GETTIN' SLOPPY THERE, LOSTBOYS

While I've always admired LOST for not spoonfeeding its viewers tons of exposition, I think the show's writers have stayed away from that narrative strategy so long that they've forgotten how to provide exposition when they have to, as seen in the last episode, "Ab Aeterno."

1) PROBLEM 1: The Black Rock ship, impelled by a storm that may have been conjured up by Jacob, the island or just Mother Nature, smashes the statue of Tawaret to smithereens, but is not itself smashed and zooms all the way into the jungle. This really strikes me as a desperate writer's ploy: "Hey, we've got to explain both of these things: let's combine them. Two great tastes taste better together!"

2) PROBLEM 2: Jacob seems somehow responsible for the ship being there-- at least he admits to having brought others to the island prior to Richard's ship-- but not only does he do nothing to prevent the killing of the slaves by the ship's officers, Jacob seems unaware of Old Smokey's invasion of the ship, his killing of the officers and the Temptation of Richard. The result is that everybody aboard the ship is dead except for Richard, and Jacob seems to conceive of Richard's potential usefulness at the last moment, rather than having planned things out as he did with the Oceanic castaways. Assuming that Jacob is some sort of deity who has a jones for experimenting with humans in an island/ant-farm, you don't learn much from the ants if you let them be killed off so quickly.

3) PROBLEM 3: The God of Ricardo's faith lays down laws and then expects his flock to take the moral superiority of those laws on faith even when the god doesn't come to his worshippers' defense at the drop of a burning bush. In contrast, Jacob brings his ant-subjects to the island and then-- what? Tells them nothing about why they've been brought there? Apparently the Others are an experiment in which Richard goes forth and recruits people from the outside world instead of trying to build a society out of stray Egyptians or Spanish slaves or whatever. But all the Others get from Jacob via Richard seem to be oracular commands rather than moral laws. Does a god who dispenses no moral laws have any moral high ground to judge the choices his followers make?

4) PROBLEM 4: And Nemesis seems to be even stupider. He's trying to convince Ricardo to go after Jacob and kill him. To that end, he materializes the spectre of Ricardo's lost love Isabella, and then makes it seem like the Smoke Monster abducts her. (Can Smokey's split off parts of himself, like DC Comics' Clayface??) THEN-- Nemesis tells Ricardo that he IS the Smoke Monster, but hey, all that roaring from me and that screaming from Isabella had nothing to do with one another: she was really captured by "the devil," who is Jacob. Of course the main reason for this odd strategy is that Richard in 2007 knows that Jacob's unnamed enemy is the Smoke Monster, and so someone's got to tell him. And since Jacob's character can't be allowed to break his super-secret "I'm too cryptic for my shirt" attitude, the writers had Nemesis do the reveal instead. Brilliant!

I'm perhaps crabby because I miss seeing the ensemble, and really didn't care that much about Ricardo/Richard and his problems, but I really thought the writers flubbed this one. Plus points: Hurley as "ghost whisperer" continued to be awesome, and it was interesting that the destiny mapped out for Ricardo by the slave-trader-- that of a servant/factotum-- is the one he accepts from Jaocb. I hope this sloppiness doesn't mar the Big Ending.