The impulse in Dexter is, despite the graphic and bold extreme of the character, not culturally unfamiliar. It’s the impulse of the anti-hero, the vigilante, except with all the sanitary super-hero cosmetics stripped away. Forget his psychosis and remember one critical tenet justifying the show: Dexter kills bad guys. His kills reflect a wild righteousness, a sense of code-driven vengeance. Aren’t these victims deserving? Virtually all had been killers themselves. All of Dexter’s kills aim for the same metaphorical target—the men who murdered his own mother (a la Batman with his own parents). Dexter ultimately saves lives, and as he imagines at the end of the first season, perhaps the crowds should really be toasting him for his work. It’s the catch that allows us to forgive what appears on screen as unrepentant psychosis on par with legendary killers from Ted Bundy to Dostoevsky’s fictional Raskolnikov. The complicated morality scales place Dexter on the side of Superman, not Jack the Ripper.

Q. Your show traffics in a lot of big themes—fate versus free will, good versus evil, faith versus reason, how often Sawyer should be shirtless. Ultimately, what were the most important themes for you in this series?
Damon Lindelof: If there’s one word that we keep coming back to, it’s redemption. It is that idea of everybody has something to be redeemed for and the idea that that redemption doesn’t necessarily come from anywhere else other than internally. But in order to redeem yourself, you can only do it through a community. So the redemption theme started to kind of connect into “live together, die alone,” which is that these people were all lone wolves who were complete strangers on an aircraft, even the ones who were flying together like Sun and Jin. Then let’s bring them together and through their experiences together allow themselves to be redeemed. When the show is firing on all pistons, that’s the kind of storytelling that we’re doing.
I think we’ve always said that the characters of “Lost” are deeply flawed, but when you look at their flashback stories, they’re all victims. Kate was a victim before she killed her stepfather. Sawyer’s parents killed themselves as he was hiding under the bed. Jack’s dad was a drunk who berated him as a child. Sayid was manipulated by the American government into torturing somebody else. John Locke had his kidney stolen. This idea of saying this bad thing happened to me and I’m a victim and it created some bad behavior and now I’m going to take responsibility for that and allow myself to be redeemed by community with other people, that seems to be the theme that we keep coming back to.

Today, the producers respond to questions about the show from readers:

Q. In your 2005 interview with The Times you said, “There can be things that are happening that are quote, phenomenal, but there’s always a scientific answer to it.” With ghosts and immortals (to name but two), you have clearly moved out of the realm where a scientific answer is possible for everything. Did you know that back in 2005 or realize it as the series went on?
—Alex, Seattle
Lindelof: While we certainly don’t want to rewrite history (or do we?), the context of that quote applied to the show at the time. Certainly, the pilot strongly hinted at supernatural elements and by the end of Season 1, we saw “the monster” was a being made of black smoke. Since that time, we’ve gone on record as “letting our freak flag fly” into the realm of the supernatural, and although it has probably cost us some members of our audience, from the moment Locke got out of his wheelchair (in the fourth episode of the series) we knew the reason behind it was not going to be “scientific.”

As for the decision to bring in ideas from many different faith traditions (as well as atheism), Lindelof says:

… it’s our hope that the show speaks to people all along the spectrum. At the same time, we’ve gone out of our way never to seem “preachy” and to have the characters on the show actively debate whether or not there is any purpose or design to what the hell they’re doing on the island.

Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.

I’m told that Paramount Pictures and former Walden Media co-founder Cary Granat producing with Reel Fx are mounting In The Beginning, a 3-D telling of the creation story. The film is using The Book of Genesis as its primary resource. A script has been written by John Fusco (Hidalgo), and directing will be TV vet David Cunningham.

I’m told the 30 million dollar film will use 3-D visuals to transform the oft-told tale into a spectacle that the filmmakers hope will attract family- and faith-based audiences that flocked to The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, that first Chronicles of Narnia installment made on Granat’s Walden watch. I hear Granat pitched the film by claiming that the Adam And Eve story has never really been told by a feature film. (At least not since John Huston.)

