I won’t even allude to it here – although some of the special features give it away, so be sure to watch them afterwards! I’ll just leave you with this: the very last line of the season blasts the possibilities of the show wide open. Any assumptions we had about the arc the show would take are most likely wrong. Lost is unlike any other show on television. It’s shooting for true greatness, and the thing is, it’s actually reaching it.

Special Features:

The DVD set (subtitled "The Unexplored Experience") is of the quality we’ve come to expect from Lost releases, although I daresay there’s more material here than on the Season 2 set. The menu structure of the is a little counter-intuitive – the special features are broken up into four different sections, but each section doesn’t really share a common theme – but still fairly easy to navigate, and there’s a little filler (want to see a preview of the DVD release of The Game Plan? No?), though not much.

Upwards of fifteen mini-documentaries can be found, ranging from “The World of the Others,” to “Crew Tribute with Evangeline Lilly” to “Lost on Location”, a collection of seven-minute featurettes on the filming of ten different episodes (including the finale). The entire the cast, as well as show runners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, turn up often throughout these features, and overall give off a good feeling of camaraderie. (It’s oddly fun to see Michael Emerson, who plays the creepy, wide-eyed Ben, out of character and acting like a perfectly nice guy.)

The best of the docs is “Lost in a Day,” a highly-detailed hour-by-hour account of what each different Lost team – the different shooting units, the writer’s room, the post-production studio – is accomplishing concurrently within a 24-hr period (short answer: seven different episodes in various stages of production are usually being worked on each day). It’s the best look inside the day-to-day mechanics of working in television that I’ve seen.

There’s also plenty of creative material; a handful of unaired flashback scenes and ten other deleted scenes are quite entertaining – Claire walks in on Nikki and Paulo having sex; Locke confronts Ben about Alex’s real mother. As I’ve said before, deleted scenes from movies are usually boring and pointless, but on TV shows, more often than not they’re really good character moments that didn’t make the cut due to time restraints.

Aside from the normal docs and scenes, there are plenty of bonuses as well. “The Orchid Instructional Film” is a neat little short (first shown at this year’s Comic-Con) in the style of the Orientation films scene on the show – only with a twist. And if you poke around ...