Yes, I can, and that is one of the greatest things about Discourse - when a threat gets more than 50 posts, it offers you a summary that highlights the posts in the thread that have gotten the most interaction (likes, replies, deeplinks, etc).
And as I posted immediately above, there is a slider that shows you where you are at in the thread. Don’t worry about having to load the whole page for a huge thread either - it only loads the parts near where you are scrolled, and then continues loading as you scroll, so that the page doesn’t take a long time to load with all those posts.