After the season finale last spring, "Lost" felt on again, in a way it hadn't been since the first season. Rather than watching out of a sense of obligation as I had been doing for the better part of two seasons I was all excited to watch again, the way I had been about "Heroes" before that show, too, seemingly lost the mission. Briefly, anyway. It could very well be that the writers' strike was the best thing that could have happened for "Heroes," since the ill-conceived plague storyline ended up being moved along rather faster than would it have otherwise and when things go back in production the writers will have had plenty of time to learn from the online response, not to mention the clever way the "Lost" writers have made their show competitive for buzz again.

But it's hard not to feel skittish about where "Lost" might go next, because on the face of things the second episode of the new season seemed to be bringing back some of the same issues that made the second and third years of the show less entertaining than they could have been. More new characters? Four major ones all at once? All of whom are apparently tied into the mojo of the island and will be having tedious flashback adventures that will randomly feature supporting characters from older seasons' tedious flashbacks? I'm not that interested in finding out that an archaeologist newcomer might have once used a woman Sayid knew as a guide.

 The sort of interesting implication of episode two, season four is that one does not necessarily have to have ever been to the island or even have heard of it to become dominated by it in the way Ben and Locke are in the series' present and Jack will be some time in the series' future. There are now no fewer than five factions at play -- the real-deal Others, the unknown corporate entity that employs the ominous fellow we saw in Hurley's flash-forward in the premiere and in Naomi's flashback last week, a worldwide group of Close Encounters-style obsessives who are inexplicably obssessed by the Oceanic disaster (some of whom have now been brought to the island seemingly under the aegis of the second group), the plane crash survivors led by Jack and Kate who still want to leave the island, and the second group of survivors led by Locke, Sawyer, and Hurley who don't trust the new arrivals.

If this seems kind of like the description of some of the greatest misses of "Lost" past -- add a bunch of characters about whom we know next to nothing, divide everyone arbitrarily into groups, and have everybody run around looking sweaty and desperate for about seven episodes -- well, at least we have the new flash-forward gimmick to keep things fresh. And taking a page directly from "Heroes," "Lost" is now using the short-arc catchphrase "the Oceanic 6" to refer to the six to be revealed over time who finally got out alive from all of this.

"Confirmed Dead" unfortunately made me think of what Roger Ebert calls the Idiot Plot, which usually is used in a romantic comedy. That's where the two characters who are supposed to be with each other stay apart for the entire length of the film for no reason that wouldn't be easily solved were all the parties involved in the film not complete idiots. There have been way too many "Lost" episodes involving people who don't trust each other refusing to listen to true information and creating conflict where there shouldn't be any -- the one where Rousseau tortures Sayid, the one where Sayid tortures Sawyer, the one where Ana Lucia tortures Sayid, the one where Sayid tortures Ben, and so on -- and this one gave bad memories to the wasted tail-section storylines from the second season, where a big group of characters was introduced, developed, and then killed off without bringing any changes whatsoever to the larger whole of the show. (The writers almost seem to acknowledge this in the latest episode with a throwaway line of Hurley dialogue.) They can't do that this time -- all of these new characters have to justify their existence quickly, the way Michael Emerson's Ben obviously has and Elizabeth Mitchell's Juliet is still kind of failing to do. By throwing a whole bunch at us at once -- and the fact that the reveal of their collective backstory is going to slow the rate at which we get to the real juicy stuff, the Oceanic 6 stuff -- the writers are taking another big risk. It will be interesting to see whether they can use the flash-forward device to quickly defuse our concerns about going nowhere with Miles, Charlotte, Frank, and Daniel.