From NYTimes.com:

By GINIA BELLAFANTE
Among avid consumers of serial television, there is no more hubristic claim than to say that you know “Lost”— know it in every convolution of its intentionally anarchic plot, know it in understanding the real meanings of all of its allusions to Philip K. Dick or game theory, or the Gospel of John, or Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence.

“Lost,” which concludes its fourth season on ABC on Thursday night, refuses our passive interest while it denies us the satisfaction of ever feeling that we might confidently explain, to the person sitting next to us at dinner, that we have a true grasp of what is going on — of who among the characters is merely bad and who is verifiably satanic. To watch “Lost” is to feel like a high school grind, studying and analyzing and never making it to Yale. Good dramas confound our expectations, but “Lost,” about a factionalized group of plane crash survivors on a cartographically indeterminate island not anything like Aruba, pushes further, destabilizing the ground on which those expectations might be built. It is an opiate, and like all opiates, it produces its own masochistic delirium.