This news is a few days old, but just this morning I found it buried in Ausiello's Twitter feed and I haven't seen it reported anywhere else yet.

The final season of Lost is going to be 18 hours instead of 17, meaning a double episode for the premiere and finale. So figure on an extra 45-ish minutes of head-scratching, "what the hell just happened" moments once January 2010 rolls around.

You may recall that at the end season three, ABC, Damon Lindelof, and Carlton Cuse agreed on the final three seasons of Lost being 16 hours each. But after the WGA strike cut season four back to 14 episodes, those last two hours got dispersed between seasons five and six, bumping them to 17 eps each.

I guess it just goes to show you that even the most well thought out plan can be tweaked, but it makes me wonder ... was this ABC's demand to get a longer season or Lindelof and Cuse's creative decision? I guess we'll know for sure if midway through the season we get "Stranger in a Strange Land, Part 2."