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Do any of you watch Lost on ABC? There are some people out there who are completely addicted. Addicted as in watch every episode and then scour online message boards for hints, clues, theories, and post their own. I'm not one of those people. I love Lost. I think it's a great show. But while I might ponder who The Others are and what exactly they might be up to.... I ponder for a limited time, usually the time between when the show is over and when I go to sleep. (Not the whole time, of course). Probably partly because I'm a mystery fan; I love the question, I seek the answer...

But Lost is beyond mystery.

In a mystery novel, for example, there is a BIG QUESTION (whodunnit) and possibly several underlying questions that help answer the BIG QUESTION. As the story goes along, each underlying question is answered until POW! The BIG QUESTION is answered.

Lost does not follow this template. It is BIG QUESTION after BIG QUESTION. As the Lostaholics will tell you, no minute detail is a minute detail. Each minute detail will eventually weave itself into the story of multiple characters. It seems to me, as I watch the show, that every character had touched the life of every other character at some point in time, in some direct or indirect way, before the airliner crash that brought them to The Island.

The Lost cast members that have been killed on the island apparently have negotiated better contracts than their counterparts on other primetime dramas. They can appear at any time, albeit sometimes with a different haircut or color, in the flashbacks of the lives of the remaining characters. Even those characters that have short cameo-type appearances resurface in other sequences, maybe in the background or as another character. (Or are they?)

Even the specific words spoken by the castaways are meaningful at a later date. "Hey Bob" might seem like a bit of small talk to you one episode, but come Season 3, it might be the secret phrase that saves them all from certain and imminent doom. You just never know with this show.

People like me, though, don't study up just to watch TV. We watch the show, missing a few minutes of the beginning or falling asleep before the episode is quite through, experiencing bits of deja vu (didn't-I-see-that-scraggly-bearded-guy-in-another-episode-wearing-a-three-piece-suit- sort-of-thing). But even the deja-vu comes far too infrequently for us to even fathom putting the puzzle together.

It's a puzzle without borders, I don't know what the picture is, and I don't even know how many pieces there are. But I pick up the ones I see and put them in my little pile. I know I've missed many, but I figure eventually I'll get enough of the picture to get what's going on. This may take several seasons, which is probably why I make minimal effort to gather the pieces I missed via the internet.

So where am I going with this? Well, I watched tonight's season finale and I feel more "lost" than ever. As more characters get added (more have been added than subtracted) the puzzle gets bigger and the pieces I have make less sense. I should be so frustrated I just quit, because my mystery-loving mind is really a mystery-solving mind. But somehow, I can't just quit. I still plan to watch the Season 3 premier. Subliminal messages embedded in the commercials, maybe?