A few months ago, I started watching Lost from the beginning. I had been interested in watching it for a while, but finally took the plunge one evening, starting the first episode on Netflix Watch Instantly. I became quite enthralled by it, occasionally watching three or four episodes a night.

I finally got caught up to the present airing just this past weekend- just in time to watch the next to last episode on Tuesday. And of course, the big series finale is tomorrow.

I’ve enjoyed the show a lot, for the most part. There were a few missteps along the way, and I honestly hated season 5 with all of its time travel stuff. I’ve found it really cool that, whether planned or not, the monster from the very beginning of the series is playing such an important role at the end. I would like to know more about the island and what’s up with the light, as well as more about Jacob, the Man in Black, and their mom.

But I’m honestly not sure if I’m going to get all of that. Despite having really loved the show, I’m quite afraid that we’re all going to be “Stephen Kinged.” That is, the ending will be like many of Stephen King’s endings. In The Stand, he spent hundreds of pages having a team of good guys trek across the country to fight the bad guys, only to have the “end” be a nuclear bomb going off accidentally, killing all involved. In the Dark Tower series, he spent seven whole books having Roland chase the tower, only to have him thrown back to the start of his quest once finding it and getting inside. Ultimately, King seems to be good at writing really good stories, just not particularly good at finishing them.

I’m worried that’s going to be the case for Lost. A wild ride, but with an ending that just doesn’t bring much closure. After Jack was “made to be like Jacob,” they could even have the show end with Jack basically taking the helm of the island, holding out against the monster indefinitely into the future, until he can pass the torch to someone else.

I hope that isn’t the case, and I hope that the finale answers most of the questions that have been left hanging. But I won’t be placing any bets…

It’s not, however, the talented people I’m wondering about. I’m wondering about the people who stand in a massive line of people for a whole day or more, in order to show on national television that they’re not overly talented. Or worse, that they’re just downright bad. Take, for example, this couple, who claim they’re going to wow the world with “Polka Today”, a style of dance they created. While I know very little about dance, what they’re doing does not look particularly revolutionary. Are they suppose to look so… flaily? Perhaps it was just a bluff, but the guy seems genuinely confident that their dancing will impress everyone there. Or check out this compilation video of some of the worst acts seen in this season thus far. What were these people thinking when they said, “Hey, I think I’ll try to win America’s Got Talent”? Did the Ozzy impersonator really think he sounded like Ozzy? They showed his closing remarks on the show (not included in the above video), and he, too, seemed to feel that he was genuinely good.

I’m sure some people who go on the show just do it to be a goof; they know they have no real talent, and that they have no real chance of winning. They do it to for laughs, to say “look at me, I’m on TV!” But it really does seem that a lot of the folks who are just bad think they’ve got what it takes to win the competition. Are their talent radar machines broken? I suppose tone deafness might explain some of the awful singers, but what of the magicians who drop their cards, lose their birds, and fall to the floor when they try to “levitate”? The lady who tried to rap, while jumping up and down on big shards of broken glass? The lady who crushed a sack full of soda cans with her enormous breasts?

What’s up with these people? The show is American’s Got Talent, folks, not American’s Got Crazy People. (Not to imply that we don’t have our fair share of those, mind you…)

In checking out the Razor website, I saw this at the bottom:

From October 5 through November 16, SCI FI whets Battlestar fans’ appetites every Friday night with “Razor” Flashbacks during all-new episodes of Flash Gordon. All the flashback clips will be available on SCIFI.COM immediately after broadcast.

Written by Michael Taylor and directed by Wayne Rose and Felix Alcala, these intense, roughly two-minute segments tell the story of young William “Husker” Adama’s rookie Viper mission during the first Cylon war. In addition to fighting for his very survival against relentless Cylon centurions, Adama makes a terrifying discovery that will come back 40 years later to threaten him, the crew of the Pegasus and the survival of the human race.

Well, that would have been nice to know back at the beginning of October. Then again, maybe it’s for the better; now I can watch all of the Flashback things back-to-back. Why, that’ll give me nearly 15 minutes of Battlestar Galactica! (I feel like a junkie saying that.)

If you’ve not seen the Flashbacks, check ‘em out; part 1 is here. A warning, however: don’t watch it at work! I just started to watch it at work, and was greeted with a sex scene. I guess I’ll have to wait until I get home this afternoon for my BSG fix. Figures.

The plot of the Heroes episode is largely unimportant for what I’m wanting to write about in this post, other than the fact that in the episode, Ivan was a bad guy. He had trained Bennett to work for The Company, and indeed, Ivan was still being employed by The Company, until Bennet blew his head off. Ivan was: of Slavic ancestry (which, for most Americans, might as well be Russian), and a bad guy. It’s peculiar how often this combo pops up in American television.

When I started thinking about this, I tried to conjure up as many instances in my memory of television shows where a Russian (or someone from a former USSR country) appeared as a character. While I’m sad to say I can’t come up with any specific examples, I know I’ve seen a fair number of Russian characters in television shows over the years – usually in things like Law and Order (and its offshoots), Criminal Minds, etc. – and all of them were dirty in some manner or another. Killers, drug dealers, mob lords – if they were Slavic, they were trouble.

Does any of this sound familiar to American television watchers (or non-Americans who regularly watch our shows), or have I just imagined this?

If I’ve not imagined this, it begs the question: why? Why have I never seen a good Russian / Slavic person in an American T.V. show? Does it hearken back to when Americans hated Russians because of communism and the Cold War, and the negative view of the people as a whole has continued to this day? Do Russians just make really good bad characters?

What gives?