I have no spoilers to reveal! I am looking forward to tonight though.

I have not watched a single episode of Lost and do not know what it is about!

We have a policy that we won't watch any shows anymore until they are over and out on DVD. So in a way, I am glad that Lost is ending, so I can actually watch the damn thing!

I have not watched a single episode of Lost and do not know what it is about!

SPOILER: Neither do the people who've watched Lost!

Maybe this will be a Prisoner moment, and be a totally mind-blowing finale, but I bet it's more likely going to be like Battlestar Galactica.

I'm looking forward to it, but I'm not sure I can watch it tonight. If I can't, I'll just stay away from the internet until I can.

I watched The Prisoner in 1968 and didn't understand it! But I liked the Rover!

I watched The Prisoner last year and was disappointed! But I still liked the Rover!

I watched some of the first season but didn't have the patience to keep going. My wife watched it for a few years longer but gave up a while ago too. These days my brain just isn't suited to keep track of anything more complicated than Big Bang Theory or Thirty Rock.

Lost is actually not confusing at all if you watch all the episodes in a couple of weeks. (See my paper, "What I Have Done Since I've Been Unemployed") I can't imagine enduring the interminable wait between episodes. Yes, there are tons of unanswered questions, and I don't expect most to be answered tonight, but the basic thread and the time travel stuff is not that difficult to wrap your mind around.

Breaking Bad comes first tonight. Sorry, Mr. Clucks, I now prefer Los Pollos Hermanos. Must be their secret ingredient.

I LOVE Breaking Bad. I'm hooked. It's the best show on TV. My parents tell me Damages is great. I'm renting it when this season of Breaking Bad is over. I watched the first season of Lost and gave up.

Tonight I am going to cheat on Breaking Bad with Lost. I want to watch the two-hour preshow if it's helpful for remembering all the back story, but I am daunted by the idea of five and a half hours planted in front of the tube watching Lost.

I've never seen Lost, and am yet totally interested to see how the fanbase will feel about the finale.

I've never seen Lost, and am yet totally interested to see how the fanbase will feel about the finale.

I'm a lukewarm viewer of the show, and I am also fascinated to see how die-hards respond to the finale. (I have to wait for it to show up on Hulu, so I'll be more-or-less avoiding any discussion threads.)

I have seen the ending and I am gobsmacked... (which is only a spoiler if you know what it takes to gobsmack me)

I think the finale was totally engaging, but will completely fall apart at the seams as people start overthinking it.

I liked it.

I thought it was completely unsatisfactory and found certain slightly spoilery elements off-putting.

How someone tells a story is more important than the story itself.

Should have ended the show with the nuke.

My favorite part was when keyboard cat played them off at the end. Totally unexpected.

I don't watch the show but I'm curious... oneswellfoop: were you gobsmacked in a good way or a bad way? Perusal of my various social media would indicate that most of my friends and contacts were disappointed.

I did not see it, but then I watched one episode in Season One and it did not grab me. .

But. . .I know how it ends.

Joss Whedon wakes up in bed with Clem the Demon (from Buffy) and mentions this odd dream he had. . .

I know I am right about this.

Joss Whedon wakes up in bed with Clem the Demon (from Buffy) and mentions this odd dream he had. . .

Jimmy Kimmel did that bit last night - Newhart wakes up and says he had a dream about running an inn, and next to him is Kate from Lost who says she dreamed she was on an island. Across the room in bed together are Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof.

Damn.

Only tangentially related: two weeks ago, a Facebook friend posted a tiny rant explaining that HE had to work late and would seen the new "Lost" 24 hours late and if his friends posted spoilery status updates "I WILL DEFRIEND" and so on. In the ensuing conversation, it became clear that mannnnnnny of his FB friends watch the episodes a day or two later, on Tivo or Hulu or whatever.

And then today he posted spoilery status updates. To a bunch of people he knew hadn't seen the show.

Now, I'm ambivalent on the whole SPOILER ALERT thing: though I try to be over-courteous and over-careful about them(except for Citizen Kane), I don't ask that others do the same. But if you've recently made a Big Hairy Deal about spoilers, it looks pretty thoughtless to be all "IT'S HIS SLED!" two weeks later.

...it looks pretty thoughtless to be all "IT'S HIS SLED!" two weeks later.

Wait—did you just spoil the ending of Snow Dogs for me?
*shakes fist at Elsa*

Why/how was I gobsmacked?
WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE HYPER-SPOILER-SENSITIVE. NO MAJOR REVEALS BUT HUGE HINTS.
For the record, the first two hours were lot of fun, with 2-3 WTF! scenes every 6 minutes (followed by 4 minutes of frakking commercials); from the moment Hurley started quoting Star Wars, I knew it was time to chant the MST3K mantra "It's just a show, I should really just relax" and enjoy the ride. And that worked for me up to the point where the show explained what The Sideways World was all about. THAT gobsmacked me, but the way things ended on The Island (who left, who stayed, who died) generally 'felt right' and I even accepted the One Big Twist that happened earlier than I expected. Many, many things left unexplained, some things I realized later that contradicted themselves and not ALL the characters reappeared (although that was sure one thing the finale tried to accomplish). On a scale of St. Elsewhere to The Prisoner, I give it a BSG-and-a-half.

