Most people probably think that men and women are equally represented in film roles.  After all, most movies have a male lead and a female lead, and there are Best Actor and Best Actress categories in every awards show.  Plus, you know, women make up roughly half (actually slightly over half) of the world’s population, so it seems natural that they would have roughly half of the film roles.  As the Bechdel Test, an interesting/sad little thought exercise I recently discovered, shows us, this is hardly the case.

As you may have heard, Lost recently came to its overly complicated end.  The final episode faced the impossible tasks of tying up six years of bizarrely frayed storylines and ending the journeys of over a dozen major characters in one two and a half hour chunk.

Obviously, only the most central plot points and themes could be covered. So why, then, would a show which always focused more on building complicated mythologies and dealing with huge life questions than on developing credible romances devote so much of its finale to kissing and flirting?