I’ve been delaying this because I couldn’t get the Javascript needed to make spoilers togglable work. I’ve now got to the stage where the code is exactly right except insofar as it doesn’t do anything, so I’ve given up. So I’m afraid you’re just going to have to do it the old fashioned way, and not read them if you don’t want to read them. It goes Lost, Heroes, 24, in case you need to skip.

Lost: quite good
I seem to be alone in this, but I rather liked the end to this series. The complaints I’ve heard are all things I’ve long since come to expect from every episode of Lost – we all know it’s no longer Good, right? Given that, and pretty low expectations from everyone telling me how much it sucked, I thought this was one of the only really fun episodes in season three.

It was even semi-clever: episodes always begin and end with the present-day bits, and dip into the flashbacks in between. This one does too: it’s just that the series has essentially moved several years into the future, and is tying up the existing plotlines in flashbacks to the island. I think this may actually be the format from now on, which would mean a long-overdue end to the flashback stories that tell you nothing and make you like the characters even less.

Resolution: pretty good
Finding out for sure that they get rescued is a pretty big deal, even if the moment itself hasn’t featured. Recent hints at some of the more supernatural theories like hell, ghosts, and near-death hallucinations are all out: they’re just on an island, it exists, they get off it. Future Jack’s sifting of maps suggests that they escape the island themselves rather than being found by helicopters or boats, since it implies that the island’s location is still a mystery. More importantly, Charlie died. Ha!

Plot holes: moderate
Plenty of minor “Why?”s, but the only really irritating one was future Jack’s reference to his father as alive. It was obvious from the start of the first episode that it was a flash-forward and not a flashback, and this was a pretty pathetic ploy to try to throw idiots off the trail by flat-out lying to them. It’s an indictment of how predictable and cheap the writing has become that I thought it more likely they were lying to me than that I was mistaken about the twist the flashback was leading up to.

Excitement: none
It didn’t bother me, but yeah, no tension or intensity at all. War with the others? Don’t care. Mikhail gone? Don’t care. Dynamite detonators killed? Don’t care. iPhone girl evil? Don’t care. The excitement of Lost was always the bizarre mysteries, the polar bears and four-toed statues. The politics of The Others and the capture of major characters is mundane and tired. If there had been any exciting scenes, they would have been diffused by the endless cutbacks to the tedious Jack plotline, the only payoff for which was wasted by being too obvious too far ahead of time.

Irritations: moderate
Interminable Jack screentime accounting for almost all of that. Didn’t mind about Mikhail coming back to life, because I didn’t really care whether he lived or died, and we already knew Charlie would, so it only achieved the inevitable. Ben facing the survivors alone was dumb, and Jack not killing him was dumb, but again, don’t care enough to care.

Highlights: about six?
Survivors commit mass murder! Brilliant! Hurley runs some dudes over! Brilliant! Charlie drowns! Brilliant! Hurley brags about saving everyone! Brilliant! Evil new high-tech faction maybe! Brilliant! Jack is pathetic and doesn’t end up with Kate! Brilliant!

Cliffhanger: er
I watched it last night, and honestly couldn’t tell you how it ended. We didn’t find out who was in that coffin in the future (I thought Juliet, but Graham says it’s referred to as a ‘he’), but ‘someone dies in future’ is not exactly a revelation we’ll all be holding our breath for. What happens about the iPhone is about the only thing I’m waiting to find out, but I could die happy not knowing.

Heroes: fun but frustrating
The climax couldn’t help but be enjoyable, but the series really lost its nerve, heart and brain at the critical moment. I feel about this almost exactly the way people seem to feel about the Lost finale – I enjoyed it at the time, but the more I think about it the more angry it makes me. It was an utterly gutless and nonsensical finalé, and they’d spent so long building to a smart and spectacular one. At least Lost only ever promised a gutless and nonsensical one.

Resolution: fucking none!
What the hell have I been doing for these twenty hours of my life? At the end of it, both people who can cause the explosion are still alive. Nothing happened.

Plot holes: numerous, enormous
DL gets shot! Why didn’t he use his power? Sylar gets run through by a slow, screaming Japanese businessman. Why didn’t he use his powers? Peter needs to be airlifted into the sky by his non-invincible brother, even though Claire had a better solution. Why didn’t he use his powers? Sylar lies down after one stab, everyone walks away. Did they forget he had powers? Guys, if you’re going to make a show about superpowers, you should occasionally remember that your characters have them.

Excitement: high
But that’s a testament to the build up rather than the finalé itself. We knew, or thought we knew, exactly what would get resolved here, and we’d been waiting for it for a long time. Then it didn’t get resolved.

Irritations: vast
All others pale in comparison to how pathetically gutless, tiresome and moronic it is to have the main villain not really be dead after all the heroes assume he is. I literally couldn’t believe they were doing it. If I didn’t have a little faith that they’ll try to move onto a new plotline for the second series, I would have stopped watching for good then and there.

