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It’s a return to form for that little series about America’s favorite island getaway, this time with a marked upswing in quality, a solid selection of extras, and best of all, no Ana Lucia in sight.

Perhaps the biggest issue any TV series faces is to keep up its momentum. When a series goes for suspense and mystery over self-contained, once-a-week plotting, the importance of momentum grows tenfold. Lost isn’t just an unusual entry in the televisual landscape, it’s an outright anomaly; you can count the number of series this intricate, yet this popular, on one hand. So perhaps it’s no surprise that after its first, overwhelmingly fascinating season, Lost was destined to a less successful follow-up. It’s always hard to capture lightning in a bottle twice.

If you had asked me where I thought Lost stood at the end of its second year, I would have told you it was rapidly losing my interest. After devouring every last scrap of season one, I had to dole out season two to myself in five- or six-episode chunks just to maintain my own interest. There were a few, fascinating new elements - thanks mostly to the new characters of Mr. Eko and the mysterious “Henry Gale” - but overall, it just wasn’t grabbing me anymore. I easily would have predicted cancellation had the trend continued.

The curious thing is the episodes collected in Lost: The Complete Third Season managed to turn matters around almost 360 degrees - not right away, but gradually, from a tense and gripping first episode to the final rush of wham! bam! intensity in the final quarter of the season. True, the early episodes are almost as guilty of treading water as most of season two; after the initial intrigue of “A Tale of Two Cities,” watching Jack, Kate and Sawyer locked up in the Others’ camp for seven weeks is like watching paint dry. It’s almost impossible not to guess where the series is going long, long before the characters reach their own conclusions. Almost as irritating is a small set of episodes that seem designed to interest us in ‘new’ (or, in terms of the story, never-before-seen) crash survivors Paolo and Nikki, finally culminating with their own flashbacks in “Expose.” It’s a great narrative conceit, sure, and it’s fun to watch the series’ creators work the characters into old season one footage, but I wish they had actually given me a reason to care about the vacuous twosome while they were at it. Another new character, Juliet, is introduced as a potential threat and possible wedge between Jack and Kate, but unless the episode focuses on her she rarely has anything approaching a personality.

Fortunately, other characters fare a lot better. After two seasons as a total waste of space (sorry, ladies), Sawyer is finally given something practical to do besides his trademark expressions of Scowl ‘n’ Smirk. In fact, those early, slower episodes serve as a showcase for Sawyer to finally gain some advantage over Jack as a viable “leading man,” although it does serve to complete the transition of Jack into a near-feckless weakling. (Really. Compare the Jack of the early days on the island to the vacuous shell of a protagonist we see in “Stranger in a Strange Land.”) Elsewhere, Mr. Eko’s past finally comes to a head, and we see how what he learned will inspire John Locke to a new course of action. Desmond Hume, last seen making the final decision on the fate of the hatch, returns with a new and unexpected ability…one that will ultimately determine events at season’s end. 

The real revelation of season three, however, has to be Michael Emerson as Ben Linus (the unsettling little man formerly known as “Henry Gale”). I don’t know where this actor came from, but in the vernacular, he is clearly going places. He commands the camera every time he enters a scene, and he can take a single word and pull every last amount of threat from it without ever seeming over the top. He comes dangerously close to usurping Terry O’Quinn as my favorite cast member, which is really saying something. Clearly, the series writers are more than aware of the great new commodity on their hands; Ben gets a lion’s share of screen time during the series, and not a bit of it is wasted.

As we’ve all come to expect from a season of Lost, there are surprises and revelations, a few answers, a whole lot of new questions, and even one or two deaths of the core characters. But the big ‘moment’ everyone talks about comes in the final, two-part episode, where the assumed nature of the character flashbacks changes the structure of the series forever. Not a moment too soon, in my opinion: Lost: The Complete Third Season is a definite improvement on the previous year, but it should be obvious to any viewer something would have to change soon. There was just enough momentum behind the original premise for one big, final push - and then it was time to send the series, and its audience, in a brand new direction. 

Lost: The Complete Third Season - or to use its more accurate, completely more ridiculous title, Lost: The Complete Third Season: The Unexplored Experience - is available as a 7-disc digipak from Buena Vista Home Entertainment. All twenty-three episodes (with the two-part finale split into separate episodes) are presented as digital, anamorphic transfers in their original 16:9 aspect ratio; as with previous Lost sets, there are some unusually deep black levels - probably a result of the cinematography style - but visible detail is always very, very fine and colors just pop off the screen. The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio tracks are very full and never less than satisfying to my admittedly amateur ear. English SDH subtitles have been provided for all the episodes, featurettes, and…yes…even the episode commentaries, which should come as a welcome surprise for fans who are hearing impaired. (More studios should follow the example.)

I must have the most concrete mind ever when it comes to extras. Usually, unless there’s some narrative cohesion to the extras list, or very, very few of them, I watch with that old advice from Alice in Wonderland in mind: begin at the beginning, come to the end, then stop. Previous Lost sets have clearly been produced by someone with a flair for the abstract. Extras were thrown together a bit helter-skelter, with no real thought toward grouping them by a loose subject or theme. Happily, Lost: The Complete Third Season goes some way toward redressing the balance.

