Well, another season finale for LOST has come and gone, and as usual, we're left scratching our heads. We've got tons of questions to ask that have replaced the questions of season finale's of yesteryear. Remember when we wondered what was in the hatch? Remember when we wondered what would happen when the hatch was blown? Season three gave us the first flash forward, and season four gave us who was in the coffin as well as a blown freighter.

But season five left us with something a little different. If you were like me, you were looking forward to finally meeting Jacob. Well, we got him right away, but we were introduced to someone else--a sort of anti-Jacob. Now, the show has always been about duality. From the first episodes we met Locke telling Walt that there is a yin to every yang. Jack was a man of science, and Locke was a man of faith. Free will has always been battling determinism, and just when we think we have a solid idea of where the show it taking us we know we can count on getting a curveball thrown our way.

Well, I hope so, at least. As much as I loved what they did with much of the finale, there has been a lingering feeling that something important, to me at least, isn't going to be tied up.

I really hope I'm wrong.

It's concerning Faraday's character. When last we saw him, he was taking his last breath of life courtesy of a bullet wound from his own mother, but just before that, he was a character who had been in the process of trying to break his own rule--Whatever happened, happend.

Now, it might not seem like much, but his reasoning was that he never considered the variables and only considered the constants. Great. That makes sense, but hasn't the show only established that there is one character who resides outside of the rules? That character being Desmond. Well, Faraday goes on to explain that they all have free will and can change the timeline. I realize that this is free will once again battling determinism, but why such a paradigm shift for Faraday? Didn't he establish that Desmond was the variable? I realize he was gone for a while, but will we find out what caused him to change his mind, or will we be left with what we have?

If this isn't addressed, we've got a sad end to the Daniel Faraday character. His legacy will be left as one who died without any other cause then to be the guy who lived up to the expectations of dying as his destiny determined. I feel that if it isn't addressed, we can write this off as the writers figuring out a way to write the character off the show as clumsily as possible. Please address this, LOST-masters. I beg you. I really don't have any reason to believe that this won't be addressed other than a feeling.

I will say that I love the way that Locke's character has been handled. I hope he remains dead and we only have the anti-Jacob version of Locke now. If Faraday's death is sad, Locke's death, in the current situation, would be a friggin' tragedy. A broken man who died for no reason--a man who became a pawn of the battle between Jacob and the anti-Jacob and nothing more. Now, that death isn't a cheat in the same way Faraday's character is a cheat. There hadn't been a character change we weren't aware of before his demise.

Now, I know we might get a season premiere where everything is set in its right place. The bomb did its job and millions of possiblities could occur. Do we really want that, though? We've got a season left, and I doubt that the writers want to reset the show for the final 16 episodes. The paradoxes would be a writer's nightmare. I also figure that the Jacob and anti-Jacob bits will become the crux of the final shows. This revelation show us there is something bigger than the characters, but the basis of the show has always been about the characters. No matter what has happened in the grand scheme of things, the characters still come first in the writing, so I just ask that we get some sort of resolution with Faraday.

One thing's for sure, though. None of us viewers can say we really know until 2010.