Boob Tube Speculation

I try to avoid TV show spoilers at all costs, so what follows is my spoiler-free speculation on what might be happening next on my favorite TV shows. Those who do read spoilers will probably know if these speculations are close to the truth or way off (probably the latter), but it's fun to guess.

The Office

The one exception to avoiding spoilers I have is that I allow myself is to read the titles of upcoming episodes. If possible, I would avoid even this information, but OfficeTally has the titles of upcoming episodes in the upper right hand corner of the page, kind of making the decision for me. At one time I thought about using the Firefox extension greasemoney to try to block just that box, but that probably wouldn't work without messing up a lot of sites, so I gave up on that. So from this I know that the title of next Thursday's (5/1) episode is Did I Stutter?. My first guess for what this episode might be about, which I had a few weeks ago, was that Ryan was going to fire Michael. Then after Chair Model I thought that in this episode Jim might propose to Pam. Then after Night Out I thought maybe in this episode David Wallace would fire Ryan, send him back to Scranton, and Jan would get her old job back. My best guess right now is that Jim is going to propose to Pam. And I have a bad feeling that she's going to say something other than "Absolutely, I do." In Chair Model, when Jim and Pam started talking about marriage at her desk, the way she had trouble finding her words explaining things and then the way she watched Jim walk back to his desk with a little smile on her face like she was waiting for him to turn around and indicate he was joking suggests to me that another engagement and marriage are not on Pam's mind for the immediate future.

The episode after that is titled Job Fair. For some reason I think this episode might be similar to The Convention. This title obviously suggests someone is going to be fired or quit their current job, or maybe Dunder Mifflin is going to have a booth at a job fair looking for some new employees.

For the past few weeks the season finale was just listed on OfficeTally as Season Finale, but I just noticed that it's been updated on OfficeTally (within the last 12 hours) to an actual title, Goodbye, Toby. OMG, Toby is really leaving! Hopefully he's going to go to the corporate office or something like that so he'll still be on the show. The Office would not be the same without Toby Flenderson, if nothing else as a sponge for Michael's contempt. The scene in The Deposition when Michael pushes Toby's tray of food off the table is one of my favorite scenes from Season 4.

LOST

Wow has this show picked up the pace in Season 4. One of the big mysteries in the Season 3 finale was the identity of the person in the casket. I originally thought it was probably Ben. But after watching the Season 4 episodes that have aired so far that does not seem very likely. And perhaps almost as important as the Season 4 episodes in changing what I think will happen on lost is Lost: A Theory on Time Travel by Jason Hunter. This is fan speculation explaining many of the central questions about LOST. While I don't agree with many of the details, I think a lot of the central ideas are probably mostly correct. It's so good that after reading it I wondered if I made a mistake, since even though it's just speculation and not technically spoilers, some of it is almost certainly correct. So if you haven't read that yet, and you don't want spoilers, maybe think twice about doing so. Because once you do you can't go back in time and undo it.

So, like I said, after watching the Season 4 episodes and reading that, it seems unlikely that Ben is the one in the casket. My current best guess is John Locke, with Michael being my second guess.

Another huge thing is what happened to everyone else that's not one of the Oceanic 6, especially Claire and Jin. My guess is that most of them are still alive on the island.

Regarding what's going to happen during the rest of Season 4, I don't have too many ideas besides what we know, that the 6 are going to get off the island somehow, plus a bunch of things that seem likely based on the basic ideas in Lost: A Theory Of Time Travel.

Battlestar Galactica

Over a year after the incredible Season 3 finale, Season 4 has now finally started airing. Even though 4 episodes have aired, few questions have been answered. Most notably, of course, the identity of the 5th cylon. So far they've been stringing us along, making us think it's a certain individual, only to then show it's probably not them, and then making us think it's someone else, and so on. It reminds me a lot of Season 3 of Nip/Tuck, and the mystery of the identity of The Carver, and it ended up being the obvious person (along with a second person who occasionally helped, who I did not think was as obvious). The person who, might I add, I originally suspected, the second he said he had previously been in Sudan helping war victims. The problem with figuring out the final cylon is that it's not as obvious as that was. The first few Season 4 episodes first made me think the final cylon might be Starbuck, and then Baltar, but now I doubt it's either of them.

A few days ago on Digg there was an article with speculation on who the final cylon might be. While I think the article is creative and the author is willing to think outside the box, I think his guess is completely wrong. The article did contain one helpful bit of information, however. There's a promo picture titled Battlestar Galactica: The Last Supper. According to the article, the final cylon is not anyone in the picture. This would mean that it's not Starbuck, Baltar, Agathon, President Roslin, Admiral Adama, Lee Adama. While searching for the link to that article from Digg, I ran across this article detailing why it makes sense that the final cylon is Lee. But since Lee is in that last supper picture, then it can't be him, right?

So that leaves it to be one of the secondary characters, which I don't like nearly as much as if it had been one of the main characters. Hopefully they handle it in a way so it makes sense and doesn't involve a lot of trickery / deception before it's revealed.

One big mystery about the final 5 cylons is why they're separated from the other 7 cylon models, and why the 7 aren't supposed to talk about them. My guess is that there was a big disagreement between the 12 about something a long time ago (relatively speaking, anyway; the skin jobs haven't been around for that long, have they?), and the 5 went their own way, ending up in the fleet. While it's not clear if they're covert agents or they wanted to join humanity, or if the 5 cylons in the fleet are the only versions of the 5 cylon models, or if like the other skin jobs there are many copies of them somewhere else. I would not be surprised if the fleet finally finds Earth and it's populated with millions of copies of these 5 cylons.

One final guess I have, which I came up after watching the first episode of Season 4, is that Lee is going to become the President after Roslin dies of cancer. That's probably the most obvious thing in the world, though, after the scene where Lee told his father that there was "a position" opening up in the government that he was going to take, and since then has become more outspoken as a member of the quorum. If that happens, that would certainly make things more interesting in the seemingly unlikely event that Lee does indeed turn out to be the final cylon.