It's ALL to Make you Buy Pizza

So I spent a couple of hours last night watching the season finale of LOST on ABC. That's good news for the series' producers and ABC, and of course their advertisers. The show tied together some threads and made some things make sense, but it also left viewers hanging. And exploring this whole phenomenon, I found out that the marketing men (and women) in the little black rooms have tied this series to a whole plethora of web and phone and e-mail interfaces that are intended to suck viewers deeper into the vortex that is LOST. And of course to hold them there long enough to pipe the advertisers' messages into our brains.

So the finale brings the sailboat to shore, on which we find Desmond, the man who was in the Hatch pushing the button until John Locke took over. Seems he has been trying to sail away since running away from the hatch, and all he has been able to do is get back to the same island. We learn from a backstory, that the sailboat is named "Elizabeth" and is owned by none other than Libby (a contraction of Elizabeth) who was gunned down by Michael in his efforts to get Walt back.

And why did Desmond have the boat from Libby - she gave it to him to forget her dead husband David. Seems that he wanted to sail to the Mediterranean but died before accomplishing that. So Desmond wants to sail the boat around the world to win money from his long lost love's father, who happens to have served on the board of the Hanso Foundation, which operates the Dharma initiative etc., etc. Desmond's "partner" in the hatch was the CIA man who turned Sayid into a torturer (earlier in season 2). And the connections go on and on making "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" look like a child's game.

And it makes for a fascinating exploration of an alternative universe. But remember one thing: IT'S ALL TO GET YOU TO BUY STUFF. Some of the hyperlinks and websites are tied into Sprite, others to Monster.com, others to other advertisers. And it is all to get you to BUY stuff.

Don't be fooled. It's all about the Benjamins. Including the book that Desmond is reading in the Hatch - Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.

So enjoy the ride but understand there are men in little dark rooms trying to sell you things.