Best Spiritual Film: The Road
Best Inspirational Film: Precious and Up (tie)
Best Spiritual Documentary: More Than a Game

Beliefnet readers, on the other hand, chose:

Best Spiritual Film: The Blind Side
Best Inspirational Film: Precious
Best Spiritual Documentary: Earth

“We’re not trying to use Doritos to propagate a message, but I think we want people to know that we have a sense of humor, that it’s OK to laugh. So much of what comes out of the faith community seems so dour and somber and we want to say, ‘Hey, we’re real people. You can be a person of faith and really enjoy life and laugh.’”

Interestingly, the story goes on to note, Mosaic is at the forefront of a Christian movement “focused on injecting faith-based themes into the plot lines of mainstream TV shows, Hollywood movies, and video games that aren’t explicitly Christian, or advertised as such.”
In addition to amplifying its message, placing among the top three ads will give Mosaic a material boost. The three commercials airing on Sunday will receive anywhere from 400,000 to 1 million dollars.

Many looks in the fall 2010 show featured a golden crown of thorns, albeit worn as a necklace, in the latest collection that tapped into Tisci’s religious and historical obsessions. The very fact that he and a French fashion house evoked the suffering of Christ before an audience of 300 in Paris said quite a lot about current European zeitgeist and debates about integrating Islamic communities into Western Europe, especially at a time when the French parliament is debating a law to ban the wearing of burqas.

Charles Darwin’s passion for nature, for chasing the dips and pirouettes of evolution, is as commonplace as frog dissection to anyone who’s ever taken a high school biology class. But the makers of Creation, the new biopic dealing with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, wisely chose to frame this passion in the context of something else of dire importance to the famous scientist: his love for his family. Darwin’s legacy is stronger for it.
Based on Annie’s Box, a biography by the scientist’s great-great-grandson, Randal Keynes, Creation centers on Darwin’s home life following the unexpected death of his eldest child, Annie. Thrown into deep depression and paralyzed by grief, Paul Bettany’s Darwin tries to continue to develop his theory of evolution but is plagued by mysterious illnesses and hallucinations of his precocious child (the perfectly cast newcomer Martha West). Both are induced by guilt made all the worse by the cold crevice that exists between Darwin and wife Emma, a devout Anglican Christian sure her husband’s work will damn him for eternity.
The film’s sentiment is strong, its visuals even stronger. Simple scenes of particles floating in the sunlight or of luminescence trailing behind the Beagle take on an added luster when contrasted with Darwin’s talk of “brute survival.” After he writes Emma a letter apologizing for his loss of faith, we immediately flash back to an outing where Charles and the children walk through the forest. The quiet, the colors, the way Darwin reverently crouches down to watch a kill-or-be-killed moment between two animals drives home the point: He hasn’t lost faith at all, merely found it somewhere Victorian society was unwilling to look.
But you’ll want to look deeply at the science in Creation; it’s presented in such splendor that even a bird’s sped-up decomposition is captivating. Darwin’s theory is so elegant, his pursuit of it so pure, that the religion of the times—evidenced by Emma’s frowns and the local pastor’s emphatic sermons—seems a mismatched opponent. Darwin may not have “killed God,” as Thomas Huxley (Toby Jones) excitedly states at the beginning of the film, but he’s certainly given believers something to think about.
The decision to cast Bettany and Jennifer Connelly as the Darwins was a sound one. The pair, married in real life, shares a shorthand that translates well on screen. This makes the narrative’s frequent flashbacks simply a glimpse of happier times rather than the only evidence we have of their long relationship. Emma’s words are often harsh—as when she implores her husband to drop his work so they may spend eternity together in heaven—but Connelly manages to soften the delivery so we see her as a woman who truly fears being without the man she loves. “I think you are at war with God, Charles,” she tells him, angry and afraid. “We both know it is a battle you cannot win.” Bettany, in turn, does a very good job as a man who can’t please anyone and who is very nearly a victim of his own feelings of failure. Darwin’s frustration and self-perceived weakness roll off him in waves.
The movie builds to a cathartic moment for its protagonist, and script writer John Collee posits this relief was necessary for Darwin’s seminal work to go forward. But by that point, publication of On the Origin of Species seems almost secondary; Creation’s Darwin is someone audiences will want to see not only survive, but thrive.