'Lost' Final Season Gets Interrupted By The 2010 Olympic Games, Showrunner Carlton Cuse Says

It's bad enough that fans of "Lost" have had to wait since May (and continue to wait until January) for the show's final season to begin, particularly considering that the previous season ended with one of the most startling cliffhangers to date.

But just like John Locke, whose faith is constantly tested by the Island's mysterious ways, "Lost" fans are about to test the limits of their own patience.

According to Arts at Harvard, executive producer and co-showrunner Carlton Cuse recently revealed that "Lost" will still return in January as planned, but the show's final season will be interrupted by the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games. The series' remaining episodes will resume following the Olympics' conclusion in February.

To describe this move as a tease is nothing short of an understatement. When it was initially announced in 2007 that "Lost" would end after its sixth season, the plan was for ABC to air three more seasons of 16 consecutive episodes, entirely repeat-free.

Clearly, that plan went off with quite a few hitches. The fourth season of "Lost" became a casualty of the Writers Guild of America's 2008 strike, yielding only 14 episodes — interrupted, of course — during one of the show's most crucial seasons in terms of story advancement.

As a result, the extraneous hours of "Lost" were pushed into seasons five and six with the continued promise of consecutive episodes — but season five, appropriately dubbed by fans as "The Time Travel Season," experienced a break between the eighth and ninth episodes. Now, the promise of consecutive episodes of "Lost" is deader than Boone following Cuse's revelation of season six's interrupted schedule.

I wouldn't pin any blame for this on the "Lost" creative team and I certainly have loads of respect for ABC's decision to give the series a concrete resolution, but the fact that we're going to have to wait even longer to learn more about the Smoke Monster, the nature of the Island and the show's other mysteries is — as Hurley would describe it — a real bummer, dude.

What do you think of ABC interrupting the final season of "Lost" due to the Olympics? Let us know in the comments section or on Twitter!

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