First of all, there are four commentaries spread across the six discs of episodes - not that you’ll ever know, mind, because unlike the second season, they aren’t listed in the accompanying booklet! Disc one features “A Tale of Two Cities,” commentary with executive producer Damon Lindelof and actor Elizabeth Mitchell; disc two, “I Do” with executive producer Carlton Cuse and actors Evangeline Lilly and Josh Holloway; disc four, “Expose” with producers/writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz; and disc five features “The Man Behind the Curtain” commentary with Lindelof, Cuse and actor Michael Emerson. Frankly, in the past I’ve found Lost commentaries a little on the dry side - technically interesting, but slow and sometimes too descriptive. And admittedly, “I Do” and “Man Behind” pretty much fit that bill (Emerson “pulls an O’Quinn” and barely even speaks, which is really disappointing). “A Tale of Two Cities,” however, is a delightfully silly track of Lindelof and Mitchell - who is absolutely nothing like the character she plays, and (dare I say it) pretty cute to listen to - “dithering” about the episode, the characters, the cages, and so on. For the more serious-minded, “Expose” reveals the nitty-gritty involved in working Nikki and Paolo into the history of Lost, from writing, filming and editing standpoints. Heck, it’s better than the actual episode. Both tracks are recommended listens.

The gimmicky menus on Lost special features discs are alternately kind of cool and ridiculously frustrating. For season two, we had DHARMA Initiative orientation films, which I thought were actually pretty fun; this time around, they’ve glitzed it up a notch with…yes…little interactive menus set in various DHARMA facilities, all linked from a main menu representing the Hydra station’s closed-circuit monitors. You have to do things like press the button on Sawyer’s polar bear cage just to get the lists of extras, and from there, you can do other things that sometimes - not always - lead to easter eggs. It’s too gimmicky for words, or indeed, people with actual lives.

Four of the six monitors on disc seven’s main menu are “live,” leading to individual lists of special features, and they can be loosely grouped by theme. Monitor #2 could be called the Merchandising section. First up is “The Lost Book Club” (8 mins.), focusing on the books featured in the show’s narrative (yet totally ignoring that ridiculous Bad Twin thing from the second season); it’s not a bad little segment, but it does have an odd “Hey, kids, go out and read!” feel, as if the dorks watching Lost haven’t picked up on that already. “Cast in Clay: Creating the Toys of Todd McFarlane” (5 mins.) and “The Next Level: Inside the Video Game” (4 mins.) are pure promo fluffery.

Monitor #3 is all Behind-the-Scenes stuff, most of it quite interesting. It was the best feature on the previous two sets, and it’s the best feature now: “Lost: On Location” (58 mins. cumulative) focuses on the location filming of ten episodes throughout the season, and it’s a lot longer than the previous two editions, with more detail, more footage, and more all-around-good material. Individually or through the “Play All” selection, these are an essential watch. “Crew Tribute with Evangeline Lilly” (7 mins.) - or as I like to call it, “Evie Loves Everyone and Everyone Loves Her, Too” - is a fast-paced little lovefest that only reaffirms how little we, the audience, care about the crew, and how much more we’d rather see Evangeline Lilly being adorable (I could watch that…well, pretty much all the time). “Lost in a Day” (26 mins.), on the other hand, is a more interesting examination of all that goes on in the Lost offices and locations within the space of a single 24-hour period.

Monitor #4 isn’t so easily pegged down - let’s call it Otherwise Miscellaneous Stuff. (Sure, that’s the ticket.) “The World of the Others” (14 mins.) is a discussion of the role and importance of the Others during the third season; it’s a bit like last year’s featurette on the hatch, and like that featurette, you’re left wondering…why? It’s not like this is telling us anything new. “Terry O’Quinn: Throwing from the Handle” (2 mins.) is a cool little clip of actor Terry O’Quinn’s knife-throwing abilities, charmingly bookended by “Do not attempt!” disclaimers, with a similar feel to some of the easter eggs you’ll find elsewhere on the set. “Blooper Reel” (6 mins.), like its predecessors, has an occasional hearty laugh, but goes on too long.

Finally, Monitor #5 includes all the stuff I would consider Deleted, Extended and Promotional Material. “The Lost Flashbacks” includes three tiny clips: “Further Instructions: Locke Escapes” (1 min.), “The Glass Ballerina: Funeral Scene” (less than 1 min.), and “Expose: ‘People Can Change’” (4 mins.). The first of these actually provides a capstone to the “Further Instructions” flashbacks which I think should have been left in; perhaps the writers decided to keep it open-ended for a reason. The second scene is pretty throwaway, while the third seems to completely shift the tone of the episode in question, and was probably best cut. “Deleted Scenes” (17 mins. cumulative) includes nine cut or extended sequences, available individually or through a “Play All” selection. A couple of these - “Alex & Daddy” and the amusing “Super Powers Dude” - are quite nice, but most are pretty inconsequential.

“Sneak Peeks” are the usual Disney trailers and teasers (for the record - take a deep breath - The Game Plan, Brothers and Sisters: The Complete First Season, Grey’s Anatomy: Third Season, Ugly Betty: The Complete First Season, What About Brian: The Complete First and Second Seasons, Desperate Housewives: The Complete Third Season, and a totally pointless Lost: New Season Preview with lots of guns). Rounding out the section we have the botched “Orchid Instructional Film” (2 mins.), done in the same charming style as previous DHARMA Initiative films, with Dr. Edgar Halowax…and some bunnies. And an ABC voiceover, for some reason.

Oh yes, and there’s lots of easter eggs on this disc. Lots and lots and lots and lots.

Lost has managed an almost unheard-of feat in American series television: going from an immensely strong opening year to a sophomore season that treads water, and then swinging back up again in its third year to start hitting homers almost every week. (I would further be tempted to say the fourth season, which just concluded its domestic broadcast run, is actually the strongest yet.) Lost: The Complete Third Season shows a program finding its feet again, and if the early episodes don’t immediately suck you back in, the last few certainly will. The transfers and audio tracks are great, and for a set with this many extras a surprising amount of them are worth your time. Sit back and prepare for a nice, long weekend vacation (or three, or four) on the island. It’s a wild, wild ride that I highly recommend.

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