To care about freedom, you have to have a big, grassy lawn. If you don’t have a few hundred square feet of grass to protect from the terrorists, you just can’t get it up for war. War, to those without lawns, is like squabbling over a good table at a bistro. Why not just relax and sit somewhere else?

I don’t like to watch
Good policy decisions rely on a firm grasp of such cultural differences. When one faction is surrounded by topless women on some pebble-covered beach on the Mediterranean and the other is eating dry white cake off a flimsy paper plate in an air-conditioned conference room, you’re going to have more than a few misunderstandings.

Similarly, when half of you chickens don’t watch TV at all, and the other half of you don’t want to admit how much TV you do watch, and all of you don’t want to be at work right now, in the middle of the summer, let alone wasting your time outlining your personal life for some TV hack, then all the little group activities around here are going to fall a little flat.

As you may or may not recall, last week was I Turned Off the TV and Did Something Great Week, and also Nothing in My Daily Life Is as Poignant or as Compelling as What I See on TV Week. Sadly, though, not one of you is willing to admit how impoverished your daily life is (Come on! We’ll all get a good laugh out of it, I promise!) and only those of you with some product, service or blog to promote told me what Great Thing you did instead of watching TV.

What you did want to discuss was Nate of “Six Feet Under.” In fact, I could probably change the name of this column to “I Like to Watch ‘Six Feet Under’” without much protest, but then I wouldn’t get to write about terrible shows like “So You Think You Can Dance,” plus I’d be out of a job in a few weeks. Nonetheless, in honor of the fact that these are the last days of Alan Ball’s macabre disco, we will definitely focus a lot of our attention on Nate and company. Those of you who plan to rent the DVD of the last season of “Six Feet Under” sometime next year should adjust your reading habits accordingly, because spoilers will be flying left and right until the final episode on Aug. 21. [In this column, you can just avoid the very last section, titled "No narm done."]

Dancing queen
But first let’s talk about “So You Think You Can Dance” (Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on Fox). Created by the same sophisticated geniuses who brought you “American Idol,” “SYTYCD” easily takes the crown as the current Worst Show on Television, since no one but the most extreme rubberneckers are watching “Being Bobby Brown” anymore, and watching “Big Brother 6″ really requires being diagnosed with a personality disorder or two.

“SYTYCD,” despite the promising title, is totally devoid of humor or irony or kitsch. You know how “Dancing With the Stars” was purposely cheesy, with the dorky hosts and the Lawrence Welk-style intonation of the title and the sparkly outfits and the outdated everything? All of that stuff actually made “Dancing With the Stars” digestible. Like a big glob of melted Velveeta on a terribly stale corn chip, the tackiness of “Dancing With the Stars” formed a protective kitschy coating to help you stomach the emptiness of watching D-listers learn to do the foxtrot.

Like “American Idol,” “SYTYCD” is self-important, flashy and deeply stupid. Think of the bad theme song and the odd, faceless pop singers and microphones you see during the opening credits of “American Idol,” but replace them with faceless break dancers. Oof. Then there’s the terrible voice-over — just think of how you feel when the host from “Rock Star” says the words “supergroup INXS,” and multiply it by 10. Throw in a vaguely pitiable gaggle of wannabe dancers and five dance instructors who’ve each been told that they’re being groomed to be the next Simon Cowell, and you’ve got a serious train wreck on your hands.

It turns out that, although making fun of some kid’s terrible voice can be amusing at times, cackling to the camera about how uncoordinated and pathetic a young dancer is just makes you look like a serious asshole. By the end of the grueling 90-minute premiere, three out of the five dance instructors were competing to be the biggest jerk of the show, with dorky Dan Karraty, who’s apparently to blame for half of the cheesy boy band moves in circulation, taking a slim lead over the rest. While it’s amusing to see Karraty enviously insulting the most talented competitor, Blake, for having too much “attitude,” the rest of this show ranges from tedious to chafing.

Brave new world
So why did I waste your time discussing it? Well, someone has to warn you away from the shoals of summer TV. This week, though, there’s some more substantive fare to look forward to: “Home of the Brave,” a documentary about Viola Liuzzo, the wife of a Detroit teamster who was murdered by Klansmen after a march for voting rights in Selma, Ala. I saw this film at Sundance last year and it had me weeping openly in a room full of critics, which I don’t need to tell you is as unlikely as it is unsavory.

I thought I’d seen enough films about the civil rights movement and that this would be more of the same old story, but Liuzzo’s tale is uncovered by the filmmakers with such patience and care that her fate feels extremely personal by the end of the film. “Home of the Brave” (Monday, Aug. 8, at 10 p.m. on Court TV) will make you want to stand up for what you believe in — or at least skip work and get drunk on cooking sherry.

