We'll get just a little bit more 'Lost'

If you are a fan of "Lost," you already know that the upcoming season will be the last. That we'll finally find out what the heck has been going on in the 102 episodes that have aired over the past five seasons.

You probably also know that the sixth and final season will begin airing early in 2010 and run for 17 episodes.

Wait — there's been a bit of a change. ABC has confirmed that the final season will not run 17 episodes — it will run 18 episodes.

Hey, if that's what executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof and their team need to give fans the ending they deserve, I'm all for it. Good for ABC for adding the extra hour.

(Three years ago, you may recall, ABC announced that "Lost" would produce three 16-episode seasons before signing off. Those plans were scuttled by the writers' strike, so instead we got 14 episodes in 2008, 17 in 2009 and now 18 in 2010 — ending up with one more hour than that three-season plan had called for.)

Of course, Cuse, Lindelof & Co. might just be postponing the inevitable. They have the toughest job in television — a job that just might be impossible.

Not only do they have to tie all the loose ends of "Lost" together in 18 more episodes, not only do they have to explain all the unexplainable things that have happened, but the finale has to be three things simultaneously:

It has to make sense.

It has to be satisfying.

It has to be surprising.

The chances of it being all that are slim.

Hey, it isn't easy wrapping up any show. The series finale of "Cheers" was disappointing; the series finale of "Seinfeld" was dreadful.

Hey, there are those who didn't like the final episode of "Newhart," which is arguably the greatest series finale of all time. It's the one when Bob Hartley (Newhart) of "The Bob Newhart Show" woke up in bed with Emily (Suzanne Pleshette) and we learned that everything that happened on "Newhart" over 184 episodes was a dream.

It was classic, and people carped.

More recently, the sci-fi crowd was in a tizzy over the series finale of "Battlestar Galactica." Personally, I thought it was nothing short of spectacular, but others disagreed.

The chances that everyone is going to like the end of "Lost" aren't slim, they're none. No matter how good it is, some people are going complain.

It's not just the nature of television, it's human nature.

I've said it before, and it remains true today: The "Lost" finale is going to go down in television history.

We just don't know yet if it's going to go down in TV history as a spectacular success or a spectacular failure.