So, super-surprising mega-spoiler alert: Lost is over, and a bunch of the internet is mad, but that was almost certainly going to be the case, unless the show really had been planned out step-by-step when it first premiered back in 2004, which would’ve been nearly impossible. I do have some problems with the sometimes haphazard way in which Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof seemed to go about managing their creation — the way they insisted they had an end point in mind, complained about the difficulties of planning an open-ended serial, negotiated for their own end date, then nonetheless brushed off some subplots due to time constraints that they helped bring about, and then seemed to backpedal a bit on the “we’ve been planning this out the whole time” angle.

But those aren’t really problems within the body of the show, which came to a satisfactory, at times excellent, conclusion last night. Honestly, making a series finale is a pretty thankless task. If people are talking about it, it’s usually because a good portion of the audience is saying that it’s crap. If you make a really terrific one — I’d put “Chosen,” the series finale of Buffy, up with the show’s best episodes ever — no one pays all that much attention.

Lost tried to thread the nerd-expectation needle with a balance between fantastical island action and emotional character connections, and, indeed, the central debate between those pleased with the finale and those who are ready to slog off the whole series as a waste of time seems to be whether the focus on the characters is more or less important than the mythology and mystery elements. I can certainly identify with that conflict; for the first few seasons of the show, I maintained that my problems with it had to do with the creators thinking it was about the emotional and character-based components, even though the most original and interesting aspect was the sci-fi/fantasy/mystery storytelling. In other words, no, sorry, I don’t care that much about Sun and Jin as people; I care about what they’re doing on this crazy island.

I can’t say that I’ve completely come around to the character side of things — I’m just not as attached to the Losties as I was to characters in, say, Buffy and her friends or even Mulder and Scully — but, oddly, when the show kicked into trippier sci-fi elements in the fourth and fifth seasons, and started moving at a faster pace, I also found myself more invested in the characters, because even the less essential later episodes didn’t sink to the feelings of time-killing you got in sections of the first three seasons. That is to say that I may not have been most interested in everyone’s character development, but the show did a better job of making that development not come off like downtime. (Or maybe I’m just happier whenever a show adds time-travel into the mix.) So I’ve at least accepted that yeah, the creators are more into the emotional character-arc stuff, some of which is great and some of which is sketchy, but OK, they’ve given us enough fun sci-fi trippiness so that strict, definite answers wouldn’t necessarily make the show any better.

Anyway: so everyone is dead! But not necessarily in a bad way. Actually, in kind of an amazing way. We were left to assume that the flash-sideways world was time-travel related, and it wasn’t (OK, a little bit of a bummer), and/or that it could be some kind of postscript to the series, and it wasn’t (OK, a little bit of a bummer that everyone is still dead, but pleasing that they didn’t issue a bunch of get-out-of-death-free cards) — but the way they handled the flash-sideways afterlife actually indulged in a little of each of those angles. There was sort of a spiritual time-travel going on, the way that some of those characters died way before Jack, and others way after, yet all came together in a single all-time point, and it offers an epilogue to their lives in a way sort of reminiscent of the Six Feet Under finale (which, I admit, I haven’t seen, but I read about it. That and the Sorpanos finale: episodes I haven’t actually seen, but sound completely awesome).

So the revelation about the sideways world was a nice one, and not, to my mind, a cheat, even if it does play right into Lost‘s tendency to get all soppy and slow-mo with the togetherness. But this time it worked; it wasn’t just a time-killing slow-mo sequence of everyone boarding a plane again (I’ll grudgingly admit there was a symmetry in that church sequence that would not have been present without all of that past plane-boarding, but still, never my favorite moments of the show).

The easy complaint is that the show wound up going the purgatory route that everyone guessed in the first year and which Cuse, Lindelof, and Abrams insisted wasn’t the solution. But of course, the island itself wasn’t purgatory — even the sideways universe wasn’t exactly purgatory, but rather that spiritual time-space convergence. Still, no Lost fan could watch the resolution without thinking of those early purgatory guesses, and I’m sure that “so it turned out it was basically purgatory, ugh” will become a whiny meme.

