by a heavily intoxicated Thomas J. Buxtehude

“This is our destiny!” the promos shout. “The answers you’ve been waiting for!” Only one thing could make me watch a show this self-important. A bed-confining illness and a merciless, television-addicted girlfriend who has taped every damn episode. “Let’s start from the beginning and watch all five seasons to catch you up!” she laughed gleefully. Fortunately, I was able to persuade her that gouging my eyes with veritable forks was not the thing I needed when I was already vomiting every hour. Instead she chose to subject me to a lesser punishment in the form of a marathon including every episode yet aired in the show’s sixth and final season. The gist of it is this: a bunch of dumbshits have set off a nuke in order to solve their problems. Obviously, that doesn’t work and they get two realities instead: one in which they are trapped on an island, and one in which they fly back to Los Angeles.

Because I care about you, dear readers, and because I have nothing better to do, I have decided to offer up a brief summary of each character’s strengths and weaknesses, and present them to you. Should you find yourself in a similarly unfortunate scenario in the future, you now know what to expect.

Jack

Taking the island by the balls and jumping into reluctant-hero mode is that guy from Party of Five. With him, the writers have created a hero so flawed, that the word “hero” practically doesn’t apply. On the island, Jack mostly follows other people around, screaming and breaking lighthouses, in hopes of someone finally paying attention to him. This is bad enough, but in the alternate universe, Jack is a doctor who has a strange obsession with performing surgery on a man named John Locke (not the philosopher, but some bald dude in a wheelchair). Mr. Locke, of course, notices how Jack salivates at the mouth while brandishing his scalpel and politely declines the invitation. So what does Jack do?  Well, he decides that if he can’t hang out with Locke on the operating table, perhaps he can just show up at Locke’s father’s retirement home and hang out with him there. In real life, this would lead to Mr. Locke calling the police and gifting Jack with a shiny new restraining order, but on Lost it leads to exactly what Jack desires: Locke’s fleshy back on his operating table.

Strangely, this is somewhat relieving, because if Jack wasn’t operating on Locke, he would be trying to hang out with his son, David, who despises him. Having clearly been recognized as a lunatic many times over, Jack attempts to convince his son that he’s cool in the same manner in which cartoon camels drive by elementary schools after work, brandishing packs of cigarettes in their shiny Lego cars. “I’ve got some pizza back at the house,” he says, smiling with fatherly pseudo-compassion at the child that he surely kidnapped as an infant. “Sure,” David says, splitting his tear-soaked face with a smile of young cheese lust. It’s a heart-filled moment, and one that I certainly shed a tear at. But we all know what happens when they get home: Jack whips out his scalpel and tries to talk young David into an all-too-real game of Operation while screaming about how his father is the ghost of Lucifer. We can safely assume that this scene was cut by ABC due to it being too controversial, but I’ll bet we see it show up on the uncut DVD. I have to hand it to you, Lost. Absolutely brilliant.

Character Grade: A

Sawyer

“Sawyer is like the show’s Han Solo,” my friend tells me. “You’ll love him.” And I do. From the moment this guy shows up on screen, he’s all about beating ass. First off, he head-kicks Jack into a fucking crater. (I can only assume this causes the brain damage exhibited by Jack in later episodes.) Not satisfied with this, he then threatens to kill him. Awesome. I am enjoying the hell out of this. A gun is sure to show up soon, which will make things even better.

But wait! Plot twist! Sawyer’s girlfriend, Juliet - who apparently fell down an 800-foot pit and detonated a nuke in her own face – is somehow still alive and (understandably) wanting to see a doctor. “Kiss me, James,” she whines pitifully in his arms. “You got it, Blondie,” he responds with ham-fisted fervor. Their mouths meld together like slabs of undercooked bacon writhing in a sea of dirt. And just like that, my cinematic violence-boner has wilted.

I can see parallels to Solo, but Han never turned into a crying mass of meat and hair. Also, my girlfriend gasped with manlust the moment he took his shirt off.

Character Grade: F-

Richard

Who the hell is this guy? All I know is that of all the characters on this or any other show, he is the most scared-shitless person I have ever seen. That, and he’s bi-polar. One minute he’s getting beaten to hell and being hung in a sack from a tree by Locke, the next minute he’s frantically running around trying to get someone to help him blow his own face off with dynamite. It’s like he doesn’t really know what he wants in life.

