With only one more normal episode to go before the grand finale, I thought I’d attempt to find out if, after 6 years, I’ve finally got the measure of this most brilliant, mind-bending, challenging TV series. Trying to figure out what’s going on is, of course, all part of the fun but I discovered a strategy that’s been working surprisingly well for this final series.

The trick is simple: Remember that Lost is a TV series written by very talented writers, not real life. That’s where you start. You don’t start by trying to make logical sense of what you’ve seen. Instead, you look at what, narratively, would make the best story. Doing this I scored a rare direct hit in predicting that Charles Widmore would have Desmond in that locked room in the submarine. The logic? Well, they needed to bring back Desmond and it seemed as good a way as any. That’s it.

This time? I want to make a much braver prediction based on what we’ve just seen in the episode, “Across the Sea.” I could be completely wrong, of course, but in many respects this is my last chance to go on the record. It’s now or never.

So, here’s what I’m thinking. Before the finale starts the writers need to get us to a specific point, and that point is quite simple: We need to know what’s at stake for all the characters, and we need to make sure that the vast majority of the questions are answered and out of the way so as to avoid ruining the finale with tedious info dump. So: What’s at stake? What happens if the Man In Black gets off the Island? What did Jacob’s mother mean by ‘made it so you can’t kill each other’? How did she fill the well they’d dug and kill all the settlers? Why did Jacob continue to prevent the Man In Black leaving the Island, and importantly… how? Was it simply by interfering with his plans just as Jacob’s mother did by filling the well and killing the settlers?

So there’s a lot of work to do between now and the finale, so how can they do it? How can they bring everything that’s happening in the present together with all this stuff from the past and make us understand what’s really at stake?

Here’s my prediction: We’re going to discover why The Others killed the Dharma Initiative. Why? Because we need to know how Charles Widmore knows the Man In Black and how to fight him. He’s the key here – he was leader of The Others during that time. Let’s just suppose that the Man In Black had been manipulating the Dharma Initiative just as he’d manipulated those early settlers. That was enough for Jacob’s mother to go on a killing spree, wasn’t it? Has Jacob followed in his mother’s footsteps here? In telling us this story, however they do it, they can reveal much more about the relationship between the two – the bit we didn’t see in “Across the Sea” and, at the same time, explain what the hell is going on with Charles Widmore.

Beyond that? Who knows. The complexities of the two timelines and Desmond straddling them both (and being Mr Action in one and Mr Passive in the other) is beyond my ability to comprehend properly although a tentative guess, based on the Lost writers’ love of repetition of key themes, I’m expecting Desmond to somehow ‘trigger the failsafe’ as he did in the Hatch, rather than continuing the ‘push the button’ (in this case, pushing the button means replacing the Island’s protector over and over). The Island will probably sink, and the other timeline will be all that remains, granting a miserable ending ‘On Island’ and a fairly happy ending ‘Off Island’. Perhaps.

But even now, at the very last minute, they’re stil keeping us guessing.. and that’s why I love it.

But yes: Dharma Initiative. Why they were killed. That’s my guess.