Lost, "The End": "I don't believe in a lot of things, but I do believe in duct tape"

As someone who's watched every single episode of Lost since the still-amazing pilot and recapped the series' entire fourth season for another blog (and never got paid for writing those recaps--as Chris Rock would say, what kind of gangster shit is that?), I'm still processing the events of Lost's lukewarmly received and sometimes frustrating series finale. I wasn't expecting the finale to answer every remaining question about the series' mysterious goings-on. How could it do so in one episode, even with an extra half-hour? I just wanted a finale that gave proper farewells to the characters and brought the goods action-wise like those eps when Sayid busted out his badass breakdance fighting moves, and "The End" delivered in the character and action sequence departments. But was all that time spent in the sideways universe during the final season worth it? I don't think I'm completely satisfied with the reasoning for the sidewaysverse. That whole business with the giant cork didn't make much sense either. Bullet time:

-My favorite recurring Lost theme was the conflict between a man of science (Jack) and a man of faith (Locke). The final season resolved that conflict beautifully, with Jack finally accepting Locke's beliefs in the specialness of the island and dying the way he wanted to (which was seeing his remaining friends leave the island safely) in a pitch-perfect final image that referenced the pilot's first moment and showed how much of an influence the Watchmen comic had on Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof.

-I'm glad Ken Leung's Miles, the character who provided the above one-liner about duct tape, lived to see another day. Bloggers like angry asian man and DISGRASIAN were disappointed that their favorite pair of Lost characters, the supercouple of Jin and Sun, was offed in "The Candidate" (some have even cried racism over the demises of the Kwons and Sayid), but I think the death of Miles, the show's sole Asian American regular and one of the few APA guys in prime-time who's neither a martial arts expert nor a coonin' buffoon, would have been a bigger letdown. (Speaking of Asian stuff, spoken-word artist Bao Phi wrote a nice post earlier this season about Lost's huge Asian American following.)

-I was also jazzed to see Miles' fellow freightie Lapidus alive after the submarine debacle in "The Candidate" because Jeff Fahey, who was underused on Lost but served as great comic relief whenever he did get screen time, is a master at making something out of nothing, ever since his laconic turn as the eccentric title hero of ABC's short-lived '90s procedural The Marshal. One of the reasons why the Star Wars prequel trilogy was an epic fail was because it lacked a Han Solo-esque figure who would wittily comment on the mystical goings-on and serve as a relatable audience surrogate. I like to think the Lost creators took notice of that flaw in the prequels, so they gave us not just one Han Solo-esque foil, but four: Sawyer, Miles, Lapidus and the not-as-cynical-or-snarky Hurley.

-The sci-fi geek in me who enjoyed all the time-travel material during my favorite Lost seasons, four and five, was disappointed that neither the nuke in "The Incident" nor the island's funky science was the reason for the sidewaysverse. The afterlife angle pretty much shot down my theory that Desmond or some other character with extraordinary powers created the sidewaysverse to hide his friends in there from the homicidal Smokey. On a superficial note, Sidewaysverse Kate looked slammin' in that black miniskirt.

-So Hurley and Ben are basically Mr. Rourke and Tattoo now? I bet the new island protector begins each morning by greeting everyone else with "Smiles, everydude, smiles!"

-Since when is Shannon the love of Sayid's life? I thought he was into Nadia. Whatever, man. I'm sure the Sayid and Shannon shippers got their panties wet that night. God, I hate that term "shippers." Other terms I hate are "squee" and "bromance." All those terms should be taken out back and shot and given a burial like the one Rick Rubin gave to the word "def" when he removed "Def" from the name of his label American Records.

-Yes! Lt. Van Buren is cancer-free! Woops, wrong series finale.

My least favorite current screenwriting cliché is...

...contrived Hot Pocket sight gags--like when a character cooks it without the sleeve, just so we can be treated to a weak gag in which the character drops it 'cause it's hot. Who the hell nukes it without the sleeve? Oh yeah, that's right, only characters in TV shows and movies do.

Yo scriptwriters, if you can't even get that little detail right, leave the Hot Pocket humor to Jim Gaffigan, alright?


Recent offenders: The otherwise solid Lost season premiere and Leverage's otherwise good "Mile High Job" episode.

Hurley's a Y: The Last Man fan!

My favorite in-joke on the most recent Lost episode--besides the rabbit cameo during the retirement home sequence, clearly a reference to the DHARMA Initiative lab rabbits--was Hugo Reyes' choice of reading material at the airport. Dude was checking out the Spanish-language edition of Vertigo's Y: The Last Man, Vol. 3: One Small Step TPB. One of my favorite comic titles of all time, Y, which ended its run last year, also happened to have been created by Lost staff writer and co-producer Brian K. Vaughan.

This isn't our first peek into Hurley's comic collection. Back in the first season, Walt leafed through Hugo's copy of the Spanish edition of Green Lantern/Flash: Faster Friends #1. (Then a couple of seasons later, in an episode that BKV scripted, Hugo and Charlie got embroiled in a debate about Superman and the Flash.)

Because Y is back in the spotlight thanks to "316" episode co-writers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse's little shout-out(*) to their colleague, I'm cross-posting "Y: The last issue," a piece I wrote for another blog last year (January 30, 2008, to be exact). Some things have changed since I wrote that post: I was critical of Torchwood, but that show has improved since then, and Eagle Eye director D.J. Caruso now wants to split his planned adaptation of Y into three movies.

