PROBLOGUE: However you felt about the Season Five finale of "Lost," perhaps we can start a discussion with our new comment feature at bottom.

I hate the phrase "spoiler alert" more than anything because it's allowed ESPN and Yahoo! to use it as a headline whenever any sort of underdog wins anything, so if you're a fan of "Lost," and don't want to know about the season finale, you should be turning away...

right...

about...

now.

First, and I have to get into this here, because I read all the comments that we're not allowed to type about anything that isn't sports-related -- Matthew Fox played a coach in "We Are Marshall."

With that out of the way, I can compare my feelings on the season finale of "Lost" to the way the 2005-06 Sabres offseason went down -- I'm not sure what just happened, but they've earned my trust. The extra good news about this rationale is that "Lost" only has one year to make my head explode, but on a relative scale, I guess I could be in trouble. Here's a hard-to-read chart a scientist gave me (EDIT NOTE: If your browser is making this graph remarkably small, email me and I'll pass along a larger version).


Like anyone, I have my theories on the finale and the plot, but I feel like I have to trust the show knows what it's doing, based on what it's given me in the past, specifically this season (Much like the Gratton-for-Briere and Warrener/Reinprecht-for-Drury/Begin trades earned Darcy Regier a nice shelf-life in my trust barn).

I can see how anyone would love or hate the season finale, so here's where we can all agree:

Positive:

On one, pretty-positive hand, the Season Five finale of "Lost" supplied genuine emotive moments and long-awaited "answers." When Juliet is holding onto Sawyer while being electro-magnetically pulled toward certain doom, it is genuine and intense, and pretty-good acting (Anyone who believes Sawyer and Kate's interactions are believable probably would go to a 'Bad Acting Hall of Fame,' and buy every souvenir there).

What the show has done, is allowed almost every single character to be hated, loved or sympathized with for at least, let's say, 10 minutes of five seasons. For example, if you're a fan of:

Jack -- you loved him, McNulty-style, right off the bat as a probable hero without the gumption to get the girl, but for almost two years have had moments where you want to slap him with a giant Foo Fighter hand from the "Everlong" video.

Kate -- kinda stinks. She went from adorable felon to scared little girl. The only reason I care if she's alive is because Jack's interminable suffering has to extend back into the real world.

Sawyer -- has been annoying for almost the entire run, but all of the sudden is an "everyman" hero. He's probably supplied the best acting/character development of anyone.

It goes on this way from the rest of the major characters right on down to Jacob, who we've really only seen for one episode (Here's where the Sci-fi nerds say, "Well, technically, uh, Nick, it was two episodes. One from 9 to 10 p.m., and another from 10:00:01 p.m. to 11:00 p.m.... Minus, of course, the commercials,").

Negative:

On the other, very-negative hand, it's like "Lost" jumped past the "We're a young team"-player-excuse suffering to the "Injuries, not effort, hurt us"-player-excuse suffering. If you want to hate the "Juliet makes the bomb explode/Jacob's on fire" ending, you can argue -- perhaps successfully -- that the show essentially spent five-years developing the major characters of the show. You might even say that they didn't figure out anything about the show's ending until this year... if they even know at all. It's what movies are derided for... making you watch 90 minutes and then introducing who's really pulling the strings, as if "you're not intelligent enough for us to introduce this character earlier."

Seriously, "Lost" has an opportunity to pull a "Prison Break" here, and that's not a good thing. Granted "Prison Break" was only a great television show for, what, 30 percent of its run? At most?

Miscellaneous:

-- In college, I was able to avoid the modern demon that is primetime television. I pretty much only watched sports and re-runs of "The Twilight Zone." Since then, I have at some point been "involved" with the following piles of brain destruction:

1. "Lost"
2. "Prison Break"
3. the most-recent season of "The Biggest Loser"
4. "The Office"
5. "30 Rock"
6. "Sons of Anarchy"
7. "The Wire"
8. "Scrubs"
9. "Gary Unmarried"
10. "Tool Academy"

-- 1977 Eloise Hawking is very attractive.

-- The actor who plays Jacob was also in "Prison Break" for a couple episodes. Yikes. I also couldn't stop thinking that he looks like Landry Clarke (Jesse Plemons) from the TV version of "Friday Night Lights."

-- A high-school friend of mine works in Hollywood, and has worked on "Lost."

Email: nick@wgr550.com