Twiddling our thumbs to Lost

Ross Douthat is correct that this House Next Door post by Andrew Dignan gets a lot right about what's wrong with Lost--except that these are the same problems the show has had since about a third of the way through the first season, when it started to become clear that the entire spooky island setup was just a tease, and when the writers made plain their intention to answer no questions--or answer them only in the most utterly unsatisfying manner possible.

Dignan also keys in on what I think will ultimately be the show's undoing for even its most ardent fans:

The other problem I alluded to is that Lost -- a show so overlong it torments my TiVo every week by running a couple minutes past the hour -- insists on confining all essential plot to the final five to eight minutes of any given episode. This means we spend the better part of 50 minutes twiddling our thumbs until we return from the last commercial break.

I have a very strong suspicion that this fill-time-till-the-finale approach isn't merely how the show operates on a single episode basis, but how it will play out as an overall series. The whole of the series is filler, designed to frustrate and seduce us into watching until some last minute, sure to be underwhelming, unfulfilling, great big shocker. But the only thing truly enormous and shocking about it will be the amount of water cooler bitching it causes.