(*) Is Hurley's Y TPB also a foreshadowing of future events on the island? The Y issues that were collected in that TPB involved the crash-landing of a team of cosmonauts who were in space while almost all of Earth's male population perished. The sole survivor of the crash was a pregnant female cosmonaut. The Oceanic Six Five has returned to the island in similar fashion, and many fans suspect that Kate, who had hate sex with Jack before the Ajira flight, is prego.

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Y: The last issue

It's a sad week for comics. The brilliant and addictive Vertigo series Y: The Last Man is wrapping up its five-year run this week with its 60th and final issue. Written by Brian K. Vaughan (whom I met at WonderCon last year--he's a nice guy and he gave me some good advice about comics scriptwriting) and pencilled by the underrated artist Pia Guerra, Y is the saga of Yorick Brown, a twentysomething slacker who embarks on a globehopping journey to find his missing girlfriend and to find out why he survived a mysterious plague that killed all the men on Earth. In 2003, the superb writing in then-new titles like Y, Gotham Central and Sleeper reignited my love for comics after a low creative ebb during the '90s drew me away. (I stopped buying comics in the mid-'90s because I got fed up with the fugly-looking "enhanced" covers, the inane costume changes and the unwieldy crossover events--all '90s Marvel and DC gimmicks to boost flagging sales.)

What does any of this have to do with TV or film? If Y were a TV show, it would have been the best mythology show on the air. (It's because Vaughan didn't have network execs meddling in his vision or forcing him to keep his series going for another few years. Aw, the creative freedom a comics creator gets to enjoy when he owns the rights to his project and answers to no one.) Maybe the writers from inconsistent and unfocused mythology shows like Heroes should start taking notes from Vaughan's comic about how to build an intricate mythology and keep it from falling apart or how to do any of the following:

Unlike Lost, no ill-conceived, one-dimensional Nikkis and Paulos have ever been awkwardly added to Y's large, predominantly female cast. Every character in Y has been richly drawn, from 355, the world-weary, kickass African American government agent (and knitting aficionado!) assigned to protect Yorick, to Dr. Allison Mann, the surly Asian American lesbian biochemist who must unravel the mystery of the plague, to Col. Alter Tse'elon, the driven and enigmatic Israeli soldier who wants to capture Yorick as part of a plot to repopulate Israel. No character is overlooked. Even Yorick's pet monkey, Ampersand--the only other male survivor of the plague--was given his own flashback issue.

Unlike Heroes or 24, Vaughan's post-apocalyptic series has never taken itself too seriously, despite its exploration of gender politics. (Vaughan once said in an interview that "the level of discussion [of gender issues in comics] was never very sophisticated. If written by men, they were either this gross sex fantasy or, alternately, the surviving women would all go down to the U.N. building and hold hands, ending war and suffering. Both were insulting to women. I wanted to subvert the fantasy.") Speaking of attempts at subversive writing, Y is genuinely adult sci-fi, unlike Torchwood, which pats itself on the back for doing "adult sci-fi," but with the exception of the standout "Out of Time" episode, it has come off more juvenile than the show it was spun off from, the family-friendly Doctor Who. It's interesting that Y has been loaded with more T&A than Torchwood--Y wouldn't have been a Vertigo comic without them--and yet Vaughan's series is still more intelligent and grown-up than Torchwood, because of thought-provoking (but not preachy) dialogue like Dr. Mann's brief and startling discussion about how the plague fixed China's gender imbalance problem and caused the crime rates in that country to drop.

And unlike the showrunners of mythology franchises that wore out their welcome--I'm looking at you, X-Files--Vaughan set an end date for Y (as well as his other creator-owned comic, the equally enjoyable WildStorm title Ex Machina, a 50-issue saga about a disillusioned ex-superhero who becomes mayor of New York). From the start, Vaughan promised to conclude Yorick's quest after 60 issues and has stuck to that promise, so Vaughan's single-minded, Col. Alter-like devotion to reaching that end point hasn't resulted in filler storylines like Galactica's Apollo/Starbuck/Anders/Dualla love quadrangle or the repetitive Heroes-goes-El Norte arc involving Dania Ramirez's endlessly weeping character, Maya the walking Ebola virus (in Spanish, "Maya" means "basket case").

It's no wonder that Vaughan's knack for straightforward storytelling, his ear for witty dialogue and his clever but never gratuitous or pointless pop culture references (I love that Yorick is a fan of The Last Detail--his reaction when he stumbles upon a DVD of the Hal Ashby flick is priceless) landed him a spot on the writing staff of Lost last year. Vaughan co-wrote the "Catch-22" episode about Desmond's past as a monk, and of course, it was one of several highlights of Lost's third season.

Before the writers' strike caused it to slip into development limbo, Vaughan worked on the screenplay for a feature film adaptation of Y, with Disturbia director D.J. Caruso scheduled to be at the helm and Caruso's Disturbia lead Shia LaBeouf as a frontrunner for the title role. Like most other fans, I think Y is better suited for TV. It would have been perfect for HBO. But Vaughan disagrees and has said, "I never felt [that it can only be a TV series to be done correctly]. Maybe because I'm the only person who knew exactly how Y ends and I've always been able to see it as something with a three-act structure--something with a clear beginning, middle and end."

Despite Vaughan's involvement in the Y feature film--he said the feature is an opportunity to improve on material that he felt he bungled in the comic's first few issues--the film can't avoid paling to the original comic. For two hours, the feature will likely be a globetrotting action thriller elevated by sharp dialogue about gender roles and amusing pop culture references. For 59 awesome issues, the comic has been a globetrotting action thriller, a thoughtful exploration of gender issues, a satirical critique of sexism in the comics industry, an all-girl gang flick, a simian slapstick comedy, a medical drama, a floor wax, a dessert topping...