How it all ends

No, not my personal situation, which will leave me with, possibly, one job too many, and, almost certainly, one residence too few -- I have no idea how that's going to play out -- but Lost, people, Lost!

Due to our TV-less-by-choice condition, we only just saw it last night, off iTunes. And, actually, because K somehow managed to convince me that Part I was the recap, we saw Part II first and were even more confused and chronologically displaced than the average viewer ("Wait...how is it possible that the people on the beach are able to see the flare from the temple?").

But, after putting the halves together, here's what I can predict:

This isn't the last of Juliet.

You know that part of the death scene, after she tells Sawyer "it didn't work," in which she appears to lapse into la-la land and says "we should get coffee. We could go Dutch," and Sawyer's face falls, because he realizes she's out of touch with reality and isn't going to make it? Uh-huh. It's a feint on the part of the writers. Juliet isn't actually babbling. What's happened is that, in her near-death and thus more temporally fluid state, she crosses over to the other narrative, in which she is asking Sawyer out on a date. This is why she recants and urgently tries to tell Sawyer, before exiting the present narrative, that the bomb did, in fact work.

I predict with 100 percent certainty that we'll see a future scene in which alt-Juliet meets alt-Sawyer -- very likely as strangers, but clearly with a hint of confused residue of knowing each other previously, just like Jack retained an echo of knowing Desmond in this last episode -- and that exact snippet of dialogue gets uttered.

I predict with less -- call it 50 percent -- certainty that this will, in fact, be part of the final episode. Evidence in favor: returning to the central relationship, with an ambiguous but bittersweetly hopeful indication of the future, is tightly congruent with the ending of Alias, from which Abrams recycles shamelessly. Evidence against: Sawyer and Juliet have thus far not been the central relationship, and switching to them, away from Kate, would be a tacit admission that the writers in fact had no long-term arc for the show. Nevertheless, it's pretty evident that they didn't (Walt, anyone?), so, yeah, maybe.

The basis for my confidence? Only my strikingly good plot-prediction record. That's actually my favorite (and most efficient) way to aggravate K: it pays off once when I lean over, ten minutes into any given movie, and whisper a sketch of the narrative sweep, and then again at the end, when I'm proven right.

Interestingly, I don't actually enjoy those occasional "unpredictable" movies about which I'm wrong at any greater rate than the ones I accurately call. Which just goes to show: it's really not the tale; it's the telling.

Nevertheless, don't forget: you read it here first.