Last week when the second-season "Lost" DVDs hit stores, I conscientiously set aside several days for marathon viewing. After experiencing the first season in that format a year ago, I made up my mind to wait for the DVD release before watching "Lost" again. I did my best not to read anything about it, either. Quite a trick given the multiformat phenomenon the drama has become, but I lead a relatively hermetic existence. Other than a few random whispers about buttons and "tailies," I made it out OK. Even a Harold Perrineau appearance on the Ellen show didn't hurt. Despite being an actor on the show, Perrineau clearly had no more idea what the hell was going on on that damn island than you or I. Perhaps less.

Maybe I don't need to take this any farther than two paragraphs. The DVDs have been out for a week, and I've just finished them today. I watched the first several discs all in succession, but then I got distracted somehow or another, and to tell you the truth I didn't feel deeply compelled to go back and finish. With the first season, a buddy loaned his set to me safe in the knowledge that he could expect them back after a weekend, since once I started viewing I wouldn't be able to stop. He was right. A few months later when I saw that first-season set available for a reasonable price used, I sprang for it so I could do it all over again. It wasn't as great the second time, but it holds up. I wouldn't rank it above the first season of "Veronica Mars," which debuted at around the same time to far less accolades, but it's good TV. There's nothing wrong with being high-concept, and the cast is remarkably good. Honestly, who knew Matthew Fox could act? Jorge Garcia is fabulous. At times he carries the show. It makes me happy he's a TV star. What other show possibly could have afforded him the opportunity? Josh Holloway is remarkably adept at making Sawyer's constant motivational zigzags seem to stem from character depth rather than writers' desperation. Even Evangeline Lilly is an acceptably good performer for someone so undisputably smokin' hot, not that the show particularly leans on her acting skills. Daniel Dae Kim (quite familiar to genre types from his roles on "Angel" and "Enterprise") and Naveen Andrews (who was in The English Patient -- remember The English Patient?) are making the most of their once-per-decade meaty roles for "ethnic" actors. Ditto Dom Monaghan for ex-hobbits.

However, the show has a real problem that's evident from the pilot onwards. You can only see it for the first time once. There's a scene in the first episode where some of the castaways hike up a hill to get a radio signal. They get a repeating message and figure out that it's been going for decades. Someone asks "Where the hell are we?" and there's an act break. That was as good as it got and likely will get for "Lost" right there. For that one moment you were right there with them, utterly terrified, utterly alone, vaguely aware of the mystical/supernatural/metaphysical implications of the whole quagmire but with no conception of what was to come. From that point you can either attempt to resolve things, which will ultimately prove unsatisfying (see "Twin Peaks") or you can continue piling on the misleads, false bottoms, and red herrings until the audience just doesn't care any more (see "The X-Files"). Either way, you're never reaching that height again. "Lost" is almost cursed by getting off the ground too quickly. Even the last couple episodes of the first season before the finale didn't quite have that magic. It's kind of like building up a tolerance to a drug in a way, I suppose. But by the second set of flashbacks for each of the major characters, "Lost" was stuck in a rather unique predicament. The show was at once in a rut (with the overly constricting flashback structure for some reason being imposed on every episode) and so compelled to move at all times forward that with every new episode it risked contradicting itself and losing whatever credibility (suspension of disbelief, whatever) it once had. I don't think the second season is a complete catastrophe, but I definitely don't regret waiting for the DVDs. Especially with "Veronica Mars" sharing its timeslot.

