(The following contains some spoilers for Lost. Chances are though, if you’re not watching Lost right now, you never will. And if you don’t watch Lost, anyone writing about Lost sounds like a lunatic, and you wouldn’t read this anyway.)

There has never been a show like Lost. Any story has to build a suspension of disbelief, but Lost is at a point in which literally anything can happen, and I wouldn’t bat an eye. There was a moment in tonight’s episode when the Man in Black explained the nature of the smoke monster and Jacob to Richard Halpert, and we were forced to either trust him, thus negating everything we used to believe, or, at the same moment, assume he was lying and learn another piece of information. The entire momentum and meaning of the show teetered on one scene that could have just as easily ended either way. That’s what makes the show uniquely exhilarating and makes up for all of the spinning of its wheels.

Because of this, and because people are starting to conjure up endgame scenarios for the final eight episodes, the show seems to offer endless possibilities for a conclusion. In fact, some viewers are actually sad that they’re starting to get questions for some of the show’s enduring questions, because the answers given to us are not as satisfying as what we’ve come up with on our own. Lost has taken us places we never could have imagined at the outset, and everyone has a unique theory about what it all means. Despite this evidence, however, Lost does not represent the power of the imagination; all of this really adds up to the impotence of imagination.

Think back through the last five seasons of the program. Have you ever been right about anything? How have your predictions worked out for you? For example, this season began with the introduction of a multi-verse. The characters are still on the island but also/alternately in a much different form of the world they would have lived in if they hadn’t crashed. I thought this was brilliant because it allowed us to have our cake and eat it too. I wanted to reconnect with the characters I fell in love with, and this approach gave us the best version of each person. For someone like Sawyer, it took extreme circumstances to draw out the humanity deep within him. If he had landed in L.A., he would continue to be a duplicitous son-of-a-bitch. The island redeemed him. Meanwhile, people like Jack simply seem better off in the real world. That’s where they find their true purpose, and it’s where they are their true selves. Just as I started to enjoy things though, this seemed to become cheap thrills for the writers. “Check it, now Ben’s daughter is his student.” “Yo, is that Miles as Sawyer’s partner?” And Cuse and Lindelof started acting as if any of this Person X from the show is now in Role Y stuff had any emotional weight. The island has now taken back all importance. The next eight episodes will probably follow Hurley, Sun, Claire/Charles Widmore/(fingers crossed) Frank Lupidis, Jin, Jacob, Man in Black, Desmond, and a Character We Don’t Even Know Yet, and we’ll forget all about Jack’s piano-playing kid. The approach and attitude that I thought would inform the show and guide it toward its end kind of…doesn’t matter. Then again, I’m probably wrong about all of this stuff.

That’s what I’m talking about. The focus of the show changes every week, so much so that any prediction made is looking ahead past points that don’t exist yet. It’s like planning chess moves, only not knowing what shape the board will be. Anyone who ends up thinking he knows the answer is a fool.

We predict what will happen in a story with the aid of a) our knowledge of how the mechanics of stories work (irrelevant here), b) clues the authors give us (irrelevant here), and c) our connections to our own experiences (also, unless you’re an ageless dude working for the Dharma project, irrelevant). The thing any prediction about the show depends upon is the island, which is as amorphous and defiantly unpredictable a setting as there has ever been in the history of storytelling.

Here’s what I mean. In season one, I was convinced that the island was some sort of purgatory. A spiritual battleground in which these people, after their deaths, were being tested by unexplainable forces within an inch of their free will and any glimmer of hope. I was thrown off this course by finding out that people who are still alive like Penny Widmore can contact the island or that the characters eventually made it back home or that we’re, you know, in a fucking multi-verse. But tonight I found out I was pretty much right. Except I wasn’t satisfied. I didn’t have an “I told you so” moment. The characters’ motivations and circumstances had changed so much that the setting I had originally imagined was irrelevant. I never changed my purgatory idea of what the island was, but it changed what my idea of purgatory was.

Even though I was imagining something eternal and otherworldly, the show outstretched any of those ideas. We think we’re attracted to Lost because we become active participants in trying to figure it out. The engine that actually drives the show, however, is the premise that we—and the characters—are never really in control.