some­thing very pow­er­ful event did occur and the hatch was destroyed. For guid­ance he builds a sweat lodge where he is vis­ited by the dead Boone and is pushed around the Sindey, Aus­tralia air­port in his old wheel­chair until he fig­ures out he has to clean up his mess, i.e. res­cue Mr. Eko who was also inside the hatch and con­se­quently tossed about the island some­where and has been cap­tured by another of the island’s polar bears.

Episode 47 of 82 was the 2 hour Sea­son 2 finale. It was jam packed with the return of Desmond, dyna­mite explo­sions, a giant 4-toed foot, even more betrayal from Michael, gun fire, tran­quil­izer darts, hiero­glyph­ics, extreme mag­net­ism, load annoy­ing sounds, bright spec­tral skies and a kiss.

It was pretty much Desmond-centric where see how he got to to the island in the first place, his being suck­ered into push­ing the but­ton, how it might actu­ally be his fault Flight 815 crashed there and in the present how he, along with Locke, let the count­down go past zero with­out push­ing the but­ton and then blows up the hatch.

Most of the other on island antics con­cerned the Fab Four (Jack, Kate, Sawyer & Hur­ley) & Michael trekking across the island so he can “get his boy back.” He finally does and sails off towards free­dom in the Other’s boat given to him for deliv­er­ing our main char­ac­ters into impris­on­ment. Except for Hur­ley who gets sent back to the survivor’s beach to tell them to stay away. Because it was a two hour show you get 2 pictures.

This episode returned to the good writ­ing that entan­gled both the off island flash­back of Mr. Eko and his on island story. Through his dreams (or reli­gious visions) he insists that he and Locke search the jun­gle for the ? which leads them back to the wreck­age of the small plane in which Mr. Eko found the remains of his priest brother. Locke has a dream which shows Mr. Eko where to go, enabling him to see the ?, which turns out to be another hatch. Inside the hatch they watch another ori­en­ta­tion film which cause Locke to lose his faith in the but­ton push­ing, but sur­pris­ingly has the exact oppo­site effect on Eko.

Episode #43 of 82 intro­duces us to the Rose and Bernard back story and is another fine exam­ple the writ­ers relat­ing the on island story to the off island one. We see how they met, the mar­riage pro­posal and after they are mar­ried how they ended up in Aus­tralia, Rose is dying and Bernard tries to fix her by arrang­ing a visit to a faith healer. Bernard wanted to fix the survivor’s plight by mak­ing a giant S.O.S., but aban­dons the plan when he finds out that that where the faith healer failed, the island suc­ceeded. Rose says she is cured, she can feel it.

Halfway done, Lock­down is episode #41 of 82 and appro­pri­ately it cen­ters around John Locke. The off island flash­back shows how John is totally locked to the whims of his con man father. After attend­ing the father’s funeral he is shocked when a few days later the “deceased” shows up request­ing help. He needs Locke to go and retrieve the money he stole from a cou­ple of very bad dudes by unlock­ing a safety deposit box. On island, John has to enlist the aide of sus­pected bad guy Henry Gale, who he has unlocked from his cell, when he gets stuck under a blast door that auto­mat­i­cally closes as part of the tit­u­lar Lock­down. While trapped under the door he gets a brief glimpse of a strange map.

Episode 38 of 82 tells us how Sayid becomes a tor­turer for the US at the end of the first Gulf War, while on the island he gets to use those skills on a per­son that the French Chick has cap­tured in one of her snare traps. She says that he is one of the “Oth­ers” and not to be trusted, the cap­tured party says he is just a cross pacific bal­loon­ist that crashed on the island 4 months ago. His name is Henry Gale which is also the name of Dorothy’s uncle in the Wiz­ard of Oz. It is also the name of an Amer­i­can physi­cist in the early 1900s who worked at the Mount Wil­son Obser­va­tory in Pasadena, CA.

Halfway through Sea­son 2 in Episode 36 of 83 we get another well writ­ten story that inter­twines the off island flash­backs with the on island action. This episode is Charlie-centric and we see him try­ing to save his drug addicted brother, but it breaks up their rela­tion­ship and their band Drive Shaft. On island he has dreams and sleep walks con­vinced he must save Claire’s baby Aaron, but all he does is make peo­ple think he is using heroin again and breaks up his rela­tion­ship she and her son.

