A couple of random thoughts: First off, I don’t get why people are questioning whether Juliet set off the bomb at the end of the episode. Of course she did! The question is: What will happen to our favorite Losties once a nuclear explosion comes in contact with a huge pocket of electro-magnetic radiation? My guess: More time travel!

One thing I have not seen on the Lost boards, surprisingly, is any commentary on the radiation suits Desmond and whats-his-face who used to be on Earth 2 and Carnivale had to put on whenever leaving the hatch. The “sickness” was the radiation poisoning…right? The question then remains, how was this cleared out so quickly by the time 2004 came around?

OK…so the big question is, who is this Jacob guy and what is his relation to the man in black? (Mr. Baddie, which some are referring to as “Esau” per the Biblical reference?)

I do think Jacob is a good guy. A semi-manipulative good guy, bringing people to the island to see if they can overcome their baser instincts. Mr. Baddie is the devil, the tempter, who we think now is somehow related to the black smoke.

Well, well, this is starting to get metaphysical. Let’s back up for a moment and return to the nuclear bomb:

Do our friends survive it? I am going to guess yes. Our big clue was the close up of the eye opening up at the end of the next season promo. That’s Jack, waking up in the forest, in the same spot, only now he’s been transported to 2007. He is part of the group that Jacob referred to when he said “they’re coming.”

All the other time travelers – Sawyer, Juliet, Sayid, Miles, Jin, and Hurley, will also be reappearing in 2007. 

However, with Jacob dead, and Mr. Baddie aka Bad Locke running the island, you can be assured that all hell is going to break loose.

Somehow in all this, we’ll have a flashblack to show us how the Black Rock got stuck in the island, where Richard comes from, and all that other hoo-ha.

Will we be flashing forward to 2012 and the end of the world? It remains to be seen. But given how tightly the story is coming together, I’m going to guess that however this wraps up, it’s going to be good. 

If we’re lucky, maybe the vanishing Starbuck will reappear as the “harbinger of death.”

Can I wait a year to see how this all resolves? It’s going to be a long year, that’s all I’m gonna say.

I’ve read some of the responses online and it seems there are quite a few pissed of BSG fans out there, notably for the angelic “deux ex machina” aspect of the ending. I can’t say I was disappointed in the finale, but I do feel there were a few things that could have been done better. (And hey, it could have been much, much worse.)

First off, I don’t mind that Baltar and Caprica Six’s mental alter egos were “angels” so much – but I still would have preferred this explanation to have something more to do with the Cylon technique of projection. And why those two? It’s not like Caprica Six and Baltar were given information from Head Six or Head Baltar that significantly changed the destinies of everyone.

But as for Starbuck – her being an angel or ghost was pretty damn lame. I fully expected her existence to be explained by some sort of left-over Resurrection ship orbiting Old Earth somewhere. So no, rather than using this much more interesting and plausible explanation, we find out she’s just a ghost – who happens to be confused and needs hints from Hera of all people – and who can physically fly physical ghost ships. Lame, lame, lame.

And of course, this all begs the question – if God is going to use ghost Starbucks and visions of Caprica Six to push forward His Great Godly Agenda, why let the holocaust of the Colonies happen in the first place?

And why was there any need to seed New Earth with Cylon/Human Hybrid blood in the form of Hera? Why not just send an angel down to the tribes and teach them some language skills?

Better yet – send a big black monolith down there ala 2001 and let that do the job.

I was glad, however, that we did finally have some sort of tie-in to our Earth. And going 150,000 years back into the past was just as good as any tie-in possible.

Question: Are they leaving the door open for a modern-day Galactica spin-off, where the Centurions return to New Earth and terrorize us humans? Possible. If that happens, can we have Head Six and Head Baltar (the angels) come back? Because at least those two are interesting.

Missed: I would have liked to see the return of Lucy Lawless as Deanna. And I would have liked more resolution between Starbuck and Leoben (Number Two). Leoben was always prophesizing things…and he was always so captivating to watch. He was definitely underutilized this last season.

At any rate, I’m not entirely disappointed – at least we had a happy ending of sorts. After watching that grim, dark show for so many years, I was glad that there was at least some sort of hopeful resolution. I’m semi-satisfied, but that’s only partially because I didn’t have huge hopes for the ending.

Now, if Lost gives us some lame loose ending like that one, I will be super pissed. Can you imagine? What if we find out that the Lost island is really just run by supernatural beings, and Richard Alpert is Satan. Ugh!

But this is all just a reminder that sometimes the question is more compelling than the answer.

I give the finale a B+.