The afterlife turn, and several repeated shots and self-referential lines of dialogue, made for a surprisingly meta final episode, which added some fun (Hurley’s “I have a bad feeling about this,” Sawyer’s joke about Kate following after him) to a pretty dire situation. Also fun: watching a trio of later cast additions, the kind of characters that are killed off all the time on the show, actually survive: Lapidus! Miles! Richard! Flying to safety! I mean, yes, they brought along Sawyer, Kate, and Claire at the last minute, but I really liked the way they accomplished this primarily by breaking away from the major characters and just trying to get themselves the hell out of there. Lapidus even got a petulant “leave me alone!” while the main characters yelled from the walkie-talkie. In a season that provided all manner of hilarious ideas for spin-offs via the sideways universe, it was fitting that the last episode would add in some tantalizing non-sideways possibilities: Hurley and Ben, Island Administrators! Lapidus, Miles, and Richard, super-mismatched trio flying ’round the world!

I did have some problems with the finale. Desmond came back into this season with a bang, and his role turned out to be disappointingly minor: passive in the island world, and receding in favor of Jack’s story in the flashpurgatorium. He basically lacked a single awesome moment here, which was kind of a problem considering how much build-up his presence received. I mean, we got to see the tearful flash-reunion of Sayid and Shannon, but not Desmond and Penny. That’s kind of messed up considering that probably at least a third of the audience would be more likely to go “What the fuck? Oh, right, Sayid and Shannon, yeah, I guess they were a thing” rather than, you know, the intended “awww” (I would’ve been way happier with Shannon and Boone having a touching moment where they remembered how they boned that time).

Also, some of the on-island action felt a little perfunctory, even with an epic Fake Locke/Jack battle strangely reminiscent of a sequence from The Matrix Revolutions, a movie I’m pretty sure no one but me actually likes (I was going to say that made sense if it was originally conceived in 2004, but actually, no, even in 2004 it would be weird to conceive anything to look like Matrix Revolutions). I’m not sure it makes sense to describe the island as a metaphorical cork, and then have it turn out to contain basically an actual cork. In fact, that seems sort of confusing. But, as I hoped, the series managed to sidestep the “good versus evil” idea. I mean, yeah, Fake Locke was pretty rotten, and the new Jacobs are obviously pretty solidly good, but Hurley and Ben don’t seem particularly inclined to follow the Jacob administration’s approach to island governance; it sounds like they’ll be focused on helping people find their way home, which honestly, even if there wasn’t a larger mission, I don’t think Jacob would’ve done. I just don’t like that dude.

So yeah, I thought it was a pretty solid, slightly uneven end to a pretty solid, slightly uneven show, with some really lovely moments of direction from series regular Jack Bender, and touching character moments for most of our core castaways: Jack, Sawyer, Kate, Hurley, and Ben all had a wealth of good moments (or in Ben’s case, good fortune: anyone else catch how Ben got out from under that tree towards the end? I didn’t think much about it, but a friend pointed it out and now it seems really weird that they weren’t able to lift the tree, but he somehow escaped, and also didn’t seem to have shattered any bones under it). There was resolution with some ambiguity. There was spiritual stuff but it wasn’t too hokey. Hurley said “dude” a bunch of times and we saw Vincent. Good show. What did you guys think? And what am I going to watch now?

I’m not sure if it’s awesome or kind of bizarre that the most delightful aspects of last night’s Lost came from the alterna-world rather than the “real” island action. Sure, there were plenty of doings a-transpirin’ on the island in 2007 (or whenever it is “now”); the story moved forward, there were at least two deaths, and Jack assumed the role he’s been training for all season as Jacob’s replacement, the island protector. All in all, lots of exciting scene-setting for the now solidly feature-length series finale on Sunday.

But what I really loved in “What They Died For” were the alt-2004 moments, mostly trading on our affection for familiar Lost characters and situations, and cashing in for a lot of poignancy and hilariousness. I loved Desmond waiting in the parking lot at Locke and Ben’s school, revving his engine to run Locke over one more time; I loved it even more when sneaky, slimy Ben defended Locke with such earnestness, and then, after getting his ass kicked, as happens in any of Ben’s realities, going on sort of a surprise family date with Alex and her mom — hey, a non-crazy Rousseau! Well, mostly non-crazy; she did seem just about ready to marry Ben after spending a couple of hours with him and his sexy (?) bug eyes.

