PBW: Whoa!!!

If you haven't seen tonight's finales of Lost and Alias, you probably shouldn't read any further because if you are planning to see them at some point, the following spoilers WILL remove some of the impact. I also plan to speak as though readers are familiar with these shows, since the amount of explanation required would make this post far too long, even by my verbose standards.

Lost's finale was the two most tense hours of television I'd watched in a long time. Fifteen minutes in and my “DUDE!” was echoing Hurley's. I should have seen the ”red shirt” a mile away, but they were really developing this character and his dialogue was a sly commentary on the show's format. The show tends to focus on 14 out of 48 survivors of a plane crash, and this week one of the background characters flat out tells one of the stars “there are other survivors, you know.” Five minutes later, it seems he jinxed himself.

There was risky transportation of explosives tonight, a crazy woman stealing the infant son of one of the survivors, a small group out at sea dealing with a broken rudder and finding another ship, only to have a stunning surprise. As the episode mixed in flashbacks showing how everyone came to be on the fateful flight that brought them to the island, many season-long questions were revealed. I found satisfaction in little details like finding out which passenger had brought a comic book on the plane. For every answer though, there were more questions. Did Charlie give in to temptation and take the heroin, or just the statue? How are the folks on the raft getting back to the island now that it's been destroyed, and will Michael ever see his son again? Is Sawyer alive after being shot and falling in the ocean? What happened to Jin after he dove in after him? Then of course there's the mysterious hatch on the island, the one thing I predicted. I knew the show would end with the view from inside and we'd have to wait all Summer. But I didn't know how deep it went. Now I'm thinking there's a whole hi-tech base under the island, that the monster is something technological operated from underneath, and that the “whispers” in the jungle are actually echoes/transmissions from the underdwellers. The French woman may have been crazy, but she wasn't the only one hearing voices in the woods, and what she heard about the Others wanting the boy was right. She just didn't realize WHICH boy.

As for Alias, while the overall episode made for an awesome homage to Resident Evil while at the same time incorporating four years of plot threads, it was the very last scene that left my eyes wide with disbelief. I may have seen something like it before, but it was the combination of elements that left me stunned. Michael Vartan drops a bombshell, and there's barely time to digest it before a car plows in to our protagonists. Cliché? Soap opera-esque? Maybe, but it certainly shocked me. And Jack Bristow may well have had the best line of the season with his “I'm trying to have more fun”, seconds before Lena Olin upstages him with a gunshot and “...cut the BLUE wire!”

Great, great night of television ending not just these shows, but my entire season of shows. These were the last finales of the shows I regularly watch, and by far the best. It's going to be a LONG Summer.

I might have to blink before September...