Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you know that the WGA strike played havoc with a lot of shows’ programming schedules. Lost was definitely one of them. What was originally going to be a 16 episode season was, briefly, only going to air the first batch of 8 episodes. Then, when the strike lifted, the opportunity arose for a slightly more complete season of 13 episodes.

Word is that Lost producers are in talks with ABC to extend the season by an extra hour. This excites me for a whole host of reasons. First, and most obvious, I’m always up for more Lost.

Secondly, though, to me this means that they don’t have enough room to tell their story in 13 episodes. This points to something that should excite every Lost fan in the room…less filler! If there’s one huge flaw about Lost, it’s that, in previous seasons, it’s spent too much time doing nothing. Hopefully, the producers’ desire to have a bit more time to really tell the story illustrates a tighter season…without wasteful episodes like last year’s “Tricia Tanaka Is Dead”.

The big question that arises, then, is one of scheduling. If Lost is to return on April 24, then that places the current finale right in the middle of sweeps, on May 22. Obviously, the network is not going to air a finale after sweeps week. Will they bump the return date up? Or maybe air an episode on a different night (like one episode Wednesday night, and the next episode on Thursday)? Or lump two episodes together into a two-hour finale? My money’s on that one.

Now none of this is set in stone, so it could change at any moment. But I think it’s definitely good news all around.