KING OF THE HILL

With the dozen or so main characters, it is hard to pin point whether any of them were essential.

For example, take your favorite character and imagine that they were never in the series. That character's back story, island life and eventual sideways appearance would be erased from the plots. Never a hint that they were present in the story lines. Now think to see if that missing character would have made any difference in how the series ended.

My conclusion is that it would not.

The ensemble cast was a diverse group of individuals who had some strengths, more weaknesses but common emotional themes that some of them could have be interchangeable during a budget cut. Call it the Neil "Frogurt" effect.

In Star Trek terms, the Frogurt character was a red shirt . . . a disposable crew member who often got killed on the mission in order to show the dangerous nature of space travel. Frogurt really did not have to be a character in the series. He played an immaterial, irrelevant bystander for most of the action sequences.

For example, if the original story synopsis was followed, Jack was supposed to have been killed off in the pilot episode. If Jack was killed off in episode one, or was never a character in the series, would have LOST traveled on a different story path, or would the ending been different? Probably not. There were plenty of other "candidates" on the lighthouse dial and cave walls.

Was Locke an important part of the Season 6 final episodes? No, his character was already dead. MIB was the character (in Flocke form) that made the mayhem, threatened people, killed people and ran around trying to convert followers. If Locke was never in the series, nothing major would have gone missing from the story lines. Some other person (Sawyer perhaps) would have gone down the well to turn the frozen donkey wheel.

If we look at the island climax and its after math, there were only two essential characters left: Hurley and Ben. Ben was not even an original story character, but a short term guest star who was to be killed off by the survivors. Hurley was the everyman character whose insecurities made him the background observer of events and conflicts like the TV audience. In many ways, the show and its themes filtered through the Hurley perspective.

In the child's game of King of the Hill, Hurley and Ben would be the ones at the finish line. Hurley would claim the flag. But there standing in the island ending does not mesh with the sideways ending because Hurley did not awaken all of his friends, and Ben respectfully refused to move on with Hurley. So, neither was critical in getting Jack to the church to meet his dead father.

Which gets us back to the convoluted split ending. What was more important: the island ending or the sideways ending? And why was the sideways ending contingent upon the characters remembering the island events? And if those events were so important, why did the sideways (dead) characters forget all about them? There is an illogical loop at work. The gears of "Live Together or Die Alone" do not mesh with the sideways "Live Alone and Die Together" for many of the central characters' conclusion. It would seem that no one character was more important than any other character in the primordial soup that was the lost story lines.