Reviewing the Previews for Tonight's Finale

Just a cursory glance at the Internet today and you'll find about 4,815,162,342 articles dedicated to tonight's Lost finale. Let's sort through some of them - none have any spoilers - to see how people are talking...

Newsday.com's Verne Gay - before ending his article with a list of unanswered questions - raves about the show in general, specifically pointing to last season's finale as the point where Lost solidified its brilliance:

One uses the word "bombshell" advisedly when discussing finales, but the final episode of "Lost" was the bombshell di tutti bombshells in the 2007 season. TV's greatest shaggy dog story had just grown much shaggier. Still picking up their jaws, fans were suddenly presented with a thousand more questions, as if (say) 500 hadn't been perfectly adequate to that point.

Everybody's biggest Lost obsessive Jeff Jensen, over on EW.com, writes his weekly preview with a tinge of sadness that the season's coming to an end, but makes an interesting point about the nature of the show:

A defining moment is upon us — and by ''us,'' I do mean the fans. For quite some time now, a debate has raged in Lost fandom about which kind of worldview should win out when it comes to resolving the show's many mysteries: Scientific or Sci-Fi? Naturalistic or Supernatural? Stephen Hawking or Stephen King? I doubt tonight's episode will fully resolve the debate — but I wouldn't be too surprised if the episode causes the debate to boil over. All to say, the message boards should be quite frothy tomorrow.

Ain't It Cool News' Hercules theorizes that the show will jump ahead to the flash-forward time frame for good, noting that it's not an entirely new concept:

Ever since “Alias” did it at the end of its second season, this business of TV shows leaping a year or more into the future has gotten right popular. Not only “Battlestar Galactica,” but also outright shitty shows like “One Tree Hill” and “Desperate Housewives” have adopted the strategy. Even “Veronica Mars” was going to make a five-year run at it before Les Moonves decided he thought “Life Is Wild” a better use of a budget.

Finally, the Boston Globe sees Lost as nothing less than an outlet through which fans search for the meaning of life:

If pop culture is a religion, then fans of the ABC series, which has its fourth-season finale tonight at 9, are its brainiest, most beguiling sect. So many of this show's worshippers are fervid thinkers, relentless observers who find evidence of truth in every Dharma wrapper and every blade of island grass. "Lost" has become a mecca for people with Theories of Everything, people who can't encounter any mystery without putting it under a microscope, posting the findings, parsing the comments. For those of us bent, either casually or obsessively, on examining existence, the quest for answers to "Lost" has become a kind of quest for the secrets to the universe.

9 p.m. ABC. You might not get my immediate reactions to the finale tonight, because (A) I'm hosting a little Lost party and (B) my brain will probably be splattered on my rug all mushy-like. But expect some big, long-winded reactions tomorrow.

TAGS: Articles, Preview, Season 4 Finale
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