ABC's LOST—spoiler alert!—is a television program set upon a mysterious tropical island marked by strange electromagnetic properties, hot-weather polar bears, smoke monsters, time travel, reincarnation, hippies, and nuclear experimentation. Somehow, though, gender relations on the island remain largely unaffected!

Several of LOST's female characters have been on a slow march toward wifey since the series' inception. My colleague Sady Doyle encapsulated the lady-half of the series thusly:

Claire’s most interesting story line was having a baby and a boyfriend. Sun’s most interesting storyline is having a husband and a baby. Kate’s most interesting story line is having two potential boyfriends, between whom she cannot choose, and also a baby eventually. Juliet’s most important storyline was that her boyfriend might have thought for 1.5 seconds about liking another girl so she had to fall down a mine shaft and explode three times on screen.

The trend continued in the series' penultimate episode. Guess what? It's job interview time on LOST! And when sleepy-eyed island guardian Jacob convenes the surviving members of his "candidate" pool he had chosen to replace him, he finally explains one of the enduring mystery of the series—why are all the surviving "candidates" totally guys?

Let's find out!

Jacob explains why he scribbled a bunch of names in a cave and then systematically crossed them out until he found the right person to take over his position—if he didn't, everybody ever would die! So anyway, at last count, the five remaining un-crossed-out candidates for the job of protecting the entire world from evil were James "Sawyer" Ford, Jack Shepard, Hugo "Hurley" Reyes, Sayid Jarrah, and either Sun or Jin Kwon (now we know that the candidate was almost certainly Jin—more on that in a second). Then, Sayid and the Kwons died, leaving an all-dude cast of Sawyer, Hurley, and Jack to duke it out.

So then Kate is like, "Why did you cross my name off the wall?"

And Jacob, to his credit, is franker than most biased interviewers! "Because you became a mother," he admitted. "It's just a line of chalk in the cave, the job is yours if you want it." That's right: Kate just got mommy-tracked! For the job of saving the world from evil by preventing a half-human-half-smoke entity from leaving this tropical island divorced from time. Funny how the laws of physics don't apply here, but gender roles are still holding steady.

And then Kate—who traveled back to polar bear island for the express purpose of not being a mommy anymore, and returning her accidental foster baby to biological mother Claire (long story)—is like, "oh, fuck."

Hey! Guess which of the remaining candidates was also a parent?

* Jin Kwon: Dad. Since Jin's wife Sun was a mother, we can assume that Jacob nixed her from the candidate pool as well, meaning that Jin was the Kwon still in the running. Sun had raised her daughter alone while Jin was lost in time for a while, so he had never even seen his only daughter; he had spent the last several years trying to find a way back to his family. Of course he would be interested in taking this thankless desert island job that would have alienate him from them forever!

* James "Sawyer" Ford: Dad. Back in the real world, Sawyer inseminated a woman he was attempting to swindle out of some money. Sawyer has also never met his progeny, daughter Clementine, but he did throw her some anonymous cash at some point. Awww.

* Jack Shepard: Daddy! When Kate and Jack left the island with Claire's baby, he took on fathering duties for the displaced kid. Then Jack grew a beard, got addicted to pills, and abandoned his foster child to go back on another zany island adventure. Sounds like a capable protector of all human life to me!

But none of them are mommies, so—hey—would they like a job?

In this edition of Sexist Beatdown, Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown and I reconvene to solve the enduring mystery of ABC's LOST: Why have all the compelling female characters been systematically eliminated from the plot, while Jack is allowed to live on as Dr. McFixALot, a character who exists only to fail unspectacularly at everything and shoot enduring looks at Kate?

Theories:

a. The plane crash unhinged Jack from space-time, forcing him to relive the same moment in his life over and over again. In that moment, Jack attempts to fix something in the dumbest way possible, and fails unspectacularly at it;

b. Jack is an agent of the smoke monster, sent to the island to torture women into killing themselves;

c. The Island represents the purgatory between the states of Jaded Spinal Surgeon With Daddy Issues and Bearded Alcoholic With Lady Issues;

d. Jack's asshole is a black hole.

SADY: Hi there! Are you LOST? Have I LOST you? It would be a shame if I LOST my internet connection! Also, kill me.

AMANDA: Wait, let me do one: I'm beginning to think i have "LOST" interest in LOST this season.

SADY: I have LOST track of all the times I have LOST interest in LOST, really.

AMANDA: It's part of the whole deja vu thing.

SADY: It stems from the fact that we seem to have LOST 98% of all the female characters.

