I went looking around the internet for an explanation of the title of last Thursday’s “Lost,” which was called “Eggtown.” That turned up nothing, forcing me to resort to a Steve Miller Band reference. It’s tenuous at best, but I assure you that one bad title is not indicative of my entire oeuvre.

One thing you do discover looking for “Lost” stuff on the internet is that “Lost” fans are wacky. Reading the comments just on one random blog posting about the episode, you can find:

• People who didn’t hear the end, and missed the entire point of the episode
• Eighteen-paragraph long analyses of how this episode’s flash-forwards fit into the overall space/time continuum theory on the island
• DOES ANYBODY KNOWS WHAT THE BLACK SMOKE IS???????
• At least a dozen calls to order
• Detailed explanations that refer to characters by names I don’t recognize at all
• Whoooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!! [note: that's the first time I've ever seen the exclamation-point 1 used non-ironically.]
• Debates over whether the baby would technically count as one of the Oceanic 6
• Debates over who’s hotter
• A tangential flame war over Downs syndrome

I dunno what I could add to all that. I thought it was a fine episode, continuing the momentum of this season without blowing me away or anything. I could see the end coming from a mile away, as soon as they showed Kate & Claire at the clothesline and Sun talking about her baby (as opposed to “our baby.”)

Attempts to turn Locke back into a bad-ass fail when he comes across as such a tool at the beginning. There’s a real fine line to his character, and they keep jumping back and forth over it — this is like the eight thousandth time he’s gotten completely played by Ben, which doesn’t make him seem like a tragic figure under the control of an evil mastermind, but like a doofus. And the way he handled Kate’s mini-insurrection wasn’t so much power-mad dictator as snippy condo organization spokesman. Making a dude bite down on a grenade doesn’t do a whole lot to make him seem any cooler.

Especially when said dude is, after only two episodes, already giving Michael a run for his money as most annoying person you could ever get stuck on a deserted island with. I think the real mystery of the island is how it manages to attract such a ridiculously high jackass-to-normal-person ratio. Any day now I’m expecting a catamaran to wash ashore carrying the dehydrated bodies of Andy Dick and Nancy Grace.

I don’t know any particularly big questions raised by this episode, except how does the end tie in with the prophecy that psychic gave Claire? That horrible things would happen if her baby were raised by someone else? Is it somehow the cause of Jack’s beard?

As I mentioned, I was confused for most of last year’s ComicCon, so I missed the “Lost” panel. I wasn’t aware until reading about it on a message board just now, that during that panel they showed another Dharma Initiative orientation film, that was later repeated on ABC’s website.

This one is for station 6, “The Orchid.” And watching it has me more excited about “Lost” than anything since the first orientation film. I’ve already been impressed with the show because of the strength of this season’s episodes, but this just confirms that they’ve still got the same cleverness and attention to detail they did when they first introduced the bunker and the Dharma Initiative. And now they have the freedom to take the story where they want and draw it all towards a conclusion.

In short: I love this series again. Now I’m going to check out the Season 3 DVDs for any special features. You really need to watch the video if you haven’t see it yet.

Edit: As it turns out, the Orchid video is included on the Season 3 set (I’d gotten a copy as a Christmas gift, but hadn’t watched them until today). They’ve also got a thing where the executive producers give definitive answers on some of the questions that have been circulating. There’s nothing earth-shattering there; in pretty much every case, they’re just confirming that the most obvious answer is the “correct” one (e.g., Desmond’s failure to push the button is what caused the 815 crash). It is good that they’re reminding viewers that they haven’t forgotten everything from the first couple of seasons, though.

It’s also good that they thought to include a bit after each “answer” where they interview a bunch of people for their take on the “new info.” Because I just couldn’t rest until I knew how Jimmy Kimmel interpreted the big mysteries of “Lost.” Hopefully the Disney Corporate Synergy department will work its magic on future releases, so I can hear Raven, Miley Cyrus, and the cast of “High School Musical” give their take on the series.

