Naturally, there are spoilers for the season finale of “Lost” in this post.

I’ve said before that the moment I quit loving “Lost” was when I saw Dr. Pierre Chang/Dr. Marvin Candle broadly exclaim that the energy the DHARMA initiative is tapping into might allow them to travel through time. The erratic time jumps that followed in season 5 really sealed the deal — they seemed formulated to confuse viewers and string them along instead of advancing the story.

It turns out the joke’s on me. You could boil down last night’s season finale into two ultimate resolutions. The first: Good battles evil; good wins. The second: Everyone dies and then lives happily ever after, the end. With that in mind, nothing I loved about the show’s first few seasons was advancing the story, either. (Nor did most of the final season, since the alternate universe flashbacks were a giant ruse, having nothing to do with the island or with the nuclear bomb detonation that seemed to have caused them.)

But if “Lost” had been a different show — say, a one-hour dramedy with a progressive but unmysterious narrative arc — last night’s finale would have been perfect. It gave some kind of peace to almost all of the characters viewers might have cared anything about, and thematic nods to the pilot brought the show full circle.  It’s the kind of finale that might have suited a show like “Northern Exposure,” which was full of mysterious wackiness and ended with a melancholy goodbye to the town of Cicely, Alaska, and its inhabitants.

But “Lost” wasn’t “Northern Exposure.” On “Northern Exposure,” the unexplained was part of everyday life in Cicely — from the beginning, it just happened. On “Lost,” on the other hand, all the strange happenings in the first few seasons were presented as though they were going to mean something later. Instead, the biggest mystery that turned out to have meaning in the finale was Claire’s second delivery of Aaron. She went from not in labor to holding a newborn in about five minutes because she wasn’t in the real world.

But really, I got about as much question-answering as I expected from the finale, and in the long run I’m mostly just relieved that the show’s over. Are you?

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