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LOST beckons us back.

Throw your flight data recorder on the bar-bie.  It’s going to be a bumpy ride. LOST Season 5 unfurled with a three-hour premiere.  In the first hour, the directors promise us this season will answer more questions than it asks and that there is a method to the mythology. Is it worth the wait?

We begin the season as usual with someone we can’t see waking up and moving about their day in a time period we can’t pinpoint. “It’s the Dharma Video Man,” I told my husband. Bingo. This is too easy.  Okay maybe not so easy. A few minutes later, my mind skipped around wondering how Dan, Dan the Physicist Man could be under the Orchid digging the Dharma station in the ‘60s. Did the white-out send him back or is he a bad guy, already there, waiting in the shadows like the character Richard “Arggh” Alpert? (I’m absolutely convinced he’s a pirate from the Black Rock. Eyeliner is a dead give-away for piracy.)

If you have not followed LOST from the beginning, you really are lost right now. What in the name of flashing bright lights and freaky smoke clouds am I talking about? If you are in this category, or if you left LOST and are now trying to find your way back to the island, don’t bother watching the latest season, no matter how mesmerizing I proclaim it. First take a staycation and catch the previous seasons on DVD or the Internet. A full week ought to do it, if you do nothing else. If you have young children, wait until they are older and you can send them to grandma’s for a week. Even with the handy-dandy catch-up episodes, I can’t imagine anyone unfamiliar with the show understanding what’s going on in a new episode. This is LOST we’re talking about!  They named it LOST because most people feel that way, in all caps, after missing just one show.

So back to tonight’s double edition. I wasn’t blow away, but I was certainly swept up. Here are the characters and story lines I have come to love, touching base like old friends. Here is the writing I have come to respect, dangling subplots like the smell of hot chocolate on a cold night. Tonight’s back-to-back episodes felt like watching runners warming up before a big race. You see them pace around the stadium in powerful, popping strides, but their muscles aren’t strained nor do their veins bulge. In world-class athletes those effortless warm-ups are still faster than most of us achieve at full speed and these episodes proved faster and more spectacular than anything else on television.

Somehow the writers gave us the Oceanic Six in extremely mixed up locations with arbitrary ambitions, but they must come together to go back to the island.  We even have a timeline: 70 hours or the earth as we know it will cease to exist. The evil Widmore and Linus hover in the sidelines ready to abscond the spoils of victory or rifle through the rubble of defeat. Those left on the Island sling through the space/time continuum with no food or water and people attacking them at every wrinkle in time.  Hold on, guys!  Just 70 hours. Or is it decades?  Centuries?

And the race is on.  Half-points will be deducted from the set designers who forgot that Aaron should be in a car seat and to the writers for making the Disposable Islander so obvious.  The first heat goes to Hurley, who can talk to the one set of people we can actually trust: the dead. Every other character is now suspicious. Only Hurley dares tell the truth. Am I excited about the race to come?  Let’s just say, Dharma gear is on my Christmas list.

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