Again with the [LIFTED] questions bollocks. Does anybody read a thing a post on this forum??

Again with the [LIFTED] questions bollocks.

It seems to me that this thread has Lost it's way somewhat... Did you see what I did there?

FFS guys, lighten up... it's only a T.V. show!

I'll go now.

Yeah get LOST John….. see what I did back

Over the past few weeks it seems I'm the new Marklar and I don't want that. I was gonna just leave this, but I wanted to make my position clear in case anybody's interested. Feel free to continue hating without me....

Apologies if my posts appear overly attacking. I wouldn't want that. However, I do feel you're feeling unnecessarily victimised. There are apologists for the finale and people who are disappointed with it. The apologists seem to be in the minority (though only slightly) and neither side can understand the other's point of view. For me it's because the two sides were watching the show for different reasons.

The reason I'm on the answers side is because that is what the show was advertised as, that's what we've been promised time and time again and it's clear to me we've been short-changed and treated like mugs. There's a large minority of people, such as yourself, who were just watching it for its own sake and are more than happy with the outcome.

The finale in isolation as a show wasn't bad, but without the answers, it was completely inconclusive to end the whole show on as far as I'm concerned.

I gave up on Lost (Sky1) some time during the first season, having decided it was just a bunch of irritating people going "woo" on a rock in the sea. An episode detailing Charlie the rock star's backstory, replete with hammy flashbacks to a wildly implausible version of Manchester, was the final straw. But since then I'd heard from devoted fans, who insisted that despite a few major wobbles somewhere round the halfway point, it was actually well worth watching.

I never acted on their advice. I could've bought the box set, I suppose, but that'd be a lot of investment in a show which had annoyed me so much in the past. Best just to tune in to the final two episodes ever instead, then. I can probably just pick up the story, right? Wrong. Thumpingly, obviously wrong. Far from clearing up the mystery of what the island was and why they were there, from my uninformed point of view, the finale consisted of random sequences in which irritating people went "woo" on a rock in the sea and in a city, apparently simultaneously. The city was purgatory and the island was real. Or was it the other way round? Characters I recognised rubbed shoulders with strangers, all of whom were imbuing each line of dialogue with such sombre, knowing significance, you could be forgiven for assuming we were witnessing the end of history itself.

The plot made less sense than a milk hammock. Jack was apparently no longer Jack, but a man who looked like Jack. He was certainly just as punchably earnest as I remember. There was much kerfuffle over a kind of magic reset button located down a well in the middle of the island. The story ended with alternative-universe-Jack having an existential chat with his dead dad. I remembered Jack's boring daddy issues from the first season; back then they struck me as a spectacularly tedious attempt to give our clean-cut hero some depth. Has any viewer, in the history of film and television, ever actually cared about a lead character's parents? Faced with a character as blankly dull as Jack, I'd be more interested in learning about the tortured background of a piece of office furniture.

Anyway, having healed his life, Jack was free to stand around in an imaginary church backslapping other Lost characters while the room was filled with heavenly light: the end. Intense and moving, no doubt, for loyal fans of the show. Might as well have been a pretentious building society advert for anyone else.

But Lost isn't the only series coming to an end. Ashes To Ashes, Law & Order, 24, Heroes: it's almost as though populist TV drama itself is shutting down. Some shows, like Heroes, don't have an opportunity to plan for their own deaths, leaving the characters stuck in limbo. Others, like Lost and Ashes To Ashes, turn out to have been in limbo all along. Limbo's very much in vogue at the moment. In fact there's roughly a 50% chance that any serial you're following will turn out to be set there. All this publicity must be doing wonders for the Limbo tourist industry.

Of course saying "aha, it was limbo all along" is just a marginally more profound way of saying "aha, it was a dream all along", a trope which became a cliche through overuse. There's no room for any more limbo-based programming, so anything currently on air is going to have to find a different way of ending, which sadly means 24 (Sun, 9pm, Sky1) – which finishes for good in a fortnight – won't conclude with Jack Bauer kicking his way through Hell and kneeing Satan in the bollocks. Another twist is necessary. Here's hoping it transpires the whole thing took place in a paperback novel being read by Shaz from Ashes To Ashes, who was herself being daydreamt by Sawyer from Lost – while he was trying to think up a satisfying conclusion for Heroes. That or it pulls out to reveal it all took place in a cat's bum. A cat's bum doing a poo. I am 39 years old.