Throughout the course of L O S T’s sixth and final season, my guest-column writing approach has been (somewhat) consistently this:

- Step 1: Watch the episode
- Step 2: Ponder, reflect, dissect, and overanalyze everything presented in the then-current episode as much as is in my capacity to
- Step 3: Ponder, reflect, dissect, and overanalyze how the concepts presented fit in the grand scheme of the L O S T story
- Step 4: Lurk amongst my favorite L O S T-related sites to see what my fellow nerds are thinking. Filter through to find thoughts that challenge or reinforce my own, then ponder, reflect, dissect, and overanalyze as per usual.
- Step 5: Share my current understandings and questions with you here to hopefully strengthen the former and minimize the latter.

This weekly process was my best attempts at keeping myself (and hopefully a lot of you) pumped up and interested in what would happen next. The end was coming, the end was nigh, and the end has happened. The completely obvious and appropriate question now is: how do you feel about it? Personally – in a somewhat frustrating but true-to-form manner with regards to how I’ve felt about this show historically – I don’t quite know how I feel.

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Namaste L O S T enthusiasts,

How is everyone feeling about “What They Died For?”  As much as I was hoping it would melt my mind, I’m going to cast it amongst the bottom rung of “not so awesome season six episodes.”  This will be a temporary standing, though, if one of you happened to think it ruled and are persuasive in explaining why to me!  Clinging to my absolutely last hope of optimism, though, I will assume this episode’s function in the entire grand scheme of this story is to serve a preparatory purpose for the Series Finale this coming Sunday.  It wasn’t without its redeemable informative value, as it blatantly defined some extremely crucial roles and objectives:

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Good Wednesday to you all,

It was good to see a complete backstory sans flashways episode last night in “Across the Sea.” Much like Richard’s “Ab Aeterno,” the result of seeing a world that once was – as opposed to a world that could quite possibly be, is currently being, or will currently become – is that we are left more informed than questioned… well, kinda. Jacob and Nemesis’ history was finally explained, the mysterious kid we’ve been seeing around the Original Timeline has been identified as Jacob (or at least an apparition of him), and last but certainly not least: we now know who Adam and Eve are. In spite of the overly blatant use of recycled season one footage to let the most obtuse of L O S T fans know that a major question was being answered, I’m happy with who it turned out to be and how it became.

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Hoooooly Shizer! “The Candidate” last night was sick! This is my personal opinion, of course, but the culmination of action and character revelation/decimation should have been more than enough to get all of you juiced up as well!

In the Original Timeline, all suspicion of Nemesis Dude’s intentions towards the remaining candidates can now be tossed aside. That electromagnetic-flurry-of-scheminess is straight up trying to kill fools. He is NOT trying to get them off the Island because (just as Jack suspected during “The Last Recruit”) he is more concerned with what would happen if they DIDN’T. Most of us accepted this already, but like the Whispers, Tawaret, and the Black Rock, we now have absolute confirmation that his objective is to eradicate all Candidates who could serve to become his proverbial cork. Regardless of him being depicted as “the bad guy,” I thought it was genius how his manipulating of the Candidates in a submerged submarine with C4 almost unfolded flawlessly. Sayid’s heroism, although uncharacteristic of his recently infected self, ended the story line of my personal favorite and debatably most metal character of the show for the sake of who he feels is the “chosen” one: Jack.

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Hey dudes,

As most of you know last night was a rerun of “Ab Aeterno,” the awesome-answer-filled-brilliantly-acted-question-answering-Richard-centric episode that rocked our drawers several weeks ago. I didn’t end up watching it but lurked about the internet to find out what the “Enhanced” rerun disclosed; these are some of the things that they confirmed:

- Isabella on the Black Rock was confirmed to be Nemesis (something we suspected and agreed on already)
- Nemesis’s manipulation of Richard was his first attempt at finding his crease
- Jacob’s touch to Richard while discussing the wine analogy is definitely what brought him agelessness (thereby implying that other gifts were given to our LOSTIES (i.e. Hugo talking to dead people))
- MIB is not able to leave the Island after killing Jacob because of the potential candidates
- The Doctor was conning Richard for money because Isabella had TB and antibiotics weren’t commonly used until after WWII (especially in the Canary Islands)
- Richard is another person brought to the island who has been directly or indirectly responsible for the death of someone.

A lot of this stuff we’ve already assumed but at least it was nice to have it absolutely validated. On the topic of being rewarded with answers for quite possibly hundreds of hours of our lives being invested into the shows’ many mysteries and questions; I’m sad to say that we will definitely be left hanging.