AMANDA: Right. I think we're down to two now! Wait, plus, Ana Lucia 2.

SADY: Yes, that Ilana chick! I do not know what is up with LOST (not letting go of the caps!) and the death of all the ladies. It is true, however, that it is a big hit on some fronts! For example: having more than one character of color, and having them have conversations with each other. Conversations that do not go like, "I am an Asian man! I hear that you are Latino! Truly, neither of us is a white person." Instead, they talk about Star Wars fan fiction. Which is fine by me!

AMANDA: Sure. And all-capital LOST has always had a tendency to dispose of characters after their most compelling storylines have been drained, or before even. I mean, a lot of people die on this show. What I want to know is where this murderous impulse was when Jack was bloated on pills and drunk at work and wouldn't shave and was trying to make his fake baby fly back with him to a magical island? I could have dealt with Jack dying.

SADY: I can constantly deal with Jack dying. Every episode, I hope it will be the one where Jack makes a cry face or starts to make a speech about "fixing things" and then a polar bear sneaks up behind him and eats his entire head. My problem with the "most interesting story lines" though, to be troublesomely ladybusiness for a moment, is this: Claire's most interesting story line was having a baby and a boyfriend. Sun's most interesting storyline is having a husband and a baby. Kate's most interesting story line is having two potential boyfriends, between whom she cannot choose, and also a baby eventually. Juliet's most important storyline was that her boyfriend might have thought for 1.5 seconds about liking another girl so she had to fall down a mine shaft and explode three times on screen.

[youtube:v=ksVUXrfi6F8]
Some LOST fan actually made a slow-motion YouTube tribute to Jack's awful need to fix everything all the time. Soundtrack: Coldplay's "Fix You." Super bonus: Not the only LOST fan with this same idea.

AMANDA: Shannon has the best ladybusiness storyline, which is revealing to viewers that she's not a stuck-up bitch by making sweet love to a man she had previously regarded as a terrorist. I had forgotten that Shannon even existed until LOST had to go back and reset this whole thing. But yes. Yes. Juliet's death is the one that really bothered me, because she is this woman who always had really interesting motives that had little to do with which boyfriend she wanted to pick. And she was never all that likable. She was the woman you were supposed to not root for while you were rooting for Kate to claim both of the boyfriends. But then, LOST turns her into the Dharma initiative's model wife – a role that she has played before, except that she was unhappy and independent and rebellious in that role. And after LOST made Juliet accept that role happily, boom. Dead! Storyline resolved.

SADY: Yeah, precisely. And I want to believe that she just exploded because she got a role on a TV show! But it is true that she showed up, and she had all of these complicated, unreadable motives, and this completely complex and interesting back story, and then she was like: hey, a boyfriend! I love my boyfriend. Oh no, my boyfriend! EXPLODE. And this is a thing that is interesting to me, because: I don't think LOST is great art. I think LOST is good-to-great pulp fiction. I have a high tolerance for good-to-great pulp fiction, as it happens. But it's so masculinized — it's seen as such a boy thing — that the only roles for women (or plotlines for women) are things about love interests. The boys are all saving the world and the girls are all saving their marriages.

AMANDA: Yeah. And we have to make sure to fix Jack so that Jack can get back to saving us. But can we turn to one of the only remaining original ladies for a moment, the one with the most explicitly ladybusiness plotline?

SADY: Yes! Let us do so!

AMANDA: I am speaking, of course, of Sun, who crash-landed on a desert island with her abusive husband and then gradually taught him not to be such a huge jerk anymore so they could fall in love again.

SADY: Ha, yeah. And then we learned that she had to keep her cardigan buttoned on a tropical isle because SHE WAS A CHEATER! CHEATER! And he was insecure.

AMANDA: The interesting thing about Sun's plotline now, is that if the plane hadn't crashed, we see Jin being taken away by customs and Sun escaping him. And we're supposed to be... sad... about this development, because we know that if Sun had just WAITED IT OUT on a DESERT ISLAND, Jin would have come around.

SADY: Ha, yeah. And here is where my feelings about feminism and romance and storytelling get all complicated, because: I actually do love the romance of Sun and Jin on some levels. I like that it's a story of a marriage getting into this unbelievably shitty place, because two people misunderstood each other, over and over, profoundly. I know that story. "I was trying to be what you wanted! So now I am unhappy! And mad at you!" "Yes, well, I was trying to be what YOU wanted, so now I am EQUALLY UNHAPPY, and mad at YOU." And I like that it's a story about two people getting to re-know each other. But, yeah: Sun getting away from Jin in the airport? Not such a bad idea, given the story we were told! Actually!

