'Lost' is back, and it's about time

The fifth season of "Lost" debuted on ABC on Jan. 21, and delivered another pair of fiercely entertaining, spectacularly produced hours that put most of the rest of primetime television on notice -- a prime example of what TV can accomplish when everyone behind the scenes, including network executives, break the shackles of the ordinary and willingly take big (and bigger) risks.

This season's gambit is a doozy, even by lofty "Lost" standards: the show will delve into the dangerous storytelling waters of time travel, a full-on (even passionate) embrace of the series' science-fiction component. It is not a safe choice; indeed, the writers of this show are taking a turn here that could alienate the more casual viewers of the drama.

This decision doesn't come as a shock to "Lost" fanatics (myself included), though. "Lost" has been a rule-eraser since the first second of the pilot, and this ever-unfolding serial epic, now in its next-to-last year, picked up the action where it left off at the end of season 4, and continued full steam ahead in its challenge to the conventions of hour-long TV (in story as well as presentation), plus continuing to provide a primer on how to create -- and maintain -- fully-realized fictional characters.

In short (or as short as I can say it): the handful of island escapees (adults Jack, Kate, Sun, Sayid and Hurley, along with a young boy named Aaron, a/k/a "the Oceanic 6") are trapped in their own existential torments: Jack is now a barely-functioning drug addict; Kate is raising Aaron, a child that is not hers, and in constant fear of being found out; Sun is in a grief-fueled vengeance mode since the apparent death of her husband; Sayid is simultaneously an assassin and a target; Hurley is finding his grasp on sanity wobbly at best.

Ben, the inscrutable but undeniably dangerous former leader of the "Others," is also off the island, and urging a depressed and haunted Jack that he has to "bring them all back," which includes the apparently dead John Locke, someone the so-called "Oceanic 6" had left behind. Add to this already volatile mix the fact that someone seems determined to continue tearing their lives asunder, and you would have enough drama, suspense and action to fill two shows.

But this is "Lost," of course, and "Lost" is nothing without the island. So while the outside world is churning with intrigue, those who are still aboard that mysterious land mass are going through their own fearful quandry.

The remaining islanders are now being pulled back and forth through time, with no way of knowing not just where they'll be next, but when. (The words, "When am I?" are actually uttered, by the way.) The departed Locke is still very much alive here, but perhaps not for long -- Richard Alpert, the unaging "Other" who was once Ben's aide, has already warned him of his fate.

Former con-man Sawyer, now thrust into a leadership position, is wracked with confusion about what's happening around him, echoing the fears of the other survivors who are finding themselves in surroundings that can change from safe to lethal in a flash -- literally. And the one person who might have the answers, the seemingly-squirrely physicist Daniel Faraday, has only one explanation: their time-warp experience is akin to a record skipping on a turntable, only instead of being mildly annoying and easily fixable, it's incredibly terrifying and possibly permanent.

I'm going to stop my recap there -- it's as a measure of self-control, you see; I could go on about so many great scenes, like Faraday meeting Desmond again for the very first time, and then Desmond waking up from a nightmare about the meeting only to realize it was a memory, or Sayid's deadly hand-to-hand skills coming to the forefront again in a dazzling and brutal sequence, or Hurley's brief and unsettling visit with ex-cop Ana-Lucia, another lost soul who never made it off the island alive.

But I need to stop to praise my favorite element of the show. While I enjoy the twists and turns that make the show famous, the greatest pleasure of "Lost" for me doesn't come from the weird mythos or action sequences, but from the extraordinary characters -- the ways they are written, the ways they are performed -- and that's something that raises the show to the level of a TV classic. It should never be glossed-over that inside the tempest of plot that makes up the show, there are amazingly realistic characters involved, and that whether they're rushing with (or being pushed into or dragged along beside) the story elements, they feel honest and true. If they didn't, I don't think this show would be a hundredth as resonant (or still even on the air).

Perhaps the emotional highlight of the entire two hours belonged to Hurley -- to my mind, one of the most lovable and audience-accessible characters ever created for TV. Late in the second episode, he sits with his usually tough-hearted mother, his face a mix of fear and frustration and loneliness. She puts her hands to his cheeks and demands that he tell her the truth about everything.

So he does. Hurley spills the high points of all four seasons in about a minute's worth of words. The scene is both heartbreaking and heartwarming, which is capped by his mother's surprisingly loving words, "I believe you. I don't understand you, but I believe you."

That really sums up my feeling about "Lost" -- even when the stories grow far-flung, the sharply-drawn and richly-played characters keep me believing.

"Lost" is the best show on TV, and I can't wait to see what's next. Four stars (out of four).