Jack-centric episode 35 of 83 was almost as bad an episode as yesterday’s was good. The off island flash­back felt forced and unbe­liev­able and was there just to show one side of him that related to his on island action. Between those two sto­ries they have turn Jack into a less lik­able char­ac­ter. Even the lying, cheat­ing, steal­ing con man Sawyer is more sympathetic.

In Episode 32 of 82 Shan­non gets shot for the third time (once at the end ep #30, then again in the tailie recap and again tonight in the begin­ning of this one to lead in.) The off island flash­backs give us the story of Shannon’s acci­den­tal killer, ex-LA cop Anna Lucia Cortez.

We have spent the first 30 shows cov­er­ing what has hap­pened to the sur­vivors of the front sec­tion of Flight 815 in their 48 days on the island. Show 31 gives us the Reader’s Digest Con­densed Ver­sion of all forty-eight days for the tail sec­tion sur­vivors and it ain’t pretty.

(29 of 82) If this episode was a movie I would have to label it a “Chick Flick.” In the off islad flash­backs we get to see how Sun and Jin met in Korea and on one side of island we get a lit­tle bit of Jin won­der­ing about Sun and on the other side of the island a lot of Sun won­der­ing about Jin.

Episode #26 unfolds in typ­i­cal soap opera fash­ion as we spend an hour and progress the story 5 min­utes, mostly with a flash­back involv­ing Micheal and his orig­i­nal sep­a­ra­tion from Walt as a fol­low up to him los­ing him again to the “oth­ers.” A full third of the show is spent rehash­ing Locke, Jack & Kate enter­ing the hatch as we saw in the last episode and pro­gress­ing nowhere. The most exit­ing thing that hap­pened was Kate get­ting locked in a closet in the hatch and dis­cov­er­ing choco­late bars.

Night 1 of 82. We have started watch­ing all the pre­vi­ous sea­sons episodes of Sea­son 5 of TDTVS , one at a time, every week­night until Jan­u­ary when new episodes begin again.

I still have trou­ble with the jet engine remain­ing run­ning long after the crash and then spec­tac­u­larly blow­ing up when some red shirt is sucked into it. The sec­ond explo­sion when the wing crashes down on the sand is a cred­i­bil­ity stretcher as well.

This episode is enti­tled Pilot (Pt 1) because it was what the pro­duc­ers, in the tra­di­tional sense, used to sell the show to the net­work. But know­ing now, what I didn’t know then, I’m bet­ting it is also called this because of the key role the pilot played in the plane get­ting lost.

Just how old was J.J. Abrams in 1969? Do you think the gen­e­sis of LOST was a show called The New Peo­ple?

Can’t blog right now, last hour of Lost is on. Come back tomorrow.

That Ben is such a nice guy.

First the actress who plays Sun is pho­tographed with an MX-5 last month and now this time a Miata makes a cameo in last night’s episode. Not only was this a Jin flash­back, but it is a flash­back for the car as well.

The episode was a sneaky one that broke new ground. We have had flash­back shows and more recently flash­foward ones, but Thurs­day was a com­bi­na­tion of the two. They were trick­ily edited to appear like just one flash­for­ward our Korean cou­ple. A few hints in Jin’s scenes were left for eagle-eyed Lost view­ers to pick up. I would like to tell you I am one of them, but I’m not, I learn most that type of stuff from read­ing The Lost Forum and sub­se­quent view­ings of the show.

The pro­duc­tion folks at Bad Robot made sure to give Jin a bulky older cell phone, a toss off line about being mar­ried for only a cou­ple months and a stuffed dragon with a ref­er­ence to it being that creature’s year (2000), but weren’t savvy enough to be aware of the dif­fer­ence between a 99/00 Miata and an 01–05 model.

If you look closely at the head­light in the back­ground of the above pic­ture you will see a sharp crease in the body ema­nat­ing from the upper inside of it plus the sep­a­rate pro­jec­tor low beam and stan­dard high beam that are the big dif­fer­ence in the model years. Now I know tech­ni­cally you can pur­chase a 2001 model year car in 2000, but that doesn’t hap­pen until the last cou­ple of months of the year and if this was really tak­ing place in Seoul, the peo­ple would have been more bun­dled up for the cold weather.

I spent the whole day wear­ing my Oceanic Air­lines T-shirt. The seller said it was pre-shrunk, but there was a lot of shrunk still left in it. After wash­ing it still fits, but it is a lit­tle short, so I ordered an XXL in dark blue for back-up.