The trouble with coming late to the party on a show as popular as "Lost" is every original idea you think you might have about it has already been trumpeted somewhere or another, and probably more articulately. I never should have gone to see what Tim Goodman and TWoP had to say before tackling my own review. I imagine if you've been following the show at all, you've heard all the boilerplate Season 2 nags yourself. One is that every episode is fast-forwardable until the last five minutes. (Which is kind of like saying you should zip all the way through The Crying Game to get to the dick shot.) Another is that the whole device of introducing a second group of survivors from the same airplane crash is a lazy way of propping up the already-stale flashback device without moving the main story at all forward. (Totally true, except Mr. Eko is, like, awesome.) Finally, everybody hates Ana Lucia. I have no defense for that one. The show's uncanny luck with casting hits a brick wall with Michelle Rodriguez. She's brutally bad, and what's more, there's no less than three episodes in a row right at the head of the season in which she's a major player. One of them, "Collision," is completely broken due to Rodriguez's wretchedness. It's supposed to be a tense hostage situation, but it comes across as a jungle-themed dentist's office waiting room. I believe in some of the wide-angle shots you can catch Naveen Andrews napping.

Unlike the first season's unified heady rush, there are some standout episodes in Season Two. "The 23rd Psalm," which fills in the background of warlord turned holy man Eko, is dynamite. "One of Them," the only Sayid episode, has an interesting setting (Iraq at the close of the first Gulf War), a great guest star (Clancy Brown from "Carnivàle"), and a story that actually gives additional insight into the character's actions back in the main storyline, unlike a lot of Season Two's lesser offerings. Anything featuring Hurley is bound to be good. Since he was used mostly as comic relief in the first season, he's one of the few regulars about whom there is still additional new information to be revealed. "Everybody Hates Hugo" is a surprisingly subtle and touching episode, and it's always nice to see DJ Qualls continuing to get work. "Dave" is a keeper too, but I for one am tired of the Hollywood device of depicting schizophrenia with an "imaginary friend" character. Fight Club, A Beautiful Mind, that "DS9" where O'Brien has the implanted prison memories, I'm over it.

"Lost" has a nagging problem with female characters. Kate is the most regular presence because all of the male leads are hot for her, but her indecision regarding with whom to finally shack up is growing old. Emelie de Ravin's overprotective mother hen is the lone cliché in a cast of characters that against all odds is largely free of them. The relentlessly bland Maggie Grace joins her equally milquetoast TV stepbrother, the first casualty of the first season, in the ground, and none too soon. The best women on the show are Yunjin Kim's Sun, who the writers tend to lose track of for several episodes at a time, and L. Scott Caldwell's Rose, who isn't even a regular. Happier times may be on the way, though. Tania Raymonde is a welcome presence as a possible ally among the sinister Others.

Towards the end of the season, the writers find a way to get around the self-imposed "every episode must have flashbacks" hurdle by flashing back to earlier events on the island, and as a result things pick up quickly. Harold Perrineau finally gets to do something besides holler "WAAAALT!" at the top of his lungs (another nitpick seemingly every critic has made me before me), Ana Lucia dies (USA! USA! USA!), and while not actually giving away any real secrets, one starts to get the impression that progress down the rabbit hole has resumed when for a midseason stretch it seemed to have utterly abated. It's entirely possible, in fact likely, that the third season will be much better. There were some decisions made here that just didn't work, but the writers have managed to kill off nearly every uninteresting character -- sadly, I doubt they can kill Claire -- among the castaways and they've begun introducing some very juicy villains.

It's worth mentioning that the DVD set comes labelled as "the extended experience" and features, as did the first season, an entire additional disc of supplementary material and several commentaries. I imagine that just as I did for the first season I will completely ignore almost all of this. Past a certain point the trademark "Lost" stance of telling you stuff without actually giving anything away gets spectacularly annoying. Some shows are richly worth examining and digging into the creative process of, and others, less so. One thing about the "Lost" second season DVD set I can give an unqualified rave. The sound design is amazing. This 5.1 remix of a TV show sounds better than almost anything else I've got in the apartment, DTS or otherwise. If you close your eyes you can tell where scenes are set just by the background ambience, whether it's the beach, the jungle, the hatch, or a flashback. It's balanced so that you don't have to keep turning it up for the quiet dialogue scenes and down for the action sequences. At times the sound completely makes the show. The climactic gunshot at the close of "Two for the Road" is, like, martial. If you're on the fence about laying down the cash for the DVDs, maybe that will tip the scales.