To ensure that fans are glued to their TV screens, the ABC network aired a two-hour retrospective, ‘Lost: The Final Journey’ before the two-and-a half-hour marathon finale of the show at 9:00 PM EDT or 2:00 AM BST, followed by the ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live: Aloha to Lost’ late-night talk show.

‘Lost’ has received 58 awards including Emmys and Golden Globes since it started in 2004. It has an average of approximately 11 million viewers every week in the US and has avid supporters in almost 220 countries.

Producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof said that the storyline of the final episode will continue on its season six DVD with 20 minutes of extra material.

Part character-driven drama, part supernatural adventure, the story of ‘Lost’ revolves around the 48 survivors of Oceanic flight 815 who got stranded in a mysterious island.

The sixth season of ‘Lost’ started in the post-nuclear haze of the explosion of the Swan construction site in 1977 and continued at a breakneck pace, shifting from different time periods and giving more back story on eccentric characters like Jacob, Richard Alpert and The Man in Black.

Sky1, together with broadcasters in six other states, will transmit the 121st episode right at the same time as ABC network airs it on the west coast of the US. The transmission time – 9 pm Sunday night in California – is translated to 5 am Monday BST.

Although live events including the Super Bowl or the Academy Award are beamed live across the globe, this is thought to be the first time a scripted TV drama is screened simultaneously in America and in other nations as well.

Viewers in the UK will have an advantage over those in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Turkey and Israel, where the final episode will be aired at the same time. However, there would be no subtitles that would translate it into local languages.

The finale promises fans a resolution to the countless puzzling storylines of the series, whose pilot episode was first aired in September 2004 and which has had 121 episodes in a total of six seasons.

“It was very weird to take these closely held secrets and actually put them in the scene. It was very liberating and exciting,” said Carlton Cuse, one of the chief writers of ‘Lost’.

Sayid, Jin and Sun were all killed within about five minutes of screen time toward the close of the episode, with the truth about FakeLocke/The Smoke Monster finally exposed for all to see. Insisting all season that he was not the enemy, that Jacob’s claims about him being the root of all evil were a lie, FakeLocke proved his true colours and revealed his true agenda; he doesn’t want to help the castaways escape the island after all.

Instead, he wants every single one of them dead. The episode stunned fans, and that’s precisely what the series’ writers and producers intended, for one primary reason – to remove any and all doubt as to Smokey’s true nature. “There is no ambiguity,” writer and executive producer Carlton Cuse notes. “He is evil and he has to be stopped.” “In many ways, the season was structured as a long con on behalf of the man in black,” Lindelof admits.

“Once we revealed that Locke was the Monster, we knew the audience would immediately distrust him, and we would have to spend at least a dozen episodes of Locke trying to convince the audience that he did not have malevolent intention, that all he wanted to do was get off the Island. But everything he was doing was leading up to one moment, which was (trying to) get the candidates in one fell swoop…

The main narrative reason for him killing our main characters is to establish how much of a bad guy he is and to clearly identify him as the antagonist rolling into the end of the series.”

Edward Kitsis, one of the shows writers, admits that as the end draws near, the biggest concern he hears from fans is the plaintive plea of “Just don’t screw it up”. Cuse and Lindelof say that they have now written the show’s penultimate episode and are currently in the process of scripting the finale itself. Actors Terry O’Quinn (John Locke), Michael Emerson (the villainous Ben Linus), Nester Carbonell (the ageless Richard) and Zuleikha Robinson (new character Ilana) appeared at the event, with Carbonell admitting the secretive nature of the show could make the acting more of a challenge than normal, saying that his favourite moment had been actually “finding out who I am… I never knew what I was doing.” Terry O’Quinn says that he had an idea where things were headed for his character in the previous season, going to director Jack Bender and saying, “”I’m going to be indestructible. Can I go with that?” And he said, “Yeah, go with that.””

Cuse and Lindelof also paid tribute to network ABC. In an age where writers increasingly feel that cable gives them more freedom than standard network television, the duo noted that ABC had been unceasingly supportive  and helped turn the show into an international success story, noting that the only difference the show would have had on cable is characters letting loose with the ‘F’ word more often!

“We feel tonally it’s most similar to the first season of the show,” Cuse said of season 6. “We’re employing a different narrative device, which we feel is creating some emotional and heartfelt stories, and we want the audience to have a chance in the final season to remember the entire history of the show. So we have actors coming back like Dominic (Monaghan, who played Charlie) and Ian (Sommerhalder, who played Boone). We’re hoping to achieve a circularity of the entire journey so the ending is reminiscent of the beginning.” He notes that the characters of Jack (Matthew Fox) and Locke (Terry O’Quinn) “have always been at the centre of the show. That dilemma of faith versus reason, and the conflict between those two characters, has been there since the beginning. It’s very exciting to bring that relationship to its conclusion, and we can’t really be any less vague about that.” Lindelof says that the success of the ending will ultimately be determined by the question “Is it satisfying? Have you given the audience an emotional ride that makes them feel satisfied, that’s a good meal?” and insists “The only question that’s ever mattered to us is “What’s going to happen to these people?””

Audiences will begin to find out the answer to that question when “Lost” returns to US television in February.

“Not every question is going to be answered,” Cuse acknowledged. “If we tried to answer every question, it would be very pedantic… (but) hopefully there will be a healthy cocktail of answers, mystery, character resolutions and some surprises.” About the only things confirmed so far about the final season are that it picks up straight after the fifth season’s cliffhanger – with the apparent detonation of a nuclear device – and the reappearance of the character of Libby, played by Cynthia Watros, who was shot dead toward the end of the second season.

That being said, Cuse and Lindelof say they have known what the final image of the series would be since the very first season. “We came up with the final image of the show a long time ago, when we started plotting the mythology of the first season,” Cuse says. “A lot of the character stuff will get worked out as we go along… We have a sense of where we are going to end the show, but we are still in the process of executing it…. We have had a lot of time to think about it. There is certainly a hope that everyone will love the ending – but I don’t think it would be “Lost” if there wasn’t an active debate among the people who watch as to whether it was a good ending.”