Lost finale gives fans

[Sydney]

Short review and questions about the finale...

There's a scene early on in Wednesday night's finale of ABC's Lost where the science teacher known only as Arzt (German for "physician") waves around some sweaty dynamite after giving the main characters a safety lecture and blows himself up.

Well, not surprisingly, Lost creator J.J. Abrams and his crew also have seemingly blown apart my pet theory and most of the other reasonable suggestions I've heard about what's being going on on our favorite tropical island.

The hatch is open, and inside is... a deep shaft with a ladder. So much for my malevolent entity (though it could still be down there).

I assumed the entity and/or "the others" would be after Claire's baby. It never occurred to me it or they might be after Walt Dawson, the boy with the odd set of psychic powers (creating polar bears and other creatures when under stress, weak procognition), though his sense it was time to leave the island didn't do him much good...

There was a new acknowledgment among the characters that they might not quite be in Kansas anymore.

When the castaways found what looked like a 19th century sailing ship (the "Black Rock," a vessel, not a geological formation; where they found the aging dynamite) stranded a couple miles inland, Hugo "Hurley" Reyes wondered aloud, "How exactly does something like this happen?"

"Are you on the same island as I am?" replied long-time survivor Danielle "the French chick" Rousseau.

And among the survivors who've gone off on the raft, Michael Dawson looks at the mountainous island and asks, "How does something this big never get discovered?"

Obviously, there's a lot of exploring left to do and a lot of questions left to answer. Who's going to survive on the raft? What do "the others" do? What is that monster? What's really under the hatch?

And does Shannon have any shampoo left so Hurley can make sure he's washed all the pieces of Arzt out of his hair?

What did you think of the finale? Were you given enough answers to be satisfied? Will you tune in again next season? Have your pet theories been proved or disproved yet?

By Jeff Dillon
SignOnSanDiego.com
May 25,2005