Lost's finale, "The End," did not redeem or retroactively improve my journey through the show's sixth season. I remain steadfast in my opinion that most of the season is riddled with pacing problems, muddled storytelling, and an unwelcome, almost hurtful distancing from the characters I have watched for six years. Most of these issues are due to the flash-sideways thread that ran parallel to the story occurring on The Island. Though these flash-sideways house characters who look, sound, and, for the most part, act like the characters I know, they are, simply, not them. They are posited as different beings altogether. Different, but the same. As alike as two sides of a coin, in that they are, intrinsically, a part of and comprise one thing, but undeniably unique in description, feeling, and purpose.

Spending time with these wraiths of the characters I'd grown to love did not exactly endear me to the season as a whole. Week to week, I was more frustrated than I ever have been with the show, because, for me, the show has always been about its characters. Its mythology, plot, and mystery have both been interesting and maddening, but Lost's characters have always been special. Beautiful. Everything else takes a distant second to the people I watched week in and week out. And Lost's sixth season robbed them from me more often than I was willing to extend my trust. Or, I suppose one could say, my faith.

However—and though my journey can not be altered, for what's happened has happened—"The End" paid off all that had come before it in miraculous fashion. The finale was executed more beautifully, more poetically, more right than I thought possible. Upon its conclusion, I sat in awed silence, weeping. Not for its end, but for its resolution. Of my issues with this sixth and final season, well, the finale informs those flash-sideways in profound and intriguing ways. I am excited and empowered to revisit the season (and, of course, the series as a whole) now mindful of the revelation of the end. And it's all because the finale is wholly about its characters. Those people: Jack, John, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley, Ben, Desmond, Penny, Jin, Sun, Juliet, Claire, Charlie, Richard, and all the rest.

While, yes, the people in the flash-sideways were not, upon first watch, the people I knew, they did become those people. They are awakened. They are enlightened. They are not ghosts, but constructs created for the very purpose of that enlightenment, resolution, and redemption. Thinking back, Jack's son is no longer just Jack's son, but instead Jack's son is Jack and Jack is his father, Christian. He is able to become the father he always wanted for himself. Kate realizes and embraces a mother's love. Desmond is both grim reaper and arch angel, depending on if one's ready or not. And Ben is finally able to repent... for just so much.

Whether the flash-sideways is a construct of some spiritualism or a gift bestowed by Hurley during his reign on The Island, it is exactly what these characters needed to resolve themselves before finally letting go. And though I am not a man of faith, it is a nice thought that one will be rewarded for doing good with the time one has, for treating everything like it matters, but that one will be able to redeem one's transgressions. Atone and change. At least, be given the choice to do both. It's also nice to think about the value of community, of love and friendship, of brotherhood and family. That through these and experience, we are linked. That without each other, we could not have reached the point where we are right now. It's especially wonderful in the context of Lost, where through this Jin and Sun are given their due (finally), Kate, at last, does see Jack again, after waiting for so long, out-living him off The Island, where Jack sacrifices himself to save those who he's been protecting all along (believing in himself, once and for all), but is able to do so without dying alone. And do so knowing he's succeeded. And where Desmond and Penny are finally able to have their life together, here and after, forever.

I love this finale. Because it is not an explanation or a justification, but a resolution. That's all I wanted. For these characters who have been through so much to finally find peace. And no, this peace does not negate what they endured, for they still endured it. It was real. It happened. It mattered. And through it all, through them, we see ourselves. Our flaws and our mettle projected and amplified. In the end, it's all of that that's brought them—and kept them—together. At the end, them together is what matters most.

That and eating peanut butter from an empty jar with only your fingers.

And kissing your constant as often as time will allow.

And being together, no matter where, when, why, or how; what happens, happens, but the choice is yours alone.

Choose to see.

Thank you, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof and everyone involved in the conception, realization, and resolution of Lost. It's been a wonderful, beautiful, at times exasperating, but ultimately revelatory six years. I will miss it, for sure.

But I am so, so very fulfilled.

One of my favorite conversations to engage in is the philosophical debate focused on whether Man (capital M, i.e., human beings as a single entity) is inherently good or inherently evil. Often, from this one question, a person's entire worldview can be elucidated. Such an immense, metaphysical notion does wonders to shed light on one's most intimate thoughts and can often prove useful in predicting their future reactions/actions to external stimuli. It all depends on what shade of grey that light happens to be. Personally, I'm illuminated by a darker lamp. My mother, conversely, basks in as close to unfiltered, white light as I've encountered.

