the tindog coffeehouse

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Previously:
The story behind ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’

As if I didn’t feel old enough already, today is the 30th anniversary of the launch of MTV. Let that sink in for a minute.

Of course, trivia buffs know that the first video ever shown on MTV was The Buggles’ “Video Killed The Radio Star”. But the first video I ever saw on the basic cable network (you know, back when they actually showed music videos), was “Centerfold” by The J. Geils Band.

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NBC’s Community has been hit-or-miss this season, but when it hits, it’s brilliant. Case in point: Abed’s “secret storyline” in the background in the October 7th episode, “The Psychology of Letting Go”. And yes, I totally missed this.

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Previously:
This week on Lost

It’s safe to say that there will be two groups of people who watched last night’s epic finale of Lost: those who are angry because they didn’t understand the ending or because it didn’t end the way they wanted it to, and those who have a soul. I’m kidding. Sorta.

Personally, I thought it was a perfect conclusion to what has been an obsession for so many people for six years, a final chapter that was full of heartbreak, renewed hope, and ultimate redemption. It was necessarily explosive at times but beautifully tender and poignant in its closing moments. This story that began with Jack opening his eyes in the middle of the jungle ended with him closing them in the middle of the jungle. But as the Sideways storyline so masterfully reminded us, that wasn’t really the end. Instead, the reunited castaways, lost no longer, would make their final journey together.

A happy ending? I say yes. But bittersweet? Absolutely.

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Since the beginning of the season, I’ve been doing these weekly blog posts about the previous night’s episode of Lost, usually as a somewhat-random, somewhat-organized list of bullet points. But seeing as this is the last post before the series finale (about which I’m still in denial), I wanted to do something a little different this week. With only two and a half hours left until the end, there’s less of a need to theorize and more of a need to understand how all the pieces fit together. Less of a need to guess the final scene and more of a need to put everything in its proper context.

Last week’s episode, “Across The Sea”, was myth-heavy and controversial, probably one of the most controversial in the whole six-season run of the show. But as I thought my way through it the next day, I wasn’t as concerned about the minutiae of it (how the people figured out the secret of the donkey wheel, whether the producers should’ve shown the Season 1 flashbacks, etc.) but rather the larger overarching themes of the series and how the story of these two mythic brothers and their adopted mother fit into them, themes such as good vs. evil, free will vs. determinism, and science vs. faith.

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