Namaste

Lost is coming to end in 2010, producers announced yesterday. This, actually, is fantastic news: it's always better for a dramatic show to know when the end is coming long in advance. It makes it easier to wrap up the various plots and story threads when you know you've got exactly 48 more episodes to work with. Unlike, say, The X-Files, a show that limped to its conclusion, bloodied and violated, deluded into thinking it had "more stories to tell" when it actually ran out four years earlier.

Of course, my only sticking point is the way they're doing it: 48 episodes to go, got it, that's fine -- in fact, I'd guessed exactly that many in conversation over the weekend. But instead of doing two more seasons, as I had predicted, they're doing three shortened seasons of 16 episodes each. Which is fine, too, I guess. But just weird.

It's understandable, though, and kinda funny. I mean, of course they're doing forty-eight more episodes in seasons of 16 episodes each. Duh!

Also, today at the grocery store I spotted TV Guide, and its headline regarding the Lost season finale, which according to buzz is a "game-changer" that is so awesome it might actually recombine your DNA. (The evidence backs them up: the finales of seasons 1 and 2 were each spectacular.)

The TV Guide headline boldly announces Five will die!, which is fairly stunning: I knew someone was going to die, but five whole characters is a pretty impressive piece of storytelling real estate to chew up in a single episode.

And since I've been pretty awesome at guessing Lost twists before they happen, especially this season (Claire and Jack having the same father, Locke's father being the guy who Sawyer's been chasing all these years, and a few others), I'm going out on a limb and predicting the death list.

• Charlie. (That one's easy, really, with Desmond's "You're gonna die, Charlie!" premonitions.)
• Ben. (They gotta take out the villain, and his own people are plotting against him.)
• Sawyer. (He just resolved his emotional baggage, which is usually the next step before death on this show: see Boone, Eko, and Ana-Lucia. Plus, one has to be a big-time shocker, right?)
• Jin. (Sun's pregnant, and killing a pregnant lady would be beyond evil, even for this show's writers. But the baby's father -- ah, pathos!)
• Hurley. (Oh, it would make me sad, but Hurley doesn't really contribute much to the show anymore anyway.)

So it is written, so it shall come to pass. Of course, I could be way off base and wrong: they could go for the gusto and kill off Jack, Sawyer, Kate, Locke and Sun, destroying their narrative and alienating their audience so entirely that most never watch television again. Hey, it's Lost, these guys are fucked up.

(The Lost v. Heroes comparison in that USA Today article is pretty funny, by the way.)