Yeah, that was the stuff that really bugged me. You hit it. It was all undefined. But more than that, really, because I don't see how Sayid is such a bad dude that he gets singled out to be consumed by darkness, or whatever the fuck it was. Everyone on the island was a murderer, and many were torturers. Hell,…

I trust you on that because you are a doctor.

I often wonder how the season would have played had the switch up to their storytelling for the final season been to tell everything in a linear fashion. Some changes would have been required, but what if the on island story is told first, straight up to Jack's eye closing in the mid season finale, and they we cut to…

Former Dearest Gary X,

Yes. And I think it was all a part of their decision early on that they were going to answer each question with three more, and that they would never actually provide real answers until the very end, which made the very end very pedantic.

I wish I could come close to touching Bai Ling.

It didn't really bother me at the time that we did not know what that world was. But when we found it, it bothered me that they had leaned too hard on red herrings. I like the sideways world, and I liked what we learned was the real purpose of the sideways, but I find red herrings to be one of the weakest types of…

Too late and too generic for my tastes. The lateness would not be a problem for me if the episode was fantastic. It was not.

If it had come in a different season, I'd probably love it. But by that point, I just did not get what it added. I really did not care about Smokey and Jacob's brother angst at that point. Hell, at that point I had decided that Jacob was a total cock, and that much of what went wrong on the island was due to Jacob…

I thought that episode was so bad that it was from another series. And upon rewatch it was also thunderously boring. I hated it then, and I despise it now. And even had it been less on-the-nose and stilted, it is the quintessential example of something that should have come much earlier in the series, let alone the…

If you really want to hear what Daniel Von Bargen could do, check out the audio version of the book Streets of Laredo by Larry McMurtry. I mean, the guy gave a performance for the ages reading that book. That was when I first learned his name, and I still cannot forget certain passages some twenty years later. I can…

Actually, for my money the best season probably changes for me with every comment. The show really was that good.

I agree. It's hard to pick a favorite season.

Watch the last scene in the Right Stuff when Yeager takes the X-1 up and has to bail out. The final shots and dialogue of the car finding him after he parachutes to earth in the desert are nearly identical to that scene in this episode. It's a wonderful lift from that movie. Made me giggle.

How about Michael Chikilis?

I remember being amazed they made me like Jack again. I even said at some point during some previous season, "Jack is an irredeemable asshole, and that's the point. They are trying to see how much they can make you hate the "hero." But if they ever try and make him likable, it's never going to work."

I agree. It's a tough call, because S3 has so many individual episodes I consider among the finest hours of television ever made. But on the whole S5 might be my favorite season of television of all time (or tied for #1 with a few others things, I should probably say).

I know Abrams was not involved that much, but I really blame him in retrospect. His obsession with secrecy and mystery (all for mystery and secrecy's sake) is almost pathological. The way he handled the whole Kahn thing in Star Trek is another example of how his autistic obsession with the mystery box is detrimental…

I like the flash sideways quite a bit. In fact, much of it is far better than the on island stuff, especially early when we are stuck in that awful Temple. But the big problem for me is just the structure, the sideways part of it. The cutting and back and forth between the two realities created a wholly unnecessary…

I thought S6 was better and worse than I remembered. I wasn't part of the crowd that didn't like the season as a whole, and I really enjoyed the ending. But the shaky parts of that season (the Temple, the Mother and Richard episodes, Zombie Sayid) were far worse than I remembered them being. But everything else was…