'Lost': Rethinking my crazy-ass thinking while cleaning toilets

The week has reached its end, and there should be a new Doc Jensen column here for you to read. Right? After all, I promised you as much a couple days ago when I posted an item in this space apologizing for the absence of my promised Wednesday column. Well, guess what? I’m here again, in this space, to offer you yet another apology. You see, a funny thing happened since I made my Friday pledge, something I like to call … work.

For when the last season of Lost concluded two long weeks ago, my editors took me aside and said, Look, dude. We know you’d like nothing better than to spend the next nine months sitting in your office eating Ding Dongs and swilling vodka while combing through Wikipedia for ideas for new theories — but not this year. In this economy, you gotta earn your keep, or we gotta cut you loose. So here are your options: You can clean the toilets, or you can write about summertime reality television. What’s it gonna be?

About 20 hours of scrubbing and bleaching later, I have found time to file this item, informing you of yet another delay.

The good news is that I do a lot of my best thinking while I’m in the bathroom. And so, during the course of my janitorial work, I have had a of couple epiphanies that I intend to share with you in my final column. For example:

Last week, I put forth the theory that Juliet’s detonation of Jughead would result a new Lost timeline,one in which The Swan will never be built and Oceanic 815 will nevercrash. Bundled within my theory was another theory: The past-aways atground zero of Jughead’s paradox-producing explosion who were touchedby Jacob will be given the chance to relive their timelines anew withcomplete knowledge of their "past lives," if you will, beginning at thepoint in which each of them was touched by The Island’s resident (andpossibly now deceased) mystery man. I argued that season 6 would tellthe story about how each of these people will ultimately choose to comeback to The Island, and that their individual flashbacks will tell thestory of why they made that choice and if they were able to live theirlives differently with knowledge of how they lived their lives before.Got all that?

Apparently not. In fact, a great many of you saw a glaring hole inmy time-travel logic. It’s one of those headache-inducing things tothink about, and even write about, but it goes like this: Timetravelers can’t go back in time and change the past in such a way thatprevents them from going back in time in the first place. It’s theGrandfather Paradox: You can’t go back in time and kill yourgrandfather before you were born, because then he never would havesired your father so he could sire you, so you could go back in timeand kill your grandfather. Yep: Ouch.

As the man who is proud to have concocted The Grandfather Pair-a-Docs Theory(to wit: Jack’s grandfather, seen in "316," is actually Jack himself),I am bummed that I didn’t catch this flaw in my own thinking. But I’vecome up with a response, thanks to my toilet bowl scrubbing, and Iintend to share it with you … soon. Here’s the deal: I gotta cover E3next week here in Los Angeles, but in my free time, I’ll be putting thefinal touches on my column, which will also include my thoughts on therevelation that the Four Toed Statue is actually the Egyptian goddessTaweret (you can find a really good write-up on the deity here),as well some other fun stuff. By the way, my partner in "Totally Lost"crimes-against-good-humor, Dan Snierson, believes that the detonationof Jughead caused the destruction of the Four Toed Statue. I like thatone! What do you think? Please, share your Taweret musings below.

Be seeing you — soon. I promise/(hope)!

Doc Jensen