What could explain this erratic behavior? It is timeless mysteries like this that make Lost the cultural phenomenon that it is. Personally, I was 99.9% sure that Richard was a virus-ridden cyborg, but then Hurley, clearly having read my blog, asked that very question: “So, dude, are you a cyborg?” Richard: “Fuck no, dude.” I am now 100% sure that he is, in fact, the gimpy robotic spawn of Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s Latino cousin, cut out of the first draft of Terminator 2 because it was too mind-numbingly retarded.

Update: As it turns out, Richard is actually a pirate.

Character Grade: B

Locke

Okay, first off: this guy can transform himself into a cloud of smoke that fucking kills people. Smoke. Seriously. Smoke that can kill people. Could it not have been a cobra? A mountain lion? A demon-possessed jackal?

In any case, John Locke is the realization of every handicapped person’s wildest fantasy. Having been thrown out an eighth-story window by my own father as a young man, I know what this is like. Every time some cake-faced demon-child took my crutches and hurled them into a nearby I tree, I’d stare them down through watery eyes. “You think that’s cool, you little shit?  Just wait!  Someday I’ll transform into a zesty campfire and fumigate your sorry ass!” For some reason, that never seemed to stop the laughter of my tormentors, but in Lost, it sure as hell does.

In mere minutes, John Locke’s smokey presence has emptied an entire temple of even the faintest glimmer of life. Lilies shrivel and die before his every footstep, and hope itself implodes into a black hole of bottomless evil at the sound of his voice. Hands down, the best character ever.

Character Grade: A+

Hurley

Hurley is portrayed as the bulbous comedic relief with a plush, teddy bear heart, stuffed to the brim with chocolate nougat filling. He is supposedly the naïve and innocent castaway whom the audience identifies with. But really, I think he knows more than he’s telling us. Sure, he seems just as clueless as me. But consider this detailed observation: Hurley is the only character on the show whose half-beard is never shaved. Every other character’s stubble mysteriously disappears. Hurley’s stubble knows secrets, and I hate him for it.

But ultimately I love him because he is an excellent plot device for pissing Jack off. Take this exchange from the episode, “Lighthouse” for example:

Jack (yelling): “Where’s Jacob?”
Hurley: “I don’t know.”
Jack (eyes glowing red): “What does he want from me?!”
Hurley: “I don’t know!”
Jack (salivating with rage):“I’m gonna burn this lighthouse to the ground!”

For fuck’s sake, Hurley, make something up! The man was clearly crater-kicked in the head! He has no capacity for rational thought!

My prediction: Hurley is killed in the finale by Jack after refusing to answer questions about his undead father.

Character Grade: C+

Ben

“Remember that guy from the first Saw movie?” my girlfriend asks. Having cut my own brain out and replaced it with cabbage after seeing that movie, she does not have to wait long for a response. “No.” “Well, he’s the villain in this show.” Fortunately for her, people I cannot remember are one of the most terrifying things in the entire world. I saw Ben holding a knife and instantly shit myself. “This is going to be a long night,” I murmured as she struggled in vain to clean the sofa.

Folks, this may be the most loathsome villain in the history of television. He whimpers, he never kills anyone or does anything remotely evil, he cowers at the sight of firearms…the list goes on and on. The man is truly evil. But, like Sawyer, his high levels of badass quickly drowned in a flood of man-tears a third of the way through the season (albeit after six episodes, rather than six minutes of kickass). However, he does get points for not being as handsome.

Character Grade: B+

Kate

Based on the promos alone, I would have guessed that Lost is a show revolving around this woman’s vagina. R&B music pulsates as Kate is shown making out in scenes with both Sawyer and Jack. Who will she end up with? I can tell by the mindless trance on my girlfriend’s face that this is probably the most important question in the world to her. Points go to the writers for allowing me to bask in her misery as they refuse to answer this question. However, points subtracted for forcing us to endure this flirtatious whore who reminds me of how insecure I am about my girlfriend’s mysterious weekend trips to nudist lake house gatherings with oil-chested men she claims are gay.

Character Grade: C

Sayid

Fortunately for us, even though Ben has been redeemed, Sayid has not. Which means there is a lot more senseless brutality on the horizon. There is no question about this man’s total lack of a soul. But just in case you couldn’t tell from that totally dead look in his eyes, the Japanese ninja guy in the temple apparently has a machine that tells him if people are good or evil. And Sayid nearly breaks his fucking machine, he’s so evil.