Hall pass
See how European that makes you feel? Now all you need is some cured meats and topless girls. Since you don’t have the money for either, though, I’d suggest tuning in for the next “Kept” marathon on VH1. As demented as it sounds, this competition to become Jerry Hall’s kept man ended up being one of my guiltiest pleasures of the summer, what with all the man titties on display and all the petty fights over who would get to be Hall’s little bitch boy.

Best of all (don’t read this if you really plan to catch up on the show), Hall’s final choice was completely unexpected. While pretty ass-kissers Austen, Anwar and Maurizio seemed like the right candidates for the job, Hall went the courageous route and picked outspoken, dirty, wisecracking Seth instead. She later told the camera that if she were younger, she would’ve gone for big blond boy Austen (whom she called the “Birkin bag” of arm accessories), but now that she’s older, she wants to be around a guy who can make her laugh. I hear you, lady! Best of all, when Seth was led into the room with Hall’s friends, they all gasped in horror/delight and Seth quipped, “I know. I’m as stunned as you are.”

Of course, the show carefully sidestepped any implication that Hall’s man would be called upon to service her engine, and also coached the guys to do the same. So, sadly, we’re going to have to use our powers of imagination to fill in the rest. The cooking sherry should help.

Real grief
In contrast, “The Real World: Austin” has left very little to the imagination this season. Between making out naked in the shower and getting his face bashed in on the street, Danny has been at the center of this very explicit drama every step of the way, but last week’s episode took the (bad birthday) cake. While the cameras rolled, we witnessed Danny finding out from his dad that his mom had died.

The rest is eerily familiar to those of us who’ve lived through a similar phone call. First, there’s the disbelief: “No! Stop lying, Dad!” Then there’s the abject horror and the non-stop tears and the awkward attempts to comfort the bereaved. For a little comic relief, we get the roommates standing around saying really insightful stuff like “When one of your parents die, that’s, like, totally different from when your grandparents die.” Too true! What we’d really love to see, though, is all the roommates hiding in their rooms (like you know they did) so they don’t have to talk to Danny, since his grief makes them uncomfortable and they “don’t know what to say.” (News flash: “That really, really, really sucks” will always suffice.)

But Danny’s roller-coaster ride isn’t over! Next, we see the guilt. (Zoom in! Cue sad music!) Just in case you’re not sure why Danny’s feeling guilty, we flash back to Danny’s last conversation with his mom over the phone, just a few days earlier, during which she tells him she’s sooo glad he called and that she loves him sooo much, and he grunts incoherently in response, then gets off the phone quickly. “Wow! He really should feel guilty!” the preteens at home agree, not remembering that Danny’s estranged mom, who struggled with alcohol, quite possibly let him down countless times until he felt nothing but anger toward her. Let’s not explain any of that now, though; let’s maximize the drama by cutting back to Danny, who’s saying he’ll never forgive himself.

Next week’s preview shows Danny’s girlfriend, crying. He’s really sad and he might not come back to live in Austin at all! Is he kidding? What is wrong with that kid?

So, has the world’s most popular traumedy, “The Real World,” gone too far, once and for all, or is anything that’s fascinating to watch totally OK to broadcast? Obviously it’s a tough call, since they have all this footage of the kid falling apart, exactly the kind of scenario they’re trained to hunger for. But to me, the flashback was what sent this episode over the edge. Bad enough that Danny has to suffer such a major loss while the cameras roll, bad enough that he feels terrible for having nothing but unkind words for his mom on the show thus far, but then they go out of their way to remind everyone what a jerk he was in that final phone call, without making the slightest effort to protect him? If this were a true documentary, they could argue that raw footage was what the show was all about. But anybody who believes that “The Real World” sets out to capture reality — instead of choreographing cheesy soft-core action — is too busy practicing the moves on “SYTYCD” to care about Danny, anyway.

If the producers want to traffic in such heartless fare, they should really consider “The Real World: Rikers Island,” so we can watch pretty teenagers get knifed in the gut, right before our eyes.

No narm done
Personally, I prefer my televised tragedies to be fictional. What I love the most about “Six Feet Under” (Spoilers ahead! Skip this if you haven’t seen last week’s episode. The episode that airs Sunday Aug. 7 won’t be discussed here) is that it’s the only show I can think of that makes tragedy positively delicious and delectable.

