Tonight’s lauded season finale of “Lost“? Yeah, there was 10, maybe 15 minutes out of the entire two hours that was any good. And those 10 or 15 minutes had to do with one thing and one thing only: revenge upon the Others.

You want a rant? I got your rant right here…

Spoilers ahoy.

The Good

I’ll just lay it out: the best (and maybe only) good few minutes of this entire season were the rescue of Sayid, Jin, and Bernard by Hurley and Sawyer. (I’m ignoring Juliet. She was pointless and they still shouldn’t trust her.)

From Hurley running down the one guy with the VW bus (I will admit, I totally did not see that coming), to Sayid breaking the guys neck with his feet, to Sawyer shooting Roscoe even after he surrendered (“that’s for taking the boy from the raft”), all I can say is, it’s about time. I even said out loud, “That’s what I’m talking ’bout!”

…of course, there’s still the fact that it took them two seasons to finally get revenge for the fact that the Others (despite their assertions that they’re the “good guys”) tried to kill them and kidnapped an innocent kid, but at this point I’ll take what I can get. It’s about goddamn time.

The other good scenes? Jack finally (finally!) beating the shit out of Ben (although I think he should’ve just killed him, I really do), and Charlie messing with the Others Girls heads in the Looking Glass station. And the Looking Glass Others dying too, that was good.

The Rest

The rest was just… just… abominable. I’ve been ranting about bad writing on “Lost” for ages now, and this is pretty much it for me, I think. Gods, where do I start?

The “game changer”—ah, the vaunted “game changer” that they’ve been promoting for ages now… where was that again, exactly? Was it supposed to be the whole “flash forward” (as opposed to “flashback”) that the ending revealed? Yawn. Was it supposed to be the revelation that the boat that Naomi was from isn’t from Penny Widmore? Yawn. Charlie dying? Double yawn.

Okay, let me address these in order. The “flash forward.” Totally doesn’t work/don’t care for a number of reasons:

• If this was supposed to be set in the future, why did Jack reference his father—who was already dead—twice? They spent two seasons beating into our heads how Jack was dealing with his father’s death to make Jack simply slip up in the “future.”
• If this truly is the future, then why are we supposed to care? We see both Jack and Kate alive at the end, and the implication is that another survivor recently died, so we know at least three made it off the island alive… well, since the show has spent three seasons making us care pretty much about only three of the survivors (with a handful of supporting folks, and 30+ people we don’t know or care about), and two of them we see back in civilization, then I’d say game over, the ones we’re supposed to care about got back, all’s well that ends well. What? What was that? You mean, we were supposed to care about all the other survivors who we previously ignored, that Jack implies all died? Hmmm…
• Jack’s future statements imply that calling the ship brought disaster to the survivors, just as Ben said. Only so what, we already knew that thanks to Charlie, and furthermore, how would Ben know that since he only just found out about Naomi, and again, why do we care? I mean, ABC has announced three more seasons of “Lost,” so it’s not exactly a cliffhanger if we know they’re going to drag it out until 2010…
• Is the show going in a time travel direction now? We’ve already seen Desmond playing Quantum Leap and apparently go back in time for real, and then has future flashes about Charlie. Is present-Jack somehow aware of the “flash forward” memories? Does it matter? I can’t think of any good scenario where time travel would make any kind of sense anyhow.

Recap: Two “future continuity” errors, and a bunch of people we don’t know or care about die anyway. Conclusion: Bad writing.

Oh and by the way, Jack’s “beard” in the “flash forward”? Worst. Fake beard. Ever.

The boat offshore and Naomi were not sent by Penny Widmore:

Wow, what a shock. I totally didn’t see that coming. At all. It wasn’t telegraphed by anyone. Really. Stunning. Really.

Say… here’s a thought… what if the ship and Naomi really had been sent by Penny? You know, following up on the whole Penny Widmore scene at the end of the second season finale? You know, to make her seem really as smart as powerful as implied? I think that would actually be more interesting. But god forbid they should try for more interesting.

Plus, you know, the ship is what, 80 miles offshore? Well, that should only take them about, oh, 30 episodes to actually get to the island, in Lost time. That should get them through the next two seasons.

Recap: A “surprise” twist. Because it’s the season finale and, you know, people expect twists. Yeah. Conclusion: Bad writing.

Charlie dying:

Most illogical, poorly contrived death scene ever. Hey, I don’t have any problem with Charlie dying, they’ve only been predicting that for half the season now, but… what? He locks himself in a small room that’s filling up with water so “rapidly” that he has time to write a message on his hand and to make sure Desmond understands what he means?

I mean, what the hell is that? Both Charlie and Desmond swam down to the Looking Glass station! Even if the station was flooding with water ten times as fast as it was in the small room, that still would have left both of them plenty of time to swim out and back up to the surface! You know why?

You can swim up faster than down!

Jesus Christ, at the slow-assed pace the station was flooding (through a single small porthole, I might add), I could’ve made a sandwich and had a beer before swimming out to safety!

Recap: Uh… why bother. Conclusion: Either bad writing, or if they wrote it so that the water was filling so fast that there was no way out for Charlie, then bad production for not making that evident. But if that was the case, why give Charlie time to write a message… eh. Bad writing.

The rest of the episode was, frankly, forgettable.

I think the writers have written themselves into a deep, deep hole with too many loose ends, plot twists, half-baked ideas, and random clutter to get themselves out of. I really cannot imagine any way that they could tie it all together that wouldn’t seem, well, stupid. Let’s just recap some of these anomalies:

• A plane full of strangers who have too many mutual links in their past to be coincidence.
• A smoke monster “security system” that appears both as a mobile cloud of black smoke and as people from your past. (It apparently reads minds.)
• An invisible man with telekinetic powers.
• An island with weird magnetic anomalies that no one outside can see and that no one on it can escape.
• It heals people, too. Selectively.
• Time travel. At least (definitively) for Desmond.
• The Numbers. (Say, what happened to those this season?)
• Whispering disembodied voices in the jungle.
• A boy (Walt) with some sort of psychic powers.

Yeah. Game over.