Has anyone found a blog or article that really explains it all clearly to those of us who are clearly too dumb to be watching it?

Amro--everything on the island really happened. Everyone in the "sideways" world, however, was dead and they had to find each other to "move on" to heaven or whatever. Some had died before Jack, some after, but it didn't matter since there is no time on "the other side." Meh.

Frankly, I feel super conned and lied to. From the beginning, one of the most common theories was that the island was purgatory and they were all seeking redemption. But the creators of the show repeatedly said that was not true. Now, technically, they weren't lying since "the island" really wasn't purgatory--but half the action in the final season revolved around people who were dead and trying to move on. Load. Of. Crap. I am stabby.

Oh shit. I should have put a SPOILER warning on that. Mods?

I altered the post title to reflect spoiler-status herein.

Thanks, gaspode. Hope I didn't ruin anything for anybody. My anger at that finale is affecting my brain function.

It just makes my brain hurt. I felt like the scenes at the end of the deserted plane pieces on the beach were implying that they all died in the first plane crash. But I guess not?

And okay, so say everything on the island really happened. What about the part where they left the island and came back? That happened too?

amro, yes ... it all happened. Even the flash-sideways "happened" since it was a place (but not a time) for Our Heroes to "exist" until everyone was ready to "move on".

I have NO clue what the scenes of the wreckage were supposed to imply, however. Unless the whole thing was really a dream of Vincent's, 815's sole survivor. I kid, I kid. OR DO I?

Here's a SPOILERIFFIC summation of my feelings about the finale that I posted over on MeFight Club:
Been talking about this quite a bit with a friend with whom I've watched all six seasons with. We both felt the island was as much as a character as the human actors and we were extremely disappointed by the poor way they basically ignored or ham-handedly explained all of the island's mysteries in favor of soft glowy-lit flashbacks of kissyfaces. And speaking of kissyfaces, why not pair up Locke and Boone? With as many handsome young men who got entangled in Locke's life throughout the show, and since Katey Sagal couldn't apparently make it for the finale and since it was heavily implied that Boone was gay (or very confused), hook Locke and Boone up! They stuck out as sore thumbs, people who were just sort of standing around with no kissyface partner. And Kate being Aaron's second mommy certainly would make more sense--based on how she "woke up" last night--than her ending up paired off with Jack, and you KNOW Charlie wouldn't complain about that. Feh.

If we can have an all-inclusive church be a "waystation" to the "next phase" then why couldn't the island--as my friend and I had been positing since we first saw the four-toed statue--be the land from which the myths of Paradise, or Eden, or Atlantis sprang? If they had done that, then Jacob and MiB could have been the people from which the story of Cain and Abel (or Jacob and Esau for that matter) derived. Richard's immortality could be because he "ate from the Tree of Life" or whatever. The original inhabitants of the island could be people from Nod or whatever. Basically ALL this stuff could have been hand-waved away convincingly AND be in keeping with the overall "spiritual" plotline in at least a somewhat satisfying manner.

But, no. The island is just a rock with a light and a cloud and every single question we pondered about its nature was, insultingly, rendered meaningless by this last season. It's all about the kissyfaces, folks.

It seems that the fan base's reaction to the finale is a clear split between those who felt the island was every bit a character as the cast and those who don't. Lost attracted many people for many different reasons. For me, I wasn't really hooked (beyond the gorgeous Hawaiian vistas) until the moment I realized that Locke could walk because of the island. The show revealed its sci-fi and/or fantasy underpinnings to me at that point, and did nothing to discourage me from walking that path until the first episode of this final season--when characters who I'd cared about for five years started acting and reacting completely counter to everything that had gone before in service to the plot. Thus, I walked away feeling extremely disappointed. Which is valid. People walking away from the show feeling happy about how it ended is also valid. If nothing else, Lost made for a great way to spend time over the water-cooler (or phone, or e-mail, or internet) with other people.

I'm still weepy, so I guess that tells you how I feel.

Related but not, I saw somewhere that two episodes of "Lost" had titles that were the ends of phrases that start with the word Lost: "...And Found" and "...In Translation". My mind went into overdrive coming up with other titles they could have done...

"...Boys"
"...Chord"
"...Generation"
"...Horizon"
"...Innocence"
"...Luggage"
"...Weekend"
"...In Space"
"...In Overtime"
"...My Car Keys"
"...My Lunch"
"...My Mind"
"...My Will to Live"
"...Without Your Love"
"...A Prototype iPhone in a Bar"