The demise of Nate feels cathartic, not only because his behavior ranges from needlessly self-sacrificing to recklessly selfish and because he’s been unyieldingly lost for so many seasons now, but also because he affords us the chance to see big reactions by his family members, characters whose behavior has always been the perfect balance of organic yet impossible to predict.

And having Nate appear to recover from his “Narm!” episode and then die unexpectedly was brilliant. We got to see the family get scared, then assume that everything would be OK like it always is, only to have the rug pulled out from under them. Not only was this dramatically useful, but it’s often exactly what a big health crisis looks like — just when you think the person’s going to cheat death, they’re gone. As the kids on “The Real World” might say, it really, really sucks.

But at the same time, it’s beautiful. After someone dies, you become aware of exactly how much you cared about them, a process that’s at once unbearable and oddly exhilarating. And in the face of mind-bending grief, lots of friends disappoint you, but others show their true colors as loyal, dependable, generous people. This is what I love about Claire’s lawyer boyfriend — he comes through under pressure and exemplifies the kind of person she’s never had by her side, but so desperately needs.

More than anything, the little mundane details of death and grief and funerals are at once horrible and sad and hilarious and breathtaking. TV shows so often stick with the tragic and forsake all of the other emotions that death brings with it. “Six Feet Under” can be counted on not only not to pull any punches, but to paint all of the subtle shades of emotion that go along with death. Watching these last episodes of the show sometimes feels like confronting the inevitability of death itself. It’s frightening and horrible, but it also makes you aware of where you are, how you feel, and what you have right here and now.

Of course we’ll miss Nate. It’s impossible to feel so much resentment for someone whom you don’t relate to or care about. For all of his bad decisions, he was always so naive and innocent, because he never knew exactly what he was doing. Even when he breaks up with his pregnant wife, a pretty atrocious move no matter how you slice it, he has this blank, blameless look on his face like he has no notion of what a huge injury he’s inflicting. He just doesn’t want to fight anymore! It’s that simple to him. He doesn’t see that he can’t take the emotional risk of having a sick child or being committed to his true match, Brenda, so he chooses a woman, Maggie, who seems lovable because she has a tragic past and her complexities and needs aren’t as obvious as Brenda’s. In blowing off Brenda, Nate is demonstrating that he doesn’t want life’s unexpected twists and turns and complications, he wants peace and quiet. In that light, Nate definitely gets exactly what he wants.

Next week: Will “Kill Reality” succeed at killing reality? If not, “The Battle of the Network Reality Stars” will pick up where Jonny Fairplay left off. Plus: “Greg the Bunny” is back!

What no one tells you, of course, is that the former inevitably turns into the latter. No sooner have you put the finishing touches on your masterpiece than a phalanx of professionally smooth humans gathers to discuss how to peddle your brand to the appropriate demographic. “Who is your demographic, do you think?” they’ll ask you.

I don’t know, you’ll answer. Crazy people? Angry people? People who just want to create something lasting but end up pissing away their prime in extended Twitter exchanges and tedious teleconferencing calls?

Desperately seeking status

Just don’t say so out loud. Too many sullen artists and brilliant recluses have made that mistake before you, and they have a laundry room filled with glorious unsold paintings or brilliant unsold manuscripts to show for it. Face it, you’re going to have to sell something, eventually. Even surgeons and priests and teachers and executives at charitable foundations (especially them) have to sell something. Don’t stay in denial about the need to sell forever, because, short of genius grants and the kindness of strangers, the creative life isn’t possible without sales.

That said, it’s hard not to get fatigued by the swirling, bullshit-polluted waters of the promotional universe, with its gluppity glup and shloppity shlop. Think too long and hard about selling yourself into a new life, and soon you won’t be able to separate your “brand” from your actual personality, or differentiate between your friends and your professional networks. Then you’ll need to seek professional help — whether that’s with a psychotherapist or a social media marketing consultant is anybody’s guess.

HBO’s “How to Make It in America” (premieres 10 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 14) dives straight into the eternal hellfire of a self-promoting universe without apology, and, bewilderingly enough, does so with a scruffy, scattered, early-30-something dude who can’t seem to decide if he’d rather pass out business cards or pass out from drinking too many vodka shots at a loft party in Williamsburg. Our hero Ben (Bryan Greenberg) faces that timeless dilemma: follow another pipe dream, or pass the pipe?

Befitting a man who’s half stuck in the past — drinking too much and waking up in unfamiliar apartments — and half stuck in some dingy present he never anticipated, Ben wears a haunted look of ambition and dread and hope and self-hatred. Even when he tells you his next big plan, there’s a wavering in his voice that asks, “Will I ever make anything of myself or am I just a big loser?”

