(May 21) -- As eager as "Lost" fans are to learn the fates of the remaining survivors of Oceanic 815, the answers given in Sunday's finale will bring yet one more puzzle: How will they cope come Monday?
"I'm going to be incredibly devastated," said Alex Ripps, 26, founder of the expansive
LOSTblog.com. "There's an emotional attachment. I don't think there's ever going to be a show like this. There's no way to not feel sad about it."
For those who haven't followed the marooned exploits of the controlling spinal surgeon, the bombshell fugitive, the unlucky lottery winner, the burned-out rock star, the handsome-rogue conman and the paraplegic who could walk, Ripps' statement must seem melodramatic. Yet in that equally mysterious and perilous place of unlikely connections known as cyberspace, this groundbreaking television show has propelled countless diehards to similarly rely upon one another in pursuit of answers and comfort.
Marco Garcia, AP
Fans attend a screening of the opening of the final season of "Lost" on Jan. 30. The ABC series will end its run Sunday night with a 2-1/2 hour finale.
And so, as the hours tick down to Sunday night's 2 1/2-hour climax on ABC, legions of bloggers, podcasters and tweeters are clinging to one another -- and wringing the last insights from fellow fans' far-fetched theories and the show's occasionally obscure literary references -- in the face of the void awaiting them.
"A lot of people are going to make the assumption that it's the show we're going to miss, but what we are more upset about is the loss of the community, in a sense," said Ryan Ozawa, co-host with his wife, Jen, of one of the most popular and longest-running "Lost"-rehashing podcasts, "
The Transmission."
"Has it been a hard week in our house?" he continued. "I guess it's hard the same way that the senior year of high school is hard. ... We're all telling each other we'll never be apart, we'll call each other every day, but there's a part of you that knows it's never going to be the same."
That "Lost" has cultivated such a dedicated (obsessive?) Web following has long been one of its defining achievements. The show debuted in 2004 just as social media networks were starting to catch fire, and its producers created websites for, among other things, the fictional airline Oceanic and pseudo-scientific operation the Dharma Initiative. Viewers could scour special Web videos for plot clues, play games, attend conferences and join online discussion groups that parsed the significance of the show's innumerable high-brow cultural and philosophical allusions.
The Ozawas were among the earliest to realize how significant the Web was in uniting the "Lost" fan base, starting their podcast right around the time Apple added podcasting to iTunes in June 2005 and the medium began taking off. With precious little corporate media content then available in the podosphere, "The Transmission" bolted up the charts and even caught the attention of show producers and actors. (The duo, who live in Hawaii where the show was filmed, once went to lunch with stars Jorge Garcia and Daniel Dae Kim; Kim showed them that he had their program on his iPod.)
Though they may not have jumped in as early as the Ozawas, many are equally heavily invested in the show -- like Ripps, a recent Catholic University Law School grad who started LOSTblog.com only last year. Among his 10 contributors around the world is Erin Willard of San Diego, who combs through Twitter constantly for the best
"Lost"-related tweets for a daily LOSTblog.com feature. Willard said she's kept herself in denial that the end is nigh by working extra hard as the quantity of tweets exploded this week.
"I've been so busy, I haven't had a chance, walking around in a fog," the 48-year-old homemaker said. "I expect on Monday, I'll feel really crummy and I'll have a giant headache." But while admitting "there's a fair amount of melancholy out there right now," she added that "since this week's episode aired, there's been a lot of anticipation and enthusiasm because the producers set us up really well for the ending."
Folks like Ripps, Willard and the Ozawas talk often about connections made, new technologies embraced. A 37-year-old homemaker and mother of three, Jen Ozawa was initially skeptical of her husband's tech interests but now believes her willingness to co-host "The Transmission" with Ryan, 35, has strengthened their marriage. She plans to helm her own, more generalized pop-culture show,
Popspotting, starting this summer.
"Before the podcast, he and I would do our own thing after the kids were in bed -- he would be on Web, I would be reading," she said. "We would not necessarily do things together. 'Lost' showed us that we can sit down, watch a show together and talk about it. From there, it felt more natural to spend more time together. It made us trust each other and rely on each other in a way we hadn't previously."
Among the more unusual Web personalities minted by the series is musician Shannon Purcell of East Hampton, Mass., who began writing original songs about "Lost" during the second season. By the following season, he and his five-person band, the Others -- named for the island natives who wreak havoc on the lives of the Oceanic survivors -- were meeting every week to record music and
post it on MySpace.
Purcell, a 33-year-old oil painter, said he realized he was on to something when other fans started making YouTube videos with his songs. He has penned more than 60 ditties, performed concerts at a Boston science fiction convention and begun
selling CDs online at prices chosen to coincide with the six numbers that recurred constantly in the series.
As Ryan Ozawa noted earlier, many denizens of the "Lost" community insist they'll stay together, and plans are afoot for that. Jen Ozawa looks forward to showing "The Transmission" fans visiting Hawaii where key "Lost" moments were filmed, while LOSTblog.com plans to hold re-watch parties, during which fans will start from the series' pilot and watch one episode a week.
"Over the years, there's going to be tons of new people who some way or another are going to get 'Lost' on DVDs or Blu-ray and going to be totally captivated, and they're gong to turn to the Internet to look for a community," said Ripps, who plans to watch the finale at a movie theater in Arlington, Va.
As for Purcell, he said he may go back and write and record songs for each episode of Seasons 1 and 2 to complete his set.
"[The ending] is a bit weird, a bit bittersweet for me, because it's like, 'Yeah, this is going to go away and there's not going to be new content for me to write about and I'm not going to get together with my friends and make any more music,'" he said. "The fact that that's going to go away leaves me a bit choked up. It's weird to say that about a TV show because I don't feel that way about any other shows. This was different."
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