AMANDA: Yeah. And I feel like a lot of long-running stories like this often engage with storylines where stuff like abuse is eventually just forgotten in order to preserve these relationships between the show's main characters, when really: Kate, a person who BLEW UP HER STEPDAD because he abused her mom, would probably never have indulged Jack in his fantasy to crash land herself on the island, given his extremely unstable behavior in front of the child they were raising together. But Kate and Jack, it must endure, so of course they are going to go back together.

SADY: Right. I mean, Jack? Unstable, abusive, alcoholic stalker. With lady problems. Who will not trust a grown lady doctor to do a basic surgery on him without passing up anesthesia so he can be hyper-critical of her operating moves the whole way through. THE ROMANCE OF KATE AND JACK MUST NEVER DIE! Because... they gave each other sexy looks in the pilot episode? With all the plot threads they have exploded or forgotten or just plain shrugged and said "sorry, not going to happen" about, I really am puzzled as to why THIS is the one that they will just never, ever, ever drop.

AMANDA: Right. And I was discussing with someone earlier how the most exciting thing about LOST has always been figuring out the rules to the game, but now that we're getting to the final season, it's becoming more and more obvious that there are no real rules to figure out, and that the creators are more interested in putting the finishing touches on these longrunning personal relationships. Perhaps they will surprise me in the end! But from where I'm standing now it looks like they're putting more effort into reestablishing John Locke as Disabled Character who falls off his wheelchair out of pride—I mean really?—than explaining to me where the fucking black hole is or whatever

SADY: Yeah. The plot points are being doled out! However, what is more important, for some reason, is making sure that we know who ends up with who running whose temp agency. So... okay. My prediction is that Hurley and Kate end up together. That's what I'm pushing for!

AMANDA: Haha. I know. I love how that was set up as such a MYSTERIOUS REVEAL. It is ROSE who runs the temp agency!

SADY: "Welcome to Healthful Lectures Employment Services. How may I lecture you today?"

AMANDA: So, I've been watching the episodes this season around my male companion, who has not watched the rest of the show

SADY: Oh, FOR REALS? That has got to be a bucketload of explanations!

AMANDA: Well ... he just overhears the dialogue. And so I have on many occasions had the opportunity to hear his reaction to the dialogue in these episodes, and his reaction is, "This show sucks so hard." And he's not wrong. It is often terrible. I'm not going to stop watching it, but I do wonder how much I'm going to end up hating it when it's over.

SADY: I know. I'm hoping for a "Battlestar Galactica" finale where the answer turns out to be, like, Cavemen. But I do love the final seasons of shows, because you have to stop dicking around and decide what you are saying and amp up all the drama and emotion as far as you can. And for that, I am enjoying this season immensely. When it is over, however, I am confident that I will have learned one thing: JACK NEEDS TO FIX THINGS. That, I will never forget. Give Jack a thing! He will fix that thing! He needs to fix the thing you gave him! Does the thing need fixing? Jack Jack fixing fixing Jack fixing Jack.

AMANDA: And of course this final season is about Jack Returning to Being A Person Who Can Fix Things and Not a Dangerous Alcoholic Stalker Who Cannot Fix a Drink Without Spilling It All Over His Ridiculous Beard. It is Jack's greatest fix of all. Fixing himself.

A new sex shop has opened up on King Street in Old Town Alexandria, and ABC News is simply shocked!

"With its cobblestone streets and row houses, Old Town Alexandria, Va., is known for quaint colonial charm," write reporters David Wright and Jenna Mucha, before immediately shattering their idyllic tableau: "The newest boutique on King Street, then, tends to stop people in their tracks. La Tache sells unique adult novelty items"—such as lingerie, lotions, and sex toys, oh my.

Lotion and cobblestone? It can never be!

If this is such a Big Fucking Deal, why is it that Wright and Mucha the only ones who seem to care about this clashing-of-worlds? The two Old Town residents ABC News could find to interview—anonymously!—about this frightening new retail trend appeared to not give a shit. At all:

But the really interesting part is that in Old Town, the neighbors don't really seem to mind.

"It's certainly different. As long as it doesn't attract undesirable people," said one resident.

Another who lives nearby said she doesn't mind, "as Queen Victoria said, as long as it doesn't startle the horses."

Wait a second—that's the interesting part? That nobody cares? And that the suggestion that anybody did care was purely an invention of ABC News? More interesting, I think, is that between two news reporters, nobody could get "a resident" to say a quote as inflammatory as "It's certainly different" on the fucking record.

Photo by Afghan LORD.