'Lost': 4 Scenarios for Next Season

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DOC JENSEN LIKES THE SCENARIO BECAUSE...
It sounds pretty profound — like My Dinner With Andre, a Tarkovsky movie, or a Sartre play, stretched across an entire television season.

DOC JENSEN DOESN'T LIKE THIS SCENARIO BECAUSE...
I can accept Jacob the Magic Jinn and ''Beam me up!'' twists, I can accept time line reboots and paradox conundrums, and I can even accept self-aware, course-correcting Fate and wars between pissy ghosts. But for some reason, my brain just can't accept the whole idea that Jughead's cataclysmic energy was somehow canceled out by the Swan's maybe-mystical energy, resulting in a zero-sum effect that hurt nobody. I don't get that.

ODDS OF AUDIENCE SATISFACTION: 10,000-1

But that's just me. And that's part of the dilemma that the producers of Lost face in terms of pleasing the audience in the show's final season: The relativity of incredulity. Given the high likelihood that the resolution of the Jughead cliffhanger is going to be utterly fantastic, which fantasy solution do you choose when one person's plausible and conceivable is another person's implausible and inconceivable? Whichever way Lost goes — and to be clear, there could be many, many more ways it could go than the ones described above — there will be those who say ''Cool!'' and there will be those who say ''Boo!'' In the end, I hope for two things, neither of which involves the words ''I hope it makes sense.'' 1. That the final season of Lost be meaningful. 2. That the final season of Lost does what it has always done: Stir our imagination. Again with the Coleridge: Curiosity is kept upon the stretch from page to page, and from volume to volume, and the secret, which the reader thinks himself every instant on the point of penetrating, flies like a phantom before him, and eludes his eagerness till the very last moment of protracted expectation...

AND AS FOR THE REST OF THE COLUMN...
There is no rest of the column. No reader mail. No research results. Nothing...except the season finale of Totally Lost. Behold the editing magic of our producer, the extravagantly talented Jason Averett, to whom Dan and I owe a great deal of thanks for putting up with our ''attempts at narrative'' and his tireless, late-night labors! Behold a descent into total madness as we finally reveal the face of our own malevolent Man In Black who popped a cap in Pig E.'s eye! And behold Dan and I, quickly sprinting from the room to get a head start on the mob that's certain to chase us with virtual pitchforks and torches! (Now we know what the producers of Lost must be dreading.)

But here's some good news (provided you think the following is still ''good news'' after this column): Doc Jensen is going on a very, very brief vacation, and then coming back on a regular basis — a couple times a month to start; then weekly as we count down to season 6 of Lost. The exact date of return: Monday, July 20. Then and there, I will reveal the results of the survey (which is not yet fully tabulated — 560 more responses since my last update!) — and reveal the cool plan Dan and I have hatched for Comic-Con. Until then, I present to you — with a huge nervous gulp and much anxiety roiling in my gut — the epic conclusion to this season's Totally Lost, complete with special effects, strange new characters, scary masks and funny costumes, and our own version of a noodle-cooking cliffhanger. Enjoy? I mean: Enjoy!

Doc Jensen

Totally Lost: the Epic Conclusion