At one point this after­noon I was on the couch trolling the net for Lost stuff using links from other Lost pages while Donna was in the other room on the desk­top read­ing the Lost forums. The best find is a toss-up between a blog from Jorge Gar­cia the actor who plays Hugo Reyes, AKA Hur­ley — Dis­patches from the Island or some nude images of Mira Furlan who plays Danielle Rousseau, or as Sawyer refers to her, the French Chick from a 1985 Yugosla­vian movie called ‘When Father Was Away on Busi­ness’.

With noth­ing left to watch DVD-wise, this evening, using the lap­top, rest­ing on the din­ner table between us, we went online to ABC.com and rewatched the 3rd episode of sea­son 4, The Econ­o­mist, to see what all the losties on the forums were talk­ing about.

We bought our next 5-week Power­ball ticket today. Instead of the usual quick pick, we opted to pick our own — 4–8-15–16-23–42. That’s right, we are risk­ing the curse, which I fig­ure in this case will be noth­ing more than hav­ing to share the prize with thou­sands of fans of the show.

We fin­ished watch­ing the last 3 episodes of sea­son 3 tonight and made a vow to wait at least 4 months before we start over again with sea­son 1.

After we fin­ished watch­ing Lost I caught up with the lat­est episode of the Ter­mi­na­tor: The Sarah Con­nor Chron­i­cles online. Mid­way through there is this scene between the man that Sarah was liv­ing with prior to her jump­ing ahead 8 years into 2007 and his cur­rent wife (the Sarah replace­ment if you will.) He was try­ing to con­vince her that he wasn’t lying, that he hadn’t seen Sarah recently. The wife looked real famil­iar. I had seen her in some­thing recently. Real recent. No, it couldn’t be. With a quick check of IMDB and I found out it was who I thought it was — Penny!

Sonya Wal­ger

I’m not sure exactly where the phrase “for­sak­ing all oth­ers” is from, might have been part of my wed­ding vows or the oath I took when I joined the U.S. Navy or maybe it is from my col­lege fra­ter­nity pledge, but I have been hear­ing it in my head a lot recently.

When I came home from work on Fri­day I had with me the bor­rowed DVD of the movie Lucky # Slevin to watch (thanks Mark.) Also on Fri­day, in the mail there was a red enve­lope with Notes on a Scan­dal inside. Here it is Sun­day night and nei­ther movie has found its way into the DVD player.

Not because we weren’t in front of the TV any this week­end, we were, for a good bit of it, but because we watch­ing more of Sea­son 3 of TDTVS.

Ben: Bring me the man from Tal­la­has­see.
Man leaves, and Locke and Alex exit the closet.
Locke: Is that some kind of code.
Ben: No Locke, we don’t have a code for ‘There’s a man in the closet with a gun to my daughter’s head.’ Although there clearly should be.

P.S. I do know that it came from my wed­ding vows…

…try­ing to watch Lost on reg­u­lar TV.

ABC is show­ing the third sea­son ender right now, I guess in an effort to get every­one excited for tomorrow’s Episode 1 of Sea­son 4. The com­mer­cial blocks are annoy­ing as all get out and to make mat­ters worse they are crawl­ing extra infor­ma­tion at the bot­tom of the screen to explain what is going on to newbies.

To fur­ther indoc­tri­nate new­com­ers, ABC will break­down the whole first 3 sea­sons in a clip show that will be shown at 8 PM, just in front of the 9 PM pre­miere of sea­son four.

Like before, I got tired of fail­ure on eBay bid­ding for Sea­son 3, so last night I broke down and bought it new. Found it on Buy.com for $28.98 ($38.98 minus $10 for first time Google Check­out buyers.)

Watched Lost Sea­son 2 pretty much all day, discs 3, 4 & 5 or about 8–1/2 hours worth. Sav­ing num­ber six for tomor­row though. We have decided that see­ing as we watched all of Sea­son 3 just a month ago, we prob­a­bly won’t buy that set, right now. Plan is to wait until they are get­ting ready to release Sea­son 4 on DVD and buy #3 then. So end of this year, early next year we will start over again and watch Sea­sons 1, 2, then 3 fol­lowed right up by 4. After that I think we’ll have to go out and buy a new couch, because we will have worn the cov­ers off this one.