This makes the half-hour dramedy “How to Make It in America” a little bit like “Entourage,” except without the money, the fame or the hot girls. (“Entourage” executive producers Mark Wahlberg and Rob Weiss are also producers on this show.) Well, no, there are hot girls here, too, but they won’t sleep with these guys, because they’re obviously not friends with a big-time movie star.

Yes, as annoying as it is to watch Drama and Turtle harvest lip-glossy sea donkeys with their flaccid pickup lines, it’s even more disturbing to watch guys not get the girls because they’re not well-connected. No one is rising above anything in this picture; the underlying ego-driven, self-promoting, screw-or-be-screwed backdrop is still there, it’s just that we’re hanging out with the have-nots this time instead of the haves. When Ben’s friend Gingy (Shannyn Sossamon) tells him she’s going to give him one of their friend Tim’s photographs as a gift, he replies, “That’s great, I mean these are like a framed reminder of what losers all my friends are.”

Ben is kind of a dick, but you can hardly blame him. He’s constantly confronted with the fact that he’s stuck in limbo, that he hasn’t actually achieved anything, that his dreams might never come true. Ben’s ex, Rachel (Lake Bell), has moved on to a guy who’s opening a bar in Manhattan. When Ben tries to hit on a girl at a party, she introduces him to her other suitor at the party, saying, “Marco is a painter. He just got back from a solo show in Mexico City.”

This is the third show on HBO’s roster (along with “Bored to Death” and, to a lesser extent, “Flight of the Conchords”) that dabbles in the hipster-manchild milieu of Brooklyn, displacing Carrie Bradshaw’s Manhattan as the place where strivers dream big and sleep around and fumble for a cigarette in gloves with the fingers cut off. 

Despite his comment about what losers his friends are, everyone around Ben seems to at least be pursuing some creative goal, whereas Ben works in retail, moons over his ex, and frets about being a nobody — that is, until he and his friend Cam (Victor Rasuk) dream up a scheme so crazy, it just might work!

Your own personal interest in “How to Make It in America” mostly relies on whether you can relate to Ben’s plight of drunken despair mixed with uneasy ambition (I certainly can) and whether you want to relive those years (I certainly don’t), let alone relive them against a backdrop of apparently soulless, skin-deep debauchery. 

That said, Ben and Cam have their share of unsophisticated, naive charms. They’re at least a little grittier and more imaginative than the first-year corporate lawyers of ABC’s “The Deep End” or the competitive doctors-in-training of “Grey’s Anatomy” and the other cute professional-class underlings that we’re supposed to feel sorry for because — oh dear! — they’re not big swinging dicks yet. On those shows, the stakes have to be artificially pumped up by cancer and alcoholic moms and married lovers because otherwise, would we really believe that whether or not “Grey’s” Christina Yang gets to practice cardiothoracic surgery techniques before she actually starts a cardiothoracic surgery residency is going to determine her fate as a doctor?

Ben, on the other hand, is reduced to hanging out at the end of a long table at a bar, hoping to get a few minutes of face time with fashion designer John Varvatos, because he needs some connections to start his designer jean business. When he asks the guy next to him, “You a friend of John’s?” the guy responds, “No! I’m a friend of his, and he’s a friend of a friend of John’s,” you can’t help but cringe. At least we’re provided with a reminder of the sorts of things most of us would never be willing to do for money, fame or even hot girls. Even after kissing ass with reckless abandon, Ben and Cam are only granted an informational interview with one of Varvatos’ associates, who immediately tells them that they’re kidding themselves.

Meanwhile, even Ben’s egocentric blowhard friends are reduced to hustling constantly, whether they’re successful or not. “I didn’t find photography, photography found me,” Ben’s friend Tim (Is that Billy Lush?) tells some strangers at his gallery opening. “I was living in a halfway house, I stole a camera from The Wiz, and I just started shooting. I mean, true art is all in the streets, everything else is bullshit. By the way, I’m having a very special deal on my 20 by 24 prints …” See also: Johnny Drama, take deux.

But the lowest moments of the show come when Ben and Cam bicker over whether or not they should dip into criminal territory to get the ball rolling.

Cam: Shady or not, at least I’m still going for it, not working for the man like you.

Ben: What are you, 12? How long are you going to keep saying “Fuck the man” for?

Cam: Until we are the man!

Hold on a minute. Was that Turtle talking?

So that’s what it all boils down to: Ben and Cam want to be the man. They’re not designing jeans because they’re passionate about fashion — not as far as we can tell, anyway. They just want to have more money and get laid more often.

