Here's why Lost deserves to die

I had thought of throwing a Lost finale party on Saturday. After all, I've watched the whole thing and it would be good to hear someone else shout "hey baldy, aren't you already dead, like twice?" at the screen when another supposedly expired character pops up in a last-minute twist, of which there are sure to be a few in Saturday's two-and-half-hour finale.

(Yes I know it's screened everywhere else in the world and you can find out, via the net, how it ended. I haven't.)

But I've scrubbed the party idea. And not just because the guest list would have only been me and my mate Graham, who is the only other Lost long-stayer I know. Or that he said no. He was possibly worried that I would try out my Unified Theory of Lost on him during the ad breaks and it would turn into a very long night.

No, it's because I'm not sure if the end of Lost is a reason for celebration. Yes, it has been one of the most audacious pieces of television, ever. A show that helped usher in a golden age of American TV drama, the likes of which we may never see again.

And there must be some good reason that folks like me have dutifully sat and watched 119 episodes of the thing since it started with the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 finding out that the plane crash was only the start of their problems ...

But, however brilliantly elaborate of plot and wild of imagination for a prime-time show Lost has been, it kind of cheated.

It's not just that it's had selective amnesia about some of its earlier seasons (whatever did happen to that fertility thing from season three anyway?) Or that it used time travel, brought on by disturbing the glowing energy at the heart of the island, to give the final two or three seasons a cosmic kick, including a flash-sideways parallel plotline pondering what might have happened if the plane never crashed. Admittedly that has been more fun to watch than yet more running through the jungle.

No, it's that it started out as a grand mystery in which we were meant to follow the breadcrumbs through the forest to some eventual sort of a-ha moment. But as it's headed towards its overdue last hurrah, on one level it's ended up as a soap-cum-horror movie with tragic and often weepy goodbyes to key figures in the Lost squad.

Sure, we would have never got mixed up in all the nonsense if those characters hadn't given us something to cling on to. But it seems after all these seasons getting by on performances doing the requisite to keep the story moving along, Lost has succumbed to a sudden outbreak of acting. It's been really slowing things down.

Meanwhile, the main story has all come down to a battle between good and evil, faith and science, fate and choice. But in shifting from its initial deep dark jungle thrills for something more meaningful, while having its own fun with the space-time continuum, Lost stopped being entertaining.

It has remained engrossing in its own infuriating way. But hasn't been as fun of late as back when those polar bears were still roaming free, there was a mad heavily-armed Frenchwoman in the hills, and that lonely Scotsman spent his every waking hour down that hatch keying those numbers into that computer.

Yes, it's been a landmark show. Not only that, but one which dumbed-up rather than down along the way in an effort to be something more than the sci-fi mystery thriller it started out as. It's high time it gave up trying.

* The Lost final, TV2, 9.30pm. Saturday.