Spoiler Alert! The 'Lost' finale engages in mumbo-jumbo. Also: hocus-pocus, rigmarole, chicanery and (perhaps worst of all) gobbledygook.

Last Sunday's 'Lost' contained the most shocking revelation in the show's history: that after we die, we meet our loved ones and then walk into a big, bright light. Yes! Shocking! Did you just have your mind blown?! Er...

Fact is, Sunday saw the moment when one of America's greatest science fiction shows decided to end its run with fifteen minutes of uncomplicated non-denominational spiritualism that wouldn't be out of place on a mid-season episode of 'The Ghost Whisperer.'

As a science fiction fan, I'm offended by this ending, the same way I was offended by the last episode of 'Battlestar Galactica.' It's not because I'm opposed to gobbledygook (I am, after all, a Catholic), it's because both shows used their finale episodes to pretend that they weren't really science fiction, but something more.

And I call BS.

If you haven't seen the finale of 'Lost' yet, here's your spoiler warning. If you have seen the show (or if you're a sane person who doesn't spend their time criticizing the Internet for having information on it) then you already know what the gobbledygook I'm referring to is ...

The sideways universe isn't another reality, it's actually purgatory. Apparently, in purgatory, you don't actually realize you're dead until you touch the hand of the most important person in your life (or, in Sayid's case, some chick he knew for like a month). Once you figure it out, though, you get to congregate with the people who meant the most to you and then walk into a giant block of light. What's on the other side? Here's the thing, man, you're going to have to figure that out for yourself. Deeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

The sound you heard at 11:29PM EST Sunday night was 15 million people screaming the "F" word at the same time.

People are pissed at the finale and they should be. The media has assumed that the anger has come from the lack of any real answers to the show's several mysteries, but they're wrong. While we all would have loved a more solid set of answers, most fans made peace a long time ago that 'Lost' was essentially Billy Bob Thornton-era Angelina Jolie: completely insane and confusing, but so beautiful and fun that it really didn't matter.

No, it wasn't the fact that 'Lost' sold us out on the answers that made fans mad, it was the fact that 'Lost' sold out its basic premise. 'Lost' was a science fiction show and we expected it to remain a science fiction show right up until the end. We fans were promised 'Slaughterhouse Five' -- a funny human drama that also happened to have science fiction elements. What we got in those final fifteen minutes was 'The Five People You Meet in Heaven' -- the worst kind of sentimental hokum.

All through its run, 'Lost' has been fertile ground for theorizing, so here's one more theory as to why the show went off the rails like that:

Science fiction doesn't get a lot of respect. Vonnegut himself once wrote that he hated being stuck in a file-drawer labeled "science fiction writer" because "so many serious critics mistake the drawer for a tall white fixture in a comfort station."

At Barnes and Noble, sci-fi is forced to join romance and mystery as "genre fiction," forever apart from their snooty big brother, "fiction." It wouldn't do, I guess, for the 'Star Wars' expanded universe books to share the same shelf with Steinbeck, regardless of how much more fun the Yuuzhan Vong are than the Okies.

It's understandable, then, for the better science fiction writers to aspire to break out of a ghetto filled with SyFy epics with titles like 'Mansquito' and 'Komodo vs. Cobra.' Real respect, the kind that might get you a night of chardonnay-fueled heavy-petting with a Wesleyan lit major, only comes when you prove yourself more than a mere sci-fi writer.

My theory is that this is what 'Lost' was trying to do in those fifteen minutes. I don't believe, like a lot of people do, that they had written themselves into a corner and were trying to pull some emotional slight-of-hand. Hell, the prevailing theory on the Internet (that the sideways universe would join with the island universe during the finale) would have worked just fine and that's coming from idiot bloggers like me. The 'Lost' writers could have come up with something far better if they had wanted to.

They didn't, though. They went with spiritual mumbo-jumbo not because they were incapable of coming up with a better sci-fi ending, but because they were afraid of 'Lost' being labeled as "just" a science fiction show.

'Battlestar' had the same problem last year. Hard science fiction for five full seasons, and then, at the end, God shows up. Even though Ron Moore's epic transcended the genre (not to mention the awful, awful channel it aired on), he still got cold feet over letting the show leave the world in the same manner it came into it.

The implicit question that both these finales are asking is this: How can something be important and be science fiction?

This is what has me angry, because, dammit, science fiction can be important and transcendent! Look at '2001' or 'Wall-E' or 'Star Trek' (TNG and TOS). Just because aliens are involved doesn't mean you can't comment on what it means to be human!

It makes me angry because when you diminish science fiction, you diminish the fans who followed it for all those years.

And, trust me on this, sci-fi fans don't need any more diminishing in their lives.

(Jay Black is a writer and comedian who really hopes you like this column. For more information about Jay or to check out one of his live shows, visit his website at www.jayblackcomedy.net.)

[follow @jayblackcomedy on Twitter]