It’s not just that it makes the characters stupid, it balances a huge plot twist on the absurdly precarious notion that the characters within this world have no concept of how it works. You don’t just get frustrated with them for being so stupid, you cease to understand them as characters. Their actions are inconceivable. There’s no longer any way to comprehend this universe.

Highlights: three tiny ones
It sad to say, but the biggest revelation and best moment in the finalé of an extraordinary 23-episode series was finding out Mr Bennet’s first name.

Cliffhanger: kind of
The chapter two teaser was a pleasantly clean break, but I’m not sure what it was trying to tell us. Do they have to stop an eclipse in this one?

24: good
This season a nuclear bomb went off in California in the fourth episode, so it’s been a bit of a low-key second-half by comparison. They’re trying to avoid a diplomatic faux-pas with Russia by preventing their defense secrets being handed over to the Chinese. Even that’s resolved very near the start of this finale, and the rest of the episode is about trying to rescue a single, rather unpleasant person from becoming collateral damage in the military resolution of the larger issue. But it was more about the people you like doing unexpected and pleasing things, and for that it was probably the most enjoyable of these three.

Resolution: near-total, as ever
It even ties up a plotline started three seasons ago, in which one of Jack’s many screw-the-rules operations actually has enormously grave consequences.

Plot holes: just the one
So the Russians, whose insistence on absolute proof of the destruction of The Component has been the driving force for this entire plotline, are delighted with the Vice President’s proposed plan of just bombing the oil rig it might be on and assuming it’s destroyed? Even if you can believe that, it’s impossible to believe that the VP would even have suggested it, so far is it from the result they’ve been pressuring him for all along. I don’t mind them doing the whole “You can’t call in an airstrike, X is still in there!” plotline again, but contorting the logic of the premise so horrifically to support it is sad.

Excitement: dangerously low
I think most of us are hoping Josh, Jack’s 16 year-old nephew with the awful fringe, will die. But even then we don’t really care either way. Those are the only stakes here, and 24 is supposed to be all about stakes. After a nuke on American soil the writers didn’t seem to know how to keep upping the ante, and ended up doing the opposite. It’s become steadily more downbeat and less intense as the series has gone on. It’s not a fatal flaw, but it’s a shame; the reason I fell in love with the series in the first place was the relentlessly escalating horror of what they were prepared to inflict on the country and their potagonist.

Irritations: none
24 established its flaws very early on in its life, so everyone still watching them has long come to terms with every silly thing it can do. I actually enjoy waiting for Jack to go rogue again (as he does three separate times in this episode alone). The only irritating recurring theme was his family being repeatedly kidnapped, and they’ve mostly learned to avoid that one these days. Technically Josh is family, but he wasn’t kidnapped to get at Jack – the villain’s entire plan revolved around him, the grand kidnapping failed, and in the end the government simply handed him over.

Highlights: several, but one in particular
This was the second episode of the season to feature some really brilliant writing. The first being an exchange early on between ex-president Logan and his much-maligned ex-wife, long since mad.

“Martha, the last thing I wanted to do was hurt you.”
“You always managed to get to that last thing, though, didn’t you?”

Here it was the fantastic clash between Jack and Defence Secretary Heller, whose life he’s saved around four hundred times at this point. (And who we saw die, I seem to recall, but whatever.) Heller’s forbidding Jack to see his mentally ill daughter, his long-term girlfriend, on the quite reasonable basis that everyone Jack knows dies. Jack, also quite reasonably but incredibly uncharacteristically, flips out.

“How dare you? How dare you? All I did, all I have ever done, is what you and people like you told me to.”

All the best moments in 24 are when Jack’s had enough. He takes more than anyone reasonably could, but the writers just keep throwing the trauma and tragedy at him until he snaps. He goes the entire series expressing nothing but grim determination, so when he finally does flare up it’s spectacular and genuinely emotional.

In season three this also came in the finale: after hacking his own partner’s hand off with a fire axe, on top of everything else, he excuses himself to his car for a moment and just sobs. In season four it came earlier on, when he was forced to threaten a doctor at gunpoint to abandon critical surgery on his girlfriend’s ex-husband, shortly after said ex-husband had saved his life, and does so with a look of utter panic.

Here it’s that line, when he can no longer take the callousness with which he’s discarded by his superiors when his task is complete. For the most part they can be civil about it, and cite official guidelines about plausible deniability that explain why they have to fire him, credit his success to someone else, arrest him, sacrifice him to terrorists or hand him over to the Chinese.

But this time it’s literally personal: he’s lost so much to them and the job that he can’t be allowed near the only personal life he has left, as broken as it is. And he ends up saying more or less what I said about him the last time I wrote about 24: that he’s barely a person, just a grimly logical tool who methodically achieves the objectives set for him. Ironically, it’s his most human moment yet.

Cliffhanger: none