Back in 2007, Ben’s sneakiness got a second or third or tenth wind; I loved the weirdly quaint image of him sitting on his little porch, waiting for the Smoke Monster that he now realizes he wasn’t so much summoning with his secret room as inadvertently cooperating with Smokey’s destructive plan. Now, I guess he figures, might as well actively cooperate, and if his enemies die in the process, all the better. His chilling follow-up question after shooting Widmore — who else are we going to kill? — could be a particularly convincing ruse (again, with the side benefit of vengeance against Widmore), or it could be a pledge of actual allegiance. One of the most fascinating aspects of Ben is his refusal to be redeemed — if his (non-alt) character does have some redemption, it’s almost incidental. Even in the endgame, he’s still angling to get what he wants, even if he doesn’t seem entirely sure of what he wants (that he’d still like Penny to die is almost as chilling as the idea that, well, Penny could die, although the writers have to know the wrath they’d engage if that happened).

So yeah, heavy stuff in 2007; excitingly silly stuff in 2004, with Desmond’s Zen prison break, aided by the corrupt Ana-Lucia (not ready yet to get punched into letting go), bringing most of the important cast members to an awesome Faraday-led classical-meets-rock concert, a concept as ambitious and dorkily prog-sounding as Lost itself. It’s kind of a neat trick, the way the writers have let us enjoy rebooted versions of these alt-characters, including (more than) a wink and a nod to the early days as Jack and Locke once again arrive at a (more benevolent) discussion of science and faith, as death and despair and mystical baptisms reign in the 2007 version of their lives.

Oh, and of course the writers can’t stop raising questions; I can’t decide if this is a sign of good storytelling or just bad habits. New (or newly revived) questions from this episode include: how is Desmond going to serve as a failsafe? Who is Jack’s ex-wife in alt-2004 (probably Juliet, right?)? How long will Jack last as protector? How can you kill a Smoke Monster? Is Ben back to his evil ways, or is he doing a long-con on Smokey? Were Richard and/or Lapidus actually given ignominious semi-off-screen deaths, or are they being saved for later? I was ready to guess the latter for Lapidus, but now, I don’t know, it looks suspiciously like house-cleaning. Again, it’s hard to tell if this is shrewd storytelling or not until we get a look at that finale thing.

Basically, this episode was a lot of fun given that it was occupying the standard piece-moving and set-up-heavy penultimate-episode slot, times a million since it leads into the series, not just season, finale. Episodes like this, enjoyable as they are, make me wonder why the producers wanted to set an end when they did. That is, the last three seasons of Lost have been shorter runs designed to stretch two seasons and change worth of episodes across three seasons to satisfy ABC while not spreading the show too thin. But in retrospect, it seems like they could’ve used the extra ten or fifteen episodes that could’ve come with full-season orders. Then again, maybe the faster pace of seasons four and five would’ve been sacrificed. Maybe it’s just this season didn’t have quite the time/plot management skills I would’ve liked to see, even with a lot of entertaining installments.

I was going to do a list of best and worst Lost characters, but that seemed a bit redundant, as producers have essentially composed their own list consisting of who’s been left alive going into the finale. But maybe I’ll throw that into my finale recap on Monday morning, if the internet hasn’t broken by then.

Your thoughts, as always, are welcome below.

In a sense, even though it took a complete break from the typical format of the show in the style of the Richard episode and the Tailies episode from way back in season two, among others, “Across the Sea” is sort of a mission statement for what appears to be the Lost philosophy on answers. You’ll get answers, yes, but not necessarily explanations. As Alison Janney’s creepy mother character said, in a line that I’m assuming had to be spoken by a guest star to cut down on any involuntary winking directly into the camera, “every question I answer will only lead to another question.” No kidding, Lost, replied ten million people all at once.

This episode did answer questions, like: who is Jacob? Who was Fake Locke before he was Fake Locke? Where did the time-unsticking donkey wheel come from? And also: who are those skeletons in the caves from season one? But it didn’t necessarily explain any of that. We don’t know the exact nature of Creepy Mother’s power, or where she got it; we don’t know the specifics of her idea that the brothers can’t “hurt” each other, because they sure seemed able to punch each other in the face and draw blood, and whether their inability to kill each other was always there or only actually came to be once Jacob became the island’s guardian and Fake Locke became a swirling ball of electromagnetic smoke; and we don’t know exactly what happened to Jacob’s brother to turn him into the Smoke Monster Later Known as Fake Locke, or what percentage of the Smoke Monster contains Jacob’s brother’s soul (or whatever). Among other things.