Sometime after being hooked up to this magic machine, Sayid sits down with the evil-o-meter’s inventor for a nice poolside chat. Dogen confesses to Sayid in heartbreaking detail about how he hit his son with a car while drunk. As Dogen shakes, on the verge of tears, Sayid consoles the man by promptly picking him up and drowning him. “Screw your stupid machine!” he shouts wildly. “I am not evil!”

Character Grade: A+

Sun and Jin

“Where is Sun?” “Where is Jin?” The racial minorities sure do get monumentally shafted on storylines in this series. Sun bumps her head on a rock and suddenly cannot speak English, forcing her to communicate via smiley faces on a notepad spawned from Jack’s magic sack, while Jin has his mouth taped shut by a salivating butcher in an alternate reality. On the island, they are desperately using their two lines per episode to shout each other’s names, but when they finally reunite, they drown in a blown-up submarine, leaving their orphaned daughter to be inevitably mothered by Kate, who will teach it to be a whore. Even in the sideways universe we can easily tell that their story isn’t going to have a happy ending. Given the show’s penchant for metaphors, I can only assume that their names are a subtle hint toward the characters’ alt-verse addictions to tankards of gin and Golden Rod tanning salons.

My prediction: Jin comes home after a long day of nude body bronzing to find his wife ragingly drunk, loudly fornicating with their prized shih-tzu (that’s a Chinese dog, right?). After punching the traitorous dog into a coma, Jin realizes his innate Asian abilities and becomes a samurai, likely to star as a nameless henchman whom Jackie Chan kills in Rush Hour 8.

Character Grade: D

Miles

Every show needs a latent homosexual character, and Lost, I have found, is no exception.  The writers cleverly throw us off the trail in an early episode by having Miles note that gun-toting psychopath Claire is “acting crazy, but still hot,” and admittedly, I fell for it. But later we discover that in the alternate universe Miles has got the hots for cop-tacular manbeast Sawyer. “We’re supposed to trust each other!” he yells after Sawyer reveals that he went to Cancun without him.

What’s amazing about this scene is how it colors our view of past interactions, like the one with Claire. You look back on stuff like that and remember, “Ah yes, Claire was looking ruggedly masculine, wasn’t she? Perhaps Miles, having only seen her from a distance, mistook her for an effeminate man-hobbit.”

Character Grade: A-

Claire/Pippin

Having seen Dominic Monaghan on the plane, I knew it was only a matter of time before Billy Boyd showed up. Yes, Pippin is a star on Lost. The writers are constantly throwing around references to their favorite writers, like naming characters after philosophers, but really…did they need to go this far to reference Tolkien? That little fucker who was always pissing Gandalf off has somehow found his way onto the island and purchased himself a gun. With this he is determined to kill Kate while ignoring the romantic advances of Miles and smoking as much longbottom leaf as he possibly can. I would review the character further, but I find myself instinctively pushing the mute button on my remote every time he speaks.

Character Grade: F

Jacob

After all the “Previously on Lost” segments, I don’t know how many times I’ve watched this guy get the shit stabbed out of him. Clearly, he is our Christ character…but with a twist!  When Jacob was but a wee tyke, some woman killed his mother, slaughtered the island’s inhabitants, and then tried to convince Jacob and his nameless brother to guard a giant cave full of glowing energy. Seriously, I’m not making this up.

Jacob’s brother thinks this is some serious bullshit and kills the woman. Bravo, sir. But then Jacob thinks that was some serious bullshit and throws his brother into the glowy cave he was supposed to protect, where his brother transforms…into a pillar of smoke who lives for thousands of years before taking on the appearance of John Locke and convincing Ben to kill Jacob for revenge. But after all that, it turns out that Jacob can actually still walk around and talk to people while dead, so none of that really fucking mattered, did it?

Character Grade: WTF

Shredder

He made only a brief appearance in the episode, “Everybody Loves Hugo”, but knowing the Lost writers have a penchant for implausible plot twists, I assume that at some point this guy will don his mask again and kill everything.

Character Grade: A+

So there you have it, folks. The most colossally fucked up cast of characters ever seen on television. It’s near-impossible to determine how it will end based on that, but I imagine it will involve a minimum of six explosions, two Kate-centered sex scenes, one Jack-helmed surgery, a pair of stabbings, time travel, dead people talking to Hurley’s beard, and finally, the entire island being accidentally nuked by Pippin.

Will I be tuning in for this finale? Hell yes.