If this were a show about creative passion, then maybe Ben and Cam would be a little more interesting than the glossy professional yuppies on every other channel, straining to make that promotion and bag that babe. Unfortunately, as Ben and Cam demonstrate, more often than not the desire to “make it” is exactly as vague and empty as those two words imply. 

“How to Make It in America” may have set out to create a humbler, more down-to-earth version of “Entourage,” but it mostly succeeds at reminding us that not having fame or money doesn’t necessarily make you more down to earth. From world-famous pop stars like John Mayer to that kid who made fun of your shoes in the fifth grade, douche bags are born, not made.

Sure, it starts out innocently enough. “Addy” (Addison, played by Kate Walsh) is dashing around the medical offices where she works, and she bumps into some snag: the practice’s budget is in the red or someone forgot to make more coffee in the break room or someone’s wife stopped by to call her a whore. Addy doesn’t take kindly to such stressors – you’ll recall that her character moved from Seattle Grace (on “Grey’s”) down to sunny L.A. for a change of scenery, and so Shonda Rhimes could build a whole new show around a manic, eye-rolling, sexually compulsive redhead who’s also – you guessed it – the best gynecological surgeon anywhere in the known universe.

Like most busy and important surgeons, Addy spends most of her time mooning over some man or blurting out long-winded tirades about how everything is all mixed up inside of her, sort of like the spunky heroine of a Beverly Cleary novel, except with shinier hair and eyebrows plucked into a skeptical, vaguely demonic arch that says, “I’m not buying it, mister!” and also, “Should I sleep with you now, or later, during the strummy indie pop ballad montage?”

Anyway, Addy and her ragtag assortment of new-age-cliché-spewing, middle-aged, oversexed colleagues get into a colorful bickering match, and then – and this is where you have to start watching your back – a doe-eyed little child is wheeled in or hobbles in on his own or is led in by an obviously screwed-up drug addict of a parent, and even though at first it just looks like a minor subplot, soon a gaping hole opens up in the sexy-single-doctors-argue-flirting universe and the entire show is swallowed up by a deep, black abyss of sniffling toddlers with terribly negligent or uncaring parents and dead moms and single dads who can’t hug their own children without giving them wretched diseases, and before you know it, you’re surrounded by snotty tissues.

You think I’m exaggerating. So let’s just review the imperiled-child subplot on the last few episodes of the show, shall we?

Subplot A: Adorable saucer-eyed blond boy answers door, insists his mom is “a really good mother” in heartbreakingly earnest tone, but then reveals that she’s a hoarder! He’s living in a puddle of his own filth! The cast on his arm is infected! Mommy, meanwhile, can’t explain any of it to the drippy therapist lady Violet (Amy Brenneman). Finally, Child Protective Services is on its way over to take the little darling honey lamb away from his Mommy! Oh nooo! At the last minute, Mommy breaks down crying and admits that three years earlier she dumped her husband for no good reason! One day her ex picked up their daughter for his weekend visit and … they both drove over a cliff and died! It was all Mommy’s fault for dumping her perfectly good man, and for not letting her daughter stay home (she wanted to stay home with her brother, who was sick, but Mommy wouldn’t let her!) and, well, that’s why she started hoarding, the poor, poor woman! But look, she’s ready to make a change! She just threw out that bag of junk! And that one! Sniff, sniff.

Subplot B: Dell, the plucky male midwife at the office, has a pretty little daughter, Betsy, with his wife, who’s a former drug addict. As he’s driving away from the house one night, it explodes into flames! His wife and child are seriously injured! It turns out his wife was cooking meth on the stove – and Dell had found a pipe earlier but still left his daughter alone with his wife, so it was all his fault the whole thing happened! Betsy wants to see her mommy to say goodbye before Mommy dies but Dell won’t let them see each other. Mommy dies! Betsy is furious and hates her daddy forever and ever!

Subplot C: Woman gives birth to baby, but won’t even hold him after he’s born, because all she wants is the cord blood, which she needs to save her twin daughters’ lives. But there’s a hitch; there’s only enough to save one daughter. Oh God, how will Mom and Dad ever choose between their two little girls? Mom flat-out refuses to choose, but Dad admits that he has a favorite, which prompts Mom to tell Dad that he’s going to hell. Mom and Dad cry, baby boy cries, twin daughters cry, Addy cries, etc. Finally one daughter gets sick and they give the cord blood to the other one, and of course the camera is there so we can watch the whole family tell her, “Sorry, honey, but we’re going to save your sister and let you die.” Naturally, instead of telling them all that she hates their guts, the girl says something crazy like “You must survive!” to her sister, and then valiantly prepares to die as we far less valiantly cry our eyes out.

