This is the first half of a two-part article. Monetizing LOST can be found over at Who Knew?

Tonight, the two-hour season finale of LOST (and possibly the last jaw-dropping cliffhanger on the show) will air, and there will be only seventeen episodes left in the series. It’s not really enough time for the show to adequately address every question you’ve had while watching it, and its writers have already made it clear in multiple interviews that some of these questions will never be answered. This assertion has understandably perturbed a lot of fans, but I would argue that their complaints are irrelevant. After more than 100 hours of plot twists, character development and mythology expansion, if you’re still watching LOST just to finally get some answers, you’re missing the point.

LOST is a show where rampant baseless speculation and extracurricular research is not only required - it’s where the entertainment value comes from. The show’s writers (especially its showrunners, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse) plant clues to upcoming storylines many seasons in advance and automatically assume that their rabid fanbase will analyze these clues. Case in point: during Season 2, Radzinsky’s map on the blast door of the hatch contained notes referring to various “Cereberus Vents” scattered throughout the island. Four weeks ago, during the judgment of Benjamin Linus, the smoke monster literally seeps through the holes of an underground vent.

It’s a tiny hint that no casual viewer would possibly have a chance of knowing, but it makes the difference between being hopelessly confused by this season and eagerly anticipating the show’s next move. Lindelof and Cuse have stated that it’s their job to make a compelling character-driven show from week to week, but let’s be honest: their skill level at maintaining a high-quality narrative in that respect is debatable. It’s the interactive element of LOST - the glorious interplay between the fans’ theories and the writers’ struggles to stay three steps ahead of them - that always stays entertaining.

One thing the show excels in is exquisite, bite-sized character moments - like in Some Like It Hoth, where Miles stares into the open doorway through which his father reads to his younger self - how crazy and surreal that moment is, taking the show’s fixation with daddy issues to its logical and ridiculous apex - these moments can be appreciated on their own as great television. The casual viewer can savor these fleeting scenes as they play out… while, simultaneously, the game-player is analyzing the scene’s implications for how time-travel mechanics work on the show, evaluating the redemptive character arc of Miles thus far and extrapolating what will happen to the character in future episodes, and attempting to view these mythological and character arcs from the perspective of the writers so as to form better predictions, to calculate a better move. It’s a giant and incredibly fun mindfuck for the fans, and it’s the job of the writers to keep surprising them, to heighten the suspense and the level of surprise when the big reveals finally come. What might seem to the casual viewer as awkwardly written, out-of-character scenes (like there are during every episode before a season finale) are recognized by the game-player as necessary set-up for a major plot point, another clue for the player to puzzle over.

So I would say that LOST fails miserably by the standards of conventional entertainment - even in the pilot episode, I found much of the dialogue and character development to be cheesy and overwrought. It’s the mystery, the puzzling over the clue, the feedback loop between the show and its fans - that’s what is ultimately so rewarding about this show. The finale will air in a few hours, and our minds will probably be blown for months - maybe everyone’s theories will be shot to dust, and we’ll have to rewatch episodes from Season 2 to figure out where we went wrong. But isn’t that the fun of it? The game continues.