It’s approximately seven hours until the finale airs on ABC and if my wife knew I was taking time today to write this she would probably kill me, but she’s a LOST fan too, so I hope she understands.

This is the last of my pieces on LOST. They’ve been a lot of fun to write, but I discovered today that they don’t hold a candle to BTD Greg’s posts on LOST, so I whole-heartedly endorse that any LOST-heads out there check out his work regularly at his blog. His post on the last episode has some great links in it.

TV is pretty slow to evolve partly because its popularity and highly commerical nature function to make it fairly conservative in terms of storytelling. For this reason, it’s coventional wisdom that one successful formula for a good TV show is to take something old and proven and make it new again with a fresh spin or a new take. LOST is one of the most original series in recent memory but I thought it would be interesting to briefly discuss the shows that influenced it, how they did so, and what LOST owes to those that came before.

TWIN PEAKS: This show broke a lot of ground for future TV shows in so many ways. One contribution that might exist to LOST is how it dealt expertly with a large ensemble cast. There’s a lot of people on that island and LOST writers juggle the characters with great skill. Also TP was full of unexplained supernatural elements. In this regard it was before its time, but its considerable cult popularity attests to the fact that mixing in the supernatural and allowing it to go unexplained for some time can be quite effective. TP also had the one all-consuming dramatic question of Who killed Laura Palmer? LOST has the one all-consuming dramatic question of What is the Island? When TP answered its question the show fell apart like a house of cards. Let’s hope LOST learns from that mistake. One last note, when TP was in its hey day, both the DIARY OF LAURA PALMER and THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF FBI SPECIAL AGENT DALE COOPER: MY LIFE, MY TAPES were published. This is the exact same thing Lost is going for with the BAD TWIN tie-in.

X-FILES: Obviously, X-FILES had lots of supernatural and psuedo-scientific plot elements as does LOST, but X-FILES also dealt constantly with the faith/belief versus doubt/skepticism dynamic in the Scully-Mulder relationship as does LOST with Locke (who’s pulled a nice 180 from one pole to the next) and other characters. LOST goes even further and makes the spiritual overtones even more explicit, which I like. X-FILES had its unfulfilled sexual tension between Mulder and Scully, and LOST sort of kind of does the same thing with the Sawyer-Kate-Jack triangle, but with a lot less subtlety most of the time. X-FILES also had its grand conspiracy, but as we all know, it eventually added up to nothing, and please, oh, please, God of TV, do not let the writers of LOST make the same mistake, please bless them that they will answer as many questions as they pose.

SURVIVOR: LOST has wisely moved away from the action being a tale of survival, but the influence of this show and reality TV in general can not be easily dismissed. SURVIVOR’s formula involves throwing a highly diverse and cantankerous group of people together on an island, need I say more? Plus, reality TV with its constant eliminations has upped the ante in dramatic TV, as a result to keep up with the high stakes, and because audiences are now much more comfortable to say so long to characters, the body count has gone way up. In both LOST and 24 characters routinely meet an untimely demise. The recent seasons of both shows have been unprecedented bloodbaths.

THE PRISONER: Many of you may not have even heard of this show, but it is the granddaddy of cult TV shows and should be required viewing for any sci-fi fan. Before Hob-Nobs were invented and Dancing With the Stars landed in America (hee hee) it was the best thing to come out of England (no offense, Ronan). The premise is a former secret agent is banished to a mysterious seaside village (much like an island) ran by powerful overloads who manipulate the environment to get “information information” out of him. Besides those similarities one feature of the show was this “Rover” a mysterious security device that looks like a big white floating ball and would attack people by enveloping them. I believe it might be an inspiration for the black cloud.

Now, the finale. What can I add? There was already a thread on it here at KB, and BTD Greg’s thread on it is great. I will add what I most often do, some random and poorly connected thoughts.

I’m not sure who or what is on that sailboat. Desmond seems like a strong guess, but I do have a hunch that Michael and Walt might be sailing away in the near future, literally or metaphorically. One thing that struck me in the last episode is that Walt is growing up like a weed. It messes with the one episode is approximately a day continuity the show manages to pull off. Walt and Michael’s days may be numbered. I wouldn’t be surprised if they find a way to deal with this before the kid’s voice goes baritone and he starts sounding like Barry White.

I don’t know why, but as I watched the last episode I was wondering if five Others were coming to take me away and I could only choose one Lost character to be fight by my side, who would it be? I decided Mr. Eko, hands down. He is a badass to the nth degree. He could just swing away with his axe and his scripture stick and tell spooky stories while I just watched. He’d make short work of five Others.

Speaking of spooky stories the dog beating story was a highlight. Seems like Sayid isn’t the only one who knows Michael is “compromised.” Maybe Locke and Eko ran back some surveilance footage and saw it all go down.

To me, the “you’re the closest thing I got to a friend” scene rang pretty false. Sawyer is not going to reach out to Jack in quite that direct of a way, I thought. He’s too emotionally stunted. I was disappointed he didn’t say anything about Ana Lucia at her graveside though.

So what can we expect tonight? Rumors and speculation abound. I’d love to see a knockdown drag-out fight, that’s what I really want. I want some mano a mano, hands to throat violence. Yeah, I delight in bloodshed, do you want to make something of it? All I know is that you can reasonably expect the log Locke and Eko printed to play a role sooner or later and you can expect the map Locke shot up the pnuematic tube to come back, maybe not in this episode, but eventually. This is a metaphor for the what the LOST writers do so well. They shoot things up into the air with pnuematic tubes, but they always come back down.

I have nothing else to say except for in spite of the fact a lot of people are jittery about this show and like to nervously say, “It’s jumping. It’s jumping.” With each episode I see I feel more and more confident that it is in capable and extremely talented hands. When these people start leaving to executive produce their own series, that’s when it’ll jump, if it ever does.

I’m anxious to hear what everyone thinks tomorrow.