On the other hand, the death and resurrection of ET is considerably more overt.

At the risk of drawing R3′s ire, I’m going to mention Star Trek and how slow I was to get the Spock sacrifice in “Khan”. I was a teenager and having a conversation with a priest about Spock’s death as sacrifice for others in “Khan”. Then he pointed out with amusement that he’d heard that plot somewhere before. It was like a light bulb (incandescent) going off over my head. Whammy!

They are trying to make a character Christ-like, and I’m still okay with it, because the show has very clearly set him up as a “Christ-figure.” (Like Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings was a Christ-figure.) The thing is that the show treats the issue of faith very seriously, and unless the previous five years have all been a setup for a gigantic “sucker punch,” I’d say that the show has earned the right to simply allude to a painting of the Last Supper—with all the ideas about faith, betrayal, and revelation that evokes—because those are the very themes that the show explores on a weekly basis. On one level, Lost is a goofy sci-fi show, but it’s using that vehicle as a way to get at very important themes, and it is the themes that compel me to watch the show every week.

I think it was JohnFN who commented “the outrage-meter at BH to be overly pegged sometimes.” I agree. I have no idea what the producers were trying to convey by placing certain people in the famous pose of “The Last Supper”. I’m willing to bet that they are referencing a famous, if cliche, work of art, not that they were attempting to make a character Christ-like.

So no reason to get our undies in a bunch (no reference to the Undie Bomber intended.)

Is it offensive? “Offence” depends on the viewer, I suppose. It’s parodying a famous vision of an important religious scene, however the famous vision isn’t even remoley accurate (They weren’t all on one side of the table, they didn’t use chairs, models were used for Jesus and the Disciples, etc), so it could be viewed as a parody of the painting, or a reference to the event itself. And it could be taken as a mockery or as a tribute with equal ease. So it comes down to the viewer, who will ultimately perceive the picture according to their own predisposiitons.

FWIW, I think the Galactica Last Supper was better done, but of course Lost has never taken itself as pretentiously as BSG did.

Me? I got no problem with it. Of course it doesn’t really even bother me when people say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas either. I’m just glad they didn’t flip me off or say something rude about my family size. I have a high tolerance and low expectations.

I love the sacred, I wish there was more of in my church, but since those aren’t the things that saved me, and the One who did was treated like trash on his last day, I’m not going to start a fight with anyone over it. Now if they say *I* have to do it, or take away my right to treat certain things as sacred, we got a fight.