What I Watched Yesterday: The Office & Lost

The Office Season Finale: That was a funny episode; a huge improvement over the last few episodes.   A lot happened this week (SPOILERS AHEAD):

• Toby leaves Dunder-Mifflin to go to Costa Rica, but never tells Pam about his crush on her.  Michael can't withhold his irrational hatred of Toby, even as he leaves.
  
• Toby's replacement, Holly (played by Oscar nominee Amy Ryan), starts to like Michael (is that even possible?) while helping "mentally challenged" Kevin (the funniest part of the episode)
  
• Phyllis takes over for Angela as the office party planner and does an excellent job
• Pam gets accepted at her graphic design school, but will need to spend three months away from Jim in New York
  
• Jim, realizing that all of the best moments in his relationship with Pam have occurred at the Office, decides to propose to Pam.
  
• Andy proposes to Angela, although at the end of the episode, Angela ends up in Dwight's arms
• Ryan gets caught double-counting sales to Dunder-Mifflin Infinity and gets arrested.  Over the course of the season, he was shown being an arrogant jerk, so this was deserved.  Ryan was putting pressure on Jim to make sales, so Jim closes some deals and pushes back on someone in management for the first time.
  
• Jim chickens out of proposing to Pam because he doesn't want to steal Andy's thunder
  
• Michael talks to Jan and finds out she is having a baby via in vitro fertilization (isn't that expensive?  Jan still isn't working).  Michael agrees to be Jan's Lamaze partner.
  

Great ending to what was, unfortunately, an uneven season.  The best part of the season was the stories of the various couples (Jim & Pam, Michael & Jan, Dwight & Angela).  The writers seem to be running out of office politics types of stories, but we'll see if they have any juice left after they launch the spin-off series next spring.

Lost:  This was a great set-up to the Season Finale in two weeks.  It's kind of like The Two Towers in the Lord of the Rings trilogy where all of the chess pieces get moved around the board.  What I liked (SPOILERS AHEAD):

• We see a flash forward with the Oceanic 6 arriving in Hawaii after their rescue.  It was nice to see them greeted by their families.
• Hurley, Locke and Ben working together as a team to save everyone on the island.  I like how Ben is still an untrustworthy bastard, even if he tries to be a hero.
• We find out the danger posed by the freighter (lots of C4 explosives on board) and Keamy's team of mercenaries.  Daniel Faraday is aware of the danger of the Orchid station from his time travel adventures (we don't know how, just that he knows).
  
• The Sawyer and Jack team-up to try to stop Keamy's team.
  
• We see hints of the future of the Oceanic 6: Hurley and his mental health issues, Jack and the trauma with his late father, Sayid and Nadia reuniting, Kate bonding with Aaron, and Sun resolving her previously unspoken conflict with her evil father.  Jack also discovers that Claire was his half-sister.
  
• Daniel and Sayid start to take some of the Oceanic 815ers back to the freighter (they didn't know it was rigged with explosives).
• Sayid and Kate get captured by Richard Alpert and the Others.  It's going to be fun to see the war between Widmore and Ben play out.
• I suspect that Juliet will be one of those killed in the finale.  She's not one of the Oceanic 6 and her story seems to be coming to an end.  She lost out in the Jack-Kate-Sawyer-Juliet love quadrangle.  Ben "owns" her, but Widmore seems to be killing off anyone of value to Ben (his "daughter", for instance).
  

Overall, an excellent episode with lots of intrigue.  I can't wait for the finale.