It was unseasonably cold here today. Maybe not as cold as in some parts — my father said yesterday the news was reporting snow in my old central Pennsylvanian stomping grounds — but chilly nevertheless. My mom is still sick, but with the confirmation today that it is pneumonia, we’re hoping that rest and antibiotics will have her feeling better soon.
Meanwhile, my day was about the same as yesterday, except for a “brown bag” lunch we had at work today. We have these on occasion, where they invite a guest speaker and give everyone who attends the talk a free lunch of sandwiches or pizza. Today was the latter, and a talk on book publicity. It turned out to be a fairly interesting topic, with an engaging speaker — neither of which are guaranteed when attending these things. Of course, it was helped along by visual aids that included a clip of one of his authors on The Colbert Report. But hey, that and free pizza ain’t half bad.
In other news, I stayed up much too late last night watching yesterday’s episode of Lost, which a lot of people seem to have really hated. Honestly, I can see where they’re coming from — it focuses on two (relatively) minor characters and offers a lot of non-answers (or simply more questions) as answers for the show’s central mysteries — but the truth is, I really liked it. There are plenty of answers I wish it had given, plenty of mysteries that I wish had been explained. But I keep coming back to something Noel Murray wrote in a comment to his AV Club review:
For me it goes back to the idea that the story keeps repeating. It doesn’t “explain” anything necessarily — if anything, it raises more questions — but in a show where incidents and images and lines recur, the idea that even the central “hero” and “villain” of the piece come from a fractured background just like the 815ers makes the endgame more meaningful. It’s no longer a war between Good God and Bad God. It’s just a continuation of an ancient struggle that makes even the people who claim to be doing the right thing into terrible, terrible people.
Lots of people, including Murray, have been insisting for a long time that the show can’t help but disappoint in its final season, that anyone looking for some perfect closure or understanding of exactly what happened is going to be let down. I think “Across the Sea” may be the first time that’s really sinking in for some folks.
Me, I really enjoyed the episode. I don’t know yet what exactly it means for the last few hours to come, but I’m eager to find out.
