LOST?

Yeah, me too. I love this show with a fervent passion - it's "I Do," in sickness and in health, (its driving me crazy, hence the sickness), for richer and for poorer (heck, there's an economic downturn), and all that. But, man, this television show is insane!

(Disclaimer: if you're a fan and haven't seen any or all of the episodes up to the two from the season 5 premiere, so help you, god, if you keep reading. Arr, matey, spoilers be ahead!)

Okay, I have been a fan of Lost since approximately the third season - my mother and I started catching up via the DVDs in a mad rush of fervent watching and we were hooked. Now, if you know anything about the show, you'll know that it's only gotten nerdier, more confusing, and more complex over the past few seasons. Now, this isn't bad or good, it simply is how the show is.

Being someone who's fully committed to seeing this thing through all six seasons, I've long been interested in noting its progress. Lost started out as a very real and fairly classic television drama - it was about people and their interactions. It was still quite a ground-breaking show, with the flashbacks and the six degrees of separation elements, but it was, at the core, about people. It simply was telling people's stories, while using the setting - a plane crash on an island - as a backdrop.

But it started getting weirder. Trees would move in the forest, polar bears would appear, a french woman showed up, and we learned about the numbers, the button, Dharma... then Ben showed up and all hell broke loose. We got into time-traveling, a fake Oceanic 815, a creepy Charles Widmore and.... AHH! So much. So many webs and layers, plots and sub-plots, hints and references! Who could possible keep track of it all?

I'll tell you who. Doc Jenson. Aka Jeff Jenson. Aka the main Lost columnist for the magazine Entertainment Weekly. Since last year, I've been reading his blogs - he writes at least one per episode - and things have finally started coming together. Through him, I've begun to see the subtle shaping of the series. I've always wondered, though, how much is really in there, and how much is us the viewers making a mountain out of a mole-hill. Much the same as my study of the Harry Potter books, I really wonder... did Jo really put in all the stages of Alchemy, purposefully? Or are we just finding that? Did the Lost creators really link everything together, place stuff in season 2 that they're using now, and name everybody as part of a grander scheme? The more I think about it, the more I realize that they must've!

In this last week, I've finally realized that Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse (the writers/creators minus JJ Abrams) maybe sort of know where they're going. They clearly seem to know that they're down to the hard-core fans... that anyone who's still watching is going to keep watching, till death do we part. All this time travel madness that permeated the last two episodes... that's the peak of Lost's nerdiness. This is where we're heading, how it connects, and hopefully, what will finally make it all come together.

Now, this has been rambly and scattered, a product of writing a blog over the course of several days, and of attempting to talk about the elusive shadow that is this television show, but I can only end by saying that I sure am glad that Lost is back, and that it's headed toward it's last two seasons. Maybe the pieces - much like our work with the Lost puzzles - will finally come together. Maybe, someday, we will no longer be Lost.