This week’s “Lost” was called “The Economist,” and the series is continuing on its trajectory of pure awesomeness. I genuinely feel bad for the people who’ve given up on the show, because I feel like my patience has paid off. They’re doing exactly what I was hoping they’d do, but better than I imagined they’d be able to pull it off: questions are getting answered. Stuff is really happening. But they’re not just tying together loose ends; they’re still playing with the format, introducing new characters, throwing in tons of new questions, and always feeling like it’s going somewhere instead of stalling for time.

The opening of this episode is my second favorite in a series that’s had some killer openings (my favorite is still Desmond’s introduction, with “Make Your Own Kind of Music”). They’re finally taking advantage of Sayid’s bad-assery, and somehow finding ways to make what could’ve been a cliched, predictable espionage story and keeping me genuinely surprised. It feels like the flash-forwards have blown the series wide open, and the writers have been rejuvenated with the potential to do whatever they want.

(Wouldn’t anyone get bored spending four years to tell a story that takes place over 100 days, with characters who’ve been mostly “set” from the beginning? Isn’t it easy to understand why they keep trying stuff like introducing the tail end, Nikki and Paolo, and the “natives?”)

Big questions raised in this episode: Who’s the “R.C.” in Naomi’s bracelet? Was Sayid’s girlfriend wearing an identical bracelet? What’s with the time difference in the rocket sent from the ship? In particular, am I the only one expecting there to be a greater time difference, or the rocket not to show up at all? What are they going to do with angry ghostbuster Miles? What happened to Jacob’s cabin? Why is Sayid such a puss who keeps falling weepily in love at the drop of a hat? And we’re seeing a lot more of Naomi than we have of other dead people: can we expect her to be coming back?

Thursday’s episode of “Lost” was called “Confirmed Dead” and correct me if I’m wrong, but by my count it had (spoilers!):

• Four new characters with immediate flashbacks
• An irritable Asian ghostbuster who uses a dustbuster
• The sunken, decaying corpse of Greg Grunberg
• A through-the-body bullet wound with a tie-in to Locke’s continuity
• Three cases of Ben getting the tar beat out of him
• Vincent the dog leading the gang on a wild goose chase, confirming my suspicions that he’s the ultimate mastermind behind the entire mystery
• A polar bear skeleton in the desert
• More of the mysterious new Live and Let Die-esque villain
• Post-Grindhouse Jeff “Lawnmower Man” Fahey as a cross between Jimmy Buffet, Jeff Lebowski, and pure drunken badassery

I’d say that this was getting back to the “Lost” I used to know, but “Lost” was never that cool. This is what I wanted the old “Lost” to be, the kind of coolness that it always hinted at but never quite delivered on. It’s like they finally said, “Screw it, let’s take the training wheels off” and let her ride with whatever wacky stuff they felt like throwing in there.

Story still doesn’t make a damn lick of sense, and it’s got too much of people standing around looking confused or just moving for the sake of getting to the next plot point for me to say it’s approaching “high art”. But hell if it ain’t moving.

I think the last season ended up redeeming itself by the end, but even after the best episodes, I was never fired up to see the next one. But as it is now, I can’t wait to see what happens next week. Who’s the rest of the Oceanic 6? What’s happening with the cabin? How does Taller Walt Ghost fit in? Who’s Ben’s “man on the boat?” What connection do the new people have with flight 815? Why did they want Ben? What’s the deal with Naomi? When is Libby coming back into the picture? Or Penny and Desmond? Why doesn’t Ben know what the smoke monster is? When do we find out more about Forever Young Nestor Carbonell?

It used to be I had no faith that the show would ever answer its questions; now I’m saying they should keep piling ‘em on. And how cool is a show that can make me genuinely interested in the answer to a question as cheesy as “Who are the Oceanic 6?”

