"Lost"

I'm not exactly sure how I managed to go three-plus years without posting anything about "Lost". I can't imagine anyone would be stunned to hear me say I like the show, and that I think it's one of the best on television. And the show certainly doesn't need my help. It's beyond the point where a grassroots campaign is necessary to keep it on. In fact, the producers had to lobby for an end date, to keep it from dragging on like certain TV shows that just won't die.

But more than any other show I'm familiar with, "Lost" likes to reinvent itself every year. (Actually, this was also true of J.J. Abrahms other genre hit, "Alias". Unfortunately, that show slowly turned into a parody of itself.) With each new season, a new location is introduced, and a new cabal of characters with a new set of priorities.

In season two, we got to explore the "hatch". (I really hate that term. It's a bunker, people.) In season three, we got to explore New Othertown. I'm hoping in season four we'll get to go out to "the boat".

In season two, we introduced the characters known to Lostphiles as "the Tailies", a group of survivors of the plane crash from the tail section of the plane. In season three, we met "the Others", a group of people who were already on the island when the plane crashed.

But it's the new blood for season four that sparked me to write this post. In episode two, chillingly titled "Confirmed Dead", we meet four new characters, already being called "the Boaties", because they come from the mysterious "boat" that we haven't seen yet. And they're fantastic. Jeremy Davies is a trippy physicist, Rebecca Mader is an anthropologist, the always enjoyable Jeff Fahey is a pilot, and, my favorite, Ken Leung is a hot-headed psychic who can commune with the dead.

How great is that? We're so far down the rabbit-hole of the Lostverse that we can have a guy talking to ghosts and it's just part of the story. No big deal. You buy polar bears and a monster made of black smoke, I guess you'll buy almost anything.

With the impending end of the writers' strike, it looks like season four of "Lost" will be thirteen instead of the originally planned sixteen episodes. Kind of funny that they have the opposite problem now: too little time to tell their story rather than too much.

But I'm hopeful that they'll keep pulling numbered rabbits out of their hats.