Those stories are just the tip of the iceberg. I also remember an episode where two parents ditched their kid, then admitted, when questioned, that they did it because the kid was, like, a major incovenience. Then there was another couple trying to have a baby just to harvest the cord blood. There was the single dad who couldn’t be in the same room with his immunity-compromised older daughter because he would get sick and probably die if he did, but eventually he couldn’t stand to see her alone anymore, so he left his toddler son behind, even though that meant he’d die and leave the kid fatherless. (And yes, we watched as he reunited with his daughter while his heartbroken toddler cried outside the door.)

How do the writers even come up with these scenarios, anyway? Do they just sit around in the writers’ room saying, “Hmm … Would it be crazy to have a kid eaten alive by enormous rats while his parents looked on, helplessly? Could we do that? What about a flesh-eating virus, that could work, couldn’t it?”

The strange thing with “Private Practice” is that you think you’re watching this middle-aged, professional-class, not very funny, not very sexy version of “Sex and the City,” and then suddenly you’re surrounded by miserable, weeping children and bad, sick, confused, exhausted parents. Next time we’re looking for those kinds of kicks, we’ll skip the little shop of melodramatic horrors and hang out in the sick kids’ waiting room at the local children’s clinic instead.

“It’s the Others, dude,” Hurley answers. “They caught us … again.”

Oh dear. It’s the Others (again), and they caught us (again). And just in case the repetitive nature of this show is, ahem, lost on you, the entire episode seems to be made up of nothing but questions.

“Who are you? Why are you holding us here?”

“I just lied to him, didn’t I?”

“So did they tell you why they burnt me with a hot poker?”

“Who do you care about, Kate?”

“So, what happened to your handcuffs?”

“Why are they after you? What did you do?”

Of course, after the discovery of the hatch or Charles Widmore’s evil corporation or the Dharma Initiative’s disturbing experiment, things really had to get simpler. Blaming misguided scientific experiments or some corporation? Maybe in 2005, but these days that stuff is beyond played. It’s the bread and butter of “Fringe” and, Christ, “Eureka!” and probably five or six shows on Nickelodeon and ABC Family, for that matter. No, far better just to scrap all of that and go back to the one thing that everyone scoffed at in the very beginning: the smoke monster!

And by the smoke monster, of course, we mean a pure, simple force of evil, now embodied in the dead, eeeeevil Locke. So even as the questions fly about, we’re just biding time, because all of the various folds that made this show intriguing – character studies, well-scripted flashbacks, unpredictable power struggles, retro eeriness that conjured up the Milgram obedience experiment – all of these things are flattened out into Good vs. Evil. In fact, everything about the current course of events feels like a retread of a really bad Indiana Jones movie (“Indy, cover your heart!”).

So mystical guy/other Other Dogen tortures Sayid as a “test,” then admits to Jack that they were planning to poison Sayid:

Dogen: We believe he has been claimed.

Jack: Claimed? By what?

Dogen: There is a darkness growing in him, and once it reaches his heart, everything your friend once was will be gone.

Jack: How can you be sure of that?

Dogen: Because it happened to your sister.

Oh my god! Finally a truly shocking revelation: Locke is Jack’s sister!

No wonder they, like, totally never, ever got along at all, dude!

OK, sure, he’s probably talking about Jack’s half-sister, Claire. Another question answered with a question. Claire is evil now? And yes, it’s almost enough to keep you watching, if you didn’t suspect that, in the end, it will all boil down to explosions, fisticuffs and a few mediocre revelations trumped up to be shocking and weighty. But then, if there was one thing we knew when we started watching this show six years ago, it was that the ending would be a disappointment. That’s just the smoke-and-mirrors nature of the smoke monster.

Don’t tell that to the promo team at ABC, though. Immediately after the last scene of Tuesday night’s episode, we cut to a preview for the next episode with a voice-over that bellows, “This is it! The final episodes of television’s biggest phenomenon are here! The time for questions is over!“

Come on, guy. The time for questions is so not over. But you had to go and say that, didn’t you? Now we’ll tune in next week in spite of ourselves, hoping for some real answers for once, and at the end of another hour, we’ll say to ourselves, “Yep. They caught us … again.” 

