SPOILER ALERT FOR JAMES (or anyone else who hasn’t seen every episode of Lost and is planning to at some point in the future)

The final season and complete collections of Lost have arrived on DVD and Blu-Ray this week, and the special feature that is being dissected the most is the 12 minute epilogue mini-episode, “The New Man in Charge.”  The feature was teased as a way that the show could address some of the questions that weren’t answered in the final season in a fun, interesting, and canonical way.   I finally got a chance to watch this feature, and below are my thoughts.   Last chance to turn away if you don’t want to be spoiled.  And if you do want to see the video now, just click here – until the video is forced down, of course.

The New Man in Charge gives a glimpse of how Hurley and Ben run things in their time as stewards of the Island.  Unfortunately, we don’t actually get to see them on the Island at all, just taking care of some loose ends elsewhere in the world.  The first scene shows Ben shutting down the outpost that has been providing the DHARMA food drops.  So we pretty quickly learn how and why those drops kept occurring.  The show makes light of how fans were frustrated and demanding of answers by way of the DHARMA employees demanding answers from Ben.  A flurry of answers come by way of an old DHARMA training video.  The video provides a few answers about things that  took place on the Island, but also, in the grand tradition of the show, raises more questions as it answers old ones.  OK, so we know what the Hurley-bird was, and why there were polar bears on the Island, but the meatier reveals about the infertility issues and the purpose of Room 23 intrigued me, and I wanted to learn more.  If the electromagnetism caused the fertility problems, were they always there, or could women safely give birth before the Incident at the Orchid station?  And why was DHARMA experimenting on Hostiles and risking their wrath by violating the truth?  I mean, Chang explains why, but it just seems foolish.  Still, knowing that they were experimenting on humans does explain the psychological experiments going ion in the Pearl Station, and it just makes DHARMA that much creepier in general.

The second scene is all about the character that people were whining about throughout the final season – Walt.  I was interested in learning more about him, but I was OK without him playing a huge role in the series’ endgame, as his character did get some degree of closure, albeit not in the context of what he could do for the Island. Well now we see that his special-ness can be used to help his father, and possibly the other dead people whose spirits are trapped on the Island, to move on. Again, an answer that is intriguing and makes me wonder how exactly Walt would be able to do that. Is that the “job” Hurley was offering him? And how did Walt, who was living in New York, end up in an institution in LA? And why does he look older than me?

Overall, I enjoyed this epilogue, and it was nice to get a glimpse at what Hurley was up to when he was in charge of the Island.  I would have liked to have seen he and Ben actually on the Island, maybe checking in on Rose, Bernard, and Vincent, or cleaning up some of the wreckage of 815 or 316, or burying some bodies on Boone Hill, or something like that.  And while I choose to believe that Hurley got Desmond home to Penny and Charlie, a verbal confirmation of that would have been nice.  And yeah, I can see how people who were expecting a laundry list of answers might be disappointed by TNMIC.  But for people like me who are just happy to get more new Lost and get a few old mysteries resolved at the same time, it’s a pretty nice way to add a little more to the Lost universe.