At the end of last month, ABC launched a new viral marketing campaign for the upcoming season of “Lost.” It’s an ad for the series’ fictional airline, with a press release announcing that Oceanic would start flying again after the Flight 815 disaster, and a promo website called FlyOceanicAir.com.

And oh no did you see that?!? The website got hacked by a mysterious stranger with some mysterious connection to Flight 815! I am intrigued! Who is this strange whistleblower? How did he manage to hack into a Flash movie? Why did he spend so much time working on jamming-your-signal visuals and sfx in After Effects, instead of just putting his movie on top of the other one? And most importantly: how do you get that constant week-old beard thing going on, anyway — whenever I try it, I go from “late 70s prom photo” straight to “werewolf in mid-transition,” with no roguishly handsome interim.

But ho!, what’s this? Has my eagle eye spotted another URL cleverly hidden inside the hacked transmission? What other, greater mysteries are there for me to unfold?

So yeah, I’m not a fan of the “alternate reality games.” They always devolve into a bunch of internet shut-ins poring over rehashes of puzzles from the back page of Games magazine, all to get to a website that plays ineptly-written videos performed by struggling actors.

But I’ve got to give them credit for this much: at least with this one, they kept the “you’ve stumbled onto a secret part of the internets!” nonsense to a minimum. You don’t even have to enter the “top secret” URL; our man Sam has cleverly hacked flyoceanicair.com to automatically jump to the game site, so you don’t have to pretend you’re discovering anything.

And apparently, he’s hired ABC’s camera and lighting crews to film him as he explores the mystery. I don’t want to tell you how to do your business, Sam, but maybe you’d have more time to find your girlfriend if you didn’t have to look at dailies and have meetings with the composer to make sure you’ve got just the right note of tension in the background music.

But really, the stuff I’m making fun of is the best part of this attempt at an ARG. The thing might not have anything remotely original involved (at least yet), but they cut out the artifice and went high on the production values. So it’s a bunch of “click here” and “find-the-pixel” puzzles, but they’re really nice-looking find-the-pixel puzzles with music and HD video. Hey, it worked for Myst.

And Sam: when you find Sonya, tell her to have that mole looked at.

“Best Week Ever” interviews Ben from “Lost”. Once again, the show proves that there’s no joke they can’t over-do, but Michael Emerson is pretty awesome in this clip:

Update: Yeah, ignore this post. At least, the bitchin’, if not the speculatin’. See comment 12.

One of the consequences of working at home is that it can turn your standard garden-variety internet addiction into a full-blown compulsion. I’ve had more days than I’d like to admit where I’ve reached the end of the internet — that point when you’ve read every news feed, followed every bookmark, looked at every page of every message board, and are still looking for something, anything to click on, just to avoid having to get back to work.

So it’s my own fault that I dug through a spoiler-fied blog post about “Lost” that led to a comment that led to a link to another spoiler-fied blog post, and then clicked on a big button that said “don’t click on this unless you want the season finale ruined” and then read the result. And so it’s my own fault that when I watched the actual show, I was underwhelmed. I kept noticing how pretty much every single scene in the episode relied on your not knowing what was going to happen.

It was all pretty well constructed and tied into what’s been going on the past few episodes; I can’t imagine how they could’ve done much better. They did follow the “Alias” model for season finales: give screen time to as many characters as you can possibly fit, thin out the cast as much as possible, and chop off as many loose ends as you can get away with. Include explosions where necessary. Then, end on a (seemingly) series-altering cliffhanger.

Everything seemed kind of methodical instead of really exciting, and of course it’s impossible for me to tell whether that’s because I’d already ruined it for myself or if they really were just spending a couple of hours putting out plot fires.

I do reassert my claim that Damon Lindeloff needs to tone down his comments to the press promising great things to come; there’s just no way to live up to the hype. The big twist here didn’t leave me as gobsmacked as I’d been promised. It didn’t when I read the spoiler, and it didn’t when I watched it play out. I mean, it’s fine and all, but I think it would’ve been a lot more impressive had we not heard for the past few months how it was going to be the most mind-blowing thing ever shown on television, remember to wear your Depends and sign a waver absolving the network of liability, no one will be allowed to turn to ABC during the shocking final minutes.