The Puppy Bowl

Maybe the men in shiny white tights no longer seem like adequate visual eye candy to match your outsize libido, or maybe you’re so old that what really makes your heartbeat race uncontrollably at this point is the sight of a 4-month old Chihuahua-pug mix, clumsily chasing a squeaky football toy across the goal line while a 3-month-old Lab-collie mix pounces on her own tail. Does this mean you’re a sad shell of your former self, or does it simply mean that you’re finally mature enough to acknowledge that nothing can make you lose sight of your own mortality quite as quickly as the sight of baby animals cavorting?

This year the festivities (3-5 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 7, on Animal Planet) include bunny cheerleaders, hamsters flying a blimp, and a kitten halftime show that’s guaranteed 100 percent clean and devoid of nipple flashing. And remember, your kids will enjoy the kittens a lot more than listening to Grandpa humming “Pinball Wizard” along with the Who, who are playing at halftime on the real Super Bowl.

The Puppy Bowl even features a human referee, who makes calls like “unnecessary ruffness.” Yes, sounds like you’d better watch with the sound off, or risk being so thoroughly polluted by Excessive Cuteness (also a personal foul) that you end up adorning your back dashboards with plush toys or take to wearing rainbow suspenders without irony for the rest of your days on earth, a style choice that’s at least as bad as singing along to “Won’t Get Fooled Again” for the 50,000,000th time in your life.

The Who?

Remember the old adage, “Those who never stop singing ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ are destined to get fooled more often than anyone else”? Still, nostalgia has a way of making fools of all of us. What else can explain why the network geniuses would turn back the clocks and break out another boomer indulgence for the halftime show this year? Let’s see, there was Springsteen, Tom Petty, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney … Apparently in the wake of nipplegate, TV execs suspect that if anyone under 65 is involved in the show, it’ll immediately devolve into a debauched, orgiastic spectacle of biblical, traditional-family-toppling proportions.

Why is it, though, that when marketing and development and publicity people want to cater to “the mainstream,” they’re always torn between peppy preteens, country-pop sensations, and guitar-solo-wielding retirees? When you turn on your TV set for some big concert, why is it always a prepubescent hottie you’ve never seen before or the classic rock radio that was playing when your high school boyfriend drove you to Hardee’s in his yellow Pinto for the first time?

News flash! Pete Townshend has revealed a part of the Who’s set list! It seems they plan to play — wait for it — “Baba O’Riley,” “Who Are You,” “Pinball Wizard” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again”! Man, I can’t wait to hear “Pinball Wizard” again, I haven’t heard that song in at least a week now. But speaking of being damned for all time, there’s always …

Faith Bowl III

It’s only natural that after several hours of watching various manly Christian hunks point toward the heavens and offer a big shout-out to the Man Upstairs in the wake of each particularly effective tackle or 5-yard gain, you’ll want to pay homage to the big boss-man in the sky yourself. Why not flip over to the Faith Bowl III on your local Catholic network, where “professional Catholic athletes” will “discuss how they live out their faith in the public arena of professional sports and what challenges to family life they face.” I can imagine a variety of challenges to family life that might come up for professional athletes, from locker room bare-ass bumps (or “moon landings” — thank you, “Modern Family”)  to the steady parade of bunny cheerleaders and assorted roving rodents in heat wandering around after every practice, anxious to snag a man with a million-dollar salary and glutes of steel.

Panelists will discuss “a sound Christian family life, and the important role of a husband and father in being a ‘true man.’” But unless the panelists are going to demonstrate their true manliness by disrobing and then killing gigantic roaches lurking in the shower or putting on some tight short-shorts and soaping up one of the luxury vehicles parked in their driveways, we’re not sure about the visual interest of this segment. The show’s producers might consider swapping out former baseball star Mike Piazza for someone who’ll look a little hotter loading up a washing machine wearing a French maid’s uniform, like, say… pretty much anyone else.

But speaking of offensive, there’s also …

The Ball Bowl

OK, fine. Comedy Central’s Super Bowl programming block is actually called “Tailgate Party 10,” but come on, it’s a ball-themed movie marathon that includes “Meatballs,” “Spaceballs,” “Balls of Fury” and “The Nutsacker.”

OK, I made that last one up. But speaking of far-fetched tie-ins, don’t forget…

The Toilet Bowl

Yes, the DIY Network just had to find the most fragile of threads to herd audiences from the big game to its third annual potty-centric festivities. Yes, thanks to the Broke But Aspirational Housewife Channel, while your resident ball-scratchers are fully engulfed in America’s yearly, fully sanctioned plunge into semi-violent homoerotica, you can sneak off to the bedroom TV set and escape into a world of dream bathrooms, bathroom makeovers and extravagant trips to Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Fascinating, really, how one’s fixation on potties seems to correspond inversely to one’s fixation on potty humor. You’re either the sort of animal who repeats a fart joke from “Spaceballs” or you’re the kind who daydreams about having a bathroom the size of a kitchen (and a kitchen the size of a living room, and a living room the size of a basketball court).