This is probably the most un-credible and illegitimate form of making such a claim, but here is my reasoning…

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Good afternoon dudes! Today I’m taking the “day after” approach instead of the “day of” approach for two specific reasons: yesterday was the Levi/Werstler takeover (which I thoroughly enjoyed) and also – as mentioned by some of you before – it makes more sense to talk about the latest episode sooner (one day) than later (seven days). For me, L O S T has been intensifying its degree of sickness tremendously the past two weeks, so hopefully all of you were pleasured by “Everybody Loves Hugo” and “The Last Recruit” as much as I was!

The past two L O S T’s have been a lot of killer and miniscule amounts of filler, the result is that much of what we’ve been wondering and waiting for has been fulfilled: we now have an explanation for the Whispers, We have an answer for the Christian Shephard apparitions, its was confirmed that John Locke was chosen because he was easiest to manipulate, the Kwon’s finally reunited, and last but not least… a human explosion!

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Greetings dudes!

It’s wonderful to be back in the United States of America. Australia is a wonderful country and all, but there is no beating the comforts of home… specifically raging wifi and network television! Given that we are beyond the halfway point in the final season of L O S T, each remaining episode has been getting significantly more in depth and heavy. The consequence of watching more than one of these episodes at a time (in my case three in a row) and trying to process it all at once is very much like having this happen to you. So in order to make all of our lives easier, I’m going to take the episode-by-episode approach on this one…

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G’day L O S T aficianodos,

It was nice to see the trend of expounding upon our main character’s standout qualities continuing with last week’s “Recon.” We’ve already pointed out how violence was expected and was delivered with Sayid, information was held within and shared through Ben, and now (true to form) we got to see our resident con man Sawyer slaying all sorts of tail. When this show initially aired, Sawyer’s character was vital in that he was on the opposing end of a power struggle with Jack. As the show has progressed, however, the power struggled turned into a love triangle, and lately it seems as if a lot of his role’s relevance has been to keep the love-story aspect of the show going. This isn’t my favorite part of L O S T by any means, so I had my low expectations fulfilled. Apart from the extreme curve ball we were thrown with Sawyer being a cop who had the exact same past in the alternate timeline, I wasn’t too into this one myself. What were your thoughts/reactions on it? There were little nugs of revelation and also a definite “Hey, I’m the Smoke Monster” by Nemesis Dude, but aside from that it seemed the episode was heavier on red herrings (i.e., Charlie’s brother at the police station) than straight up information. We DID learn that Nemesis has a crazy mother, but the details are still hazy so methinks it’d be best to wait for more to begin getting way into it. Another bit of plot unfolding that we were let in on is that Widmore looks to be on Team Jacob… or at least opposed to Nemesis. This would make my most recent speculation completely wrong if absolutely true, but I’m going to be stubborn on this one and wait for it to be for reals confirmed before giving up on it. You never know with this show!

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Fellow followers of L O S T,

So how was everyone feeling about last week’s episode, “Dr. Linus?” I was certain the writer’s blew a good portion of their load on the previous week’s action-packed “Sundown,” and that with a Ben-centric story, we were just going to get little tidbits of clues regarding the Island and the Nemsis vs. Jacob conflict…  But I was wrong!  Lindelof and company have temporarily abandoned their prime time penchant for mid-season filler to deliver what I view as my favorite episode of the season so far! Aside from an Emmy award worthy performance from Michael Emerson, a surprise cameo from Dude from Real Genius, and a crucial beach side reunion montage back on The Island, we were given nugget after nugget of valuable information throughout the entire episode that either completely answered or brought us closer to answering many questions, such as:

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Virtually every Sayid episode we’ve ever seen has delved into some form of his past and inner gnarliness, so it only makes sense that last week’s “Sundown” blasted us with all sorts of action, violence, and brutality. Viewing the episode for substance, though, we were only handed little nuggets of answers to some very minor questions (Who is Dogen?) in exchange for even more: how was Dogen the only thing keeping Nemesis out? Why couldn’t Nemesis be killed by stabbing when Jacob can/was? How can Nemesis give people “anything they want in the entire world?” These are the freshest of mysteries which I’m fine with keeping on the back burner (for now) to get into the more crucial topic of the timelines.

With the flash-sideways of Sayid’s life, the alternate timeline has remained consistent with the kinda-consistent-to-the-OT-facts direction it has been taking since its introduction at LA-X. In both timelines, Sayid was an interrogator in the Iraqi Republican Guard and holds his love interest Nadia as “the most important thing to him in the world.” The OT inconsistency here is that in the ALT Nadia is unobtainable to him as she is actually the wife of his brother. Here are a few more examples of characters with the standout details of their past as we know it in the OT being similar but slightly different in the ALT:

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Last week on L O S T we were introduced to “The Lighthouse,” which further complicates the nature of Jacob vs. Nemesis and their candidates. Earlier that same day I shared an idea that the Cliffside Caves actually belong to Nemesis Dude, with those whose names written inside being the pawns played in Nemesis’ Jacob-defeating end. Given that our writers have been creating a black vs. white duality since season one, it makes perfect sense that their response to a cave would be with a lighthouse. The Lighthouse, aside from an obvious physical contrasting to the cave, also possesses a different purpose: bringing people to the Island (which as we know is what Jacob has been doing since time immemorial). It is here we see an almost identical rendition of numbered candidatesto the ons in the caves, which implies that both sides are aware of all names in consideration.