I can’t really improve upon that article much, but I will add my own brief two cents: I think the big statue (and old temple) that have been seen by the time travelers does confirm my theory that the Lost island is Atlantis.

I’m still having Lost time traveling dreams, by the way. Boy, does that show ever get under my skin!

SPOILER ALERT: Alert your eyes from here on out if you haven’t watched this on your DVR yet!

For me, the major revelation in this episode was that the characters could get physically dislodged in time. Daniel Faraday, the physicist who is seen it the beginning of the show back in the Orchid station circa 1980, likens the time shifting to be like a record skipping.

For many years now fans have been wondering what the true key to the island was, and this has to be it. Time is what Lost is about, which is why flashbacks were integral in the show’s first seasons. Now we can see that time travel is perhaps what will explain most of the strange happenings on the show, from the Black Rock being stuck in the middle of the jungle to the appearances of Jack’s father. (Somehow, I suspect, dead people walking around like the living will have something to do with the time travel.)

My brain was working on so much overdrive from the idea that I had Lost dreams last night, dreams in which I was a woman from the 1970s but kept appearing at different moments in time here in the civilized world. I could not remember, however, exactly where I was from, and I felt considerable confusion as I kept finding myself in the same house but in a different decade. In one scene from my dream (because it was seriously like a television show), I was getting ready in this house, which used to be mine in the 1970s, but was now owned by new people in the present day. The new owners thought I was an intruder. Then a large group of people started to gather at the house at a particular time period, because we’d all gotten dislodged somehow and this became the focal point.

The underlying theory in such time travel is that all time is simultaneous, but we only perceive it to be separate. Thus, it would be possible to exist at other points in time simply because all time is here, now, overlapped with all other time.

One thing that I am thankful for is that Lost is not trying to work in time paradoxes. Faraday clearly states that history cannot be changed, that we can “jump along the string” but not change it, no matter what we do. “What happened, happened.”

This is a thankful respite from all the ridiculous time travel sci-fi out there, made possible by 50 zillion time paradox episodes in the Star Trek shows (most notably Voyager) and the Terminator franchise.

We also find out in the premiere episode that the wheel that dislodges the island from space-time was buried underneath it before the Dharma Initiative arrived, which then begs the question: Who put it there? Aliens? Or Atlanteans? Because it’s entirely possible we’ll find out that the island is, indeed, the mythical Atlantis, with the Others as the only survivors of whatever holocaust dislodged it from regular space and time in the first place.

You’ll find some excellent predictions as to what will happen this season over at Slate.

With a nod to Lost, we have some sort of secret plot involving bio-terrorism and a large technology corporation. Strange icons (a butterfly, leaf, apple and frog) appear before commercial breaks, with a strange yellow dot that is sure to get fans wondering across the Internet.

Sadly, the premiere falls short of being brilliant. It is, in fact, convoluted and a bit unbelievable plotwise. (My feeling is that if you are going to cover fringe topics, then you better make your real world stuff believable to anchor the show.) We have a female FBI agent who is trying to save her dying sweetie. Somehow this leads her to release a crazy scientist from a mental hospital and set up an old lab in the basement of Harvard.

Watching this, you can’t help but wonder where the other scientists are who might be working on a cure, and how on earth can a scientist in a mental institution for 17 years be so comfortable with modern technology?

Other plot holes abounded: As an FBI “liaison,” she is sent with her partner to a storage locker to investigate a guy who boarded a plane in Germany. Already, this is not making sense to me. By the time the crazy scientist plugs her into a storage tank to get memories from her sweetie-in-a-coma, I had given up on the plot making any sense.

(And never mind that she missed the most crucial info once she was in her sweetie’s brain!)

The saving grace of Fringe is that the casting is terrific and the action is fast-paced. I’m hoping that once it gets past the weak pilot, it will turn into a decent show (like Eureka did). Sometimes pilots are horribly contrived just to get the setup going – once we get past that, it’s smoother sailing.

My grade: B-

A few thoughts:

1. The island can be moved? Deep underground in a strange cave with ancient markings? And when it’s moved, the cave goes from being bitterly cold to desert heat? Well, for anyone who questioned whether Lost was sci-fi, this certainly answered that.

2. “I see dead people.” Hurley’s seeing dead people, Michael sees Jack’s dead father, Miles hears dead people…is this still a function of sci-fi or the paranormal? Are we in some sort of pseudo virtual reality world?

3. Bunnies getting transported forward in time…space/time continuum…aaaaaaiiiiieeeee…

My head is still reeling, and still I can’t come up with the Unified Lost Theory That Explains Everything…

PS Did you know that the real Jeremy Bentham’s corpse is on display in a wooden box in England?