The polls have closed here in SC and every­one is say­ing that Obama is the big win­ner, but Donna and I already knew that around 6 o’clock this evening. That is when the phone stopped ring­ing with those auto­mated cam­paign mes­sages, today’s tally at the Bog­a­r­dus house­hold, Barack Obama 6, Hillary Clin­ton 3. There were 3 “unde­cid­eds”, i.e. no mes­sage left. We had planned to get out and vote, but were afraid The Oth­ers might kid­nap us, so we stayed inside.

The Lost Sea­son 1 DVDs came in the mail today.

He said he was going to put Sea­son 1 Disc 1 in his Net­flix queue to see what I was so hooked on that I would spend two whole days anchored to the couch watching.

Disc 1 arrived Tues­day night, Mark and his wife are now totally Lost. Wednes­day morn­ing at work he cussed me out for get­ting him hooked on the show. The first 4 episodes were just enough to get them addicted and now he couldn’t con­cen­trate on work, all he could think about was watch­ing more. A junkie jonesin’ for a fix. I was slightly jeal­ous as I remem­ber that feeling.

Wednes­day he stopped at a video rental place on the way home and gets the 5 discs left of Sea­son 1 caus­ing him to stay up way past his bed­time watch­ing episodes 5 through 16. Right now Mark and his wife are prob­a­bly fin­ish­ing up Sea­son 1. On his way home from work today he was going to stop and get Sea­son 2 for Sat­ur­day. Right after say­ing that he said, “Nope, prob­a­bly won’t wait that long, Fri­day night.” I’m bet­ting they may start Sea­son 2 tonight…

Mark didn’t think the video place has Sea­son 2 for rent, but he did see them in the used DVD bin for sale. He fig­ures even if he buys them for $5 bucks each ($30 total) he can recoup his losses by sell­ing the set on eBay after watch­ing them.

This led to a quick check of eBay to see how much a sea­son of Lost was going for — $25–30. Hey, here’s an auc­tion Sea­son 1 that ends in forty min­utes with a high bid of $16.49. I said I’d pay that much for it. Mark goaded me on, so I bid $17. Wouldn’t you know it, I won, so now I have Sea­son 1 of Lost on the way for rewatching.

Maybe I’ll pay Mark $20 for Sea­son 2 if he ends up buy­ing it…

Star­ring Brian Bog­a­r­dus as Don Bir­nam and intro­duc­ing Donna Bog­a­r­dus as Helen St. James.

We went to the video store this evening and spent $25 rent­ing all 7 DVDs of TDTVS. Twice.

The first time we went into the store and found the TV sec­tion where they had the Lost discs all lined up. I grabbed the first three think­ing that would be enough to keep us busy for a while. Donna said, “No get all of them.” Checked out all seven and came home. Donna took a quick nap and about 5:30 we thought we would start our marathon. Each disc has 4 episodes and each episode lasts about 42 min­utes, so we fig­ured we would watch one disc tonight leav­ing 3 for Sat­ur­day and 3 for Sun­day. When I opened up the case for disc one, I real­ized it was a Sea­son One disc. WTF? All of them were Sea­son One…

We didn’t pay atten­tion in the store, we just fig­ured that the sec­ond season’s stuff would right up front because it just came out on Tues­day. Nope. Donna called the store up and asked if they had Sea­son Two in stock. They did. She asked them to put the whole set aside for and we would be in later to get them.

As we were check­ing out we asked for the “Stu­pid Renters Dis­count” and explained what we had done. The man­ager was there and had the clerk call up our account. She could see we had picked out 7 DVDs just two hours before and took pity on us. She did a swap thing and we didn’t have to pay for them the sec­ond time. Nice.

Was me crash­ing down from 40,000′ just like Oceanic Flight 815 (Sid­ney to LA.)

Last night was a new episode of TDTVS and true to my deci­sion, I didn’t watch it. I was going to wait until Sep­tem­ber and watch the DVD of Sea­son 2 in it’s entirety. Donna, who has less will power, watched it in the other room, while I wasted time on the inter­net with Radio Par­adise play­ing softly in the back­ground to mask any dia­log leakage.

I’m not say­ing I’ve been a saint all this time either, I have pumped co-workers for a few details of what has been hap­pen­ing and I have peeked at a few screen cap­tures from Season2 on some fan sites.

After talk­ing with one friend/fan at work dur­ing break this after­noon, I fell off the wagon. I spent the next 45 min­utes read­ing the syn­op­sis of the first 12 episodes of Sea­son 2 on the offi­cial ABC site.