Jughead

This week's installment of Lost was, I thought, an improvement over last week's premiere, but still very much cast in the same mold. Again, the story was heavy on intellectual entertainment and lighter on emotional storytelling.

But the moments were there this week. We saw that Desmond and Penny had a son (and named him after Charlie). Daniel confessed his love for Charlotte. Charles Widmore pleaded with honesty for Desmond to take Penny away and hide her (knowing the threat that Ben had already made against her).

But despite these good moments, the greater emphasis was on making connections in the Lost "mythology." Actually, it was a week to learn tantalizing new bits of information about Widmore. He funded Daniel's original research in time travel, and was also originally on The Island fifty years earlier (which begins to illuminate his eagerness to return there). And in other news (Other news?), it turns out to have been John Locke himself who originally sent Richard to test Locke as a child for his potential leadership ability.

It does now seem that the model for this season is going to have The Island jumping around through time. This is the engine by which random bits of the distant past could be painted in for the viewers.

For example, we could go back to the time Danielle Rousseau first arrived on The Island, gave birth to her daughter, and set the repeating distress signal in French.

We could find out how that crazy four-toed statue came to be there.

We could go back to hundreds of years to when the Black Rock first arrived on The Island. Indeed, it was pointed out to me tonight by a friend that perhaps we now already have the explanation for how that ship came to be stranded out in the middle of land, where it could not seemingly be. If it is in fact The Island itself that is time-hopping and not the people on it, then the Black Rock could have actually been sailing through the empty waters of the South Pacific and had the ship materialize right there underneath it.

Maybe you can think of still more mysteries of Lost's past that we can expect to see resolved this season.

But this all perfectly illustrates what I've been saying. Lost's fifth season seems set up to be a feast for the mind, as your brain whirs away trying to make these connections. But the drama is taking a back seat in exchange for this.

We'll see what comes next.