This color spectrum, of course, can be directly correlated with how optimistic/idealistic/hopeful/just a person is—the lighter greys to white light—or how pessimistic/dystopic/cynical/unjust a person is—the darker greys to black light. This color palette has been used to great affect—and, unfortunately, to great cliché—in all sorts of media. Westerns are especially fond of this symbolism, i.e., the morally upstanding Sheriff dressed in white and the lawless villain dressed in black. Because of this cliché, the direct color correlation has oft been switched, where the man-in-black is actually the hero—most usually an antihero who, while morally justified, lives by his own code rather than society's—and the man-in-white is the villain. Within single media properties, characters have been known to switch color-correlations to reflect the growth of a character, whether it be from light to dark or dark to light. Most notably, we first see Luke Skywalker dressed in white, optimistic, idealistic, ignorant of the dark side, but last see Luke dressed completely in black. It's not that he's turned to the dark side, but rather that he recognizes the dark side as a part of him (his father) and a part of the world around him. By embracing that knowledge, he's ultimately able to shield himself from it.

All of this good/evil, light/dark, order/chaos talk is meant as a primer for the actual topic of this post. And that, readers, is the sixth and final season of the anomalous hour-long genre series, LOST.

POSSIBLE—nay, PROBABLE—SPOILERS BELOW

Last night, the episode "Ab Aeterno" aired. Within it, its audience was privy to a heap of (probable) confirmations that (for the most part) did not lead to another, larger heap of new questions. If you've seen even a single episode of LOST, you'll know how odd an experience that is. The most global (probable) confirmation is that of The Island's purpose and the subsequent purposes of The Island's most tenured residents, Jacob and the man-in-black, who I will forthwith refer to as Seth.

We learned last night that The Island, as described by Jacob, is akin to a cork in a wine bottle: it is the barrier between our world—the one in which we live, fight, fuck, and do laundry—and a force of evil/chaos. The Island, for all intents and purposes, sounds very much like a kind of Pandora's Box. Since Pandora's Box was never really a box at all, but a jar, it is unlikely that LOST's braintrust represented The Island as a vessel more akin to a traditional jar in Jacob's metaphor unwittingly.

The Island's keeper and protector, Jacob, is furthermore revealed to be—as his clothing indicates—of the side of light. And it is Jacob who is engaged in a seemingly timeless wager with Seth over the very nature of Man. Whether we are inherently good or inherently evil. While Jacob attempts to prove to Seth that Man is inherently good—that, when given absolute free will of choice, Man will do good for his fellow Man—Seth attempts to prove that Man will do evil/create chaos/do good only for himself. And while Seth is a captive of The Island, apparently representative/incarnate of the very evil/chaos that The Island is meant to block, Jacob is able to bring people to The Island in order to be the very test subjects upon which Jacob and Seth try their antithetic theories.

It is this point that I wish to delve into. LOST is about a lot. But, most importantly, it is a show about choice (and the lack thereof). Jacob states that, while on The Island, he will not interfere with his candidates' free will of choice. And it is to be inferred that since Seth can not kill any of the candidates outright, he, also, can not interfere with their free will of choice. Those are the rules as I've gleaned them from the series up to this point. In other words, Jacob will not/can not tell his candidates (his word, by the way, for those who are most likely to prove that Man is inherently good or, rather, those who are most worthy of being tested) exactly why they are on The Island. Exactly what is going on. Seth, as well, can not (even though he, much more than Jacob, would like to).

But it's in the minutiae that the most interesting dynamic exists. It's the subtle nudges toward the light or dark that Jacob and Seth both use to influence the candidates. The slight bending of the rules, if you will. Instead of an explicit fork in the road, Jacob and Seth are both able to act as pebbles atop the asphalt causing only the slightest of course corrections that are then able to increase with time. Most often, Jacob uses his power of influence on the course of his candidates' lives to get them on The Island in the first place (or, in some cases, second place). He provides Sawyer the catalyst which ignites his life-long vendetta. He removes hope from Sayid's vocabulary in order to then allow him the free will of choice with which to choose hope. He saves John Locke, conversely providing him with hope, in order to bring him to The Island so John Locke can choose for himself just what type of man he is.

But are not these manipulations inherently perverse? Is fueling a child's rage and thereby directing the very path of his life any less evil than lying to a man's face in order to convince him to do what you desire? Shades of grey. Light and dark, good and evil, order and chaos overlap far more often than is generally recognized. Does committing an act of evil, no matter how small, in order to eventually achieve an act of good, no matter how large, make that original act of evil any less evil? Conversely, does committing an act of good in order to lead someone toward an act of evil make that original act of good any less good?

These are the questions LOST is asking with Jacob and Seth. It's these answers that I'm most eager for; it's with these answers that the series will then be painted. It's the rubric with which the shade of grey will be chosen.

My answers to the questions above? Acts of evil are necessary to prove acts of good; for without evil, by what would we measure good? Those acts, however, are no less evil. They are not to be absolved due to their result. That much is, in fact, black and white. For just as we could not have good without evil, we can not have grey without its parents, black and white.

