Second. He had a line in the first season finale.

Yes. I found upon my rewatch that the sideways stuff worked a lot better because I knew what it was, and what it meant to the characters and overall theme. So it was so much stronger on an emotional level, and that made Season Six work better for me. But structurally, yeah, it's a mess, in no small part because so…

And a big part of the structural problem with Season Six ties into that Need For Secrecy. Namely, all the emotional, cathartic and resolving stuff is put into the Flash Sideways… but it only makes sense as that if you know what the Flash Sideways actually is, which they don't reveal until the last ten minutes. So…

I did listen to some of them, and they are very interesting. But the Final Five stuff is a prime example of the sort of thing I'm talking about. Not who they chose, but the concept in-universe itself. We're told that Cylons have twelve humanized models, each has a number: Dannica is a Three, Sharon is an Eight,…

Yes, exactly. And I have a lot of mixed feelings about how BSG turned out, but the main thing I think is that the writers were clearly inspired and excited about a new idea and direction for the show at the end of the second season— but that idea didn't line up with the things they had already established.

I agree that you can't and shouldn't "plan it all out ahead of time", and "making it up" is hardly some crime (because that's what writing is. But I think BSG is a bad example of Doing That Well.

I did like the theory that Dave was the first manifestation of Hurley seeing the dead, and he was Libby's husband. Come to think of it, that could work with Libby's story, that she was in the sanitarium because SHE was seeing her husband, but Hurley effectively chased him away, allowing Libby to return to the real…

Strictly speaking, we don't see Yemi become the Smoke Monster. Yemi goes into the tress, and then the Smoke Monster comes out. So, it's implied they are the same, but at that point… it wasn't necessarily the case. It could have been "Yemi" was a manifestation of something else, and then was all, "He's all yours" to…

I always had a problem with the sophistry of The Others claims never being properly analyzed. By the end of the run, we're more or less told that The Others Were Right, without REALLY showing us why or how or about what.

I agree, but I do think it's poor long-term writing to drop mysteries without having a sense where you think you're going to go with them. Ron Moore with BSG is a fine example, where he admits "And they have a plan" was just something that sounded cool, and the lack of really understanding that hurts that series. …

It also helps to remember how much the original Bab5 five-year-plan didn't survive contact with reality. When you get down to it, what he originally envisioned and what we got were very different things indeed. (I recall one of his early GEnie comments in which he talked about how much the arc would dominate each…

It would have been interesting that way, in that Eko would handle the information very different from Desmond. When it's time for Charlie's death, Desmond gives Charlie the information and lets him choose what he'll do. I can see Eko letting his faith lead him to making the choice on his own for Charlie.

Though the Finale of S1 of Heroes mostly suffered from a lack of money to really deliver on what they promised.

I think that was another victim of Season Six Consolidate Plot Points. I think Richard was originally supposed to be MUCH older (the Latin, "Ricardus", some of Ben's comments), but then they put him on the Black Rock to answer two questions at once. Making the Latin seem kind of odd.

The thing with the FSW, though? Rewatching the season made it clear THAT was the story that really interested the writers. The Island stuff was largely procedural, hitting the signposts and moving the chess pieces where they needed them. The characters' afterlife was where their emotional energy was. …

Like I've argued before, I really believe that making Smokey into Jacob's Adversary was a late decision, since most of what we see up until Season Six paints the Smoke Monster as Jacob's hand-of-judgement, rather than something against him.

I very much think so. The various iterations of Christian, and making them all be the MiB, is challenging to reconcile, as well as the role of the Smoke Monster in terms of the Others. I mean, you can make it work in Headcanon (and kind of have to), but it doesn't fit cleanly.

I've held— and I still hold— the opinion that the idea behind the MiB (Jacob's Adversary, if you will) and the Smoke Monster were separate things up until the beginning of Season Six, and only then did they consolidate the two into being the same. The Smoke Monster's role as the Island's official Judgment System (as…

Ironically enough, our next door neighbour is, in fact, a local celebrity. She wasn't the one, though. The one who hit on me had national/international level exposure, but very niche.

Off the prompt a bit, but a few weeks ago I had a minor celebrity whom I've long nursed a fanboy crush hit on me, and hit on me HARD. Now, I'm a married man, and I didn't cross the line, but… I more or less was at the line and going, "Yup, there's the line I shouldn't cross." I told my wife about what had happened,…