Lost is increasingly aptly named, as there by now cannot be a viewer left who isn't thoroughly at sea with it. I love it to bits, but these days I'm only watching it as a chore.
Having enthusiastically invested so many hours in it, I'm bloody-mindedly determined to hang on in there, as maddening as Lost now is, because I've become obsessed with getting an answer to at least the first of the many puzzles of the story: what the bloody hell was a gigantic polar bear doing galumphing about on a tropical island?
How did it get there, did it have a wife and cubs, how many mad scientists had it eaten, and didn't the temperate climate play merry hell with its fur?
That damned bear, in the pilot episode four years ago, was the first indicator that what we were looking at was not your standard "castaways on a desert island" adventure soap, but some seriously original science fiction.
But the suspense is no longer killing me. It's annoying me. The dastardly Lost writers are proposing not to give us answers till the year 2010. By then, even I will have probably forgotten the bear.
Last night's season final was as disorienting as usual, coming without the usual finale frisson. Yes, yes, there was a cliffhanger. We see John Locke lying in a coffin.
Locke is one of our very favourite characters. We have even wondered whether he is meant to be some sort of Jesus substitute.
We've always known they were going to kill characters off, but hated to think it would be Locke.
But by now, the thought is sneaking upon us that some fictional euthanasia might bring us closer to the answers quicker. And anyway, on Lost, dead doesn't mean gone. Or even dead.
Instead of gasping, "No! He can't be dead in his coffin," this long-suffering fan thought: "Ho hum, what's the bet he's not really there, or only dead in some metaphysical sense?"
Because Lost, as its followers know, does not treat life or death or geography or matter as anything other than metaphysical constructs capable of being manipulated by Lotto numbers.
Locke could well be simultaneously lying in a coffin, back on the island hewing more pointed sticks, on the operating table donating another kidney to his unscrupulous father and back sitting in his wheelchair doing clerical work as in episode one.
The volley of non-sequiturs in Lost has come so thick and fast, most of us have given up trying to keep up with developments, let alone analyse or second-guess them, because nothing is capable of being made sense of. On the contrary, we are blatantly lied to.
For this season, we've had much time-forwarding to "the Oceanic Six", who are supposed to be the only survivors of that plane crash. But I've counted more than six who've made it back to the real world. There's Jack, Sayid, Ben, Kate, Hurley, baby Aaron, Jin, Sun and young Walt.
And I've probably left out a few, because why would you bother trying to run an accurate tally? The Oceanic Six - or Nine or 11 - are now cropping up all round the world. I fully expect to see Victor the labrador and the giant polar bear wandering up the Champs Elysees together in a forthcoming episode. It'd be about as logical as anything else.
The most stressful thing about Lost is that no one connected with the production has ever been able to confirm that its creator, JJ Abrams, knew what the answers were, or where the story was heading, when they launched Lost.
It's possible he may still not know what it's all about, but is just writing his way in and out of knots till someone thinks of something plausible that allows him to stop.
You can see some of the joins. Charles Widmore, the apparently crazed gazillionaire, was introduced part way through as some sort of key to the plot. He has been rather awkwardly projected back and forwards into the plot.
The gist seems to be he will do anything to possess the secret of the island, and rat-faced Ben will do anything to keep it from him. What are the hopes, then, of any of us poor viewers getting a hold of it?
Anyway, last night, Ben plumbed the depths of the island's most ominously significant vault - and again, I've lost count of the number of hatches, chambers and vaults discovered on the island, each more significant than the last - and did something to something which caused the island to disappear. Poof. Finito. No more.
But like millions of other poor fools, I'll be there waiting for it to reappear out of whatever orifice when the next season comes to air.
*What did you think of the season finale of Lost? Post your comments below.
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