Could it be that Daniel Faraday was actually an original member of Dharma? The opening of the episode seems to suggest –- or, at least, I initially assumed — that Daniel is there after the big bright light when poof and the island disappeared. But what if he was a worker, a physicist with Dharma would maybe did one experiment too many on that wall (maybe he caused The Incident!) and has been unstuck in time ever since? There were strong suggestions last season that he was – the memory loss, the reference in his journal to Desmond being HIS constant.

The hardest part about potentially watching a career and newspaper go kaput is not so much the actual ending, but the mixture of glee and empathy with which many of our colleagues are greeting it. In the last week, we have been subjected to “news” reported by two television stations, a radio station, a newspaper and some dude with a Twitter feed in St. Louis — and those are only the ones we here at America’s Fish saw, heard or read; there were certainly more that we missed — that the Rocky Mountain News is going to close . . . tomorrow. Maybe the next day. The Twitter feed even reported at 3:34 a.m. Tuesday that we were going to close later that day. Alas, we did not.

So here it is 2009, and we here at America’s Fish have been so preoccupied with the potentially impending demise of a newspaper and the impending, potentially now-annual loss of a newspaper job that we have left the news of Mike Shanahan’s firing float atop our little pond like a dead fish for nearly three weeks.