I know this is just about the latest-starting weekly Lost recap/review series ever, but I found myself reading lots of Lost posts on Wednesday mornings, and I decided that it’s kind of weird not to have someone at Tifaux covering the only interesting one-hour show on network television (sorry, not feeling it, Glee, Chuck, or shows with cops, lawyers, or doctors). So glory to the low-tech debut of 5-4-3-2-Lost, covering the final five and a half hours of this crazy show.

The first third or so of “The Candidate” had me worried, rife as it was with island-hopping, which is far, far less enjoyable than time-hopping. At the end of the last episode, Jack ditched everyone else to stay behind and see what the island had in store for him. This episode promptly got the gang captured and caged, and sent Jack, NotLocke, and Sayid to save them. Entertaining enough, but as Sawyer noted out loud, it’s all a bit circular at this stage, don’t you think? I know some of this is necessary piece-moving, but I have to think there was a better way to get the good guys on the sub with NotLocke shut out and firefighting with Widmore’s people, and that Team Lost is maybe not thinking far enough ahead when they have so-and-so go to this island and such-and-such abscond for that island, and then one has to sneak onto the first island and retreat to the second island and blah blah blah.

But the episode more than made up for it in the second half, where we got character development, plot twists, emotion, and nerve-racking suspense strung together with merciless efficiency. The dilemma of the surprise bomb — Jack arguing that the candidates could not die by NotLocke’s hands, and so not tampering with the wiring would actually save them; Sawyer’s reasonable conclusion that he should tamper the hell out of that wiring — was fast and smart, and made the preceding half-hour or so make more sense, rather than less, without just raising six more questions.

Speaking of which: Now we’re really getting down to the wire, and I know some other fans/recappers/critics out there have gotten impatient for answers. What I think haters overlook, though, is how many answers we’ve already received — just often in a sidelong or subtle way. We’ve gradually learned pretty much the whole deal with Dharma, the Others, and a fair share about Jacob and the Man in Black. You know, big picture stuff. There are certainly early story threads that seem to have been dropped or at least consigned to the area of side freakiness for color rather than actual plotlines (Walt’s psychic powers; for that matter, Miles’s psychic powers; in Lost World, having any kind of psychic powers seems to be considered kind of a passing interest at best), but tying every throwaway character moment from the past six years into a nice bow wouldn’t be very satisfying, I don’t think.

Still, with just four and a half hours yet to air, there are some questions raised, especially by events of this season, that I will probably be irritated if/when they are left unanswered. To that end, I’ve compiled a list:

Who are the skeletons in the cave? Hurley just brought this up again this season, so they have to go back to it, right? This could go so many ways: freaky, heartbreaking, romantic, whatever. Do something.

You know when Sawyer and company were unstuck in time, and at one point they were getting shot at in a rainstorm? When was that? I know this is a minor point, but there better be some kind of awesome paradoxical-type answer to this!

What did Juliet mean when she told Miles “it worked” from beyond the grave? Also, what was going on when she was babbling about getting a cup of coffee when she lay dying in Sawyer’s arms? Both seem like she experienced some kind of Desmond-style consciousness traveling, so I guess I’m just looking for a little confirmation there.

Jacob isn’t just some benevolent zen-like figure who preaches just going with the flow, and Jack isn’t just going to take his place as Island Guardian, right? Because that would be fucking lame. Okay, I guess this is sort of a leading question. I’m fine with NotLocke being evil and Jacob, being in opposition to NotLocke, not being particular evil. But I hope the writers can find a more inventive, mind-bendy solution than a bunch of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo about good, evil, guardians, and fate.

There may be others, but I can’t think of them at the moment. I’d love to hear suggestions for the mysteries that must be at least addressed, if not completely solved, in the comments.

