Infinitive Splitter

Spoiler alert: I’ve never seen this show, but everything I’ve overheard about it makes it sound like an experiment conducted by ABC to see how much nonsense a really devoted audience will tolerate. I haven’t heard anyone say a good thing about it in months, apart from a lot of “Watch it from the beginning and you’ll see.”

Well, I don’t think I’ll ever to do that. I’m just going to watch the 150-minute series finale and tell the Internet what I think.

8:59 – I have almost as little experience with NBA basketball as I do with Lost, but the automatic TV reminder just took me away from the Lakers-Suns game. Context-free entertainment is easy for sports to pull off; we’ll see if that’s true about weird, dramatic television.

9:01 – Excellent! The “previously on” scenes made absolutely no sense to me.

9:05 — How long have these people been on this island? Their hair and clothing make it look like it’s been a long afternoon.

9:07 — I gather that this is hard enough for people who watch regularly to follow, so I’m probably making it almost impossible by trying to type and drink and watch at the same time.

9:17 — So at some time, some people were bailing strangers out of jail and taking them to very important concerts, and then at some other time a bald guy planned to blow up an island where some of those same people are, along with some others? And everyone speaks needlessly cryptically all the time?

9:27 – I thought this was going to be all smoke monsters and time warps and parallel universes and smoke monsters. I might be seeing some parallel universes or time warps (I can’t be sure about the chronology of these the flashbacks or flash-forwards), but apart from one reference to a “magic Leprechaun,” which I’m pretty sure wasn’t literal, this hasn’t been nearly as crazy as I’d hoped.

9:34 — Eh, who cares? Abort.

Late update (the next morning) – I tuned back in at the very end to see the big reveal. Since it was the purgatory scenario, which ranks below the dream scenario on the list of acceptable television show endings, I feel vindicated in my decision to watch only 34 minutes of the 121-episode series.