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Good day all,

This evening, a new episode of L O S T awaits with intentions of confusing, bamboozling, and casting us further down the six-season-vortex-of-mystery we have known for too long. Mid-season theorizing tends to be laborious in that the writers’ method for answering one question is to pose several more, which as a result leads to an overwhelming amount of hazy supposition on all forms of LOST sites. If any of you check out DarkUFO, The Fuselage , 4815162342, or even LOSTPEDIA, I’m certain you’ve noticed how gnarly it is to navigate through and read any concise analysis of what’s going on. The good news, though, is that the seemingly eternal-end-in-sight is right around the corner, and gauging from a lot of the ideas being shared here, I think we’re heading down the right path!

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Greetings metal maniacs and L O S T enthusiasts,

I hope everyone had a rad past week and, for those of you who are into it, were able to watch “What Kate Does.” It wasn’t nearly as action packed or blatantly informative as “LA X”, but still there are some interesting occurrences worth discussing.

Fate vs. Freewill has been one of the central themes of this show since the get go. The introduction of the flash-sideways timeline is, at surface level, supposed to show us what life would have been like if the plane never crashed. The notion of fate, though, is becoming increasingly more “the point” as we are seeing the main characters fulfilling the destinies intended for them by (or at least on) the Island. From Ethan’s involvement with Claire’s pregnancy, to Kate being present when she initially goes into labor, to Locke’s potential “healing” via his encounter (and possible operation) with paralysis-reversing-surgeon Jack, we are seeing similar parallels to the timeline on the island. We haven’t actually been given any EXACT consistencies, however, just a bunch of “very-similars” to keep us guessing. On a side note, the woman who was assumed to adopt Claire’s baby was named Lindsey Baskum, which super nerds have decoded as an anagram meaning “Used by Malkins.” Richard Malkin was the psychic who played an extremely crucial role in getting Claire on the original Oceanic Flight 815. His involvement in this timeline is unknown for now, but the connection is worth mentioning just in case it gets the wheels turning for any of you.

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Hello connoisseurs of heavy music and television shows,

Thank you all who thoroughly read, perused, or just kind of stared at my last blog, as well as all of you who left any form of comment. I read every single one of them and answered several of the ones that pertained to the topic. Before I start discussing the previous and upcoming episode, I would like to address just a few of the trending opinions I noticed in last week’s comments section:

Why a column on L O S T?

When the idea of doing this was presented to me, I was slightly apprehensive because it seemed a little random for a metal blog. What I’ve always like about MetalSucks, however, is that they do things differently then other metal sites (or maybe just better). While the majority of posts here are related to the current happenings in the metal community, the rest of the stuff we’re periodically subjected to appeals to our idiosyncrasies as “fans-of-heavy-music-who-probably-spend-way-too-much-time-on-the-internet.” A whole blog (or even maybe a thesis!) could be written on the social anthropology of the aforementioned group (us), but to get to my point quicker, I’m going to generalize and say that my assessment of most of you is that you’re educated, have a sense of humor, have very diverse tastes in music beyond metal, are extremely opinionated, and enjoy interacting with similar “birds of a feather.” This sites’ ability to creatively keep your interest beyond cleverly commentating on press releases, shows, albums, etc. is why I think its been doing so well, and why we all keep coming back. Simply put, its seems a lot of you can dig “off topic” stuff. With that in mind, I didn’t think it would hurt to discuss L O S T with those of you who care.

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Last year As I Lay Dying guitarist Nick Hipa mentioned to Axl that, like the editors of MetalSucks, he is a huge fan of the show L O S T (cue dying giraffe noise).With the final season of one of television’s great serialized mysteries debuting tonight on ABC, Axl and Vince thought, “Hey, why not ask Nick to do a series of columns about the show’s final episodes?” Luckily, Nick agreed! And so, without further adieu…

Hello fans of extreme metal music. My written word appears before you for one sole purpose: to share information, ideas, insight, and theories on ABC’s mind-melting TV show, LOST. In many circles, LOST is regarded as the Master of Puppets of prime-time television; hence, it is worth discussing on a metal blog.

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