This has been kind of an up-and-downer of a season, with some flat-out great episodes mixed in with an inordinate amount of piece-moving and character-shuffling. But the circling and wiggling of those episodes will look a lot better in retrospect if the final hours really deliver. Of course, “retrospect” is a relative term for me: I’m not particularly planning on rewatching Lost ever. This diminishes my appreciation of certain aspects of the show because I have no practical interest in how certain episodes play better a second time, or watched in rapid succession on a DVD binge. But I think it also enhances my appreciation in that I have no problem enjoying Lost in the moment. I don’t cherish any of these characters as much as I adore, say, Mulder and Scully — but then, that could make a failure of masterplot more crushing, since there are plenty of stand-alone X-Files episodes based in character, even through the weaker seventh season (and the eighth and ninth seasons are easy to ignore). I’ve become invested in the Lost characters more as an inevitable offshoot of the cool weird sci-fi stuff. That said, the creators don’t need to throw a bunch more hardcore time-travel at me to win me over.

Next week, I’ll be back with another sorta-recap and a ridiculous wishlist of what I’d like to see from the show’s final hours.

Shit! Lost is starting already? Tonight*?! With the show being off the air for almost a year, I meant to, you know, try and remember what was happening before the season premiere. Oops, too late, I guess. Or is it?

If you’re like me and forgot to do a Lost refresher, here’s what you can read to get back up to speed.

TV Guide has been doing “catch-ups” about all of the characters, so you can see where we left off with Jack, Kate,  Hurley, Richard, Sun & Jin, Sayid, Sawyer, etc.

New York Magazine’s Vulture blog does a good job of collecting theories about this season that have been floating around the Internet. They mostly sound like BS, but some of them are entertaining.

The AV Club does a great “” post from the point of view of just having re-watched seasons four and five. The writer grapples with whether the story all hangs together, lists our most pressing outstanding questions, and even includes a recap video.

I easily tire of “Doc” Jensen’s Lost interpretations, but people seem to love him, and those people would probably be interested in Entertainment Weekly’s Lost package. The best feature is a list of 10 episodes you need to see to basically get the gist of what’s going on. It’s all very Locke-heavy.

Just for fun: Jersey Shore’s popularity means that people are all about Italian-Americans now, so this one Italian-American family seeks to capitalize on that with their (via Flavorwire). And New Yorkers might be tickled to see the island mapped out, NYC-subway-style.

And, though everyone might be flipping out that “the first four minutes” of the season premiere were leaked online, two of those minutes are really the last two minutes of last season finale. If you’re really super-impatient, you can watch that to get your “previously, on Lost” fix.

*Groundhog Day. Does this mean that our favorite Losties will have to keep re-living their days until they get them right?

Guess who’s going to be on TV tonight? Yeah, John Krasinski and Joel McHale, tall, hot and funny, whatever. The really important addition to Thursday nights is my beloved John Cho, who joins Joseph Fiennes, Sonya Walger, and Dominic Monaghan in ABC’s FlashForward, which starts tonight at 8.

John, whom some of you will insist on calling Harold from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle/Escape From Guantanamo Bay (or you could call him Mr. Sulu, that would be fine), is not making his first foray into TV. He had a recurring role on the short-lived and tragically underwatched but really quite enjoyable Kitchen Confidential in 2005, and he guest-starred on How I Met Your Mother in 2007.

In fact, I have been rewatching HIMYM on DVD for the past two weeks or so, and damn, but that is just a funny show. The older stuff (can you believe this is season 5? Me neither!) really holds up, and as someone whose stomach turns a little when couples baby-talk to each other, it amazes me that I’m still cool with the whole Lily-Marshall cooing-at-each-other thing. I think my goodwill toward them dates to the pilot, when they got engaged, had sex on the kitchen floor, and then, when Lily noticed a Pop Tart under the fridge, Marshall said, “Dibs.”

Anyway, there have been two weird coincidences in my rewatching. The first is the show’s deep love of Patrick Swayze. First, there was Barney’s co-opting of the Dirty Dancing story for his losing-my-virginity tale in season 2, then, the literal (offscreen) Swayze sighting in an episode I watched last night, the one in which John Cho seduces Marshall with Kobe lobster and Swayze into becoming an evil corporate lawyer. I find it some sort of strange cosmic error that I’m watching these now, a week after Swayze died.

The second coincidence is the Cho episode showing up the night before the FlashForward premiere. I will be honest, as much as I deeply loved Joseph Fiennes back in 1998, I have not given him much thought lately. And I have such lingering resentment against Lost for the two season I wasted on that show that I definitely wouldn’t give it a watch for Walger or Monaghan. But Cho? I love Cho. He makes everything better.

