Question: Feeling a little...lost?

So it finally happened. The snake has swallowed its own tail. (Actually, that’s not really true, but I love saying that.)

I will say this: Lost is back, and as convoluted and filled with a sweaty, shirtless Sawyer as ever.

There’s an end date in sight, (next season), so the creators of this complex little show have an awful lot to do. There are many, many threads that have either been dropped or twisted around so completely that I’m starting to wonder if the writers even know what’s going on. And how many writers are there? From the looks of it, plenty.

Part of my problem, I’ll admit, is the mode in which I watched last week’s series premiere. I watched in on abc.com on a computer that can just barely handle the task. So it was very jerky and the sound was synched way off so it was a little like watching a Japanese B movie. But I was dogged and determined to see the show that I have stuck with through thick and thin.

Now that the island and/or the survivors are traveling through time, it’s getting dicier figuring out when things are actually happening, although so far the clues have been pretty clear. (Locke went back in time, saw the heroin-filled Mary statues, and the plane crash; shortly thereafter, the victim of the crash is but a skeleton. It’s back to the future! We get it, sheesh.)

But the two-hour season premiere left me a little cold. Again, it may be the way I watched it. The cinematic Lost has always played better on a large screen with few to no commercials. Watching on my rinky dink laptop at a slow speed with multiple commercial interruptions (limited, my ass) probably doomed the whole enterprise.

But still I watched.

It’s just that I have so many questions.

Why is Desmond special? Does this relate back to the whole constant thing? Why doesn’t Penelope call her psycho dad off? How did he ever even find the island? Nobody else can. What happened to Nikki and that guy who got buried alive way back when? Are we supposed to believe that Ben Linus is a good guy? Is he messing with our heads personally? Where’s the smoke monster these days? Haunting a Club Med in Fiji? Why doesn’t Richard age, and does he have permanent eyeliner on or is it his natural look, and if so, does it mean something symbolic? Why aren’t all the survivors on the island really tan? They can’t still have sunscreen. The only tan one is Sawyer, and we’re treated to his bare chest every other scene, it seems. (Not that I’m complaining, but what about some of the other Lost hotties? I kind of like the nerd vibe of Daniel, but I bet his chest could act as a reflector.)

I feel a little bit like I have to see this series through, even though I will probably be disappointed. How can any ending tie everything together and leave the viewer satisfied? I don’t think it’s possible. Maybe that’s the whole existential point. Life doesn’t make sense, so why should this show? The metaphysical is inexplicable, dude! It’s all been Libby’s dream. Fade to black, crank up the Journey song.

Or maybe I’m not giving the writers enough credit. Maybe they’re just going to go balls-out in the last season and explain EVERYTHING. But I doubt it.

We’ll probably feel just as lost when it’s over as we did when it started.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s the whole point.

But at least there won't be any Journey playing at the end.