(this blog entry should contain a "spoiler" warning, since I'm going to tell you about what happens at the end of the movie "Magnolia" - however, I don't really believe that it is possible to spoil the movie Magnolia. If this "spoiler" keeps you from watching that movie, then you can send me a check and a bouquet of roses).

Not too long ago, I told you folks how Ethel and I had been drawn into the Lost TV serial(of course, not having cable, we get it from Netflix).

Things haven't gotten any better (or worse, depending on one's perspective). I get up at some God-awful cow-milking hour in the morning, commute to Scott$dale, go to the gym and to a meeting and to work and then to an evening meeting to avoid the evening traffic, and then commute home to Anthem, get there around 7:15 PM, and Ethel (who's been laying around all day eating BonBons and napping) shoves some food down my throat and tells me that we need to watch the next three episodes before she'll let me go to bed.

The increasingly complex storyline sort of scares me; while I hope that, someday, it will all tie up neatly, I'm afraid that we have a Magnolia on our hands. In case you're not familiar with it - Magnolia was a 1999 movie that was nominated for three Academy Awards - which only shows how rampant drug abuse is in the film industry.

Magnolia was a movie that indicated, at the beginning, all kinds of wonderful plot resolution with wild - but explainable - tie-ins. However, it completely failed to deliver  - you'll note that the IMDB synopsis still, after nine years, says "This plot synopsis is empty. Add a synopsis".  Since the PLOT was empty, it's sort of hard to synopsize it. I thought about adding a synopsis that said "Never mind. There's no plot to synopsize" but I wasn't sure that synopsize is a word  (as it turns out, it is). No doubt the actors delivered great performances - but what can you do with a script that basically says "Okay, we're running out of film, so everybody just stop acting and we'll drop some frogs from the sky and roll some credits."

Magnolia was basically three hours and eight minutes of my life that I will never, ever get back; of course, it seemed like much longer than that. But right up until the end, I sort of figured that the storylines were going to merge and make sense. So now I've been burned - once bitten, twice shy. And, thus, Lost scares me.

The story is absolutely amazing - assuming that it is, indeed, a story, and isn't just a ten-year long Magnolia. But I'm afraid that the same thing is going to happen - that the writers will eventually realize that there is no way to possibly pull all of these threads together; that there's no way to explain how Jack's father and Hurley's grandmother played pinocle with Kate's abusive stepfather and the blonde prophetess that taught Desmond how to see the future; and so, for the last episode, it will turn out that the whole story was dreamed up by Bob Newhart while he was napping at South Fork in Dallas (apologies to Gen X,Y and Zers - those are references to old TV shows in which whole storylines were explained away as dream sequences. It speaks to my own anti-hip status that I never actually saw either of Bob Newhart's shows, and only saw those episodes of Dallas that my first wife forced me to watch.

Maybe I'm just being paranoid - but it seems that the writers have cast all caution to the winds. And let's face it - they may be results oriented, rather than principle oriented; they may be of the opinion that it's okay to create unresolvable situations since their job is entertainment, not honest storytelling.

That's certainly a valid viewpoint. However - the names of the writers are prominently displayed at the start of each episode. Unless those are nom de plumes, then the writers had better pony up with some good resolutions, or they'd better go into something like a Witness Protection Program, because folks like me will be huntin' 'em down : )