I had the same reaction last year. The second ABC's
Lostended, with a jaw-dropping cliffhanger, I did the math, perused the TV horizon, and sighed a sigh of mournful resignation.
Already, I'm lost without Lost.
Face it. By the time this week is over, and certainly after Fox's 24 and American Idol end their annual marathons next week, broadcast TV will begin to smell. The summer will reek of, and from, tacky reality and competition shows. Wednesdays on ABC, instead of Lost, we'll have Wipeout.
Check, please.
And at this point on the calendar, the next fresh episode of Lost is some eight months away. No wonder viewers flee to cable during the summer. It's not only the pursuit of quality. It's self-defense.
But Lost, last night, ended not with a whimper -- but with a very big bang...
(IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE LOST SEASON FINALE YET, STOP HERE, AND COME BACK ONCE YOU HAVE.)
I won't go into much detail here, but there are certain things about the season finale that exemplified precisely why I love this show.
It fleshed out some mysteries -- literally, in at least two cases, by introducing us to the complete oceanside statue (previously seen only in ankle-high ruins), and to Jacob, the elusive island master. It also introduced a new adversary, still unidentified, who succeeded in finding a "loophole" aimed at killing Jacob. And what a loophole... the spitting image of Locke.
It provided a long-overdue showdown between Sawyer and Jack, as Jack sought to complete Daniel's mission of detonating a nuclear bomb near the electromagnetic rift in order to prevent "the incident" that brought them all to the island. It also, in a delicious moment of doubt-seeding, had Miles ask a frightening but eminently logical hypothetical: What if Jack's detonation of the bomb WERE the incident?
It 
built everything up to the climax of the bomb being dropped, then deviously delivered an anti-climax instead. Nothing exploded. Nothing happened. Not until the last minute of the season finale, when we learned that Juliet, who had fallen into the collapsing drill site containing the unexploded bomb, had just enough life left in her to bang the device with a rock and detonate it. The screen filled instantly with white, and the episode, and the season, ended.
It was the Lost version of The Sopranos' cut to black, only this was a cut to white -- the show's White Album, a blank canvas on which next year's final episodes will be painted.
The teaser promo said it all, without saying anything but the barest facts. The show's title. When it will return. The finality, and theme, of its return.
And finally, at the end, one teasing image: the extreme close-up of an eyeball. Presumably, but not necessarily, the eye belongs to Jack.
That's the image with which Lost began five years ago -- a closeup of Jack's eye, widening to show his face, then his body, as he awakened in the jungle, completely disoriented, before stumbling to the beach and seeing the plane wreckage.
At the start of the finale, Jacob and his unnamed nemesis were debating about the nature of the island, and the evil that men do. The unidentified man complained that Jacob kept bringing people to the island, but that it always ended the same way: badly, with violence and death.
"It only ends once," Jacob says with zen-like calmness. "Anything that happens before that is just progress."
Lost, too, will end only once. I can't wait.
And right now, the day after, I'm sad that I have to. Shows this good, this powerful and this original are rare -- and the broadcast networks aren't exactly doing well at replacing them as they leave.