Note: This discussion will involve the novel A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin and the novel The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, though it will not delve deeply into the plots or developments of either. Therefore, worry not about spoilers, folks.

At the moment, I'm reading A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, the first book in his A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series. Now, I don't read a lot of fantasy. I'm a sci-fi and literature (however pretentious that sounds... a lot pretentious) guy. It's not because I don't like fantasy, it's because my first experience with a huge, sweeping, fleshed-out fantasy story was Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. I loved it. And ever since my mom introduced those books to me, nothing in the fantasy realm has been able to come close. It all felt derivative. So I just stopped reading it.

CUT TO: 2006: Two of my roommates while I was in college could speak of nothing but A Song of Ice and Fire. Fantasy? I thought... no thanks.

CUT TO: 2009: David, my writing partner, began reading A Game of Thrones. I'd just finished the book I was reading, and knowing that the novel had been optioned by HBO to become an hour-long format fantasy series, I decided I'd put off reading this book long enough. A few clicks later, there it was on my Kindle.

In Kindle language, I'm about twenty percent through the novel. And even though while I'm reading I'm enthralled and captivated, when I set it down for the night I have no burning desire to continue reading. It's a great story with great characters and has convinced me that not all fantasy is as derivative as I first suspected, but there's something missing. I still haven't been able to create any sort of personal connection. Why?

It's all in the way the book is structured.

Each chapter of A Game of Thrones is written from the point of view of one of eight different characters. Therefore, each chapter presents events, new and old, from that character's POV, shifting the reader's own POV of the event as more and more information unfolds. It's brave and bold and quite interesting. But the real kicker is that Martin employs a third-person limited POV instead of a first-person limited POV from the chapter-character's POV. It's that distance that is keeping me at arm's length. Instead of being placed inside those characters, chapter by chapter, I'm told about the hardships and changes and emotions those characters are enduring from a distance. It's the difference between reading a memoir and an edited recorded history of that memoirist's life. While the recorded history is interesting and filled with useful information and tons of knowledge, I'd take the first-hand, first-person memoir every time. There's a connection there that speaks volumes more than any history book can. And while I'm reading A Game of Thrones I feel as if I'm reading a recorded history of Westeros instead of the sweeping tale of Westeros' inhabitants.

What's most frustrating is that I've seen the chapter-by-chapter-POV-shift structure used to such great success in the past. My favorite example is Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Poisonwood Bible. Each chapter is narrated, from that characters first-person limited POV, by one of the five women of a missionary family while living in British Congo. Each of the women are of different ages, of different maturity levels, and of different experience levels, and each chapter (much like A Game of Thrones) presents events, new and old, from each character's different perspective. But the main difference is that, because Kingsolver employs a first-person limited POV, I'm able to make a genuine, personal connection to each character. Even further, Kingsolver alters her writing style and voice from chapter to chapter, depending on which character's POV we're seeing the world from. Not only is it a brilliant marker for the reader's brain to decipher who's speaking and how we're now seeing the world, but it's another layer of distance eliminated. Whereas Martin is keeping me at arm's length, presenting an even, historical representation of his world as it happens to his characters, Kingsolver invites her readers closer, embraces that her characters will have vastly different (and often conflicting) viewpoints and embraces that the personal connection gained by seeing events wholly through the eyes of a first-hand source is unmatched.

I just can't help but feel like I'm opening a history book every time I (figuartively) crack the spine of A Game of Thrones. It's a shame, too, because the story is quite good. And Martin is an outstounding author. But it's his choice to keep his unwaivering writing style throughout the book while using a shifted third-person limited POV that has driven a wedge between me and his novel. Above all, I'm reading to be entertained and enlightened, not because I fear that I'm going to be tested on the political leanings of the Starks and the Lannisters on tommorow's The History of Westeros exam.

I love to read. In fact, I'm quite sure that I only love to write because I love to read. Creating, toiling away, writing is the work; reading is the reward. Knowing this (and because I just turned 23 a few days ago), a group of my family and friends chipped in to buy me the latest, greatest breakthrough in reading technology: the Amazon Kindle 2. It's an eReader. A digital, wafer-thin physical book-made-from-paper replacement. It can hold about 1,500 books in its memory stores, enough to make the question "What's the one book you'd take with you if you knew you were to be stranded on a deserted island without the hope of rescue?" obsolete. Its screen uses new-fangled eInk technology which arranges and rearranges negatively or positively charged microcapsules into patterns allowing for very low energy consumption (as it only draws power when the pattern needs to be changed, i.e. when you virtually turn a page) while also being very easy on the eyes. The eye-strain problems of the ever-ubiquitous LCD screen are a thing of the past with eInk. (And with my poor-excuses for eyes, that's important.) Though, the drawback is it can only display text and images in grayscale. No color whatsoever. But, since it's an eReader, meant for eBooks, that's hardly an issue. And it's especially easy to forget when you're staring at an electronic display that you'd swear is a printed page, with honest-to-goodness ink stamped on actual paper made from trees. It really is amazing.