On the upside, it looks like they will be able to fill out three more half-seasons of material. But at the same time, it bugs me that I’m relieved instead of disappointed that they’re only going to be half-seasons. And I can’t shake the feeling that they’ve somehow spoiled the essence of the show, what made it compelling in the first place. (Sorry about that, but it was either “spoiled” or “lost,” and both are equally corny). The only thing they’ve introduced that’s really interested me, is Jacob in the cabin. I’m hoping he’ll stick around to pick up the slack.

And everything after this point goes into more detail, so don’t read unless you’ve reached the end of the internet.

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You’d have to be pretty cynical, or have already given up on the series altogether, not to think that this week’s episode of “Lost” was pretty damn cool. The guys behind the show have admitted to being big fans of Stephen King, which probably explains why this couldn’t have been a better TV adaptation of a Stephen King story unless it’d actually been based on a Stephen King story.

Jacob’s cabin was hella creepy, the kind of potential for surreal scares the show has been hinting at ever since the pilot episode. (But rarely delivering on). I could tell that this season has made me gunshy — when Ben was standing at the door and saying, “once you go through here, you can never go back,” I knew the ending credits were about to start. But hey, we were only 40 minutes into the show! They actually set something up and delivered on it!

More than that, though, is the fact that they’re finally showing signs they understand the balance between creeps and revelations you have to maintain to live up to the potential of the series. It feels less like a lot of hand-waving and “Ooh, look, isn’t that spooky?!? Really cool stuff is coming up later, we promise!” and more like they’ve finally got the balls to put their cards on the table and start coming to conclusions.

Of course, despite everything we were shown, there wasn’t actually a lot of brand-new stuff revealed tonight. Most of it just confirmed what we’d already seen or already suspected. The trick is in the presentation; seeing it from a different perspective made everything seem new and more significant. It’s easy to assume that Ben’s visions of his mother are from the same source as Eko’s visions of his brother (or Jack’s visions of his dad, and Kate’s horse). We finally get some confirmation that the Dharma Initiative is a different group than “the Others,” and we see what form the fight between them took. The whole business with the van and Roger Workman was too pat and contrived, but at least they snipped off another loose end.

Which hints at something clever, but frustrating, about what they did with this episode — by repeating some of the stuff that we already knew, they’re saying that these are the questions they want you to be thinking about. They’ve built up a ton of dangling plot threads over the years, and I suspect they’ve realized it’s going to be impossible to tie up every single detail the internets have speculated about. So they’re repeating the questions they have answers to, and telling us to just forget about the rest. The episode is called “The Man Behind the Curtain,” after all.

There were only two big new things in the episode: meeting Jacob, and meeting Nestor Carbonell’s character 40 years ago. (The cliffhanger was new too, of course, and I thought it was pretty well done). Again, the trick was in the presentation. The scene in the cabin was given a big build-up and made the focus, and it paid off.

The other meeting was just as significant for the questions it raised — obviously, why hasn’t he aged, but also, why isn’t he the leader since he’s been on the island for longer — but was treated a lot more casually. To me, that’s the surest sign the show’s getting back on track, when you can have a conversation that’s significant, but it doesn’t spend the entire time giving you music cues letting you know that it’s significant. It’s a sign that they’re confident they have enough story to tell, and they’re not forced to drag out every new minor plot element to make it last an entire hour.

And of course, the castaways are talking to each other again, for whatever good it does. Having them share what they know only solves half the problem; they’ve got to actually do something about it. And I tell you that Jack and Juliet better have one hell of a master plan cooking to warrant all the nonsense they’ve been doing for the past four episodes. The only time you see a couple of people being more annoyingly coy and smugly withholding information is when you listen to the “Lost” podcasts with the exec producers.