After months of grieving the death of Charlie and Locke, LOST has finally returned.  But it’s return is bittersweet. 

LOST is a unique in many ways, but what makes it stand out it that it has an undeniable overarching storyline, with a beginning, middle and end.  Up until this point, the key characteristic of LOST was it’s complicated storyline and characters.  Each episode was filled with new surprises that only deepened the mystery.  While it was confounding, it also kept drawing you back.  But in the two-hour season premiere, it was clear that two key things have changed.

First is a shift from being biographically focused to being plot focused.  For the first four seasons, each episode followed one character, and filled in their back story (or forward story.)  But this season seems to have ditched the straight-forward character focus to begin tying together the loose elements of the plot.  Secondly, it seems that the focus has shifted from creating questions to resolving mysteries.  The relatively new character of Faraday, an humble but obsessive scientist, is less a meaningful character, and more a device by which to reveal the nature of the island.  Instead of weird hatches or polar bears in the tropics, we see arrival of that mysterious airplane from season two and the get clues as to why Richard doesn’t seem to age.

It’s exciting to see the loose ends being tied together, and being able to claim to your friends “I knew it all along!”  But it’s also kind of sad.  It’s almost like watching someone grow up.  While they are maturing and becoming who they are supposed to be, the excitement of childhood is diminishing with time.  As the complexity of LOST diminishes, I don’t think the ratings will.  We’re hooked, and we’re going to keep watching as long as it take to get back to the island…or back off again…or killed by a smoke monster…

In case you’ve been under the impression that the 85 hours you have spent watching LOST were worthwhile, here’s a recap, that make you might feel ridiculous.