Tonight is the two-hour season finale of Lost, preceded by a slightly expanded version of last week’s penultimate episode (technically the first part of the finale). Meanwhile, to hear the critics tell it, this is the best season of Lost since the first, if not ever. Why? The explanation used to be that signing a deal that cemented an endpoint for the series gave the show’s cast and creators a renewed sense of purpose, but you don’t hear that much in the thinkpieces popping up hither and thither today regarding the finale. No, the explanation they give is that this season, with its embrace of the flashforward device that made its debut during the last ep of Season Three, has made it a televised mind game par excellence.

Here’s Juliet Lapidos (whose name makes her sound like she’s a Lost character herself) at Slate:

…only in the current season, which ends Thursday night, has Lost achieved complexity and intricacy worthy of the critical attention it’s been receiving all along….the writers have shaken themselves out of the old formula–and are finally attempting a truly high-wire narrative move.

Here’s Ginia Bellafante in The New York Times:

“Lost,” which concludes its fourth season on ABC on Thursday night, refuses our passive interest while it denies us the satisfaction of ever feeling that we might confidently explain, to the person sitting next to us at dinner, that we have a true grasp of what is going on — of who among the characters is merely bad and who is verifiably satanic. To watch “Lost” is to feel like a high school grind, studying and analyzing and never making it to Yale. Good dramas confound our expectations, but “Lost,” about a factionalized group of plane crash survivors on a cartographically indeterminate island not anything like Aruba, pushes further, destabilizing the ground on which those expectations might be built. It is an opiate, and like all opiates, it produces its own masochistic delirium.

Here’s Emily Nussbaum at New York, making the clearest case yet for Lost-as-puzzle in a piece straightforwardly entitled “Why Lost Is the Best Game Show in TV History”:

[The introduction of flashforwards] flipped the Lost game board out fifteen squares in each direction. It expanded the show’s setting from the island to the world. It raised the level of narrative difficulty, both for the writers and for the fans, pivoting elegantly away from “Will these people get off the island?” and complicating the whole notion of “What will happen next?” (And I’m not even getting into the whole time-travel thing.)

But best of all, it made the show’s appeal weirdly clear: that this is as much a game as a story. It’s no surprise I find myself talking about the level of difficulty; it feels very much like we’re leveling up. My husband, who is a video-game critic, pointed out that Lost online commentary often feels less like a response to a story and more like the way fans deconstruct an ARG, an alternative reality game, participating in communal puzzle-solving and focusing obsessively on tiny details.

You say this like it’s a good thing!

Even moreso than the widespread fanboy venom spat at the show during early-mid Season Three, my disconnect from the nerd CW regarding the proper approach to the show has thrown me for a loop this year. Back then, it was easy enough to simply ignore the constant bitching and nitpicking and enjoy Lost for what, to me, it is: a byzantine sci-fi mystery about the choices we make–from romantic to philosophical–when confronted with failure.

But this year is different, because now that I’m no longer seemingly alone in enjoying the show anymore, I’m discovering that the way others are enjoying it may be limiting my ability to do so is well, or at least limiting the ways in which I’m able to do so.

First of all, I simply don’t find the show impossible to follow or explain, because it isn’t! The only thing that makes it so is if you deliberately throw yourself against the rocks of the “unknown unknowns” that make up the show’s mysteries. As I’ve pointed out at length, it’s no more possible to “figure out” “what’s going on” in the show’s mythology now than it was at the end of Season One, when we’d yet to see a Dharma Initiative logo, take a visit to Others Village, time travel with Desmond, meet anyone with the surname “Linus” or “Widmore,” see a four-toed statue, summon the smoke monster, hear the phrase “Oceanic Six,” and on and on and on. There’s tonight’s season finale and two full seasons between us and getting to the ass-end of Lost‘s full complement of everything-you-know-is-wrong revelations.

So the show is incomprehensible only to the extent that you insist upon trying to comprehend it. I choose rather to appreciate it the same way I would any other great show–the performances, the writing, the criminally overlooked cinematography–or any other great science fiction story–eye-opening ideas, fun technology, Frankensteinian terror–or any other great mystery–wondering whodunnit and guessing from time to time but not trying to construct elaborate theories of who what when where why how even though there’s still a full third of the book to go–or any great pulp story–digging the types and tropes and sex and violence.

In other words, I don’t find it to be a high-school grind–but beyond that, I don’t see why that’s pleasurable! It’s not just that people are driving themselves into “masochistic delirium,” it’s that they adamantly feel that that is the best way to experience the show! I’m not a masochist and I’m not feeling delirious. I don’t want to solve a narrative. I want it to unfold–and the genius of Lost, to me, is that it’s all about that unfolding. Why try to jump ahead of it?

UPDATED BECAUSE I’M STUPID AND FORGOT TO INCLUDE THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS POST IN THE POST WHEN I FIRST POSTED IT:

However, I realized yesterday that the constant barrage of Lost-as-game theorizing and “masochistic delirium” and so on we’ve all been subjected to may be preventing me from being able to enjoy those aspects of it–that in some theoretical world where there’s less of that going on to drive me up a wall and interfere with what I find the main attraction of the show to be, I’d be much more into that sort of thing. Am I letting reverse peer pressure blind me to what may well be the genuine pleasures of treating Lost like a puzzle, theorizing madly about it, working myself up into a weekly frenzy? I honestly don’t know. I remember doing more theorizing back in the day, before doing so took on such a manic feel, so maybe there really is something to this.

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