It's a funny thing about "Lost": I'm a big fan, have seen all the episodes multiple times, have even allowed myself to fall into the rabbit hole of its fanatical (and endless) Internet fan theory webs on a few occasions, and yet I don't feel like I've ever been with the crowd when it comes to the show. I didn't pick up the DVD's of the first season until after the backlash against the second season had already began, and I didn't start watching the show on a week to week basis until the beginning of the third year. When I began watching it off of DVD at that point I had the same complaints that a lot of people did about the beginning of the second season: new characters that only served to give an excuse to rehash old scenes from a fourth or fifth "new" angle, writers that seemed to be winging it, wildly swinging emphases... you name it. So I stopped paying attention closely, I missed a few important episodes (the one where Desmond becomes unstuck in time Billy Pilgrim-style really would have helped me with understanding the whole rest of the third season), and I was blindsided by the spectacular third-season finale. Then, finally, I seemed to be on the same page with consensus popular opinion on "Lost" -- it had led astray, but all was now forgiven. Who wasn't anxiously awaiting the fourth season? Was anybody who had seen the first three still planning to wait for the DVD this time?

I can't say with any certainty that the show isn't going to drift again. There's a lot of story left to be told and although we know now that showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have an arc sketched out for the rest of the story, it's also clear that a lot of what remains still has yet to be written. (This interview with Lindelof gives some hints about how the writers went astray in seasons 2 and 3 despite having strong overall ideas.) The crossover to a weekly flash-forward from the old marriage to flashbacks (which became redundant right around the fourth or fifth trip down memory lane for most of the central characters, particularly the well-defined ones like Sawyer and Jack) is something that the third-season finale implied was coming and what had most fans excited for the new feel of the show.

The fourth-season premiere smartly began with a flash-forward, to lift the fans' hopes up immediately, but largely it dealt with resolving the various cliffhangers from the last season. Or at least the ones that took place in the show's "present." While the flash-forward was surpisingly low-key, it had a significant number of obvious and subtle clues as to what's going to happen (or did already happen depending on your perspective). Man, who doesn't love time-travel fiction? For the grammar alone. But interesting the episode was more about tying up loose threads -- specifically, providing immediate emotional payoffs and consequences for the choices made by Charlie, Ben, Locke, and Jack in "Through the Looking Glass."

A couple of questions for those of you who have already seen the episode. First of all, is the flash-forward thing going to hold up? Hurley and Jack's dialogue in the flash-forwards from "The Beginning of the End" suggested that only six characters ultimately made it off the island. We already know three of them -- can the show sustain itself with only six characters to flash-forward to? Or, more intriguingly, will we see flashes to Others (Ben, or the still-mostly-engimatic and seemingly-immortal Richard) or survivors (Locke, obviously, but possibly Desmond, who has a close connection to the island and could well be too much of a coward to return to Penny, or maybe... here's an interesting one... Walt as a grown man?) remaining on the island in the years after the Oceanic Six escape?

What's interesting is that the "Lost" writers haven't only flipped the script for how each episode (or most episodes from now on, anyway) will work, they've also taken the ultimate ending of the story from a complete cipher (Will they get off the island? Will they find out they're dead? Will it all have been Hurley's, or somebody else's, delusion?) to an obvious event (the return of the Oceanic Six to the island, some years later) but with almost no evidence to suggest how or why that event will play out.

Odds and ends:

-If Hurley can see Jacob -- in fact, he can see him more easily than even Locke, although to be fair Hurley didn't know what he was looking at -- that suggests strongly that his connection with the island is very deep indeed. Is this why Hurley was on the list along with Kate, Sawyer, and Jack when Ben orchestrated their abduction at the end of season two? Why then did Ben decide to let Hurley go, and why wasn't Locke on the list?

-What of Desmond's visions? Other than in that time-skipping episode they seemed to focus mostly in on Charlie, for reasons that were made clear (at least in a storytelling sense if not a metaphysical one) in the finale. But if the castaways are still in danger and several more of their lives are going to have to be given to secure escape for a lucky few, what part is Desmond's prescience going to play in that? It seems to me like putting the character through a series of torturous decisisons where he has to choose between people living and getting off the island would be delicious drama... or an episode where the ex-monk becomes unstuck in time again and manages to communicate future information back to the group in the present. Desmond wasn't featured heavily in the first episode of the fourth season but the fact that I'm thinking a lot about what the new format will mean for his character is an excellent indication of how the "Lost" writers play the long con. Desmond's introduction at the beginning of the second season was as arbitrary and clumsy as Nikki and Paulo's, his disappearance for most of Year 2 and then sudden reappearance just when he became convenient to the plot was ridiculous, but in the third season he rapidly became my favorite character on the show.

-Bring on Harold Perrineau. I am so ready for Michael to be back.

-On the other hand, the mere mention of Ana-Lucia in Hurley's flash-forward was enough to make my skin crawl. The writers need to be very careful about using the flash-forwards to paper over past bad decisions. But on the other hand, it's very interesting how defensive future-Hurley became about even acknowledging knowing one of the plane crash survivors who didn't make it off the island. How elaborate of a cover story do you suppose the Oceanic 6 concocted? And why is the airline so sensitive to Hurley's well-being years after the fact? Could there have been some kind of conspiratorial link between the Others' real-world corporate face (as glimpsed in Juliet's third-season flashbacks) and the airline? That's a nice thought, isn't it?

-I was dissatisifed with the way most of the castaways, save Jack, immediately seemed to accept Locke as a rational person only minutes (in real time) after he killed a complete stranger by throwing a knife into her back. That didn't ring true -- it would have been more believable were Locke to talk to Hurley privately, and then for Hurley to lead the group off to the barracks. I think that given time it's possible for most of the group to understand why Locke acted as he did -- indeed, I imagine in short order all of them will -- but the fact is that the half-year layoff between the last episode of the third season and the first of the fourth doesn't apply to the characters on the show. They don't know which of their adventures are finales and which are premieres.

-Upon further reflection, the "Oceanic 6" catchphrase/clue could be a red herring. It's entirely possible that more than six castaways escaped the island, but due to their status as wanted criminals their presence among the survivors was kept quiet. (We don't know the details of the escape in the very least so this is completely in bounds.) This is particularly relevant to Kate and Sawyer. In "Through the Looking Glass" Kate's dialogue in the flash-forward with Jack suggested she was living with someone; I theorize we were supposed to initially believe it was Sawyer, later we're going to find out Sawyer wasn't one of the "Oceanic 6" and think it wasn't, and then we'll find out that he didn't die and it totally was. You can't kill Sawyer -- ladies love Sawyer. Evangeline Lilly and Josh Holloway are the two safest actors on the show.