And then there’s Matt Muenster, a darling little morsel of a home contractor who’s happy to fill the Nate Berkus role in the American housewives’ extreme makeover fantasy, bathroom remodeling edition. If Mike Piazza won’t put on a bunny costume and retile our half-bath, we’re pretty sure that this smiling sweetie will. Mmm, look how he can caulk and talk at the same time! We ladies love a truly adaptive male — particularly on a day when our own captive beasts appear incapable of doing much more than grinding potato chip crumbs into the rug every time one of their boyfriends on-screen crushes one of his boyfriends on the field.

So let’s see: Puppy lovers, nostalgic boomers, homoerotic beastmasters, Christians, the testicle-obsessed and the bathroom-fixture-fixated. That pretty much covers all of us, doesn’t it?

Congratulations, TV executives! You’ve reduced the American population down to six key demographics. Just recognize that Christians don’t buy stuff, puppy lovers get distracted easily and wander off, the bathroom-fixture-fixated are prone to start cleaning their own bathrooms during the commercial breaks, and nostalgic boomers fall asleep by 9 p.m. — presumably because they’re hoping that, with a little more sleep, they won’t get fooled again tomorrow.

Not bloody likely. Either way, enjoy the nacho-cheese-and-beer-induced paralysis and have a happy Super Bowl Sunday, America!

Oh yeah, and his back hurts like crazy when he’s on his feet all day. In other words, you’d have to have ice water flowing through your veins not to enjoy this elaborate P.R. experiment in spite of yourself. It’s pretty tough to resist the heartwarming tale of Larry O’Donnell, president of Waste Management, who gamely agrees to pretend to be a new hire named Randy Lawrence who’s training in several different low-level positions within his company. Larry is eager, he says, to get a closer look at how the business functions and what the experience of working its lower-level positions might be like.

And sure, Larry is likable enough in his role as a humbler, entry-level version of himself. He does seem to feel horribly guilty for the ways that his company’s policies have been misused or misinterpreted by supervisors, leading to humiliation, inconvenience or overall job dissatisfaction of the ranks. One low-level supervisor runs to clock in after lunch to avoid having her paycheck docked by her boss; a trash collector pees in a cup while she’s out collecting trash, because there’s no time to stop and use the bathroom; a female office worker holds down four different positions at the company at once even though she’s only paid for one job, and she’s about to foreclose on her dream house. (Imagine how the company’s publicists and the show’s producers drooled when they wandered across that very timely P.R. gold mine.)

The workers involved all seem very capable. Larry, meanwhile, can’t do much of anything right in his role as a regular working Joe. Delightfully enough, a supervisor named Walter fires Larry after watching him haplessly attempting to pick up trash on a littered hillside for just a couple of hours.

“Nice workin’ with you, but you just don’t have it,” Walter tells Larry.

“Walter is the only person who ever fired me in my whole career,” Larry says. Well, Larry, that’s because you haven’t technically been working all these years, nor have any of us who sit in front of our computers or talk on the phone or go to meetings all day long, not compared to what working-class people do all day. And when you see Larry in action, you sort of have to wonder how the man worked his way up the ladder in the first place. Meanwhile, Fred, a guy who cleans out Waste Management’s porta-potties swiftly and efficiently without ever complaining about the work, a guy who coaches Larry enthusiastically all day long, seems like natural management material.

“We’re like hunters, we see her prey, we creep up on it,” Fred tells Larry the day they work together, referring to a cluster of portable toilets.

Larry is truly impressed with Fred’s work. He really is. In fact, his experience doing these crappy jobs for his own company will forever change his management style — that’s what he tells a gathering of employees at the pep-rally-style conclusion of the show. And really, he does seem genuine when he says it. But short of seeing Fred promoted and watching as raises are awarded to every last one of the capable workers we met, should we care? Shouldn’t all CEOs be forced to do the really bad jobs at their companies, so they understand how their passing decisions and cost-cutting maneuvers affect real human beings?

It would be nice if this sort of thing might happen without the cameras running. It would be nice if businesses simply started to police themselves, to take on a commitment to fairness and justice instead of simply answering to the board and the stockholders and the bottom line.

That’s a little too much to expect — or at least that’s what the captains of industry and the Once-lers of all stripes tell us. So, instead, we’ll have to soothe ourselves with publicist-invented fairy tales.