Both drew huge ratings, with "Idol" pulling in nearly 30 million viewers and "Lost" 20.7 million, but only "Lost" provided riveting suspense.

For instance: The "Lost" castaways opened the sealed hatch that has taunted them for weeks. But after they blasted it with dynamite, what was inside?

You'll have to wait until the end of summer for that answer.

During the thrilling first season of "Lost," fans of this information-stingy serial may have felt a little lost themselves. No wonder they were hoping for some revelations on the two-hour finale.

Sorry. This episode — as fascinating but frustrating as any — mostly compounded the intrigue.

It also left the audience with one agonizing cliffhanger.

That came in the face of what seemed like a long-awaited rescue when, in the dead of night, the raft that took off from the island last week carrying four of the refugees encountered a rickety fishing boat.

Jin (Daniel Dae Kim), Sawyer (Josh Holloway), Michael (Harold Perrineau) and his young son, Walt, (Malcolm David Kelley) were ecstatic — until a rough-looking sailor on board the other craft ordered harshly, "Give us the boy."

A fight broke out, Sawyer was shot, then the bad guys snatched Walt, plowing through the inky water as they set the raft ablaze.

Alas, you'll be waiting until fall to learn Walt's and Sawyer's fate, too.

Throughout its freshman season, "Lost" became a breakout hit as it logged the adventures of some four dozen survivors of a jetliner crash on a tropical island who-knows-where (the plane's last transmission before splitting apart in midair wrongly pegged its location as hundreds of miles away).

On a recent episode, a freak accident claimed the life of one of the main refugees.

But there were plenty more, as portrayed by a large cast of featured regulars including Matthew Fox (as the sexy doctor, Jack), Evangeline Lilly (a dishy jailbird), Terry O'Quinn (the mystical outdoorsman, Locke), Dominic Monaghan (a rock-star junkie) and Jorge Garcia (the fat guy, Hurley, who says "dude" a lot).

As they struggled to figure where they were and how to get out of there, these characters have also forged some semblance of a community, however fractious at times.

Details of their past have been filled in with flashbacks leading up to that fateful Oceanic Flight 815. Wednesday's episode had several scenes from the Sydney airport as characters unknowingly crisscrossed one another's paths on their way to their assigned seats on the doomed airliner.

Yes, the finale delivered a promised glimpse of the polar bear-like creature that, since the premiere, has stalked the castaways, but until now was never really seen (at least by viewers). It was also an embedded joke, appearing in one drawing of a comic book Hurley was reading on the plane.

The main thrust of the episode was the harrowing trek through the jungle to reach the hatch (an outing that included an attack on Locke by the off-camera mystery creature).