What 'Game of Thrones' has in common with the final season of 'Lost'

George R.R. Martin, the author whose “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels inspired HBO's “Game of Thrones” phenomenon, doesn't want his TV show to disappoint viewers the way “Lost” disappointed him, and now, with two episodes to go, many “Thrones” fans feel like that's going to happen.

Martin compared the final episode of ABC's island mystery series to a, uh, bowel movement in a 2011 interview. (He mistakenly thought the episode revealed the characters had been dead the whole time, of course, but that's an argument for another time.) Many “Thrones” watchers used similar colorful metaphors on social media after “The Last of the Starks” suggested that the heroic Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) was ready to turn heel, and showed Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) abandon noble warrior Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) shortly after taking her virginity.

Whether the public shuns the final episodes of “Thrones” like Martin (and many, many others) shunned the “Lost” finale remains to be seen. What is certain today is that both series used their third-to-last episode to talk to the audience, whether the audience realized it or not.

“Across the Sea” was one of the more baffling installments of a TV show that featured a sentient cloud of smoke and time travel. It took “Lost” viewers back hundreds of years in the life of the show's mysterious, supernatural island, to when the struggle between two seemingly immortal brothers began. One brother finds an ancient Egyptian game and creates his own rules for it, rules that always seem to favor him. When the eventual steward of the island, Jacob, protests, the game master, aka The Man in Black, says: “One day you can make up your own game, and everyone else will have to follow your rules.”

Jacob's “game” would turn out to be the island, and certainly its own rules defied all logic. Here was a clear signal from showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse that they were making up their own rules, too - there was no grand plan for “Lost” from the beginning, no carefully planned, six-season narrative. It was a show about a plane crashing on a weird island with weird stuff happening on it, and the writers were winging it. In its final season, “Lost” told us that the answers didn't matter - the people did.

“The Last of the Starks” talked to us, too, primarily through Jaime. When he decides to leave Brienne and Winterfell for King's Landing - and his sister, the evil Queen Cersei (Lena Headey) - he reminds the many viewers who have fallen for him that perhaps their devotion to an incestuous murderer has been misplaced. “I pushed a boy out a tower window, crippled him for life, for Cersei. I strangled my cousin with own hands, just to get back to Cersei,” Jaime says. “She's hateful, and so am I.”

Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) and Varys (Conleth Hill), Daenerys' trusted advisers, talked to us too, voicing their concerns that the woman who promised to end tyranny in Westeros might be too reckless and too much like her father, the so-called Mad King, to sit on the Iron Throne. But of course the show has been preparing us for a heel turn for a while: She had her dragons burn the Tarlys alive after the loot train attack in Season 7. She has insisted that Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and the entire Northern region bend the knee. She will never be able to call Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner), perhaps the show's most sympathetic ruler, a friend.

Throw in the events of last Sunday - losing one of her two remaining dragons to Euron Greyjoy (Pilou Asbaek), and losing her closest friend, Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel), to the executioner's blade - and the emergence of a Mad Queen seems almost inevitable.

I don't know how “Game of Thrones” will end on May 19, but I'm pretty sure it won't end happily. Anyone who has been watching for the last eight years should know that, even if we long for Jaime's absolution or Dany's ascension.

And I'm pretty sure they weren't dead the whole time.

<i> Follow Sean, who cried all the way through the “Lost” finale, on Twitter at @SeanStanglandDH.</i>