And this one time, he called me! That was great. His kid picked up the phone during the interview and started mashing buttons, which was adorable. So, FlashForward! Might be great, might not. I will give it a try.

Judging from this promo, Charlie could be coming back from the dead.

Ausiello reports:

An ABC spokesperson declined to comment, but a network insider cautions against reading too much into the spot. “There’s obviously a lot of ABC talent in the promo,” the source points out. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that Dominic is returning to Lost.”

Monaghan’s rep, meanwhile, had this response when asked if his client was being resurrected on Lost. “You never know. Stay tuned.”

So, that was one episode of Lost, eh?

I won’t go into details because I think I should give everyone at least a one-day window before I go around squeeing spoilers. Fire up those DVRs and Hulu queues, people! Besides, I’m not sure I’ve digested it enough to say anything meaningful about the finale. There’s a lot to mull over.

I will say this: Watching Lost with friends and family is fun. Watching Lost with MY friends and MY family is more fun. You doubt me? I offer proof: One of my friends baked me a DHARMA cake.

I know what you’re wondering. The answer is “funfetti.”

Warning: The post is filled with Lost spoilers.

A list of characters I remember who have died on Lost:

Alex (shot by Keamy)
Leslie Arzt (blew up)
Mikhail Bakunin (speared)
Boone Carlyle (falling death)
Michael Dawson (‘sploded)
Naomi Dorrit (knifed)
Mr. Eko (monster mashed)
Daniel Faraday (killed by mom)
Paulo & Nikki (razzle-dazzle)
Neil “Frogurt” (flaming arrow)
Scott Jackson (or was that Steve?)
Keamy (shot by Ben)
Charlotte (unstuck in time)
Claire Littleton (maybe?)
Ana Lucia & Libby (shot by Michael)
Joanna Miller (pointlessly drowned)
Nathan (neck snapped by Goodwin)
Seth Norman (monster snack)
Charlie Pace (hero’s death)
Ethan Rom (shot for revenge)
Danielle Rousseau (ambushed)
Shannon Rutherford (shot by Ana Lucia)
Goodwin Stanhope (impaled by Ana Lucia)

That’s not counting all of the Oceanic and Ajira passengers that didn’t make it through the crashes to begin with, anonymous Others who died in random shootouts,  everybody else on the freighter, passers-by who were killed by Lost characters in their adventures off the island, people who seem to have dissipated into thin air (Rose? Bernard? Vincent?), or any of the people in the Lostpedia list that I’ve barely heard of.

So, when Jack asks Kate for one good reason why he shouldn’t detonate a hydrogen bomb, the correct answer is, “Because you’re going to kill the few of us that are left.” Not, “Because then we never would have met.” I’m sorry, Kate. Your pissy, on-again, off-again romance with Jack is not worth the life of one Frogurt, let alone someone like Boone (who, we all remember, is God’s Friggin Gift to Humanity). I’d want to set off the bomb just to stop you from whining.

There’s so much to discuss on any given episode of Lost, that I’m just going to talk about one particular thing that’s been chapping my ass a little bit.  And it’s all about Kate.

On the most recent Sawyer-centric episode, the writers threw a curveball at us by flash-forwarding three years on the island to where Sawyer and Juliet had made a happy home together on the island.  Even though I can’t recall much of a flirtation between the two, by the final ten minutes of the episode Sawyer and Juliet were smooching in the kitchen and exchanging I love yous like Ozzie and Harriet with a grim backstory.

And so, at one point, Sawyer has to tell another island resident that he once loved a woman (Kate) and he let her go. So, when the group shows up at the end of the episode Kate makes an especially dramatic entrance and we’re led to believe that there’s a new love triangle in town.

So herein lies my beef: Kate’s a very pretty lady, but seriously? Juliet’s pretty hot herself (shoulda seen her doing the hot lesbian action with Angelina Jolie in Gia — I mean, if you’re into that) and she’s a smart doctor who’s tough without shrieking about keeping up with the boys. I thought it was kind of annoying that she can just strut her befreckled ass onto the island and suddenly it’s game on again.

Love triangles between ridiculous people are pretty hard to tolerate (Hi Meredith! Hi Derek!), so I was pretty glad when it seemed to be at least narrowed down to Jack and Kate and whether they’d be able to hold it together. I really hope Sawyer and Jack don’t end up getting into another fight over her. Sigh.