But it's not the technology of Amazon's Kindle or the sheer glee of knowing I have the capability to carry around my entire library of literature in the palm of my hand, it's the abstraction of reading itself. Rather, it's the abstraction of what it is to be a book, to own books, to have a library. I know this feeling well, as I've experienced it twice now, first with music, second with movies, but with books it's different. Scrawling some grouping of symbols meant to represent ideas on a physical, portable surface has been a tried-and-true process since, well, the beginning of recorded history. It's this process that recorded history. Music wasn't portable until the 20th Century in any kind of ubiquitous portable format. Movies couldn't be carried around until even later. But books, well, they've been around for a while. They've been transported, the information within them shared for a long, long time. And while the process of creating a book has changed, become streamlined and more modern, the idea of a book is pretty much the same.

And now I'm just giving up on them? As much as I love reading, I love the experience of reading perhaps even more. The smell of new, crisp book pages. The cracking of a book's spine, that visual representation of one's love for a book, showing just how often it finds its way back into one's hands. The feel of the different weights of paper, always unique, always a new challenge to learn the pages' properties. Hell, even the bookmarks and the cover art. But now that I own a Kindle, all of that seems to be a thing of the past. I'm removed from that experience and left with only the ideas inside the book, which, at once, is a very interesting prospect in and of itself and a crying shame.

It's interesting because my focus will be fully on the words, sentences, paragraphs, and the ideas of which they're a part. From what I've noticed thus far, I'm reading faster than I ever had before, and I'm able to read multiple books at once with far more ease than was possible with actual, printed books. But I really do miss the tactile sensation that reading used to provide. The Kindle is cold, devoid of emotion. I can't foresee any future memories of me reading being quite as warm or nostalgic any longer. And though I've not finished a book on my Kindle yet, I can't foresee that moment being as satisfying as it always has been: watching the pages of one's book slowly creep farther and farther to the left on one's bookmark until SLAM, the book cover closes after that last sentence is read, the puff of air enveloping one's head as the closed book rests atop one's chest. With the Kindle, it's merely a press of the Next button as a status bar creeps along the bottom of the drab, grey screen, followed by an unceremonious press of the Home button after that last page is reached. I suppose I could clutch my Kindle close to my chest, but there's no cover art to stare at or heft to feel. Though this process may alleviate the plague of depression I feel every time I finish a book, distancing me somewhat from the emotion of finishing a book, leaving a group of characters. It may at least cut down on the amount of time I'm afflicted since it'll be so easy to start anew with my Kindle pressing ever forward like an emotionless little reading robot.

Apart from the emotional severance, the Kindle also presents an end to the library as I've always seen it. I was never one to display my records or CDs and only own a relatively small amount of DVDs, but books have always been both for reading and for display in my home. I'm proud of my book collection. I want them to be seen, studied, questioned, and debated. I love doing the same to others' collections. But if all of my future book purchases are to be of the digital variety over WhisperSync, stored electronically on Amazon's servers, I suppose my collection has come to an abrupt halt. I'll still be purchasing graphic novels, as there's no replacing those (yet), but novels, literature, anthologies, collected essays, books of poems, will they never reach my bookshelf again? Will Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood and Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs be my last two purchased printed books? I suppose I'll get used to this abstracted definition of book ownership just as I got used to downloading music versus thumbing through CDs in a store and downloading movies or just watching them instantly via the Internet rather than searching through the available discs at my local Best Buy. I suppose.

What I don't think I'll be able to get used to, however, is the idea of pirating books. In the past, I've illegally downloaded myriad MP3s and a few (more than a few) movies. I didn't feel any guilt while, for all intents and purposes, stealing music. I felt a negligible amount of guilt after downloading a film (though, for the most part, I've generally only downloaded films I've already paid to see in theatres and want to/need to see again). But when perusing the pirate market of eBooks available, I was struck with an immediate, adverse disgust with myself. Books, it seems, are the form of artistic media (that are able to be pirated digitally) that I find most precious. I think this has to do with the time investment involved. One song is, what, around a four minute time investment. One album, an hour. One film, an hour and a half on average, three/four hours max. But I could spend weeks with a single book. Sure, the replayability of an album or a movie is greater than a book, but it's that first experience, the first read-through that's so precious. More precious, in fact, than a first listen or a first watch. I can't imagine stealing that. I don't want to.

So, overall, I love the Kindle's execution. How it's evolved the way I read. But this abstraction of reading, well, it's going to take some getting used to. Do they make a "new book smell" candle? That'd probably help. A lot.